Stuart Hill

Chancellor, Interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academic colleagues, special guests, ladies and gentlemen, and especially all who are graduating today – it is a special privilege for me to be able to participate in this celebration.

As well as congratulating you on your achievement (A BIG WELL DONE!), I think it is important to also acknowledge the contributions of all of the others who have been involved in your achievement, some of whom are here today to share in your celebration. These important others may include parents, partners, children, friends, and of course your lecturers and tutors. Only you can know how you have been helped and supported in this journey of learning and development, and what the particular challenges were that you had to deal with. I encourage you to reflect on the support that you have received and, when the moment is appropriate, thank those who helped you – and acknowledge your achievement in facing those challenges.

Your new status is an acknowledgement of your knowledge and competence within your chosen areas of study; and of the effort and ‘stickability’ that has enabled you to be graduating today.  This new qualification will give you access to numerous opportunities throughout the rest of your life. I encourage you to recognise and embrace those opportunities that most ‘fit’ who you are, who you want to be, and what you want to do;  and be aware that doing this may involve considerable courage and risking the possibility of failure.

I am reminded of the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury who observed paradoxically that a genius is likely to be a person who makes the most mistakes fastest. This may just mean not giving up in the face of rejection.

Early in my life I was fortunate to receive an important lesson in relation to this, and it has remained valuable to me throughout my life. I was at a dance – I was quite young – and I had asked a particularly attractive girl to dance, and she had declined my offer – and I was looking quite dejected.  An older boy had noticed this interaction, and how I had been affected, and he came over to me and asked if I liked dancing, and I said yes – then he said “it is not very complicated – you just keep asking the girls until one of them says yes!” Since then I have never been short of dance partners (and I am happy to dance alone), and never been without meaningful work, including in my role as Professor of Social Ecology at UWS.

As well as helping you secure meaningful work, the learning that we are celebrating today will also help you to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life. At times such as this it is helpful to reflect on how you want to live the rest of your life, and to do this at the deepest level.  One way to do this is to imagine into the future that you are as old as me – really ancient – and are looking back on how your life turned out.  It is best to do this by imagining that the circumstances were ideal and that you were able to achieve all that is really dear to your heart – and to do this with someone who can really support you in the process.  An effective technique to get started is to imagine what were three important ‘gifts’ that you received and three important ‘gifts’ that you gave that brought most meaning to your life. I realise that this may be difficult to do (and easy to postpone) – but I can assure you that the effort will be well rewarded.

To illustrate this, and to provide me with an opportunity to share some of my wisdom with you, I will tell you about several of the ‘gifts’ that have been most important in my life.

The first is a gift that I gave when I was just 10, and a shy, quite timid boy from the country. I had just had an abscessed appendix removed and was in the Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London with other seriously ill children. The child next to me had an enormous growth out of his back, which had to be protected with a kind of rubber tyre. One day something must have happened and I saw blood coming out of this growth – so in spite of my condition and pain, I got out of bed and went into the corridor to get a nurse – I was quickly told to go back to bed and my protestations were initially dismissed – however, I insisted on one of the nurses coming with me to see the boy who was in trouble – whereupon he was immediately rushed into emergency and his life was apparently saved, partly because of my prompt and persistent action.

Throughout my life I have continued to speak up and act in the face of injustice, oppression and damage to person and planet, often in the face of denial and indifference from others; and as a result of doing this I have many stories and memories of how injustices and damage have been avoided.

On reflection I realise that I was often choosing to do what the psychotherapist Lawrence LeChan observed is our ever present choice: to act on love rather than act on fear.

Reflect on when you have similarly chosen to act on love rather than on fear, and on what might help you to continue to do this throughout your life. It is important to keep in mind that acting on love produces by far the best stories, and leads to the best outcomes.

