The university’s first winter honorary degree ceremony was a resounding success as John Simpson was dubbed with a doctor of laws and addressed a capacity audience in the Bonar Hall. He described his day in Dundee as thoroughly enjoyable, commenting on the unique and stunning location of our university and city. He expressed his wish to build strong links with the university and return here in the future. Deputy Principal Professor Geoff Ward delivered the laureation before John Simpson replied with a delightfully anecdotal account of his years in journalism. Below are some extracts from his lecture:
"I would really like to express my enormous gratitude to you for having awarded me this doctorate, and the lovely but unjustified peroration. I mean I don’t think it’s really true, I don’t feel it’s true at all but it would nice if it were and I am very honoured that anybody would think about saying these things.
We are faced, I suppose, with another war that is coming up. To be honest it is something which has been pretty much inevitable for a long time. In fact possibly since the election brought George W Bush to power.
It’s not for governments to tell the broadcasters in a free society what they ought to say and how they ought to run their affairs. It’s a matter of being able to put your hand on your heart and say as best you can; this is the truth in is much as I can know it and that in itself should a sufficient protection against criticism.
I narrowly missed getting an interview with Saddam Hussein in 1990 on the grounds that the BBC wasn’t prepared to undertake to broadcast the interview in its entirety which was their demand and we took the line then that we don’t open our airwaves to anybody so why should we open them to Saddam Hussein?
I mean of course everything is an opinion, the question of whether there is going to be a war is an opinion. It’s the question of whether it’s right or wrong is a very important opinion and I don’t feel that it’s my function in life to give my opinions on the rightness or wrongness of it and I don’t think it’s the BBC’s function. I think, in the words of an unlikely perhaps, source to sight for this kind of thing but Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright, writing in one of his letters about his function as a playwright said: "I feel it’s my job to put the evidence in front of the jury and let the jury decide on the result".
So when I go there, I will go to some part of Iraq, whether it’s the pigsty or room 617 in the Al Rashid Hotel, I don’t know. But when I do I go I shall be different, I’ll even have a different title, I’ll be called "Doctor" and people will keep coming round to me asking me if I’ll help them with their chilblains and their broken limbs. But I’ll go there with great sense of honour.
For the full text of John Simpson’s address see: www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/prfeb03/simpsonspeech.html