Angad Singh Padda: 'When I was growing up, I lost two of my best friends to drug abuse', U.C. Berkeley - 2017

16 May 2017, UC Berkeley, California, USA

Thank you so much.

Class of 2017. It's late. All right. All right. All right. Let's be honest. Let's be honest. That intense beat right there, right? That was everybody's heartbeat right before we opened our admissions results. Let's be honest, all right? Man. When I got in, I was so happy. So happy, I kid you not, my face was as bright as this turban. I was that happy. When I got in, then I called up my best friends. A true story. I called up my best friends: "Guys, I got into my dream school, my dream school," and they said, "Good. Now find yourself a wife." True story.

No, no, no, no, no, no, not just a wife. She has to like Indian food.

Audience: Woo hoo.

On a serious note. On a serious note, for this speech, I need everybody's help. Everybody who is here right now, everybody's help. So, right now, help me out. For a couple of seconds, please, close your eyes, everybody. Now, think about that one problem that matters the most to you, that one issue you really need to resolve to make this world a better place. Think about that, and then open your eyes.

That right there, that right there, is the core of my speech today. When I first came to the US, my only objective was to become successful and live the American Dream, so that one day, I could use that success to go back to my home state and fix the drug problem. Real talk, no lies. When I was growing up, I lost two of my best friends to drug abuse. I did. So, that's the problem that I gotta fix, right? But when I met every single one of you, right here, I learned about the problems that you all hear about.

For example, whenever there's a kid in Oakland, who can't afford school, that's a problem. Whenever climate change wipes out a species, that's a problem. Whenever a Muslim woman gets bullied, because of her hijab, or a Jewish man, because of his yarmulka, or a Sikh man, because of his turban, that is a problem. That is a problem. The ones that you all care about. When a father in Syria cries, because he lost his entire family, to a missile strike, that's a problem. Right now, as of this very moment, Venezuela is starving. That is a problem.

So, why am I talking about this? Why? Because, you know what separates all of us? It's that all of us, much more than the profit, we all care about prosperity for everyone. That is who we are. We want to use our education to go beyond ourselves to make this world a better place. We want to unify this world. That is the core spirit of every single student over here right now. That is who we are.

So, in essence, on that note, many people are probably wondering. That's fine, but that's also nonsense. That's so impractical because unifying the world has never been done before. What are you talking about? There is no place in this world, some will say, where people have been unified like that. What if I said that there was? What if I said that there was a place like that, where people are one? So, right now, everybody imagine this beautiful village in India. It's a beautiful village. I want you guys to see the houses, the farms, the fields, the cattle, but now imagine one more thing: that the houses in that village have no doors. The houses in that village have no doors. Is that possible?

It is. There's a village in India, I am not kidding, called Shani Shingnapur, and in that village, not a single house has a door, and that's because the villagers firmly believe that there is no need for borders, or barriers, or discrimination. They are all one, and that is why in that village, there has never been a theft, or a robbery, or a single incident of violence. So, class of 2017, I ask all of you, what if all of us can use our education to create a world just like that village? Just like that village. Do you know what that world would look like? In that world, there would be no walls, or borders, none. In that world, there would be no Muslim ban, no Muslim ban. In that world, nobody would call the other person bad hombres. That is the world we have to create.

They say that dreams are not the ones that you have when you go to bed. Hell no! Dreams are the ones that don't let you go to bed, like the one that Martin Luther King had. That was a dream! That was a dream, the same way I know that everybody over here, we also have a dream. Our dream is to create a world where we are all one. The reason I played that intense drum beat over there, the main reason is because I wanted to show the world, that that is the heartbeat of every single Berkeley student. Our heart beat with that passion to create a world where there is no "I", there is no "me". There is no "I", there is no "me"; there is only an "us" and there is only a "we". That is it. That is who we are.

So, here is my ending. Here is my ending. No, I am not going to say, "Let's go out there and earn the most profit." I am going to say, "Let's go out there and earn prosperity for everyone." I am not going to say, "Let's go out there and earn the six figures." I am going to say, "Let's take away six of the world's biggest problems." I am not going to say "Let's just enter the Forbes 40 under 40." I am going to say, "Let's unify this world with 40 Pew." That is our identity. That is who we are. That is Berkeley heart, going beyond yourselves to make this world a better place, to make this world a better place.

Audience:[inaudible 00:08:58]

I love you too.

Audience:Woo hoo.