One of the most important ‘gifts’ that I received, and that changed my whole life, occurred soon after I left school at 16, and was working part-time in a factory. I had not performed very well as a student in the boarding school I had been sent to, and I had a pretty poor image of myself as a learner. However, I had always been interested in zoology – so I went to the local technical college in Watford (like a TAFE) to see if I could do a couple of ‘A-level’ biology subjects. I was directed to the teacher Dr Joe Bossanyi, who I asked if, because I was such a poor student and was working part-time, I could do the program in three years instead of the usual two years. Dr Bossanyi, who I later learned was the protégé of the great pioneer marine biologist Sir Alistair Hardy, looked at me for a while, drew a deep breath and shook his head saying no – my heart sank – then he continued, no, we are not going to do it in three years, we are not going to do it in two years, we are going to do it in one year!   I was glad that he said ‘we’.

And ‘we’ did – and I have been doing things that often appeared to be almost impossible ever since.

This is the sort of experience that you can use as a touch-stone, to remind you of what you are capable of doing.

After I graduated with an Honours Degree in Zoology, this experience with Dr Bossanyi helped to enable me to set out on an adventure to the tropics and do the first major ecological study of a whole ecosystem by an individual. It also helped me to have courage, when I was faced with finding a job after gaining my PhD, to write to Professor Keith Kevan at McGill University in Montreal, the leader in the world in my area of interest, and to essentially say “I have selected you to work with next”. He welcomed me and became another important mentor and friend, and we viewed our relationship, in some ways, as an ongoing sharing of our ‘gifts’, as we collaborated in our teaching, research and outreach.

I hope that this is helping you to imagine, by looking back from some time in the future, how your life’s journey has been (i.e. might be) influenced by such courageous actions, and by the giving and receiving of meaningful ‘gifts’.

It may seem as if my references to ‘gifts’ is a bit quaint. However, there is a growing field in economics that embraces the concept of a ‘gift economy’, which its advocates claim could help us to move forwards from our present economic and cultural systems, which foster individual short-term often unfair gain at longer-term public expense, exhaustion and waste of precious, particularly finite, resources, devastating impacts on the environment, and on ourselves, others and other forms of life, and from the common feelings of disappointment as it is realised that money does not bring the kind of happiness that we mostly yearn for.  You can learn more about the ‘gift economy’ by Googling it.

My last example of a meaningful gift concerns another life-and-death situation. I had just finished a lecture tour in Sweden and was about to catch my plane home. I had talked about how our psychological processes influence how we relate with one another and the environment. I had practiced as a successful psychotherapist for many years.

As I was getting ready to say my goodbyes someone who had been at one of the talks ran up to me, and with a sense of desperation asked if I could talk with his friend who apparently had told him that she had decided to commit suicide that day.  I explained that I was about to catch a plane, so would have very little time to meet his friend.  So he ran quickly and brought her to me.  I had no idea at that moment what I would do – so I listened as deeply as I could.  When the woman had finished talking I reflected for a moment, and an idea came to me – and I said to her “I want you to imagine that you have just gone to the doctor for a check-up, and afterwards she looks at you gravely and says, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that you have a terminal disease for which we have no cures’.

Almost immediately the woman shouted at me ‘I don’t want to die’ – to which I simply said “just remember that”. She smiled, hugged me, hugged her friend, they walked off, and I ran to catch my flight. I hoped that it all turned out well, and I occasionally wondered what happened to that woman.  Then, 20 years later there was a knock on the door of my office at the university. It was that same woman. She told me that she was travelling around Australia, and about her wonderful life back in Sweden. Neither of us mentioned our interaction at the airport. However, it must have taken some effort to track me down – and I guess that she just wanted to let me know that she was still alive and, indeed, doing well. This is what can happen in a ‘gift economy’.

This example also illustrates the difference between what we want deep down in the essence of our being (in her case to live), and what we might reactively and superficially think we want (perhaps in response to a current difficulty).  It is important to remember this distinction when making the big decisions in our lives. For example, it may involve responding with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a request when saying the opposite would be easier or more acceptable. Exercising genuine leadership often requires that we do this.

These days as a retired professor I receive many surprise gifts – often as emails that invariable start with ‘you probably don’t remember me, but you… (and then a description of something that I had done in a class or tutorial – often something that I no longer clearly remember doing)… and then how valuable it had been for them in their life.

So I encourage you to both reflect on the most important gifts you might give and receive throughout your meaningful lives – and to get started after this ceremony is over by giving and receiving some gifts associated with your graduation.

Again, a big well done – and thank you for listening to this small gift to you.