Address Given by the Chancellor, the Rt. Hon. Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, P.C., M.A., LL.D., D.Litt.

On behalf of all in this distinguished assembly I congratulate the 442 students who are receiving their degrees and diplomas today. We wish every one of you a highly successful career and an abundantly enjoyable life.

Malaya and Singapore expect a great deal from you young graduates of this University. In your various spheres you are to be influential personages in a new nation’s progress. If I may say so, that requires that you shall be something more than just the competent doctors, school teachers, engineers and other professional officers that you are now qualified to be. You must also be good citizens. You must not only be capable of snipping out tonsils and adenoids, or teaching a child that two and two make four, or building a suspension bridge with impeccable technical skill; you must also be men and women with well-rounded characters, many-sided interests, and sympathies stretching in various directions far beyond your narrow professional occupations. If this country is to be the home of a truly civilised people, who are not only concerned with physical and material well-being, but who also make significant contributions to the intellectual, artistic and spiritual advance of Mankind, then at least a goodly proportion of its leaders, its educated citizens, must be well-read, must have an urge to pursue this or that creative hobby, must be patrons of the arts and crafts, must take an intelligent, active interest in politics, and must in other ways make a modest claim to being broadly cultured characters. 

I hope your years in this University have planted in you an inclination to be some of those things. It seems to me that one of the chief functions of a university is to do exactly that. Let me try to convey something of what I mean by relating my own experiences at a University called Oxford.

On my first arrival there I was not at all displeased with myself. At the school which I had just left I had been the headboy, the captain of the football team, the captain of the cricket team, the captain of the fire-brigade, the editor of the school magazine, the Prime Minister of a government in the Parliamentary debating society, the chief comic actor in our dramatic society and a principal performer in various other light-hearted activities. I thought that I was already an individual of quite respectable attainments. But on my first evening at Oxford I discovered to my surprise that this was a sad hallucination, and that I was just a savage ignoramus. I was strolling down Oxford’s famous High Street with some other freshmen, feeling like one of God’s especially chosen mortals, when one of my companions pointed to a gabled roof soaring in gracious silhouette against a full moon, and exclaimed, ‘What a beautiful piece of Gothic architecture! What do you suppose its date is?'.

I gazed up nonplussed, for hitherto I had no notion that architecture could be anything more than mere architecture; it was news to me that there were different styles of buildings; and it had never struck me that anyone need bother about the date of a gabled roof. I had been too busy on the football field to notice the architectural merits, or demerits, even of our school sports pavilion.

Then another of my companions referred casually to an author whose works were fashionable in England in those days, called Walter Pater. He asked me which of Walter Pater’s books I liked best. Well, I had been too busy squirting fountains of water from the school’s fire-hoses to drink at the fount of Walter Pater’s scholarly commentaries on Ancient Greek society. In fact, I had never heard of him. So I could not take any part in the sophisticated conversation which then sprang up amongst my fellow students about numerous theories propounded by that illustrious Man of Letters - and I felt very foolish.

However, my friends soon exhausted that topic and turned nonchalantly to another. One of them began to argue that the French impressionists were the finest school of painters who had ever put brushes to canvas, whilst another youth expressed the view that they were no better than a troupe of glorified cartoonists. As I had hitherto been too occupied keeping wicket for my cricket team for me to have time to become aware of the French impressionists, once more I walked in shameful silence beneath the laughing moon along Oxford’s High Street.

Then and there I felt the challenge of a University education. I felt the challenge of association with a lot of my own contemporaries who evidently knew much more than I did about many important and entrancing matters. Indeed, I realised my colossal ignorance of almost every thing that should be of concern to Civilised Man. I felt humbled, and realized that I must either go and throw myself into the river Thames with a mill-stone tied round my neck, or else start at crack of dawn the next morning to learn about the intellectual and artistic pursuits of the human race. After a brief mental struggle I decided in favour of the latter course - and the next day I borrowed three books : one a treatise on Gothic architecture, the second a work by the revered Walter Pater, and the third a portfolio with reproductions of paintings by the French impressionists.

During the next three years I did not spend an undue proportion of my time attending lectures about History - the subject on which the Examiners would conduct an inquisition on me at the end of my University career. I rather liked History, but I had also now discovered that there are many other fascinating phenomena on God’s Earth than that sorry yet not entirely hopeless tale of Mankind’s slow, stumbling progress down the centuries from a state of shooting each other with bows-and–arrows to a state of threatening each other with hydrogen-bombs. I had become an enthusiastic admirer of Gothic architecture; and -- although I thought Walter Pater a precious bore -- was a voracious reader of scores of essayists and novelists. As for the French impressionists, I considered them a company of inspired geniuses. Incidentally, I was also a zealous student of the lives and loves of wild birds, and impecunious and easily gullible collector of European porcelain, and a very amateur biologist who was prepared to argue with anyone whose knowledge was as superficial as my own that there were several flaws in Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution. 

