Response to Honorary Doctorate
Liverpool Hope University
Professor Simon Lee
Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool
26 January 2016
Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, fellow graduands, ladies and
gentlemen,
Thank you to Dr Ian Vandewalle for those kind words and to those responsible for this
honour. Congratulations to fellow graduands. You and I have been encouraged,
inspired and supported by families, friends, teachers, by Hope the university and by
hope, the virtue. Similarly, your example will have inspired them and others.
Our younger daughter, Rebecca, here present, used to do a good impression of me
speaking on Hope’s graduation days, saying ‘We are all graduands’, we are all in the
process of graduating, of proceeding to the next stage of our lifelong learning. But it is
true and even today, we can learn something. And I do not mean that it must have
occurred to some in the cathedral today that if you can get an honorary doctorate for
thinking of Hope, you would like one too, because Hope is such an obvious name for
this university. One of my heroes is Sir Arnold Lunn, who was at my old college a
hundred years ago and then invented downhill and slalom skiing. Until then skiing was
cross-country, going along, or jumping, going up, so the Nordic skiing establishment
were horrified. They asked him how he would like it if they started changing the laws
of cricket? He said that would be great because there were too many draws (an issue
now addressed by limited overs cricket). Now, downhill skiing seems obvious. A
hundred years ago, it was radical. ‘Hope’, I trust, seems the natural name for this
university. Twenty years ago, it came as a surprise to those who thought it would never
work.
Twenty years from now, what will you recall from your time at Hope? Even when you
receive your certificate, you will not know the full extent of your achievements, of what
you take and what you have given. Indeed, the paradox is that the more profound an
influence from university turns out to be in your later life, the less likely you are to have
appreciated it at the time. Putting it more positively, there will be a slow release of
hope buoying you up year after year, decade after decade. There is a delayed reaction
to your student experience, which is just as well since nowadays so many students
carry on paying for the privilege. Don’t blame me for that, I was very much against the
government decisions on this. My point today is that there is a plus side in years to
come, as influences from your Hope past can transform your lives. I will illustrate this
with three examples from my own experience: a person, an idea and a sense of place.
Please think along with me of the person, the idea, the place who will turn out to have
influenced you the most and perhaps you will let the alumni office know in decades to
come if you were right.
First, a person. When I took my final exams and went abroad for further study, I lent a
first year student my Roman Law notes. I didn’t know then what was to happen when
I sought to reclaim them a couple of years later. Yes, Reader, I married her: Patricia
McNulty, here present. Patricia’s parents, Maud and Bernard McNulty, were born in
Liverpool, met as teachers at St Augustine’s on the Dock Road and gave their working
lives to opening up opportunities for education. So that must have influenced our
decision to come back to England for me to work here. As my father-in-law had been
a student at SFX, St Francis Xavier, now the Cornerstone, that must have influenced
the decision to convert that old school and church into Hope at Everton, now your
campus for the creative arts. You might not marry one of your fellow students but I
guarantee that their influences will criss-cross your lives.
Second, an idea. Although the most obvious thing I took from my first year exams was
the result and a prize, in the days before those exams I went for a few evenings to the
university mission in the Sheldonian, a round building. This was extra-curricular, I
didn’t have to go but I’m glad I did. The speaker was a Belgian, Cardinal Suenens, a
high priest of ecumenism. He talked about Hope: ‘to hope is not to dream but to turn
dreams into reality’. I didn’t think about that again until the peace process in Northern
Ireland and then it came back to me when I was coming here, to this street called
Hope, linking these two great cathedrals. The rest, as you know, is the history of Hope.
We put that quote on the scaffolding for the building works at the Cornerstone. A
nearby Sure Start children’s centre adopted it. And so the influence of an idea spreads.
Similarly for you, there will be an idea lodged in your memory which will have its day.
You might not appreciate how it works. It was Jamie, our son, who was then 11 but is
here present at 32, who pointed out that one of the reasons Hope works so well as a
university title is because it is both a noun and a verb. For us, this idea of Hope led to
Hope on the Waterfront, the Network of Hope and Hope across the Irish Sea. We were
the first to use ‘Waterfront’ in Liverpool, now it is a world heritage site and the brown
signs from far away point you to the Waterfront. We stepped in to the old Granada
studio there when Richard & Judy left the Albert Dock. My colleague, Sean Gallagher,
director of finance and resources, gave up his weekends to serve there as a volunteer
alongside cleaners, receptionists and many other staff. One day, a Sri Lankan
businessman came in and was so impressed by the senior staff serving at tables that
he decided to send his daughter here and so a stream of Sri Lankan students started
to flow. We played three video clips on the big screen there, Marlon Brando in the film
On the Waterfront saying it is good to be a teacher, another clip where the priest is
told to go back to his church and he says this is his church, Christ is here on the
Waterfront, and Bill Clinton winning the Presidential nomination at the Democrat party
conference, reflecting on his background in Hope, Arkansas, and concluding with the
immortal line, ‘I still believe in a place called Hope’.
Third, a place. Even now, at this late stage in your time at Hope, you might take some
inspiration from this ceremony, in addition to your certificate. This is a wonderful place
in which to graduate. It symbolises education in the round, education of the whole
person, in mind, body and spirit. It is linked to this city’s great Anglican cathedral by a
street called Hope. And it is on the site of the old workhouse, opposite Mount Pleasant,
where the Sisters of Notre Dame came from the Continent to educate young women
to teach refugees from the Irish famine over 150 years ago. But do you know, for
instance, that there is a glorious crypt underneath this cathedral, designed by Sir
Edwin Lutyens? It was part of his plans for a huge cathedral that has been described
as his master-work, not ever having been completed. But our master-works, ourselves,
will never quite be the finished article either. Things will turn out differently. We will
turn out differently. A month or two after I was born, in 1957, a new archbishop came
to Liverpool, who resolved to finish the Lutyens crypt, started in 1933, but then to halt
work on that scheme and to commission by competition architects to build a new
cathedral on top for £1million. There are people in the cathedral today whose families
gave a pound per brick to help build this. The magnificent Lutyens design could not
have been completed until the middle of this twenty-first century and would have cost
tens of millions of pounds. Archbishop (later, Cardinal) Heenan wrote of the crypt that
‘Every stone has come from the hands of craftsmen who respect the granite they
fashion. But of the hardest work there is no evidence to be seen. Beneath the polished
marble of the floor the rock foundation has been hewn for pipes and wires …’
This place, or what is underneath this place, has influenced me in many ways. We
have bought a house designed and built by Lutyens at the same time, in the 1930s.
That is where we live now. But more importantly, the story helped me understand how
cathedrals and universities work. Beneath the polished presence of our graduands
today, of the hardest work there is no evidence to be seen, In my case, the hard work
by myself and by former colleagues, such as Sean Gallagher and John Elford, and
former governors, such as the late Sister Eileen Kelleher, Pat Mullin, and former SU
officers, such as Kelly Parker, and many others, that work is buried under the brilliant
new buildings and wonderful gardens of today’s Hope. It does not matter that most
students will not know our names or who did what. But it does matter that we had a
dream, that we were commissioned to be, as it were, the architects of Hope and that
you continue to turn that dream into reality. I have every confidence that when you go
on to change the world, you too will build on a firm foundation, adding your polish but
without forgetting the earlier hard work, of which there is no evidence to be seen.
So thank you, congratulations, and walk on, with Hope in your hearts. I still believe in
a place called Hope.