By Grant Smith, education reporter

IT WAS a day of extremes at Dundee University yesterday—from politics to fashion.

Honorary degrees were conferred upon BBC journalist Alan Johnston, kidnapped last year by Islamic extremists in Gaza, and Dame Vivienne Westwood, who once shocked the nation by bringing bondage clothes to the High Street.

For Mr Johnston it was a return to the city where he studied in the 1980s. This time last year he was in captivity, not knowing what his fate would be.

He had spent three years reporting from Gaza and was coming to the end of his stay when he was captured by radicals who held him for four months.

Fortunately, after a high-profile campaign to secure his release, he was freed in July 2007. He has since written a book about his experiences.

Yesterday was, however, a chance to reflect on a happier time in his life when he was studying for his degree in English and politics.

Mr Johnston said, “I stayed here for four years. This was my home—I lived a couple of streets away from here—so it’s great to come back under these circumstances.

“It’s like coming back home and it’s very kind of the university to honour me in this way.”

Asked about his memories of his time in the city, Alan said it had been a “fantastic” period in his life.

He added, “If you can’t enjoy life as a student when can you enjoy it?”

University principal Sir Alan Langlands was delighted to welcome Mr Johnston back to the university, describing him as someone “characterised by his journalistic rigour, dedication and courage”.

That was a sentiment echoed by Dr David Robb, who delivered the laureation address before Mr Johnston was conferred with his honorary degree.

He said, “Alan Johnston’s dispatches are testimony to his adventurousness and his willingness to encounter hardship. They reveal, too, his ability to convey the complexity and where necessary the pain woven through the stories he has to tell.

“This is our opportunity to say to him, with hearts filled with joy and thankfulness, we rejoice with you that the ordeal is over and that we are able to greet you now with ‘Welcome back to Dundee’.”

More than 4000 students are receiving their degrees and diplomas at the university’s series of graduation ceremonies.

Yesterday’s graduands were called up on stage to be dubbed with the traditional blue bonnet by university chancellor Lord Patel.

There was no sign of Dame Vivienne being asked to design a new bonnet, but she would undoubtedly come up with something special if was she was.

In her laureation, Professor Mike Press told the audience, “Before you is a thief. An outrageous and extraordinary one at that.

“She has plundered our culture, our history to tell stories with clothing and about clothing. Stories about personal identity and British identity.

“And what better way of commenting on the nature of Britishness than to use cultural signifiers that I am sure that all of us here are very familiar with—Harris Tweed and sadomasochistic bondage wear.”

He described Dame Vivienne as “simply the most significant designer of our age” but also a figure of political significance, whose recent cultural manifesto, performed at the university yesterday, and her opposition to the Government’s 42-day terror detention bill marked her out as someone determined to use her talents to change the world.

Also receiving an honorary degree was author William Boyd.

Professor Kirsty Gunn, in her laureation, praised Mr Boyd’s novels.

She said, “Whether he’s writing about the Edinburgh of the early 20th century or a remote outpost in Africa, whether his characters roam from the sepia-tinted past to the technicolour present, from the frenzied streets of Manhattan to the quiet quad of an Oxford college, he brings the whole world in, makes it bright and fascinating and ordinary and lived in, all at once.”

The ceremony was also a special occasion for retired solicitor Sheila Smith who was celebrating the award of her second degree from the university—some 34 years after first.

Her achievement in completing her MA in History is all the more remarkable because she is profoundly deaf.

She said, “It does make it hard at times—in my fourth-year we had a lot of seminar-based teaching where a lot of different people around the room can be speaking and when you are trying to follow things by lip-reading that makes things very tricky.

“But the staff and my fellow students were extremely helpful, and the disability unit at the university were very good, and with their help I’ve managed to complete my degree, which I am absolutely delighted about.”

The ceremony was, however, tinged with sadness as a posthumous certificate in Higher Education was awarded to Forfar woman Sheridan Vivian, who died last year, aged 19.