First of all, I'll say a few words about this occasion, which some of you may find both irritating and mystifying. It is a convocation; but contrary to your expectations, perhaps, no one is receiving a diploma or a scholarship.

A convocation doesn't have to be the occasion for awarding either of these. If you return to the roots of the word "convocation," you'll find them in two Latin words: "con" (meaning "together" or "with") and "vox" (meaning "voice," "speech" or a "call"). A convocation is rooted in the act of "calling together" and "speaking together". It's a gathering where people can speak and listen. In modern times, it's one of the few occasions when nearly all members of that micro-universe, a university, can at least try to overcome the dilemma of social, administrative and intellectual fragmentation so characteristic of contemporary, highly-organized collectivities.

Many of the faculty at this convocation are dressed in academic gowns and have paraded ritually into a theatre. It's all a very theatrical display, and if some of you are now as I once was, you're inclined to be ironic about all the pomp and ceremony. But I've come to understand that the gowns and the parade are not necessarily deceitful or self-important. Both gowns and parade impose obligations by singling faculty out. Wearing scarlet, green, yellow, or blue is not like wearing anonymous grey. It isn't a way of hiding. It flourishes the equivalent of a flag which signifies, "This is where I stand. This is where I may fall. I stand or fall for truth." Whatever that truth may be, incidentally, it is not directly convertible into coinage. On the contrary, it costs something else and something more.

As for the parade, I suggest it's a beating of the boundaries, the definition of a privileged place. Just as the Romans drove a furrow around the perimeter of what they planned would be a city -- an enclosure of civilization, needing protection against destructive forces, both natural and human -- so faculty have beat the bounds of this convocation, where we may talk together.

Let me return to that deliberate pause after I wished you good morning at the beginning of this speech. I paused because I still haven't thoroughly worked out who you are as an audience, despite having had several months to do so. Ordinarily, I would have concealed my uncertainty by doing what I've done before in similar circumstances. I'd have used the salutation, "Ladies and gentlemen." Or I could have played safe with a second kind of salutation, one like this: "Distinguished guests, faculty, staff, new students and [just to be on the safe side] ladies and gentlemen." But neither of those two salutations really applies to the present circumstances honourably or truly. Neither salutation accurately defines my situation or yours.

Try a third salutation, one I drafted while attempting to be faithful to the current vocabulary of managerial and administrative theory: "Executive officers, stakeholders, present and future human resources, good morning!" An interesting conglomeration. If you haven't heard some of those designations before (count upon it, you will), they may sound fanciful. Like many other people here today, however, I've heard and (to my shame) used such designations myself during the last half-a-dozen or so years. You students, for example, are "clients." (Although I believe you should more accurately be called "patrons" -- that sly reversal is significant and betrays an authoritarianism concealed by the masquerade of pragmatism enacted by the vocabulary.) I, and others like me, are "present human resources". As for the stakeholders, I can't help but see them as a gathering of people standing around a barbecue holding raw T-bones -- or a frantic gang of peasants running about with wooden fenceposts anxious to put Dracula into peace everlasting.

Perhaps you've guessed what I think of this vocabulary. What's in a word? What's in a word is a whole agenda of implication. When certain words are allowed, they bring with them a chain of consequences. If I used the words of my third salutation and really meant them, I would, among other things, be doing the following.

First, I would remove all of us present from the tradition of education which began (to choose a rough starting point) with Plato lecturing and conversing in his academy nearly two and a half thousand years ago. (Incidentally, among those he opposed were Sophists, manipulators of discourse, who offered to sell technique as if it were truth.) Second, related to what I've just said, I would be collaborating in the commercialization and industrialization of the relationship between student and teacher and between the student and knowledge. Third, related to my first and second point, I would be reducing knowledge to a commodity -- something which can be cut to measure, packaged, invoiced and paid for by a "client" (still anachronistically called a "student"), who buys the knowledge from a corporation (probably itself in the process of becoming a "transuniversity," operating "offshore" with no basis in real cultural responsibility and coherence), administered by officers who are essentially corporate executives. Typically, for example, administrators of a "transuniversity" encourage faculty to engage in projects which protect and promote indigenous ecologies and economics in places other than where they live and work; but the same administrators collaborate with ideologies and practices which debilitate the ecological, social and economic context out of which the "transuniversity" grew and upon which it must still draw for sustenance -- especially the "human resource component".

A fourth implication of my salutation -- one which lies at the root of the three just mentioned -- is that it denies all of those it salutes any other identity than an economic one. To the human being as a political, social, religious, philosophical, artistic and even, in the deepest sense, scientific being, it concedes no recognition. In my third salutation, all of us are resources -- human (of course) -- but resources nevertheless, like coal, nickel, petroleum and (I'll extend the list deliberately in a way I hope you'll find significant), codfish, salmon, passenger pigeons, giant pandas, tigers, great auks, and right whales. Unlike "Ladies and gentlemen," unlike "Distinguished guests, faculty, staff, new students..." and so on, the third salutation, "Executive officers, stakeholders, present and future human resources," defines humans as manageable, saleable and (if history be a guide) exhaustible, that is, spendable.

But I do have a fourth salutation, one I believe in and arrived at when I remembered an adage which the English poet, William Blake, published in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell almost two hundred years ago: "Opposition is true friendship". My fourth salutation is: "Good morning friends, fellow students and fair dandelions".

