Beware the lie of the lips

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M. Barrie’s on ‘Courage’, for instance — and notorious, among them Lord Birkenhead’s on ‘Glittering Prizes’.

I’ve just been re-reading one which caused quite a stir at the time. This was Bob Boothby’s, delivered at St Andrews University in 1959.