All those interests were stimulated by the University atmosphere, which somehow encouraged us callow undergraduates to go adventuring in such highfaluting spheres; and above all I was stimulated by the chatter of my fellow students, whose remarks on a thousand different topics were an unfailing source of provocation, amusement and occasionally even enlightenment.

Those lively undergraduates were ready to talk -- as I hope you are -- with self-confident authority on any subject under the sun. On many evenings we used to gather in this or that friend’s room, drinking coffee and talking, talking, talking until the small hours of the next morning about Philosophy and Politics, Religion and Science, Humanity and Ethics, Literature and the other Arts, and every other matter which engaged our fancy. Occasionally we even touched lightly on the problems of Sex. There was no subject that we were not ready to approach, assault and demolish with gusto.

Of course, we talked a frightful lot of nonsense; our entire conversation through several years was shallow and puerile; we often propounded with dogmatic certainty false theories which you, in your later and more erudite generation, would brush aside with the lightest feathers of argument. But we acquired a great thirst for knowledge; we were pathetically sincere even when we were most grievously misguided; we wracked our brains and searched our souls; we sharpened our wits on each others contending; we hunted eagerly after those elusive quarries; and we developed a passion for a great variety of the solemn and lofty, as well as the gay and pleasant interests in life.

For me, that was my most valuable education at the University. It was not what I learned from Professors about the limited subject of History -- though that was also quite rewarding -- but the stimulation that I received, in countless conversations with dons, graduates and undergraduates alike, to be aware of innumerable intriguing aspects of Creation, to select a few favourites amongst them for rather special study, and so to share in an insignificant way in Mankind’s strivings after Enlightenment. Naturally, at the end of it all, I am still very ignorant. I remain a barbarian in many habits of thought and action. I can lay little claim to true culture -- for life is too short for many of us to attain profound wisdom. But at least at Oxford I became sensitive to many beautiful features of human existence and endeavour, and I feel an occasional faint glimmer of consciousness of the sublime joy that would be mine if I could receive and comprehend Ultimate Truth.

Well, that seems to me one of the most fruitful services that a university can perform for a crowd of young students; and I hope that this promising, nine years old, potentially great University of Malaya is becoming a place where such experiences are at the command of Malaya’s and Singapore’s rising generation. Of course, you must give first priority to the subjects in which you will in due time be examined; the medical students must swat at anatomy, physiology, surgery and all their associated horrors; the science students in their laboratories; and the arts students must dabble in the works of Confucius and Shakespeare and Rabindranath Tagore. You must each make yourself proficient at what is later to be your professional means of livelihood; for you must be capable of earning a decent living. Moreover the Malayan nation needs good teachers, doctors, engineers, journalists and other professional men and women. And if some of you become -- as you will  -- absolutely, first-rate practitioners in those fields, that will be something to e very proud of. 

But do not content yourselves with being just one of those useful creatures, and nothing else. Take an interest in many other things. You have always had an entertaining Dramatic Society, and a tuneful Musical Society, admirably travelled Historical and Geographical Societies, and one or two suitably noisy Political clubs, and certain other similar, equally productive associations here. So some fields are already quite well sown, and their harvests are beginning to ripen. But I sometimes feel that in this University you spend too much time training to be many-sided citizens; too much time poring conscientiously over text-books, and too little time chattering with carefree enthusiasm about all those other pastimes of a cultured rational people which beckon outside your lecture halls; too much time preparing for examinations, and too little time preparing for life.

Naturally we had some advantages in Oxford which you miss here, but you have other advantages in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur that we lacked there. When you stroll down Orchard Road no gracious, dreamlike Gothic spires soar against the shining moon -- but there is a wealth of other treasures in those little Malay and Chinese curio-shops along the sidewalks. And in your own art-gallery in the University, and in Raffles Museum and elsewhere, you can study splendid specimens of mysteriously smiling Khmer sculptures, fine Chinese porcelains, sacred Indian bronzes, Javanese shadow-play puppets, intricately embossed Siamese silverware, and diverse other works of art made by peoples all over the Far East. Surrounding this island of Singapore are various lands which have been for centuries the homes of rich, sensitive cultures, wonderfully creative in the arts and religion. Nor do you need to turn only to the past for instruction and inspiration. Amongst your contemporary fellow citizens in this city is the painter Choong Soo Pieng, the writer Han Suyin, the naturalist Loke Wan Tho, craftsmen like Malay weavers and silversmiths, a humanitarian like your own Vice-Chancellor, and many others to point you the way to a full, creative life. And in the Federation of Malaya, too, there are many distinguished statesmen, artists, scholars and other vital leaders of a talented people.

The once allegedly arid cultural desert of Malaya is in fact a wondrously pregnant soil. It is a meeting place of the great Malaysian, Chinese, Indian and European civilisations. It is producing already also its own indigenous flowers. It is in some ways an ideal site for a University, and that is why this institution can become one of the greatest universities on earth. Of you young Malayans' capacity to reap the full benefits of its education I have no doubt, for you have qualities of intelligence, enthusiasm, character and ability which are scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world. Like all your countless other friends, I wish you well.

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