Those of us who went to uni in the olden days and often despised our vice chancellors to the point of occupying their offices and sometimes even burning effigies of them, rather envy today's ANU students their likeable new vice chancellor.
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Vice chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt AC radiated affability at Thursday's 2016 Commencement Address occasion at the Australian National University. Well before things got underway he donned an ANU T-shirt, chatted affably with undergraduates (the first 50 of them to arrive for the event were given one of these collectible ANU T-shirts for free). He posed, like the celebrity that he is, with his students for selfies.Then he took a selfie of himself framed by the audience (of about 2000 souls) seated in the dappled shade along the leafy University Avenue.
Then there was an engaging moment in the ceremony when, during his speech, he invited a young woman to join him ("we're going to do this together to show we mean it") in reading/reciting the ANU's pledge against on-campus sexual nastiness against women. Insincerely done this would have clunked a lot, but as it was it was touching in the extreme. The young woman was Linnea Burdon-Smith, the women's officer of the ANU Students Association.
Everything in life is enhanced and given some jolly grandeur by a cheerful fanfare of trumpets. Thursday's Commencement Address ceremony was commenced and later closed by three trumpeteers a'fanfaring. Trumpeters Miroslav Bukovsky, Dan McLean and Ben Marston bookended the lovely morning with some brassy celebratory works by Czech-American composer Vaclav Nelhybel.
After the trumpeting the three men of the Wiradjuri Echoes (there was a strong Aboriginal emphasis throughout Thursday's event) performed for us. The didgeridoo's unearthly low growl, a sound unchanged for thousands of years, set up strange vibrations in my 21st-century plastic chair.
In his speech Professor Mick Dodson AO reminisced that when he went to uni "way back in the '70s" university was free and beer was so cheap "I could get pissed on 24 cents".
He told the students in the audience to embrace the wonderful opportunity university education gave them to pursue their dreams.
"And you should always remember the wise words of the great Nelson Mandela, that 'education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world'. From today onwards follow your dreams. Make a difference."
ANU graduate Lieutenant General David Morrison AO, our controversial new Australian of the Year (some are asking what he has ever done, really, to earn that role) and a former Chief of the Army, gave yet another of those speeches that leaves one wondering if his 36 years spent in the army were spent in the right place. His mind seems really rather nimble.
And he seems very well read. In Thursday's speech he emerged as an intellectual fan of the late Christopher Hitchens, the dazzling atheist and essayist. How many members of the forces have ever read even a page of Hitch?
He, Morrison, taking as his theme the importance of rational, educated, university educated debate in the conversation of the nation told us that "during one moment of reflection on how we conduct contemporary debate in Australia, I reached for a particular favourite book of mine, Christopher Hitchens' Letters To A Young Contrarian.
He quoted Hitchens endorsing Sir Karl Popper's sentiment that "argument is valuable, and is essential for its own sake. It is very seldom that in debate either one of the two closely matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or converting the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position with which they began."
Morrison was lamenting that Australian debate seldom reaches that ideal state. He didn't say it but, really, anything less like what happens in debate in our virulent federal parliament (where what's said matters so little that we might as well have the divisions first and the debates afterwards) is impossible to imagine.
"Always argue with both passion and respect," Morrison urged his young audience.
"Listen perhaps more than you speak. Although I would be a complete hypocrite to say I've led a blameless life on that score."
Vice chancellor Schmidt's speech included what he called the "sombre moment", where he noted that last year on campus there had been more than 20 reported instances of "unwanted sexual attention". They'd ranged from cyber bullying to sex itself. Here he and Ms Linnea Burdon-Smith read the pledge together ("I pledge to help make my campus a safe place ..."). Then astronomer Schmidt warned that it was easy to recite the pledge but that he required everyone on campus to live by it.
Sombreness over, he compared his young listeners' first days at the ANU with his own first days in 1985 at university in Tucson, Arizona. There (unlike the leafy greenery all around us on Thursday) all was "cactus and desert".
But stranger still was that his university had just been voted The Party University of the Year for the USA. Campus life was so debauched, he reminisced, that life seemed like "one big toga party" and he felt he had time-travelled to the bacchanalian Rome of 60 AD.
"You're going to have fun here," he assured his new students, "but in a responsible, respectful way."
Then, as if to help the students overcome their dashed expectations of their time at ANU being one big toga party, the three trumpeters signalled the end of proceedings with another of Nelhybel's brain-tingling fanfares.
