Beware the lie of the lips

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M. Barrie’s on ‘Courage’, for instance — and notorious, among them Lord Birkenhead’s on ‘Glittering Prizes’.

I’ve just been re-reading one which caused quite a stir at the time. This was Bob Boothby’s, delivered at St Andrews University in 1959. Its theme was ‘Tolerance’, which you might think uncontroversial, but controversy and Boothby went hand in hand. His fierce criticism of John Knox and his claim that the Reformation had ‘plunged Scotland into a long, dark night from which she was ultimately rescued by Robert Burns’ was resented by many and indeed provoked what may now be seen as almost the last blaze of the old fire of Scots Calvinism.

It was actually a remarkable address. I find myself agreeing with almost every word, and his message is perhaps even more necessary today, when we seem to lurch between licence and a new Puritanism, than it was in 1959. ‘Tolerance,’ he said, ‘is not a negative quality. It is the antithesis of dogmatism and fanaticism; and an essential condition of all that is valuable in human life, without which any real comprehension of nature or of mankind is impossible.’