In the beginning of my speech today, every single person here from right there to right there, you all thought about that one problem that mattered the most to you, right? May 15th. May 15th, 2017. Now is the time. Now is our time, class of 2017 to go out there and fix all of these problems. Every single one of them. And so, here is my last sentence. My last sentence. You know, everybody talks about a legacy, right? Legacy, legacy, legacy. Our legacy will forever be remembered. Our legacy will be the class that not only did good business, no, no, no. The class that not only did good business, but the class that engaged in the business of doing good. The class that engaged in the business of doing good.

Peace, love and respect! Thank you so much. Thank you.

Hillary Rodham: 'To understand that limits no longer exist', Wellesley student speech - 1969

June 1969, Wellesley College, Massachusetts , USA

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us—the 400 of us—and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be quick because I do have a little speech to give.

Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade—years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program—so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "You know I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.

Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were at a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that we initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that were coming to Wellesley, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that Miss Adams, one of the first things she did was set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds anymore. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts to kind of - at least the way we saw it - pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.

Many of the issues that I've mentioned—those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility—have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multimedia age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling.

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen them heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words—integrity, trust, and respect—in regard to institutions and leaders, we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper or Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity—a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All we can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in "East Coker" by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word consequences of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To translate the future into the past.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

Thanks.

Donovan Livingston: 'We were born to be comets, Darting across space and time', Harvard University - 2016

25 May 2016, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin,
Is a great equalizer of the conditions of men.” – Horace Mann, 1848.
At the time of his remarks I couldn’t read — couldn’t write.
Any attempt to do so, punishable by death.
For generations we have known of knowledge’s infinite power.
Yet somehow, we’ve never questioned the keeper of the keys —
The guardians of information.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen more dividing and conquering
In this order of operations — a heinous miscalculation of reality.
For some, the only difference between a classroom and a plantation is time.
How many times must we be made to feel like quotas —
Like tokens in coined phrases? —
“Diversity. Inclusion”
There are days I feel like one, like only —
A lonely blossom in a briar patch of broken promises.
But I’ve always been a thorn in the side of injustice.

Disruptive. Talkative. A distraction.
With a passion that transcends the confines of my consciousness —
Beyond your curriculum, beyond your standards.
I stand here, a manifestation of love and pain,
With veins pumping revolution.
I am the strange fruit that grew too ripe for the poplar tree.
I am a DREAM Act, Dream Deferred incarnate.
I am a movement – an amalgam of memories America would care to forget
My past, alone won’t allow me to sit still.
So my body, like the mind
Cannot be contained.

As educators, rather than raising your voices
Over the rustling of our chains,
Take them off. Un-cuff us.
Unencumbered by the lumbering weight
Of poverty and privilege,
Policy and ignorance.

I was in the 7th grade, when Ms. Parker told me,
“Donovan, we can put your excess energy to good use!”
And she introduced me to the sound of my own voice.
She gave me a stage. A platform.
She told me that our stories are ladders
That make it easier for us to touch the stars.
So climb and grab them.
Keep climbing. Grab them.
Spill your emotions in the big dipper and pour out your soul.
Light up the world with your luminous allure.

To educate requires Galileo-like patience.
Today, when I look my students in the eyes, all I see are constellations.
If you take the time to connect the dots,
You can plot the true shape of their genius —
Shining in their darkest hour.

I look each of my students in the eyes,
And see the same light that aligned Orion’s Belt
And the pyramids of Giza.
I see the same twinkle
That guided Harriet to freedom.
I see them. Beneath their masks and mischief,
Exists an authentic frustration;
An enslavement to your standardized assessments.

At the core, none of us were meant to be common.
We were born to be comets,
Darting across space and time —
Leaving our mark as we crash into everything.
A crater is a reminder that something amazing happened here —
An indelible impact that shook up the world.
Are we not astronomers — looking for the next shooting star?
I teach in hopes of turning content, into rocket ships —
Tribulations into telescopes,
So a child can see their potential from right where they stand.
An injustice is telling them they are stars
Without acknowledging night that surrounds them.
Injustice is telling them education is the key
While you continue to change the locks.

Education is no equalizer —
Rather, it is the sleep that precedes the American Dream.
So wake up — wake up! Lift your voices
Until you’ve patched every hole in a child’s broken sky.
Wake up every child so they know of their celestial potential.
I’ve been a Black hole in the classroom for far too long;
Absorbing everything, without allowing my light escape.
But those days are done. I belong among the stars.
And so do you. And so do they.
Together, we can inspire galaxies of greatness
For generations to come.
No, sky is not the limit. It is only the beginning.
Lift off.

