Speech given to a freshers dinner, August 2023...
Welcome to this university and welcome to this hall. I want to take a moment to congratulate you on making it here. You’ve worked very hard to get into this university. Many of you will have spent countless hours studying and preparing for exams when you would no doubt rather have been doing other things. Well, you’ve made it now, and you’re free, maybe it feels like for the first time. It’s now up to you what kind of life you build, how you spend your time, and—to some extent—where you end up.
I want to share a passage with you from my favourite novel, Middlemarch, by George Eliot (or Mary Anne Evans). It’s the final paragraph of the novel and describes the way the life of the main character Dorothea went following the events of the novel. It reads: “Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
There’s a lot that could be said to unpack these words, but the gist of them is that Dorothea had great ambitions for how her life would go and, in the end, the life she lived was by most measures an ordinary one—and yet, as Eliot points out, the growing good of the world and that things are not as bad as they could be with you and me is owing to people like this “who have lived faithfully a hidden life”.
You probably have a lot of goals, hopes, and aspirations. Two things about this: the first thing is that by working hard now you can improve your lot in life. By making good choices about how you spend your time, who you spend it with, and what ideals you move toward you can set yourself up so that in the future you will be in a better position than you are now, or would otherwise have been. Academic excellence is a part of this project and it’s at the core of what we value at this university and this hall, so we expect you to work hard.
But we also expect that you are human, and that means that things aren’t always going to go great. Which brings me to the second thing about having goals, hopes, and aspirations—namely that not all of them will come true. In fact, many of them won’t, and you might feel sometimes that your life is a lot more ordinary than you had hoped it would be. I want to tell you that that’s okay. Achievement isn’t everything. Eliot’s words (and Dorothea’s life in the novel) remind us that an ordinary life is tremendously valuable because each of us is valuable regardless of what we achieve. I want each of you to pursue your dreams and go as far as your intelligence and hard work will take you. But when you hit that limit, whether in the next four years or the next forty, and as you journey there, don’t lose sight of what matters most. And that’s the people around you.
Our motto at this hall is: “We begin with people.” Life in hall reminds us that that while academic achievement is important, even very important, it’s not the only thing that makes a life worth living. Friendship, fun, learning from others, and working with others through differences for a common good are all part of what makes life meaningful. Take time to enjoy these things. Work on them. And remember that at the end of your life what matters more than your grades is the kind of person you become and whether the lives of those around you are better because you were there.
Cheers to the class of 2027!
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