Mac grads ‘beneficiaries of 130 years of positive ambition’
Convocation is a “calling together” of the university family to celebrate individual achievements and our shared mission, where speakers like me often advise graduates like you to find balance in life by seeking personal fulfilment and success, while also serving the greater good.
In such a context you’re unlikely to hear anyone celebrating ambition, an attribute we often associate with selfish, even antisocial attitudes. We talk of naked ambition: unmediated, not linked to any purpose beyond itself.
This is the ambition Shakespeare had in mind in “Macbeth.” Many of you know the plot: witches predict a Scottish general will one day become King of Scotland. Consumed with ambition, he plots to murder the king, and utters these lines:
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on th'other ...
(I, VII, 25-28)
The point of Macbeth’s equestrian metaphor is that there is no particular goal spurring him on, other than “vaulting ambition” or the simple desire to jump, with no regard for the point of doing it. He cannot control his ambition — it “o’erleaps itself ” — and it ends in disaster for our Scottish pretender who (in one film version at least) winds up with his head on a spike.
That’s why you don’t hear convocation speeches about ambition. Still, it is important to acknowledge that ambition in some form plays a role in the lives of university students, faculty, staff and alumni. You are here, for example, to celebrate your graduation because you aspired to achieve this. I hope today you are experiencing the pleasure of personal ambitions legitimately fulfilled.
If you’re not sure what comes next, that’s fine and understandable, and certainly no indication that your ambition has “o’erleapt” itself. The desire for knowledge and enlightenment is always a sufficient spur to action — ambition of a very pure and admirable kind.
That is one of the things that make universities so wonderful: while they exist in a sense because of our ambition to know and understand our world, they nourish our imaginations and fuel our greater aspirations. Universities are places, in other words, where personal ambition can and should be channeled for the betterment of our world.
In 1918, British philosopher Bertrand Russell — whose archives reside at McMaster — was about to be imprisoned for his pacifist activities. He wrote that while the great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticizing ... either their own conditions or those of the world at large ... a certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will, which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community. But very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love toward mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives.
Russell admirably describes how the ambivalent quality of personal ambition is transmogrified in some people into unambiguous good. As some seek “to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves,” ambition for the self turns into ambition for the good of society.
All of this is to acknowledge that while society is nervous about ambition, humanity will go nowhere without it. As McMaster graduates you are beneficiaries of 130 years of positive ambition: what an effort of thought and will went into opening the medical school in 1970, building the McMaster Nuclear Reactor in 1957, establishing the McMaster Museum of Art and inventing problem-based learning on our campus, not to mention the discoveries taking place in our labs and classrooms every day.
The Russell archive, which I mentioned earlier, is also evidence of McMaster’s ambitious spirit: that the papers of this major British figure would end up in Hamilton in 1968 must have seemed unimaginable to most people — except to Will Ready, McMaster librarian, and my predecessor Harry Thode, who both had the highest aspirations for McMaster as a centre for scholarship and made it their goal to bring the archives here.
This year McMaster has been acknowledged as the most research-intensive university in Canada. For the second year we are a finalist for the Global Teaching Excellence Award offered by the Higher Education Academy and Times Higher Education in London. McMaster rose to 66th place in the Academic Ranking of World Universities and to 78th position in the Times Higher Education World Rankings. With more than 18,000 universities in the world, that means you are graduating from an institution in the top 0.5 per cent globally. You could not have made it here without ambition, and McMaster could not have achieved such standing without generations of “effort, thought and will” and determination to achieve the highest goals possible.
But does the pursuit of excellence justify society’s investment in institutions like ours? Those “Brighter World” banners you may have seen on campus remind us that all our teaching, learning, research, creation and innovation is ultimately done in service of a goal.
The positive ambition which drives the university is an energetic and relentless pursuit of solutions to the problems that impede human advancement. As graduates of McMaster you are part of that ambition; indeed, you are vital contributors to making this a brighter world. Your talent and energy, combined with the fruits of your studies, make you powerful agents for positive change. You must have confidence in that, believing, as Marie Curie wrote, that you are “gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
I hope you will use this power in service to a properly ambitious vision for the world. I hope finding a place in that vision for your personal aspirations will bring you great joy and satisfaction.