Archives & Oral History Department I . - hlC% --\-- Release No. : 35 /NOV 01-l/84/11/14 SPEECH BY PRESIDENT DEVAN NAIR AT THE MAIN CONVOCATION OF THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE IN THE SINGAPORE CONFERENCE BALL ON WEDNESDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 1984 AT 10.30 AM This is the first of ten convocation ceremonies to be held wet the next few days. In all, 3,726 graduates, including those of you present today, will receive their degrees. I congratulate all of you. You join the swelling ranks of graduates in Singapore. In fifty years, from 1910 to 1959, our tertiary institutions only produced nearly as many graduates as we now do in a year. In this period, a mere 3,037 received university degrees. But in the last 25 years, the output of graduates was 44,366 (this does not include graduates from the polytechnics). By the end of this century our graduate output is expected to stabilise at around 4,480 a year. Between 1985 and 1999, another 65,660 students would have graduated. These figures do not take into account the significant number of those who have graduated, and will continue to graduate, from recognised universities abroad. Your university education has prepared you for entry, into careers and professions in industry, finance, trade, medicine, and the civil service. A number of you will emerge as leaders in your chosen professions and careers. I wish you all the best. 2 You would do well, however, to appreciate that the availability of satisfying careers, and your progress in them, is contingent on the quality of leadership in the body politic. It is in your interest, therefore, to try and ensure that men and women with talent, ability, integrity, character, and a sense of commitment to their fellow citizens, are actively involved in the processes of social and political life. Scientific, technological, economic, social, artistic and cultural drives and fulfil- ments will escape us, if we allow lesser persons with dubious credentials, or no credentials at all, to take over the reins of the social, legislative and executive processes. This has happened in too many developing countries in the post-World War II era, to the grave detriment and unhappiness of professionals and non- professionals alike. “Leave government to the clowns appears to have been the fatal attitude of some of the best trained and finest minds in too many countries. “Politics is dirty business. We had better confine ourselves to our own nobler pursuits”. The dangerous assumption here is that the government of a nation and society can safely be left to less noble and less able minds and hands. Such professionals have suffered, and continue to suffer, the sometimes ghastly social revenge exacted by their unconcern. For if well-educated, good and worthy men and women opt out of public life, politics does indeed become dirty business, instead of the high and serious calling it ought to be. And willy-nilly, the legislative and executive processes become the preserves of dirty people, who will give you a dirty body politic, and you end up as denizens of a dung-heap. With its inevitable complement of blue-bottles buzzing over and around you. 3 - Reading about some of the broken-backed societies of the Third World, the words of the poet W B Yeats come to mind. I quote: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold: Here anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.* As graduates of one of the finest universities in this part of the world, you can count yourselves as being e among the best in our Republic. You do not lack learning and achievement in your chosen disciplines. I hope you will lack neither conviction nor commitment in the lives that stretch before you. Can we leave surgery to barbers and the ailments of our children to quack doctors? Surely governing a modern society, and determining social, educational, cultural, economic and technological choices, priorities and policies are just as important, if not more so, as running a reputable hospital or university. If we leave these central preoccupations to the mediocre and wheeler dealers, our children would indeed end up as hostages to fortune. I repeat, this has already happened elsewhere. And it could happen in Singapore too. Partial and simplistic explanations are too often offered for the appalling material and moral conditions of several Third World countries - conditions which we in Singapore have so far managed to avoid. The anatomy and psychology of failure deserve closer scrutiny, if we in this Republic are to learn the right lessons. And such careful scrutiny does reveal one feature common to all failed societies. The ablest and the best either keep out, or were kept out, of the public political process. 4 It bears constant reiteration that if public life is not made the first resort of the ablest and best persons in society, we will have only ourselves to blame if it becomes the last refuge of the mediocre or, worse still, of scoundrels. All that we need do to prove the point is to draw attention to any number of vivid illustrations from around the world. Those who wish to renounce social responsibility al together, are a different matter. There are still enough mountain caves, forest retreats and desert islands strewn about on our planet, where they may pursue their salvation, unmolested by their fellow men. I suspect, however, that the final word in these matters will belong to those who seek truth and fulfilment within society, rather than outside it. For, it seems to me that the real victories in life are only possible where the battle is joined, whatever one’s field of endeavour in society may be. To continue, too many Third World intellectuals tend to adopt a defeatist attitude in the face of what appear to be quite insuperable problems. They accept the tacit assumption of many western scholars that venality and corruption in public -life are part of the natural landscape of oriental societies. This is simply not true. We would do well to remember that Confucius, Lao Tze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Krishna, Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed were the products of oriental societies. The great ethical systems of the world, including those which took root in the modern West, had their origins in West Asia, China and India. It was not the once deeply entrenched traditional ethical values which failed these societies. It was the leaders and peoples of these societies who failed these values. 5 It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the quality and achievements of any institution - whether governmental, economic, social, cultural, educational or whatever - the public respect and confidence it evokes, all depend on the knowledgeability, executive skills, character and commitment of the men and women who run the institution. Many of the old proverbs are the distilled experience and wisdom of a people. Several institutions throughout the world might have been spared the ignominy of futility and shame if they had heeded the old adage: You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear Pigs and silkworms produce qualitatively quite different results. In short, permit the wrong people to be in charge, and you must live with the wrong results. There is no guarantee that we will not fall, at some future date, into precisely the same pitfalls, into which other developing countries have fallen. We may well do so, if we do not take pains to develop adequate responses to the immense challenges of change. For change is of the essence. Indeed, it is the law of life. It is crucial to understand that we in this Space Age are largely victims, and not masters, of unprecedented change. We are participants in the most radical transformation taking place in history, to which no past changes can be compared, either in scope or rapidity. The silicon chip, biotechnology, and new generation computers promise to intensify the processes of social and cultural change in even more mind-boggling fashion. You can expect to see far more political, economic technological and other changes in your lifetimes, than I have so far seen in my own lifetime. The younger you are, the longer the future ahead of you. People of my age group are now treading the last lap of the journey we began sixty OK seventy years ago. I can 6 assure you that some of the changes my generation lived through were traumatic enough. Prepare yourselves, therefore, for acceleration of the pace of change. Deceleration is an Arcadian pipe dream, for there can be no return from the Space Age to the Stone Age, any more than there can be a return, say, from modern medicine to witch doctors. Such rapid change needs to be presided over by the best men and women in society, of proven intelligence, talents, vision and character. But the contrary has happened in several developing countries. Mediocrities, or mad muscle-men like Idi Amin and his ilk, took over. The consequences suffered by these countries need not detain us. They are part of the litany of national impoverishment, sluggish or negative growth rates, or even devastation. Among the casual ties of rapid social change in less developed countries, ushered in by modern science and technology, are the qualifications and attributes expected of the persons who man the legislative and executive branches of government. Stringent criteria are laid down for the study and practice of the various disciplines and professions in all modern societies.