Well Congratulations everybody. This is a great day for you. I must say you are very nicely behaved for a graduation group. I am used to people cheering, and stamping and shouting, but this has all been beautifully done today. This is Essex for goodness sakes ! There I was looking to see how many ankle chains came up, and everybody was wearing such long trousers I couldn’t see !

I was delighted to be offered this degree by this University because I make my home in Essex, and I love Essex with all my heart. One of the important things about the time you have spent here is that this place is your sweet mother – your Alma Mater. Now that may be a strange thought for some of you, especially for those of you who are sitting in front of me worried about how you are going to pay off your debts, worried about what kind of a job you are going to get. You will look back on these years as a very, very special time.

But there is something I am going to ask you. At University you are taught to be critical. Students are the conscience of society. We rely on you. We tired ‘oldies’ rely on students to keep asking the questions that the authorities don’t want to answer. This has become very important for us all now. Even if you think to yourself, "Well, goodness, I did witchcraft, how is that going to help me when I leave here and get a job for Tesco?" Well I’ll tell you how. No matter what you have done here, no matter what subject you have studied, you have been taught to question, to investigate and to resist easy answers. You have been taught how to do the most rewarding thing that human beings can do – which is to think, to actually feel the muscles of your mind working as you begin to inspect a problem. (Nowadays we have to call problems issues, but I think you know what I mean.) You will be surrounded in your life by people selling things to you, people giving you twisted versions of facts because they want to influence your behaviour. What the University has done for you is to give you a way of defending your intellectual and spiritual independence. And you must guard that – you must guard it with all your might and main, even if it means that you stay in a state of uncomfortable uncertainty. Doubt is a heroic activity, don’t give it up. Don’t become one of those people who looks for the answers to questions on the Internet, grabs hold of a factoid, and says "Today I found out …." something or other, usually some nonsense. You don’t find things out like that. You discover truths by testing them, by testing yourself in relation to them. There may come a time in your life when you really, really need the answers to some very hard questions. There might be questions about your own health. What should I do ? What are the treatments available ? What are the odds ? What are my chances ? All those questions will require the skills that you have been given by your sweet mother – by this place. And need I say that if you have a child, who gets into some sort of difficulty or is born with a particular problem or a particular inheritance, you, and probably only you, will master all the facts of that case? All the ways that you will do it will be an outcome of the way you were taught to think here; of the kind of discipline that you applied to your own wishes, desires, impressions, hunches.

You ought to know by now what the nature of evidence is. Now you also ought to be aware that there are people who don’t want you to be able to do this – that there are forces of obfuscation at work. You have only to think about the mysterious matter of a small and devastating war in Iraq to know that somebody, somewhere is not telling the truth. Maybe everyone, everywhere isn’t telling the truth. Now I don’t want to suggest to you that truth is single, that there will be one set of facts which will explain everything. I am asking rather that you treasure your own scepticism. It is the one thing that will save us – a continuing scepticism and discipline when it comes to examining the facts of everyday life.

And there is now just one little thought that I would like to leave you with. Some of you are going to go to the heights in the corporate world, some of you are going to acquire power, and some of you perhaps will operate in a much more modest sphere. What I would like to ask you is to consider the situation that education is in, and consider your own sufferings as undergraduates, and your own worries. The time is coming when we are going to have to invest in intellectual capital. We are going to have to set up a proper system of bursaries and support for students, rather than cockamamy ideas like the one we had today, about taxing middle class students, so that you can give presents to students from poor backgrounds, which seems as good a way of splitting the student body as I ever heard. This is something that you ought to resist – middle class students are often the poorest of the lot. Now that you are leaving university - some of you will come back as graduate students - don’t forget the issues. Remember what was important. You will come to treasure what your sweet mother, what your Alma Mater, did for you. When you think of that, think of a way of making it easier and better for the students of the future. I am not an expert in ways to do this. In the past I set up scholarships by lending my house to foreign students – that was the scholarship – my house for six months. Three people used it, and one person wrote rather a good book as a consequence. There are lots of ways of doing this, and human ingenuity is needed if we are going to make available to the people who really want it, and would make the best use of it, the kind of education you have enjoyed here.

So please accept my very best wishes for your future. I have been honoured today to graduate with you, and thanks.

Germaine Greer
10 July 2003