"Friends" because I do have friends among you and expect to make at least a few more during the next months. "Friends" also because I'm grateful to have worked at this College with people who know how destructive bullying, flattery, intrigue and sycophancy are and who have managed to stay clear of that welter of personal insecurity and unconscious, compensatory self-inflation which seems to endue the acts of so many modern organizations with covert but quite recognizable cruelty. "Fellow students" because we are, ideally and at best, all students -- both those of us in the first year of studies, for example, and those who teach them. Fellow students because despite various motives for choosing to be at NSAC, including properly and prudentially monetary ones, we can be united by the glory and beauty of knowledge, by a shared sense that learning, like love, is a matter of psychological, moral and spiritual necessity for most human beings. "Fair dandelions" -- well, I know I take a terrible chance with that one. I choose "fair dandelions" because they are common, undervalued (even despised sometimes) and magnificent.

The late Dr. A. E. Roland, who taught in the NSAC Biology Department for many years, noted in his The Flora of Nova Scotia that more than 1,000 species of dandelions have been described. There are, I would guess, also more than a thousand species of human beings in this theatre waiting to reveal themselves in the thousands of situations, both good ones and evil, which make up university life. Dr. Roland also noted that all species of dandelions in the maritimes, with the "reputed" exception of one (Taraxacum latilobum) which may be native, were imported from Europe. Like most of us, therefore, dandelions were at some stage in their species' history, uprooted, emigrant, provisional, then gradually established in an alien land -- like starlings, barn pigeons, timothy and wild horses.

Of what use are dandelions? I could hardly salute them as stakeholders. Cows will not eat them -- too bitter. Dandelions are not quoted on any commodity exchange. You hear of pork and beef futures, but no dandelion futures. There are no dandelion quotas. If dandelions have a monetary value, it is because of the trouble they cause some humans. They acquire value in certain situa-tions -- especially golf courses, for example -- where they help support industry intent upon their eradication.

"Eradication" comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. And anyone who has tried to deal with dandelions knows that to eradicate them he or she must go to the root of the matter. Chances are, despite determined uprooting, a chunk of the root will remain -- and up will come the dandelion again. Nor can dandelions be cut down. If left alone they can overtop grasses and scatter seeds from flowers two feet high. But height is not necessary for their survival. Mow or chop them, and they'll respond by growing so low to the ground that you can't adjust a mower blade or swing a scythe to sever their flowers. As one of my favourite scientists, the American botanist and entomologist, Anna Botsford Comstock, wrote about 85 years ago, dandelions seem to be "endowed with acumen". By that phrase, she meant that dandelions, like human beings, insist upon their right to exist and their right to live out their natural cycle. Only by contriving an artificial, monocultural, expensive, and, in some ways diminished and specialized ecosystem can the eradicators of dandelions thwart their will to live.

But aside from a "negative" or "paradoxical" economic value as a "pest" to weedkillers and their associates, dandelions have values other than economic -- as I believe all beings do. Have you, for example, eaten dandelion greens -- fresh, young, in the very first spring of the year -- and tasted spring itself? Have you sipped dandelion wine -- pale yellow like the light of a fine October day -- sharp, clean, astringent, like the taste of the first skim of ice you find in the rain barrel or on the surface of water in the cattle trough?

And there are all the uses children have for dandelions. Dandelions often make the first bouquet a child gives to his or her mother or to a friend. Children make rings and necklaces from dandelion stems (and stain their fingers black with white dandelion milk -- thus explaining one of the old country names for the dandelion: Devil's Milk Pail). And children (even some of us who are no longer children) tell the time and foretell events and work out the terrible binary choice between love-me, love-me-not by breathing the filmy globes of their seedheads into hundreds of sailing balloons, each with a gondola of fruit slung safely underneath, crossing over the sea to Skye.

Uses like these are not analyzed in "The Financial Post", but they are the kind of uses which link us as human beings to the non-human world (without such uses that world becomes inhuman, inhumane), and if we forget them or discount them we forget and discount ourselves. So, I have saluted you also as "fair dandelions".

I'll end, as I began, by the world of ceremony and ritual and symbol. I'm sure many of you know that the word "dandelion" is the phoneticized spelling of what Anglo-Saxon ears nearly a thousand years ago heard when their Norman French conquerors said, "Dent du lion" or, to translate from the French, "Tooth of the Lion", "Lion's tooth". Why "Lion's tooth"? Many authorities on plants note that it was because the jagged serrations of the dandelion leaf were thought to resemble a lion's fanged jaw. Reasonable. But I suspect something more profound was at work in that naming -- something more perceptive and unconscious than making a simple equation of analogy -- jagged leaf equals fanged jaw.

I look at the dandelion's maned, yellow head, and watch it turn on its stem to follow the course of the sun, as if it were the sun's mirror. I remember that botanically the dandelion belongs to Asteraceae, the same family as the sunflower. I think of the lion, which is a regal and priestly beast in many cultures (remember the lion of Judah in Genesis and Revelation, for example) and which was also in those cultures associated with the sun. I think of Aslan, the great lion of the sun in C. S. Lewis's Narnia sequence (which was the chief source of the Disney feature length cartoon, "The Lion King"). And I end up thinking of humans as dandelions, of dandelions as humans, of the lion's yellow mane, of the yellow sun whose rayed and mane-like flowing light sustains life here on earth and is mimicked and mirrored by the dandelion's common flower. I think of one thing for which dandelions are useless: pick them, put them in a bowl, and they will wilt and die. Like us, they need sunshine and earth. And I wonder who is the lion, what is the sun, who is the dandelion, what are you?