Delivered May 28, 2026
Good afternoon, everyone. It is an honour to welcome you to the 236th Encaenia of the University of King’s College.
Graduands, I am delighted to be celebrating your graduation with you, and with King’s Chancellor Debra Deane Little and Dalhousie President, Dr. Kim Brooks, because this is also a Dalhousie convocation.
I confess that at my first Encaenia, I may have told the class of 2017 that they would always be my favourite class. I may have said something similar to the valiant pandemic classes of 2020 and 2021. In fact, in one or way or the other, I may have suggested to every graduating class of the last ten years that they would always be my favourite. So let me make something unequivocally clear right now and for all time—Class of 2026, you will always be my favourite graduating class!
This afternoon, the goal of all of us here to celebrate you, to paraphrase the legend, Bob Dylan, is to “make you feel our love.” We want you to know that we love you. Guests of the graduates, colleagues, let’s show our love for the formidable Class of 2026 by giving them the ovation they deserve and will remember!
[Applause and cheering]
That was a very impressive ovation. Graduands, it does seem you are deeply loved and greatly admired! And I know you are bursting with love in return. 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.
[Applause and cheering]
It is my last Encaenia as president of King’s. It presents a dilemma. I, of course, want to focus my remarks on you the graduates. I also feel the urge to say something about King’s and its importance in this moment in its long and illustrious history. So, I have done what anyone in my position would do—I have turned for inspiration to JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
In the movie version, the story ends with Galadriel the elf asking Gandalf the wizard, “why the halfling?”, referring to the reluctant hero of the story, the little book-, tea- and breakfast-loving hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. Gandalf answers:
“I don’t know. Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I found. I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”
The sentiment of these lines from the movie is true to Tolkien’s work. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond says, “Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
Tolkien’s books are a great success because we all identify with Bilbo and the other little people who are his heroes. We all feel like “halflings” from time to time. Not the movers and the shakers but the moved and the shaken. The same can be true of little universities. As something of a hobbit creature myself, I am proud to say that for the past ten years, I have been president of a university that might be viewed by some as a halfling among universities.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who, I must point out, was born in Canada, recently wrote a farewell column calling for a renewed humanism as the necessary response to the distemper of our time, the escalating problems we face and the dysfunction of our civil discourse and politics. Humanism, he wrote, is, “any endeavor that deepens our understanding of the human heart, any effort to realize eternal spiritual values in our own time and circumstances, any gesture that makes other people feel seen, heard and respected.” He called for a revitalization of the “Great Conversation,” that he described as a “tradition of debate” and a “collective effort”, encompassing all the subjects of a liberal education to, quote:
“… find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition—the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion.”
Class of 2026, I congratulate you all for graduating but also for being part of the Great Conversation. I congratulate you also for making friendship the means and the purpose of the version of that conversation that happens at King’s and at King’s and Dalhousie. It is friendship after all that elevates good conversation into great conversation. I assure you, it is not just David Brooks who thinks you have done something meaningful and worthy for yourselves and the world. We all think you have.
By engaging in the Great Conversation, you have already created something important to your future and to the future of us all. You have created not just a community, but communities within communities, interconnected and bonded not just by similarities, but by differences—the collective strength to find a workable balance that Brooks describes. You have thereby become the community builders the world is always in need of.
Recently, Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly of Acadia University wrote that the world needs universities to create and sustain a culture of belonging. To do so, she writes, they must nurture both bonding capital, which connects us to those like us, and bridging capital, which connects us across differences. Without bridging capital, in trying times, we are more vulnerable to narrow patterns of thinking, to conformity and to the exclusion that harms the excluded and endangers all of us. Democratic life, as Donnelly puts it, “requires tolerance for ambiguity, openness to complexity, and the willingness to remain in relationship when it would be easier to withdraw or dominate.” She adds, “in the smallest moments, we can begin to cultivate the kinds of worlds we long for, worlds that ask more of us and allow more of us to belong.”
Universities such as tiny King’s have a vitally important role to play in nurturing both bonding and bridging capital. In learning to cultivate both, you have empowered yourselves to put your academic education into action in your careers and communities and in our world.
The magic of King’s that has become precious to me is our resistance to the modern urge to divorce learning from loving. We do learn to think well, or critically if you prefer, but also to embrace our hearts desire to live in community, to love and be loved, and to know more profoundly through love.
I believe this includes our love for those we learn with and from and our love for all those we will share knowledge with, in our lives beyond the Quad.
To be the kind of university Donnelly says all universities should aspire to become, we must continue to embrace the diversity that develops bridging as well as bonding capital. We have made progress on reconciliation and inclusion, by the grace of those who have not always felt welcome and because we are defined by our commitment to putting the precepts of communal life and learning into action. That progress needs to continue for the difference we can make to belonging in and beyond the Quad.
Our love must humbly keep company with our doubts about what we think we know, to ensure we are able to truly hear and to understand each other, as Donnelly says, across our differences.
The poem, The Place Where We Are Right, by Yehuda Amichai, puts it this way:
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
The subjects we study to earn an arts, journalism, science or fine arts degree cannot save us, any more than any other set of academic subjects can. But I have come to believe, like David Brooks, that we probably cannot be saved without them. What Christian Wiman has written of poetry, is true of all the fields of study and creativity we celebrate today—they allow us to “more fully inhabit our lives and the world” so that “we might be less apt to destroy both.”
In the novel version of The Hobbit, the story ends with Gandalf telling Bilbo, “You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”, to which Bilbo responds with a laugh, “Thank goodness!”
In the end, we are all little people in a wide world. But like Bilbo, we have the potential to be the very kind of little people who can, in community with each other, through simple acts of kindness and love that give courage, keep the darkness at bay and allow the flowers to grow.
Class of 2026, congratulations on all you have already accomplished and contributed. As you go out into the great wide world, think from time-to-time of all of us in this room together, on this day, for you. We are with you always.