The Conferring addresses were given by Dr Elizabeth Okasha, Department of English, UCC (attached) and Ms Sylda Langford, Director General, Office of Minister for Children (attached).
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Conferring Address by Dr Elizabeth Okasha, Department of English, UCC , Friday, September 14th 2007, 10am & 12.30pm.

It is a great pleasure to be here today to share with you this day of celebration. It is a day for all of us to celebrate - you who have just graduated, those of us who have taught you, and perhaps above all your families. I recall some happy, and immensely proud, occasions when I attended the conferrings of my own children.

When I was asked to address you today, I thought at first that I would describe to you some of the changes that I have witnessed in the last 30 years, since I first came to UCC in 1977. I thought it would be easy for me to describe changes in Ireland, Cork and UCC over 30 years. It would be easy to talk of affluence and Celtic tigers, of how we now have six or seven times the number of students we had then (though not unfortunately six or seven times the number of teaching rooms). It would be easy to describe people's reactions in 1977 to my way of speaking my mother tongue, to my husband's brown skin - when in fact the accent evoked considerably more hostile reactions than the skin pigmentation. But then I thought that this sort of thing has been done many times before, and anyway this date of 1977, such a short time ago to me, is part of pretty ancient history to most students.

So instead I decided to address my remarks primarily to those of you who have just graduated and to consider briefly what a university is, what we all do who work here, whether as students or staff, with particular reference to studying in the Humanities within the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences.

With whatever degree you have been conferred today, you will no doubt be feeling pleased and confident about your future, and so you should be. You have achieved a high accolade in our society, a Humanities degree from a really good university, and there are now many career paths open to you. If you wish to travel, your degree will make this easy. If you wish to stay in Ireland, there are jobs available. It is not so long ago that this was not the case, when we as teachers knew that we were in effect teaching people so that they could catch the boat or the plane to England, the US, or elsewhere, due to lack of employment here. That haemorrhage of talented and educated young people is thankfully a thing of the past. In that sense you, and we, are really fortunate.

However, university education is not, and should not be, primarily a way for any individual to acquire wealth, an easy job, a comfortable way of life. Your education in the Humanities should hopefully have taught you about making a contribution to society, about undertaking a worthwhile career, about being open-minded and countering prejudice, about doing your best, about being enthusiastic about what you do.

If university education should not be simply about making life easy for its graduates, still less should it be harnessed by any government, by any state, primarily as a means to increase its exports, its wealth, its productivity, its gross national product, or whatever. This language of the corporate world and of marketing, with inputs and outputs, deadlines and benchmarks, based so much on competitiveness as a fundamental value, in my view goes absolutely against the ethos of what universities should be about. Traditionally a university was a community of scholars, engaged in (and I quote) 'the pursuit of truth in the service of society'. These words are not new; they are attributed to Bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen speaking around 1500 AD. Competition with others working in a university would have been anathema to the Bishop, and I believe it still should be considered so in many of the aims and activities of universities today.

University staff are employed both to teach and to conduct research. Research in the Humanities is intellectual work: it is worth doing for its own sake, quite regardless of whether or not the results can be perceived as having any immediately evident concrete application to society. Of course there are other faculties and other colleges in the university where research work is indeed, and is rightly expected to be, of immediate and practical use. It is essential that a university supports applied research in science, in medicine, in engineering, and so on. These areas of research are vital to us in our 21st-century world and the government is naturally eager for universities to pursue research in these areas, and indeed to compete with others while so doing.

