Graduation day

Big day today. I went to my son's graduation ceremony for his B.Sc. in mathematics. As UQ is a "sandstone" (big old) university I hoped that the ceremony would be fairly traditional -- and it was: Black academic gowns, trencher caps and silk hoods for all graduands. And they played the last part of the San Saens organ symphony as the graduands filed in. Then came boring speeches of course. And the graduates filed out to the strains of "Gaudeamus".

A non-traditional feature was however that some of the young women graduating showed a rather fetching amount of bosom. Fashion at work. I was a little disappointed that most of the male graduates did not wear ties -- except for the Asians of course. And almost all the young women had long hair! Pleasing.

And there were many Asians there. The Applied Science graduands were almost all Asians. The person announcing the names made a right hash of the Asian names -- including an inability to pronounce "Nguyen" (pronounced "naWIN"). Since Nguyen is as common a name among Viets as "Jones" is among those of British descent, I thought that was rather crass. The university was politically correct enough to include in the ceremony a totally irrelevant speech by some Aboriginal woman about indigenous this and indigenous that but making an actual effort to have foreign names pronounced well on an important occasion was far too hard. The intellectual decline of the universities under Leftist influence gets ever worse.

Then at dinner time we had a family dinner to celebrate the graduation. We went to an Indian restaurant that my son and I both like. And it did us proud with excellent food as usual. There were 16 of us there -- including my son's godfather: Prof. John Henningham. It was a most congenial occasion with much chatting among those present. Henningham (we are old friends so address and refer to one-another by surname only) at one stage asked my son: "And do you share your father's ideology" -- getting a firm "Yes" as the answer.

I of course "shouted" for everyone -- for the very reasonable total of $305.