Tim’s daughter, Hannah, graduated as a vet last Sunday at Cambridge University and back at the office, Monday morning’s show was all about the ceremonial pomp steeped in history that still exists.
Picture students in their elegant robes flowing towards the graduation hall with joyful, yet elegant, parades via the city’s main avenues – and half the ceremony being held in Latin! It made me think how formal education in the Middle Ages was often only available to a small part of the population, almost exclusively at religious institutions and monastic schools for the wealthy, who could afford to pay for their tutors.
Although the earliest universities started teaching almost a millennium ago, universal education has been a recent development, only becoming of age in many countries after 1850. I studied at Padua, the world’s third oldest and the first free-thinking, or ‘laic’ university – actually the first to see a woman, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopa, get a degree back in 1678. It is now fascinating to see the King Fahd University of Saudi Arabia inaugurating the Kingdoms’ first university for women, developing a state-of-the-art urbanistic project to host a microcosm for female students living on an eight million sq meter campus with a dedicated subway and all the services that a 21st century student may expect from a most advance, modern academic infrastructure.
Today, thousands of institutions exist around the world and see millions of students pass through their doors into the real world armed with qualifications in an array of subjects. Access to information has never been so widespread and all the issues that our auto ID industry addresses are evident in higher education establishments tasked with today’s need for education on mass. Security, attendance levels, identification, access to services, contactless payments and e-commerce, privacy, data protection and even anti-fraud measures proliferate as requirements in any university – whether modern or ancient. So, although the old traditions are maintained for posterity and upheld for the Alma Mater principle, high-tech knowledge, expertise and solutions are of equal importance – if not more so – in order to maintain continuity, order and efficiency - and protect the customs and protocols established so long ago.
And I am so pleased that these traditions will be passed on now in the digital age, via a legacy of female students from Elena to Hannah to the many Safiyas or Ayshas, who will continue our centuries-long journey in the academic world from generation to generation. |