Simon Chesterman: ' From here on, you set your own exams', NUS Law School, Singapore - 2012

7 July 2012, National University of Singpaore, Singapore

Mr Wong Ngit Liong, Chairman, NUS Board of Trustees

Professor John Wong, Vice Provost (Academic Medicine), Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Graduands of the class of 2012.

What is the difference between being clever and being wise?

Commencement is by far my favourite event in the academic year.

It marks the culmination of our students’ achievements, years of hard work rewarded in a degree and celebrated with friends and family.

But as the name suggests, it is also a beginning: a beginning as you enter the workforce or pursue further study, and as you transition from being our students to being our alumni.

This is my first graduation ceremony as Dean of NUS Law. I’m delighted that my predecessor, Professor Tan Cheng Han is here also.

For the Law students, congratulations: this is the last occasion on which you must listen to the Dean of the Law School.

In future, I’ll be asking for your time.

For the graduands of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music — I hope that this is the last time you’ll need to listen to a lawyer at all. But that’s unlikely.

It is, however, probably the last time you’ll sit in a room with quite so many lawyers.

I would also like to offer a special welcome to the families that are here — none of our students would be graduating without the support you have given them.

I’d like to do three things in my remarks today:

First I will say something about the passage of time.

Secondly, I’ll talk about the choices ahead of you.

And thirdly, I’d like to tell you a story.

But nature of these addresses is that I’ll be lucky if you remember one thing a year from now

I hope that that will be the difference between being clever and being wise

1. Time

First let me say something about time.

As I said earlier, a graduation is both an end and a beginning.

For many of you, it is the end of your studies, but the beginning of your career — as you make the transition from being students to alumni

There is a similar progression for academics

If we are lucky, some graduates will distinguish themselves by saying that they were once so-and-so’s student.

In time, however, it is often the professor who distinguishes him or herself by saying I used to be so-and-so’s teacher.

Together with all my colleagues, I look forward to great things from you — for which we may take just a small amount of credit

We ask only that you stay in touch and tell us of your achievements.

As alumni there are many ways you can help

Most importantly, you can do good things — you can make us proud.

You can also advise potential and future students.

Finally you can contribute your time and, if you are able, your money to building NUS to be one of the truly great institutions in the world.

So how has your time at NUS changed you?

Naturally, I hope you’ve learned something.

But I also hope that you think you have changed, and that we have played a role in that change.

In particular, I hope that we’ve prepared you for a globalized world.

We talk in these days of global lawyers.

Musicians know that they are entering a global market.

If I can borrow a music analogy – discussions of law and globalization often refer to harmonization.

This is sometimes misunderstood as meaning uniformity, as the world gets smaller, or flatter.

As the music graduates know, that is not harmony. That’s monotony.

Harmony is when things that are different work together in a pleasant way, when they create something new, perhaps even something beautiful.

Now I confess that it’s more likely that people will associate beauty with the work of someone like Clarence Lee, who will be playing later. But I do believe that there can be beauty and elegance in a legal argument.

Or at least that there can be ugliness, which suggests the possibility of beauty.

I also hope that we have encouraged you to be ambitious.

Now that you’re leaving University, we won’t be setting exams for you anymore.

But I hope you will continue to set ambitious goals for yourself.

And if you ever get to point where you are achieving all your goals … then maybe those goals aren’t ambitious enough.

Having completed your studies, you earn today a piece of paper that testifies to the fact that you are clever.

Whether you are wise is another question.

2. Choices

Secondly, let me say something about some of the choices you will have to make in future.

For the real test of a university education is not whether you can complete it, but what you do with it.

Each of you made a choice to be here, a reason why you studied law or music, and why you stuck with it.

Perhaps it’s the same as what you said to an interviewer several years ago. Perhaps not.

Moving forward, in law certainly, but I believe also in music, you will face choices where there is an easy option and a hard option.

There will be an option that is open to you because you are clever, because you are able.

But it may not be wise.

In the past few months there have been an unusually large number of stories about corruption in Singapore.

This is depressing, of course.

But as my late colleague Tom Franck used to say: no one’s completely useless — you can always be a bad example.

Today you earn a qualification recognized worldwide. We hope that this is a building block in a brilliant career. But the thing that will define you is your reputation.

Resist the temptation to follow Groucho Marx.

“These are my principles,” he once said. “If you don’t like them, I have others.”

Warren Buffet put it nicely when speaking of bankers, though the same might apply to lawyers and perhaps musicians:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

Joseph Hall, the English bishop and satirist, was more optimistic:

“A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired -- but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.”