Much research in the Humanities is, however, not like this. Very often research in the Humanities is not 'applied' or 'useful', but is concerned with our culture, with enquiry, with pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge and of understanding, with suggesting new interpretations of existing evidence, with being creative. My own research area could hardly be of less 'use' in an applied sense. My research has been almost all on inscribed objects dating from the first millennium AD and emanating from Anglo-Saxon England, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. Looked at objectively, many of these artefacts are gravestones, and often not very attractive to look at, though some are beautiful, for example pieces of jewellery. Interpreting the texts inscribed on these objects, comparing them with each other, dating the artefacts, and seeing whether anything can be concluded about the early societies which produced them - now of what conceivable use is this to anyone? In a practical sense, absolutely none. Yet I would suggest to you that such research work in general (rather than mine in particular) is of enormous importance. Its importance lies in terms of our culture, our knowledge, our understanding of the past, our encountering languages, literature and art from other places and times in all their strangeness, in challenges to our own moral and ideological prejudices.

University staff are public servants, paid by the State, and clearly the State has a perfect right to make sure that its money is being well spent. Certainly the government has the right to demand that staff work hard, and that they pursue research according to international intellectual criteria. But, equally, no State has the right, I think, to judge the value of any individual scholar's research in terms of its direct financial productivity, or its clear applicability to the immediate public good. In the course of my career I have been asked a couple of times what is the point of my research. It pleases me to be able to report that these questions have not come from any official quarter, but it pains me to say that they have been asked, in all seriousness, by other academics here in UCC. If we in universities are not all committed to pursuing knowledge for its own sake, then how can we possibly expect anyone outside universities to be so? 

As university staff we are also of course required to teach students effectively, and you have all been the recipients of much of our teaching during your years at UCC. Here again, competition is not, and should not be, part of our brief. We do our best: we do not vie with other staff in our Departments to teach 'better'; nor do we strive to teach 'better' than others in similar departments in other institutions. Yet we can feel under pressure. Of course we can accept another 50 students into a particular First Arts class. We can repeat our lectures when there is no lecture hall big enough to accommodate the whole class. We can expand tutorials until they resemble mini lectures. All this brings in extra money, shows that some subject areas here in UCC are enormously successful, indicates that in some areas we are doing much 'better' than UCD or NUIG. But of what use is this if the learning experience of the students is significantly diminished, if the Library is inadequately financed, affecting its holdings and the effectiveness of its dedicated staff, if there are only cramped seats at the back of the lecture hall, where you can neither see nor hear properly? There comes a moment, well before the largest lecture hall is full, when the quality of education our students are receiving in this situation is diminished. The pressure may be financial but the result is not necessarily teaching to the highest standard.

What indeed are we doing as teaching staff in the Humanities? When I started out as a university teacher, longer ago than I care to remember, I was full of lofty-sounding ideals. I recall saying in a rather superior tone, possibly during the interview for my first post in Scotland, that teaching students was all about teaching them to evaluate evidence. Over the years a note of realism has set in and I now content myself with more modest aims. I try to encourage my students to read voraciously, to think, to be open-minded to others' arguments, to read and summarise accurately other people's writing and thought, to construct their own clear and persuasive arguments written in good English. But above all I aim to inspire them with enthusiasm, to motivate them to study through my love for my subject.

I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity to spend most of my working life teaching and doing research in such a rich and stimulating environment as UCC. I sincerely hope that all of you who have been conferred today feel as privileged as I do.

I would like to end with a brief word to those of you who are starting, or continuing, with research in your chosen area, whether at MA, PhD or post-doctoral level. These are some words which were said to a group of us in an address as we started out as PhD students in Cambridge. 'The most you can hope to achieve', we were told, 'and this will not be the lot of all of you, is to add a footnote to the volumes of human knowledge'. How many of us here today on this podium, or indeed amongst all UCC staff, have achieved this? Probably very few. But we have all gained immeasurably by trying.

May the same be true for you.

Thank you.

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Conferring Address by Ms Sylda Langford, Director General, Office of the Minister for Children, Friday, September 14th 2007, 3.30pm

I  want to thank the President of UCC, Dr Michael Murphy for the invitation and honour which I have to address you on this most special of days.  The invitation was a special honour for me as I too am a graduate of UCC, a badge of honour which I have been proud to wear since I sat out there in 1969 like you do to-day.  The education both formal and informal, which I received as a social science graduate in UCC, was a foundation which enabled me to build a solid and satisfying professional life in social policy and the social services in Ireland.

