Passing through the Straight Gate, Edinburgh Graduation 2025

I am officially now a Dr, though explaining this to friends and family is not straightforward.

'Weren't you already a Dr?'

Well yes and no.

I'd passed my viva and my external examiner called me Dr.

I'd corrected my thesis and sent them on.

I'd gained the official award somewhat anticlimactically via Outlook.

However, a Sheffield colleague suggested the moment wasn't until you walk across the university stage and accept your folder and tube, which this time around was empty. ONLY then will the University of Edinburgh's Senatus Academicus confer the award of Doctor of Philosophy onto you.

Artsy graduation photographs courtesy of my mother, Suzanne - attempting with great effort to cause embarrassment.

I then got hit on the head with the saggy breeches of John Knox. A fitting end to four years of hard study. Knox would've had something bigoted and vitriolic to say about the Vice Chancellor, honorary doctoral graduate (the crime writer and football club co-owner Val McDermid) and student orator all being women, but his role in the Church of Scotland seems to retain some relevancy.

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On a more serious note, graduation ceremonies reveal a lot about an institution - not just their dance with accepting women, their labour and their academic contributions. Ceremonies reveal an emphasis on decorum and prestige - the University of Edinburgh was mentioned as 'one of the world's best' several times, alongside issues facing the current academic sector. The Vice Chancellor's impressing on us to fill out the Graduate Outcomes Survey revealed, briefly, the metrics driving UK Higher Education, research funding and academic rankings. More viscerally, the brave students who in reaching the stage unfurled banners saying "No more universities left in Gaza" and "Blood on your hands" revealed a sector and institution too slow to respond, let alone anticipate - Palestinian occupation, apartheid and genocide.

Occasional references to the state of the current graduate job market were also swiftly brushed under. You could argue that a graduation ceremony is not the time nor place for hard facts or realities, with the student orator choosing to focus on the room's achievements (quite rightly!) and how the University of Edinburgh would provide a cloak of security in the following years, as the example of Laura Kuennsberg being a former graduate shows.

Through all of this, I was left thinking whether I'd have said anything different. I wouldn't have mentioned Laura Kuennsberg, or railed against an institution that was my academic home for four years at the expense of celebrating attendees' awards, although I too appreciate that the University of Edinburgh is institutionally answerable to issues warranting protest.

In my limited knowledge of 19th century British poetry, despite my recent degree being in English Literature, I kept returning to 'Invictus' (1888) by Ernest Henley (1849 - 1903) as a means to rectify this, and the line "It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll".

During a graduation, you want to bask in your achievement, you don't necessarily want a list of unvarnished truths - I get that. As crises become perma-crises, maybe carving out the odd space to pause and reflect is okay. In my mind, there remains a line between celebration and preparation for eventual challenges. The gate is not always open or free-hanging, it may be bolt straight limiting your movement.

Nonetheless, once through - your end destination remains the same as everybody else. It requires more effort to pass a straight gate, more time, but you end up finding ingenious workarounds, or at least some extra resilience. The scroll gained at a ceremony may be the result of several applications for extenuating circumstances and 'charged' with a difficult university experience, but it's in your hand nonetheless and counts all the same. Maybe more. Similarly, the world of work is neither neat nor tidy, and for the few in which it is - that's due to a hefty dollop of privilege, which needs recognising.

So, can a graduation ceremony balance celebration with a recognition of the messiness of graduate outcomes stemming from geopolitical issues, structural inequalities and occasionally institutions themselves? Does that take away from the joyous moment? Or does it depressurise graduates, who will be entering an environment no longer judged on examination scores and grades out of 100?

Keep the pomp and circumstance - after all it's meant to be an occasion, but let's recognise the straight gate's presence and how outcomes, both during university and beyond, don't emerge from a vacuum.