So choose carefully in your professional life.

Remember also that there are many ways to find professional fulfilment.

An increasing number of lawyers, for example, do pro bono work and find enormous satisfaction in that.

As Singapore continues to change politically, there will be increasing demands for access to justice.

Lawyers will play an extremely important role in those changes, and you may have a role to play too.

Choose carefully in your personal life also.

Many of the choices in your work life will be complicated.

Complicated questions are, in one sense, easy — you can break them up, look at different angles, piece them back together.

It’s the simple questions that are the hardest, because they just sit there staring you in the face asking you if you’re sure. Are you sure.

What is the right thing to do?

Whom should I marry?

What sort of person am I?

Again, reputation plays an outsize role.

So treat people the way you would want to be treated.

Try to see yourself as others might see you.

And never take friendship and love for granted.

3. Story

Now I come to the story (1).

It is a short story about an old woman and a bird.

There are many versions across different cultures.

It has no known author.

I’ll tell you the version that I know.

Once upon a time there was an old woman. She was blind. But she was wise.

Now you could tell a different version about an old man, or maybe it was a young girl. Perhaps the bird was in fact a butterfly. But let’s stick with my version for the moment.

Old woman. Blind. Wise.

One day, some clever young people decide to visit her.

They know that they are clever and intend to demonstrate this by proving that the old woman is a fraud.

She may be blind, they think, but she is not wise. And she is not cleverer than they.

So a young man has brought with him a small bird. He holds the bird cupped in his hands.

“Old woman,” he says. “In my hands I hold a small bird. Tell me: is it alive or dead?”

The old woman is silent.

He repeats his question: “Is the bird I am holding alive or dead?”

And he smiles. Because if she says it is dead, he will release it — and the flapping of its wings will show her to be a fool.

But if she says it is alive, he will crush it to death and drop the carcass in her hands.

Still the old woman says nothing.

She is silent for such a long time that some of the young people begin to laugh.

Finally she speaks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if the bird you are holding is alive or dead. The only thing I know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Conclusion

Now if this were a class in Law School I can imagine the student feedback:

“Prof didn’t actually tell us what wisdom was.” “He didn’t say what would be on the exam.”

And that’s my point. From here on, you set your own exams.

So, in closing, let me offer my congratulations to the graduating class of 2012.

I wish you peace and harmony;

I wish you success and happiness;

I wish you cleverness and wisdom.

Thank you.

[1] Adapted from Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture,

Toni Morrison's delivered her own commencement speech which is on Speakola here.

Nick Selby: 'If you want to play theme music during your convocation speech like a badass, we’re at Georgia Tech, we can do that!', Freshmen Convocation - 2013

18 August 2013, Georgia Tech University, Georgia USA

And so, in the words of Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Georgia Tech is proud of its many traditions, but the one I find most exciting is ...

Our tradition of excellence!

Our mission as students is not to follow in the footsteps of the astronauts, Nobel Prize Laureates, and president who graduated before us, but to exceed their footsteps,

Crush the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand!

We here are all such innovative people.

So I am telling you

if you want to change the world, you’re at Georgia Tech, you can do that!

If you want to build the Iron Man suit, you’re at Georgia Tech–you can do that!

If you want to play theme music during your convocation speech like a badass, we’re at Georgia Tech–we can do that!

I am doing that!

Congratulations on your acceptance and brace yourselves for a hell of a ride on your way to becoming a hell of an engineer.

The above is the brilliant conclusion to the speech. Below is the full version. It contains ten tips for new Georgia Tech students.

Tony Wilson: 'Kiliing me softly with Contracts', Melbourne University Law School, 1995

November, 1995, Malvern Town Hall, Melbourne, Australia

Judge Curtain, Professor Crommelin, faculty staff, guests, students, ex-students, people who have attended lectures for five years without actually enrolling,

I remember when I was a student - young, idealistic, and ready to change the world. Unfortunately like a good many others in our faculty, I was also somewhat keen on sleeping. which meant changing the world had to be slotted somewhere into the early afternoon. Results were not initially forthcoming. Still. a group of us stuck at it for about two hours a day over five years, generally doing our most productive work in the upstairs coffee lounge. If we had to name our greatest success it would probably be achieving lasting peace in Northern Ireland - basically the culmination of a plan forcing Catholics and Protestants to negotiate, under threat of being set upon by Students for Christ.