Personal Experiences and Learning

There are a number of lessons which I have learned over the years since I graduated which I would like to share with you, as the graduates of 2007.

One lesson is that some fundamentals never change - human being's needs, hopes, expectations, aspirations, experiences of happiness and suffering, never change.  The other lesson is that the economic and social context in which we human beings live out our lives is in constant change.

Because of these two opposites, those of us who choose to work in the social services must remain perpetual students if we are to be equipped with the relevant knowledge and skills required for effective social policy and social service.  To give you an example of what I mean - when I graduated here in 1969, child abuse, physical/sexual/emotional, was not on the curriculum; domestic violence was not on the curriculum; suicide was not on the curriculum.  This was because such issues were not acknowledged in society, not because such problems did not exist, as we know all too well to-day.

Social change churns continuously in society throwing up new insights, new problems new solutions.  Therefore, effectiveness in the social services requires of us continuous professional development so as to update knowledge and skills.  As a young graduate I faced into a society where it was accepted as normal that women give up their job on marriage, where there was no family planning or divorce, where a young single girl who became pregnant hid away in an institution awaiting the adoption of her baby, where a young person who had a nervous breakdown was destined to live out their live in a prison - like psychiatric hospital, where the pawn shop was the first and last resort of the poor.

You however face into a society which is far more complex and diverse on the one hand, but on the other where there is more openness, honesty and visibility in relation to social problems.  You face an Ireland to-day which is more likely to tackle its social problems.  In Ireland, it would appear that we lack the experience and skills required to live balanced lives in a Celtic Tiger economy  - we have not yet learned that excessive drinking, drug taking, excessive personal pressure through work or otherwise, excessive individualism, is not good for us.  Many of the social problems you will have to deal with in your working life are as a result of our not yet having achieved a balance between our emotional and social needs as human beings, who are members of families and local communities, and the demands and opportunities of economic success offered to us by a Celtic Tiger economy.

Another lesson I have learned over the years while working in social policy and social services is that people in need of services are rarely problematic.  What is problematic, however, is how professionals, agencies and Departments tend to position themselves as service providers.  Those of us in the services tend to operate in isolated silos offering one piece of service.  However, there is no such thing as a uni - dimensional child, young person or person with a disability or elderly person - yet, they have to move from housing, to education to health and move within the different sections of these services to get their needs met.  Good service outcomes require from us professionals a whole - system planning approach and strong linkages between the planning and delivery of universal and targeted services.  Thankfully, this holistic thinking is now seeping into our national policies as reflected in the seminal            report of the National Economic and Social Council - "The Developmental  Welfare State" and is also reflected in the plans by the HSE to roll out Primary Care Teams across Ireland which aim to have all professionals working together in one location to facilitate joined up service provision for the people in a locality.

However, the most important lesson I have learned over the years is, that those of us who opted to work in social policy and the social services should never forget the most important qualities required of us if we are to be successful professionals i.e. we must be rooted in compassion and care.  If we are simply processing people in need of services through bureaucratic systems, if we are so busy processing that there is no time for care, we cannot be effective professionals in the social services.  Being caring and compassionate does not imply that we are not at the same time insightful and strategic - in fact, my experience has been that you have to be really strategic to be effective within the social services.  But care is the bottom line and never lose it if you chose to work in a caring profession.

Finally, my congratulations to you, to your families, your friends, your teachers and tutors who have supported you to get to this day.  They have all reason to be proud of you.  You are the future of our Irish social policy and social services which will be entrusted to your care as you commence employment across the Irish State.  My wish for you is that your careers will be as satisfying and fulfilling as mine has been.

Thank you for your attention and Good Luck.

517MMcS

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