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In reality Jim needs no honouring from this university, because true honour can only comes from within and if ever there were a living embodiment of an honourable man it comes in the form of the Duncster Many, many, many years ago when all around here was green fields I arrived for the first time as your Rector. I live - and you must learn to be tolerant and forgiving here - in London. When I stepped from the Euston Sleeper and stood on Dundonian soil for the first time. Jim Duncan was there to greet me with a small clutch of students. At the end of that first day, Jim stood on the platform at ten to midnight and waved me off. This procedure has been repeated many times over the last six years. My first and last sight of Dundee has always been of Jim.
A deep and necessary part of this ritual was to become the morning breakfast cooked at Jim's house by his wife, the miraculous Hilda. Without Hilda's eggs, bacon and black pudding nestling inside me there isn't the faintest possibility that I could ever have withstood the punishment of a full Dundee day.
But that first day was more than a little unusual, for on the day preceding my arrival 6 years ago students had, by way of protest taken over the library and several floors of the main administrative buildings of the university and were threatening a rent strike. Before I had so much as been shown where the lavatories were I was having to try and negotiate with some very angry students in a computer room they had invaded about a subject I knew less than nothing about. What was the grievance? By how much had their rent gone up? What would mollify them? Jim wrote down for me on a piece of paper some details about Caird Hall, Rent Committees, Student Welfare Steering Committees, Resource Allocation Modules and God knows what else besides and somehow, by the end of the day, the matter was resolved.
Jim, you see, had the official designation of Rector's Assessor. Which is to say that he stood in for me when I wasn't there, accepting letters, petitions, suggestions and all kinds of material from students and others, sifting, weighing, passing on to me. Given my propensity to be all over the place all the time, and hard to be telephoned, it is amazing Jim didn't resign in the first month. Patience, however, is just one of Jim's remarkable qualities. He never nagged me and never gave up on me.
Each time I came up to Dundee I would try and visit some of the departments within the university. These meetings Jim would have carefully set up months in advance. He sent me itineraries to London beforehand and would accompany me on these bizarre tours through the faculties. It is impossible to be shown around somewhere on an official visit without being made to sound like the Prince of Wales. 'And this is the biochemical research laboratory, Rector.' 'Is it? How fascinating? And tell me, how long have you been a Professor here, exactly? Really? Gosh?' All the time, Jim accompanying me, or hurrying to his car to fetch something that I had left behind in it and then catching up with us and gently reminding me that it was time to move on to the next appointment - especially keen when he saw that computer look in my eye and knew that I would sit happily playing at a keyboard for the next two hours unless he prodded me on.
And then would come the Court Meetings: until you have seen a Dundee Court Meeting Agenda you have never seen a mound of paper. My copy would be ready for me, with Jim having asterisked any of the items of rectorial concern, in other words, of student welfare concern. How long it took him to go through that telephone directory times ten and underline and circle any relevant points in that baffling wilderness of print, I don't know. But with the possible exception of the Dean, I think Jim Duncan may be the only person who ever actually read those imponderably, achingly tedious volumes. And all for me. No not for me for the students. This is the point. Those who were executive officers for DUSA, the Students Association, will know, but I bet thousands of other students never knew, for the plain fact of the matter is that Jim Duncan cared about the students and cared deeply. Amongst all that bone-numbingly, stultifyingly wearisome garbage that seemed to make up nine tenths of the Court Agenda, would be hidden nuggets of great concern to the students. Whether it concerned night buses, library opening hours, rents, accommodation, sporting facilities or food, if it impacted on the students, Jim would want to know about it, its intent, its meaning, its future application. The Finance Committee couldn't pull a fast one on Jim. Not that I'm suggesting for a moment that they tried ... of course not.
Aside from anything else, Jim also sat on student welfare and rental committees. He kept in his head figures about rent rises on sliding scales of 3.9 percentiles, with year-on-year indexing, he actually took all that in and then wrote it out in baby form for me to understand.
Perhaps Jim's most important function however has been to sit with me in the various student bars It is an ahsolute compulsion amongst Dundee students to watch me getting drunk. Whether on the way to the installation ceremony or in the evenings before my departure for the station, you fluffy little darlings are obsessed with filling me the most disgusting concoctions you can devise. Pint glasses are filled with curacao and creme de menthe and inevitably Bailey's Irish Bloody Cream, and mixed with Guinness and vodka and handed to me with an expectant hopeful look. If only you knew ... if only you knew how expert Jim and I became at distracting you for a second until - voile! Into the pot-plant with the whole thing. My liver and intestinal tract owe much to Jim Duncan.
My own personal gratitude is one thing: without Jim and without Hilda's black-puddings, my life at Dundee would have been much, much harder. But it is the university who is recognising the achievements of Jim Duncan because he has served this university, and served its students, with modesty, distinction, industry, doggedness, insight and kindness for years and years and years. Of all the departments I was shown around the one, I think that Jim showed me round with the greatest pleasure, was the department of prosthetic dentistry, where he himself worked for many years. Jim worked too (as the member of Parliament for .... whom we are honoured to have with us today can testify) as an constituency agent, selflessly and loyally for years. I like to think that the years of being an agent for an MP, taking him to meetings, preparing him for surgeries, briefing him about local events, was a preparation in Jim for the infinitely more important work to come, that of Rector's Assessor the University of Dundee.
Meanwhile of course, Jim is also continuing to stretch his mind by taking Open University Courses. That is so much the measure of the man. A measure I think of a certain kind of Scot - on the outside apparently old-fashioned; inside always valuing and understanding the value of mind and of education, always open to new things, new ideas. He may look like an elder of the kirk, but Jim uses a computer and can make eighteen year olds look slow on their feet.
I am, ladies and gentlemen, a foreground person: a show-offy old queen might be another way of putting it. Let's face it, so are most of the university staff. We like to run things, make speeches, do stuff, be seen doing stuff, get patted on the back, and generally swank about the place feeling great and being noticed. Our admiration for people like Jim Duncan is therefore tinged often with a kind of guilt. It is people like Jim Duncan who should be running the world, not people like us. It is a melancholy fact that, excepting those here present naturally, the kind of person who wants to be a political or career leader, is precisely the kind of person who should be barred from leadership, and the kind of person who is content to be in the background is precisely the kind of person who should be at the wheel.
Jim Duncan has done more for the students of this university than they will ever know. He has served Dundee, the university and town, for generations. With his wife Hilda he has tolerantly watched students getting drunk and behaving stupidly, and watched Rectors getting drunk and behaving stupidly.
I will think always of that face diminishing on the platform as I return to London. Jim's face is Dundee to me. The city of Dundee, at first sight serious forbidding granite, until you see the twinkle of the Tay. With Jim, those beetling brows that suggest a dourness and threat of judgement, until that is, you see the twinkle in the eyes.
Therefore, Chancellor slash Principal slash my lords slash graduates slash ladies slash www dot Dundee dot co dot ac, it thrills me to the core to present to you, to recommend to you, to urge to you the merits and qualities and person of Jim Duncan: in token of his kindness, his care, his years of love and service to confer upon him the degree of doctor in law. Thank you.
