Address of welcome delivered by the Rt. Hon. Malcolm MacDonald, P. C., M.A., LL.D. D.Litt., Chancellor of the former University of Malaya. 

Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen. 

I have the singular honour of welcoming Dato Dr. Lee Kong Chian to his throne as Chancellor of the University of Singapore. I do so with enthusiasm on behalf of the entire University and of this audience which represents the whole of Singapore. When I was considering what I should say this morning about our Chancellor, I remembered the aphorism that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." No truer comment on the frailty of human nature has ever been spoken. I am a public servant, and I have watched many men climb to the giddy peaks of high government office where they wheeled power. Some of them survive the experience unscathed. They remain decent and humble even though highly distinguished human beings. Others of them, alas, get spoilt by their elevation. The altitude goes to their heads. I can remember men who remained perfectly normal, natural, rather charming persons so long as they were Chief Secretaries or Heads of Departments. But then they were promoted to being Governors or Ministers, and their characters seemed to change overnight. They took on airs. They developed a greatly inflated opinion of their own importance. And suddenly they began to address ordinary mortals like you and me as if they were God Almighty addressing miserable inferior sinners. They became pompous and arrogant potentates, hopelessly corrupted by power. Well, other assets besides high government office can give men power. Money, for example, is one of them. In my life, I have known many many millionaires. Some of them are very odd creatures. Their characters also are sometimes apt to become corrupted by the power which their vast wealth gives them. They develop into petty and arrogant oligarchs in all their affairs, who assume they can buy not only anything but anybody and get away with any misdeeds. One of the many endearing things about the Chancellor is that he is the very opposite of all those types. He also has wielded, for a long time, immense power. I happen to know that he could have held high positions in more than one or two governments in Malaya and Singapore during the last 15 years. But he always refused every offer. And as for the power that money gives to men, no one in Malaya, in recent times, has commanded such fabulous resources as he, with which to exercise it. But he remains utterly unspoiled, simple and unassuming and humble, inspite of the extraordinary influence that he can exercise in the commerce, in the finance, in the politics and in other potent realms in South-East Asia. His humility is one of the marks of his true greatness. 

If l may say so, the Chancellor is not always so smartly dressed as he is this morning. No one seeing him in the streets would suppose that he was other than a very ordinary citizen of Singapore. He does not assume any airs, or adopt any mannerisms or wear any dress to indicate or advertise that he is, in fact, one of this great city’s most outstanding sons. I have often come across him strolling along Orchard Road without any socks, and with only a pair of soft slippers on his feet. And therefore, when he turned up in Geneva the other day to visit all us assembled delegates at the International Conference on Laos, I was surprised and shocked to see him wearing a pair of elegant socks and leather shoes. I wondered whether he was, at last, putting on airs, being corrupted by power. But in reply to what I hoped was a tactful question, he explained to me that he was afraid of getting frost-bitten toes amidst the Alpine snows of Switzerland, if he was not rather warmly shod. He has a grand combination of great qualities of head and heart. He has charm, he has a gay wit, he has unfailing ability, he has a calm wisdom, he has unsurpassed generosity, and he has modesty and goodness. We could salute him this morning in any one of half a dozen different illustrious capacities. He is a supremely successful industrial magnate. He is a veritable prince of philanthropists; he is a man with widespread, even if unobtrusive political influence, he is an enthusiastic humanist, and he is one of the best and most sagacious friends that anyone, old or young, could desire to have. But we welcome him most particularly this morning as a superlative friend of education. His ceaseless help and his almost unbounded benefactions to schools and colleges and universities, to libraries, museums and art galleries and to countless numbers of deserving individual scholars, have greatly added to the intellectual and cultural richness of Singapore. No one could be a more fitting first Chancellor of the University of Singapore. On days like this, orators are supposed to pronounce homalies which will leave a lesson in the minds of the young undergraduates and graduands of the University. Well, I cannot do better in that direction than say this. Probably, many of you undergraduates here choose this or that hero or heroine in history as a model to guide your own conduct and inspire your own ambitions throughout life. Perhaps he or she may be Confucious, or Akbar the Great, or Oliver Cromwell, or Florence Nightingale, or Queen Cleopatra, or Elizabeth Taylor, or any one of hundreds of other variegated celebrities. The thought that I would like to leave with you is that you will probably do more good and spread more happiness in your own generation if you will try to model yourselves in many ways on Dato Lee Kong Chian.

Mr. Chancellor, we greet you most warmly this morning. We pay homage to you. We thank you for doing the University the honour of accepting its Chancellorship, and we wish you and the University a happy partnership together for many years to come.

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