Once More With Footnotes

Doctor of Letters.
     
    It's now a tradition that I return the compliment and some suitable member of the faculty gets a degree from Unseen University (plus a badge and rather nifty UU scarf). It gets a laugh and a picture in the papers and everyone seems to enjoy it. I used to do the oration in Latin, or the Discworld equivalent, which co-incidentally looks like very bad Latin, but it had t o be very bad indeed before most people "got it"; Jack Cohen at Warwick University got his for "habeum tonsorius per Alberto Einstineum."
     
    This one, from the happy day in Portsmouth, was how the English ones go.
     
     
     
     
D octor W ho?
     
                  Vice-chancellor, venerab le staff, guests, students, and graduates, I hope that no one will take it amiss when I say that what we are in fact doing today is celebrating ignorance. Ignorance is generally an unregarded talent among humans, but we are in fact the only animal that kn o ws how to do it properly. We've got where we are today by starting out ignorant.
     
                  It wasn't always like this. A few thousand years ago, we knew everything — how the world began, what it was for, our place in it ... everything. It was all there, in the stori es the old men told around the fire or had written down in a big book. No more questions, everything sorted out.
     
                  But now we know that there's vast amounts of things that, well, we simply don't know. Universities have made great efforts in this area. Thin k about how it works: you arrive at university, the gleam still on your A-levels, and you've pretty well got it all sussed. Then the first thing they tell you — well, the second thing, obviously, because they have to tell you where the toilets are and so on — is that what you've learned so far not is so much the truth as a way of looking at things. And after three years or so you've learned there's a huge amount that you don't know yet, and that's when they give you a scroll and push you out. Ignorance is a wo n derful thing — it's the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything.
     
                  Well done for surviving and thank you, Vice-chancellor, on behalf of the graduates, and also on behalf of myself.
     
                  I'm not quite sure why you've given me a Doctorate of Letters. Certainly the biggest service I have performed for literature is to deny on every suitable occasion that I write it but, nevertheless, I am honored. I suspect the award has really been persistence. I have been writing Discworld books for the bett e r part of two decades. They have, I hope, brought pleasure to millions, and it almost seems unfair to say that at least they've brought fun and money to one. They've taken me around the world a dozen times, I've had a species of turtle (an extinct species, I'm afraid) named after me, and I think I've signed more than three hundred thousand books; I've even done a signing in the middle of a rainforest in Borneo and three people turned up — four if you include, as you should do, the orangutan.
     
                  But I've always wondered what life would have been like if a convenient journalistic job hadn't opened up on our local paper and I had gone on to university instead. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the cheap beer. On the other hand, that was in the late '60s, and as we kn o w from our politicians the only thing you were sure of learning at university in the '60s was how not to inhale, so maybe I made the right choice. After all, now I have my degree, which I believe means I'm allowed to throw my hat into the air, something I ' ve always wanted to do. Once again, many thanks to all of you from all of them and all of me. Thank you — and now for a small but important change in your advertised programme.
     
                  I said I did not go to university but I have since made up for it by owning one . Unseen University as the premier college for wizards came into being about eighteen years ago in the very first Discworld book and seems to be becoming more real every day. And since I have some influence there, I have prevailed upon the Arch-chancellor to allow me to perform a little reciprocal ceremony to celebrate the bond between our two great seats of learning. So ... forward, please, Professor Michael Page.
     
                  Although he is far too thin to be a real wizard, Michael has