For most of us, this is the last function we will attend in the law school as law students. A lucky few might have a supp or two to look forward to, but in general terms this is the last hurrah. The first function we attended as *law students was the First Year dinner - or First Year smorgasbord - as it is generally termed by the later year students who constitute the vast majority of those who attend. The Dean of the Law School, Professor Crommelin was doing his diplomatic duties on this particular evening and was sitting at my end of the table. I decided to get acquainted.

"Hello, I'm Tony Wilson."

"Michael Crommelin, pleased to meet you" came the reply.

I was happy with how the conversation was going. After all, if I'd learned nothing else from the Meatballs trilogy it was that I wanted to be on this bloke's good side when the inevitable misguided toga parties and itching powder raids took place. Then I decided to introduce my new friend to Kimberly Kane.

"Professor Crommelin have you met Kim? Kim this is the Dean"

Kim, whom I would later discover has an ability to raise the gaffe to the highest form of art, quickly began carrying the conversation. Yes she was excited about doing law. Yes she was enjoying her wonton soup. Everything was going smoothly and it seemed only a matter of time before Kim secured herself the editorship of the Law Review. Unfortunately, when it came Kim's turn to embark upon some introductions of her own, things went horribly, horribly wrong.

"Shelley have you met Dean? Dean this is Shelley".

Still, she wasn't the only one struggling to come to terms with the new language of university life. My own personal low-light came in the second or third month of semester when I finally plucked up the courage to ask my torts teacher why so many judges have first names that begin with "J". I'd simply assumed that all of Australia's Johns, Jeremys and Jemimas had opted for a career on the bench.

The early nineties came and went with barely a sigh. By second year most of us had bulked up enough to walk upright through the wind tunnels near the law library, which made getting to and from the Student Union quicker and easier. I toyed for a while with becoming a radical, inspired by the deeds and misdeeds of the Austudy 5, but eventually decided against it because of the great primary coloured hairspray shortage of 1992.

Surely the standout memory of second year must relate to Contracts law. Not to the subject matter itself of course, which eloped with my knowledge of Con & Admin to the far recesses of The Clyde about half an hour after the exam. but rather to the complete Fred Ellinghaus Contracts experience. The bad news is that this particular subject, and its eccentric bare-footed prophet had such a profound impact upon me that I decided to write a song about it. The even worse news is that I'm now about to sing it. For humanitarian reasons Sebastian Hughes, who for a period sported the greatest blonde afro of the post-Garfunkel era, will provide the accompaniment. The song is called "Killing Me Softly With Contracts".

We ventured to the lecture

And some were heard to muse

That person teaching Contracts

S’not wearing any shoes

He may have been a genius,

But boy was his class tedious

 

Running my hair through my fingers

Leaving some drool on the page

Killing me softly with Contracts

Killing me softly with Contracts

Ripping our hears out, with his gags

Killing me softly with Contracts

 

The casebook was quite yellow

The casebook was quite dear

The casebook had been written

In the latter Whitlam years

But still I went and bought it

Right from the one who taught it

 

CHORUS

 

I tried to dig implied terms

I really tried like hell

I even tried to love Dean J’s test for estoppel

What tragic inspiration

Made the bastards teach frustration

 

CHORUS

By 1993 the Law Library expanded to have two photocopiers in working order, causing the photocopier to law student ratio to plunge to 1 for every 500 students. Unfortunately these halcyon days of university administration couldn't last, and today students look back on the two working photocopier era as being part of a golden past. This was also the year many of us embarked upon Property Law. If Fred Ellinghaus had been killing us softly with Contracts, it's fair to say that Murray Raff was positively disembowelling us with Property. But whatever his faults were. you always had to have a soft spot for Murray for the simple reason that he was willing to share his slides of Europe with us to help explain the Torrens system. His basic reasoning seemed to be as follows - the Torrens system originated in Germany; the Torrens system has something to do with this course; I'm trying to teach this course, so here's a picture of me putting away a Wiener schnitzel on the streets of Berlin. It was inspirational stuff.

I always know when it's exam time because I start brushing my teeth five or six times a day. Can't be too clean. I say to myself. Wouldn't want my Equity notes to think I’ve got bad breath. Another fairly sure sign is the Motor Market. In swot vac I read it because strictly speaking it's part of the newspaper which strictly speaking is part of the greater educational order of things. And after all, isn't that what swot vac is all about? - Education.

