 Madam President, colleagues, members of staff, ladies and gentlemen, fellow graduates, friends and comrades, allow me to say it is a petrifying pleasure and an honor to be standing here in front of you all offering the vote of thanks in this special occasion as an outgoing co-president of democracy and education of the SOAS Students' Union. I've only recently understood how important it is to celebrate accomplishments in life, particularly when these mark the end of a cycle, closing one of the many parentheses life is made of. Our time at university is definitely one of them, and if you want this ceremony, these funny robes and hats, represent some sort of exclamation mark coming right after this parenthesis. I would like to thank all of those who were involved in some shape or form, organizing and working through all of this punctuation. From the team who organized today's ceremony to those who followed us through our time here from the world-renowned academics to faculty and support staff to the librarians, catering and security staff, and obviously to the always-inspiring SOAS cleaners whose ongoing struggle to be recognized as full members of our academic community has accompanied us through our time here, teaching many of us way more than any degree you could ever hope to. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Students' Union for having managed to put up with me and the rest of you for a whole year, and for the smiles and the acute intelligence for their patience and friendship, for their support and professionalism in representing the many loud voices of the SOAS students. And finally, despite him not being here this morning, please join me in thanking Professor Paul Webley, who's highly regarded consideration amongst both students and staff, his clear testimony of the hard work, modesty and vision he provided in his eight years as Director of SOAS, so please join me. I have to be completely honest with you, I cannot remember much of what was going on when I was sitting there last year, apart from the fact that I was somewhere in that area there, drowning in a black borrowed lawyer's gown way too big for me, blissfully unaware that SOAS has gone grey, far from any exit routes and having forgotten to stop at the toilet before. Big mistake. That said, in solidarity with any of you who may be going through the same experience today, I'll try and be brief. The first time I tried writing down what I was going to say today, I found myself with a never-ending list of memorable experiences and anecdotes completely unrelated to anything vaguely academic. Most things I had written down had to do with picket lines and smoke grenades, night-long jams in the junior common room and unrecommendable substances in the Kazakh yurt, ingenious plans on how to take down management, silent raves in the library, naked pictures on the Japanese roof guard. And other unbelievably silly and embarrassing experiences that I'm sure all of you would really want to hear about. However, I decided not to use that in today, I decided not to use that list in today's speech, as I thought that maybe your parents or the government shouldn't know exactly how their money has been spent. A good friend of mine once told me, seek self-respect and not attention, as, trust me, it lasts far longer. If I started speaking about our many adventures, I'm sure I would have your attention. I'm not that sure about the self-respect. That's why I'll try and be a bit more ambitious today in spending a couple of words on why opening and closing this university parenthesis is such an important moment in our lives. Universities have always been an essential part of the social system we've inherited, being one of the many patriarchal tools used to educate, control and reproduce the elites. Saucer's colonial mandate after all, when it was founded a century ago, speaks for itself. Today, however, the role of universities is to feed the system in another way, being complicit more than ever in the reproduction of consumer capitalism. We live today in a society that needs professionals, technicians, employees and consumers. And towards these, the university mandate is clear, to produce marketable degrees purchasable by the new recruits, needy of a certificate to access a highly competitive labor market in order to become those fully entitled professionals, technicians, bureaucrats, employees that our society so desperately needs. In this sense, universities and capitalism are working hand in hand, one feeding the other, increasing competition to higher the demand and shaping the offer according to the commercial principle that whatever sells and is successful is good, whatever has low demand and has very few students is bad. Value is price, they tell us, price is value. On the other hand, however, universities have also been the bastions of critical thinking, being the only institutions which have been able to shed light on the historical and social dimension of men and women's individual discontent with this world. Both in the past and in the present, universities offer the necessary time and the resources for the elaboration of those questions that, if answered, will help us understand how we got to today's very troubled world. It is widely acknowledged that never has humanity lived in an age so enriched by scientific knowledge and technological discovery or better equipped to defeat illness, ignorance, poverty, while at the same time being so confused about how to use this knowledge. Universities offer a privileged ground where to address these fundamental questions, where to contest the assumptions holding together our unequal and unjust society, where at the same time we can evaluate what is worth keeping and cherishing, as also giving space to the emergence of new radical ideas, combining hard work with pure intellectual curiosity and imagination. This is what universities are for. At its highest level, every form of science, be it natural or social, is guided by one's own spiritual engagement and not mere technical knowledge. Be it music, be it law, every discipline we study is grounded on imagination and intuition. It's speculative, creative, interactive, rather than definitive, career-oriented, market-driven, and most of all, every discipline of study is profoundly political in its ultimate research for new horizons and possibilities. This is what I found at SOAS. At SOAS, I found an oasis where the youth, together with older generations, could contemplate the past, evaluate the present, and prepare for the future, while at the same time learning to live with integrity and an open mind toward the infinite wonders of the world, which is pretty outstanding if compared with the message coming from most other institutions where the mantra is to get a degree, pay one's duty, and start a career, being pressured towards the only inevitable result, this engagement, indifference, and the growing tendency to separate our actions from the moral responsibility of their outcomes. It might be because of the latest financial crisis, it might be because of our growing atomization, but to be honest with you, the feeling I get is that there is very little faith in us. Little faith that the generation with the highest ever dependency on our family's savings, our generation, will manage to straighten up the crooked timber bent by those who've devoured the 20th century, which puts us here today in an interesting light, privileged to have been given the chance to come to university, whilst inheriting a world that is more and more divided, egotistical, unfair. All of this encircled in the assumption that we can't do much about it, but accept it, feed it, conform to it. Well, I think that in my four years at SOAS, I've probably been brainwashed enough in thinking that our generation not only can, but actually has a mandate to try and prove these assumptions wrong. So as graduating class of 2015, as an outgoing SOASians, I believe this place has taught us all that we have a responsibility not to turn our back to the crude reality of our time. This doesn't mean taking the whole way of the world on one's shoulders. What this means is being audacious when we go out there and decide what's coming next, when we get to the stage of having to measure our own dreams with the reality around us. It's a responsibility to be modest in our ambitions, to be pragmatic in our creativity. In measuring ourselves with the outside world, let's not lose our ability to believe in change, to value differences, to resist the norm. Huge challenges arise in the path towards a radical reconstruction of a truly equal and just society, as much as long and winding is the road to the fulfillment of our own individual dreams. Alas, SOAS has shown us how we don't need to choose ourselves over the world or vice versa. As by simply taking responsibility over ourselves, we will take responsibility for the world around us, too. At SOAS, you've had the time to think about these challenges, like philosophers interpreting the world. But remember, good old Karl's say, the point, however, is to change it. Thank you for listening, folks. Good luck.