Maryvale Institute
Birmingham

Degree Ceremony
St Chad’s Cathedral

Wednesday 3rd November 1999

Remarks by

Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University

It is a great pleasure to be with you this afternoon. Ever since I first visited the Maryvale Institute it has held a special place in my memory. I think that the acuteness of my recollections of Maryvale is a combination of the people and the place.

I particularly recall the ceremony at which we awarded an honorary doctorate to Archbishop Couve de Murville. He wore his purple cassock for the occasion which combined with the yellow and blue doctoral robes to make him quite the most colourful candidate I have ever encountered. May I also pay tribute to the pioneering work that the Maryvale Institute has done in introducing the methods of distance learning to Catholic higher education. I am very proud that the Open University is associated with Maryvale and with your work. In this context is a privilege to honour Professor McGoldrick who has played such an important role in the development of the Maryvale Institute.

The Church can be very proud of the role that it has played over the centuries in the promotion and development of education at all levels. It is very easy for us to forget, in this era when leaders of national governments proclaim that their agenda is ‘education, education, education’ that the state is a relatively recent arrival on the educational scene. Previous to that the Church was the motor of education and continues, as at Maryvale to be an important player to this day.

I myself was a student at St Edmund Hall, Oxford - one of Oxford’s first colleges - it was named for Edmund Rich, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who taught in Oxford in the thirteenth century. I have always been inspired by one of his sayings in particular: ‘you should live as if you were going to die tomorrow and learn as if you were going to live forever’. Clearly the current concept of lifelong learning is not new, but has been actively promoted by the Church throughout its existence.

Let me also quote from the secular literature of England only slightly later. One of the first references to an academic in our literature is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The character in question is referred to by Chaucer as the Clerk of Oxenford, who must have been an Oxford don not long after the creation of that university.

Chaucer tells us that the Clerk of Oxenford would rather have twenty books in his bedroom than nice clothes and that he was not a rich man. And then he adds:

And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

I have always felt that to be the best one line summary of the ambitions that we should harbour as scholars and academics. First, what we do should be done gladly. We should be pleased that our community values the academic mode of thinking, that great triumph of the human spirit, enough to support us to be people of learning.

Second, I like the order of the words. And gladly would he learn and gladly teach. Reminding us that learning comes before teaching and that the good teacher is always a learner. That is the attitude I encounter at the Maryvale Institute, learning and teaching with gladness, and I congratulate you for sustaining that atmosphere of study, reflection and scholarship.

I also congratulate you for being a successful institution within the Open University’s network of accredited institutions. I want to tell you how much we value the Maryvale Institute within our diverse network of institutions and to thank Father Daniel McHugh and the staff for their participation in the activities of Open University Validation Services. You bring wisdom, commitment and a tradition of scholarship that is an inspiration to all the other institutions.

In the circles in which I move Cardinal Newman’s work is particularly topical at the moment. He it was who first coined the term ‘virtual university’ which has now become a commonplace to describe programmes of higher education conducted online with computers. For Cardinal Newman virtual university was a pejorative term and I think he was right. When people call the Open University a virtual university I tell them that, on the contrary it is very real to the tens of thousands of students and staff who make up our vibrant academic community.

It is for all these reasons that it is such a pleasure to be here this afternoon and to congratulate the new graduates whose success we have celebrated. We are proud to count you as new graduates of the Open University and you should be proud to carry with you the name of the Maryvale Institute.

On your behalf I thank the families that have supported you during your studies and the staff of the Institute who have guided your learning. I wish you every success in the future.


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