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Chancellor, distinguished colleagues, friends and family, graduands:

It is my pleasure to be with you here today as you celebrate the successful conclusion of your studies. For some of you, today promises an absolute and final liberation from the demands of formal study, whereas for others—such as those going on to graduate study—it provides a sort of breather in which you can collect your energies and confirm your intentions before plunging back into the life of formal learning. 

For yet others, graduation marks a transition from one kind of educational experience to another: from medical school to residency, for example, or from law school to articling or whatever means they have chosen to satisfy their experiential learning requirement for licensing. It is true, however, that even outside of those professions, academic learning inevitably gives way, after graduation, to the continuing education that comes from experience. 

I draw the distinction between formal and experiential learning, however, because I want to invite you to reflect on the extent to which your degree studies here at Queen’s have prepared you for the world in which you will now seek to build a career and live a good life. You have been exceptionally well prepared, of course, within the terms of your degrees and your field of study. And in some areas which I have already mentioned the practical application of academic study—the demonstrated ability to transfer what is learned in the classroom or lab into everyday life experience—is in fact required for licensing to practice.

While outside of the professions there may be no such formal requirement, your studies will be applied to life nevertheless; skills and insights learned in the study of history or philosophy or psychology are most certainly transferable to many areas of work, and historically have often been transferred with very great positive effect for both the individual and society. Although our culture at present is inclined not to acknowledge this—I was in a bookstore a few days ago and was dismayed to notice a volume with the ironic title At Least You’re Not an English Major: And Other Comforting Sentiments for the New Graduate (Glenn Boozan)—that doesn’t make it untrue. English professors like myself would do well to identify more explicitly the ways in which studying literature cultivates in the student a unique power of agency in the world of practical affairs.

What I have been enumerating so far are the relatively direct ways in which academic studies prepare you for the world and life after graduation. There are also indirect, possibly attenuated, yet nevertheless impactful ways too. Here I am thinking of things like campus social life, clubs, student government, and athletics, for example. The experience of attending Queen’s encompasses all of these things as well, and they have an educational, formative impact that is in many cases no less than the impact of what happens in the classroom in the context of formal, structured study. 

A similar view is embedded in our institutional mythos, and is frequently articulated by our alumni, among whom we are proud to number leaders in government, the arts, industry, commerce, engineering, law, health, research—to name only a few fields in which graduates of Queen’s have distinguished themselves.

Graduates, that you are well-prepared and set on a similar course is clear—at least so long as the broader context within which you will build your careers and live your lives remains relatively stable. But these are strange and unstable times, and it is important at graduation to ask what—in addition to the tools you have acquired to date through your formal and informal education at Queen’s—you might need to navigate an unpredictable future. That is why I focused earlier on the issue of transferable skills and on your capacity to make your education count—even when (as sometimes happens) your practical reality, the context within which you find yourself operating, is challenging or even hostile to the reality for which you were educated.

You are all familiar with the challenges facing your generation, so I needn’t enumerate them here, except to note that the rules according to which at least the last three generations engaged with the world and their futures are radically changing. The collapse of the rules-based international order, the failure of institutions and agreements that brought a measure of stability and predictability to the world after World War II, has within the short time you have been students here at Queen’s become a lamentable commonplace. And that collapse is both a symptom and a symbol for instability in many more areas than geopolitics: in the global economy, for example, in the advent of the “post-truth” era, in the deepening of the climate crisis, and more recently and perhaps most challengingly in the advent of generative AI. As a colleague of mine (a philosopher) repeatedly points out, our culture and its institutions are caught up in a crisis that has many dimensions, but that is also epistemological—having to do with what we know and how we know—and is therefore fundamental.

It goes without saying that very few areas of human life will go unaffected in such a crisis, so what, in addition to the formal and informal preparation you have received during your studies, will be helpful as you navigate your way forward? To answer that question—not surprisingly because I am an English professor, as I told you—I want to turn to a famous literary text, namely a speech of Polonius in Act I, Scene iii, of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 

Outside of the complex ironic reverberations of the play, especially those which surround the character of Polonius himself, the advice he provides is nevertheless sound. And you will almost certainly be familiar with a good deal of it, this speech having made its way into the common idiomatic currency of English. Speaking to his son Laertes, (not inappropriately for this occasion) traveling to France to continue his university studies, Polonius offers some fatherly and unsolicited advice on a number of topics, beginning with dress: buy clothes that are “rich, not gaudy.” Why? Because “the apparel oft proclaims the man”! And when dealing with the financial challenges of campus life, he advises, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,/ For loan oft loses both itself and friend.” 

You are probably also familiar with the end of Polonius’s speech, but it is profound and true, even if Polonius himself couldn’t live up to it: “This above all—to thine own self be true,/ And it must follow, as the night the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (I,iii) This may not be an effective rebuttal to the idea that we are in an epistemological crisis, but it is certainly one answer to it. If truth is objectively indeterminable, if what we know and how we know is less and less a matter of consensus, all we have and all we can use to guide us are our values. “To thine own self be true” says Polonius, and it is interesting that what follows this premise “as the night the day” is honesty: “Thou canst not then be false to any man.” And from that honesty come the key values: responsibility, equity, justice, and respect for all.

These values will certainly help you navigate the uncertainties that lie ahead, but will they be enough? There is one human faculty I haven’t yet mentioned which will undoubtedly be the guarantor of a better future for each of you and for humanity at large, and that is imagination, without which a brilliant future for each of you cannot be planned and without which a good and just society cannot be conceived, let alone realized.

I want to leave you with another insight, derived again from the world of literature, specifically from the writings of the speculative writer, Ursula K. Le Guin. In 2014, as she accepted a prize at the National Book Awards, LeGuin said this:“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

My wish for all of you, graduates, is that following the advice of Polonius you will be true to yourselves, no matter what happens in the world around you; and that in your work, whatever it is, you will always keep vital that capacity to imagine, both for yourselves in your lives and careers, and for us all, for the good of our society at large.

Congratulations, realists of a larger reality!