It is amazing to think that those of us who are finishing will probably never go back inside the Exhibition Buildings again. Mind you, it is not inconceivable that the Exhibition Buildings will become a sort of 'Vietnam" for this generation of law student. I know that there aren't too many nights when I m not back in there ...dreaming ... dreaming of the crush for an exam number. Dreaming of fully loaded, fully tabbed sets of notes and of the silent smiling, geriatric invigilators stalking the aisles: dreaming of unstable desks and pens and booklets
and misplaced student cards; dreaming of the faces on the ones being left behind doing three hour examinations - some of them just nineteen, twenty years of age; dreaming of the horror … the horror of....(pause)

Look there'll be home and caravan shows at the Exhibition Buildings. Everyone will tell me that they're very informative and that it's safe to go, but I'll never go back.      [Head in hands] Never ... go ...back....

But of all the exam nightmares to haunt us in the years to come, I daresay there will be none more vivid than the PA announcement nightmare. The Exhibition Buildings PA system. when it is working, basically exists to scare the living daylights out of students who may finally have settled down enough to begin to construct an answer. A typical one might go something like this:

"Students sitting for 730 301 Advanced Administrative Law ... There is an error on page three of the exam booklet - question two, paragraph three ... Would students please amend the sentence beginning "Phil gave the cherry picker to Abbey" to read 'Phil gave the cherry picker to Ainslie ... Thank you."

On the first day of first year law. Robert Evans said to his TPL class, "the study of law will alter your mind. None or you will ever be the same". He then read us some Elizabethan poetry, gave us a wide-eyed smile and struck a pose which would later be made famous by Krusty the Clown. Five years down the track and one can't help but think that Robert was right. Two days ago, a group of us were having a conversation as to who was the best House of Lords judge. The debate basically ran along two lines. One group thought Lord Morris of Borthy Gest should be number one, for the simple reason that he is from Borthy Gest. Another group were equally strident in singing the praises of Lord Wilberforce. who revolutionised not just tort law but life as we know it with his deceptively simple "but for" test.

An ugly verbal fracas eventuated with the Borthy Gestians refusing to give an inch until they were eventually persuaded to the Wilberforce line by the sheer strength and versatility of the "but for" test. After all, but for the fact Lord Morris was from Borthy Gest, he would not even have been considered in the first place.

The people who participated in this conversation probably should be named, for they surely they deserve to face some degree of social ostracism. But instead it will merely be offered as a catastrophic example of a mind-altering legal education spinning wildly out of control.

It's hard not to feel completely, ecstatic about the occasion of our finishing our degrees. Maybe it’s relief. maybe it's satisfaction, maybe it's just that five years is a hell of a long time and most of us are ready to do something else. Nevertheless, as time goes on and alarm clocks begin to play an increasing role in our daily lives, this attitude will no doubt change. I certainly plan to dedicate much of my later life to telling and re-telling long-winded meandering anecdotes about my university days as "the best days of my life". It will be my prerogative as an old person, and I encourage you all to do the same.

As the organ transplant salesperson said in Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life "remember that you're standing on a planet that's revolving, revolving at 900 miles an hour", As we step tentatively into our post-university lives, one could be mistaken for thinking that the Earth has even shifted up a gear.  If anyone needs further convincing on this point, consider this recent experience in a McDonalds drive ­thru:

"Hello sir, can I take your order?"

"Could I please have a McFeast and a large fries"

Two seconds later her headphones crackled with disturbing news regarding my order "Um, excuse me sir, there's going to be a thirty second wait on that McFeast. Will that be okay."

I didn't know what to say, but I did know that I had to say it quickly. After all, too long a delay and time would be up, and none of us would ever know if I was okay about the thirty second wait. After weighing the pros and cons, I squeaked out a yes, with barely five seconds to spare.’

Thank you to Julie, Shail, Anna and all the organisers for all the effort which has gone into making this evening a success. Thank you also for the invitation to do this speech - if you could call this hotchpotch of thoughts and memories a speech. Perhaps if U2's Bono were here tonight he might have assessed it as follows: "It's not so much a speech as a collection of bullshit'".

Long after most of us have forgotten that a charitable trust can be administered cy pres, we will remember our times at university for what they really were - a time for learning, living, falling in love, falling out of love, talking. laughing, sleeping, recovering and creative footnoting. To the academic staff who face an uphill battle each year to make the curriculum fresh and invigorating, we thank you. To the administrative staff who recently triumphed in having the paper dispensers in the Law Library toilets lowered to eye level, we thank you. And to the friends who have provided me with what undoubtedly have been the best years of my life, I thank you. In the words of that most politically incorrect advertisement for Roses chocolates - to everyone "thank you very much, thank you very, very, very much."