Delivered May 29, 2025
Good afternoon, everyone. It is an honour to welcome you to the 235th Encaenia of the University of King’s College, which is the 10th convocation for the MFA in Creative Nonfiction and the first convocation for the MFA in Fiction.
For a small university that thinks it is a college, a King’s graduation is a large and complicated affair. I am please to be here with my colleague, Dr. Kim Brooks, because this is also a Dalhousie convocation. We are also graced with the regal presence of our Chancellor Debra Deane Little. And this year, we are also joined by Dr. Rustum Southwell, the Chancellor of Dalhousie, which is wonderful. If you get confused about who is doing what and why, that will probably be because we are as well. There are a lot of moving parts. So now is a very good time to recognize Dr. Sarah Clift, the Clerk of Convocation, who will be conducting air traffic control.
Graduands. Today belongs to you! Everyone, please stand and join me in delivering a heartfelt congratulations to the formidable Class of 2025!
That was a very impressive ovation. It seems you are held in very high regard, graduands! Let’s have you rise and hear you give your biggest ovation to your family, friends and your faculty and mentors, and all who have supported you, in achieving your academic goals.
Whether you’re leaving here having created a manuscript, a thesis, a hypothesis, a composition or a portfolio of essays or stories—I hope that you have come to know more about yourself and what you are capable of, which is anything you turn your hand and mind to.
Your work—and life—at King’s and Dalhousie has required a willingness to open yourself up to new ideas, new versions of yourself and to sit with some of life’s, and the world’s, big and essential questions—the one’s that remain unanswered, even after you made your way through the long reading lists King’s is famous for.
In fact, if you’re leaving with more questions than you arrived with, well, you’ve joined an illustrious line of people who have pursued a liberal education and lived to tell the tale—who chose to engage with the complex and enduring questions for which there are no simple explanations, the ones asked by generations of artists, scholars in all fields, journalists, writers and, yes, even university presidents. The questions the King’s interdisciplinary approach to learning is made for.
And sitting with those big questions, often without the certainty of answers or assurances about your own or our future, is not easy. You can doubt yourself and the choice you have made for an education that can seem like a diversion, to some, from the important task of finding a job and earning an income. That takes perseverance but something more. I think it takes courage.
By now, you must be thinking—did the iconic Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip say anything about all this? Great question! Indeed, they did. In of one of their biggest anthems and most recognizable songs, called Courage, written by the late Gord Downie.
Fans know that the song’s full title is Courage (For Hugh MacLennan). A song that sounds like a brash celebration of courage when belted out in concerts, sporting events and bars, or used as a soundtrack, is the subtle tribute of one Canadian artist to another.
If you’re not familiar with the song, and you’re starting to worry I will sing it to you, don’t worry, I’m not going to. But I will share a few of its lyrics with you though, in just a moment.
In case you don’t know MacLennan, I’ll tell you a little about him. We are King’s however, and so I know many of you will be indignantly saying, “of course I know who Hugh MacLennan was”—I am reminded of the Welcome Day when I found an incoming student sitting under a tree in the Quad reading Northrop Frye.
MacLennan was a 20th-century writer who lived in Montreal and taught at McGill—he was one of Leonard Cohen’s professors. Some of his books were important to me when I was in high school. He was from Nova Scotia and wrote about people that I could identify with because they also were Maritimers. Each Man’s Son was about a boy growing up in a coal mining town in Cape Breton like the one MacLennan was born in. Barometer Rising was inspired by the Halifax Explosion, which happened when MacLennan was a child living in Halifax.
MacLennan was brave enough to write novels about Canadian people, places and events when conventional wisdom was that there would be no market for them and the literary establishment thought Canada was incapable or unworthy of creating its own literature. He wrote the books he wanted to write anyway and, in doing so, helped establish our Canadian literary culture—a culture that now includes a diversity of voices and perspectives that MacLennan could not have imagined. But it wasn’t an easy path. He faced doubters and questioned himself along the way.
The Tragically Hip did something similar in music—when they started, success for a Canadian band meant commercial acceptance in the United States. Instead, they created songs so specific to the Canadian experience, they’re now part of our culture. And not just the positive parts—near the end of his life, Downie used music to call for accountability for the national shame of residential schools.
The inspiration for the song Courage was MacLennan’s book The Watch that Ends the Night. Some of the song’s lyrics paraphrase part of the last chapter of that book. The lyrics go like this:
“There’s no simple explanation
For anything important any of us do.
And yeah, the human tragedy
Consists in the necessity
Of living with the consequences
Under pressure, under pressure.”
Both the novel and the song are the work of artists being introspective about the process of creating, accepting that there’s never a simple way to explain why people behave as they do, whether they are characters in books or songs, or the people writing them. Yet we are drawn to carry on trying to understand ourselves and each other.
Downie follows those lines with the song’s chorus: “Courage, my word, it didn’t come, it didn’t matter.”
That part’s important—the song and book are about forging ahead when certainty, and indeed courage, elude us.
More than a celebration of courage, the song is a lament on how often we need to follow our desire to understand more deeply and to make our voices heard in the firmament without the reinforcement of courage to do so, and how difficult that can be. Sometimes, when people after the fact credit us with being “courageous,” it’s hard to accept. We didn’t feel courageous at the time—we were unsure or even afraid. And yet, we forged ahead.
Among the many things you accomplished during your degrees, was this: you forged ahead in your studies and in creating a community that believes our work in the humanities, journalism, science, music and creative writing is important not only to ourselves but the world’s understanding of the fundamental questions of our time and all times. And you did it, as Downie wrote, “under pressure” of all kinds. I think that is courage, even if it may have felt at times that courage did not come when it mattered.
Downie’s fascination with MacLennan, and with other Canadian artists of earlier generations, is an example of how we, in the liberal arts, are always in conversation not only with our contemporaries but also with those of the past and of the future. The questions and the conversations never end. It is the liberal arts tradition we are proudly part of. We question relentlessly and embrace complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty—welcoming insight from those who see things differently. This way of learning and living will abide in you and serve you well as you move on with careers or further study.
You can take inspiration from those who will soon be your fellow alumni. I am always amazed by the breadth and diversity of their career success, by their contributions to the world and by their success in making lives that are about more than their careers. I look forward to watching you succeed as they have, in your own beautifully diverse ways.
Gord Downie and Hugh MacLennan embraced the complexity and ambiguity of our existence and understood that the questions are the point. Amazingly, Downie made all of that into a song that is fun to dance to. They both tried to make the “human tragedy” we all face more bearable. As one MacLennan character put it, to “love the mystery surrounding us.”
Near the end of The Watch That Ends the Night, the protagonist tells us to “Go to the musicians,” to hear “…the last possible harmony … a will to live, love, grow and be grateful … To struggle and work for that, at the end is all there is left.”
Class of 2025, I want to thank you for choosing King’s and Dalhousie for your journey to the edge of what you knew, for challenging yourself to keep asking questions, for moving forward even when the path is uncertain.
Today, as you step into another of life’s great unknowns, be assured that your King’s community will always support and believe in you. If ever you need a little extra courage, think of us all in this room together, on this day, for you. We are with you all the way.