About 480 people graduated in person during the ceremony at the Dunedin Town Hall on Saturday.
"At all levels, research-informed teaching in a university relies on the values of curiosity, scepticism, serendipity, creativity and genius."
Graduates transferred those values into society and thus contributed to an innovative culture, he said.
Prof White is a leading researcher in the Otago University psychology department.
He is also an award-winning postgraduate supervisor who recently completed his term as university deputy vice-chancellor, research and enterprise.
AgResearch, a Crown Research Institute, and Lincoln University announced in March that they will investigate a merger between the two institutions.
Some commentators have queried whether "blue skies" research undertaken by universities would be adversely affected by such a merger, and what such a move would mean for the academic freedoms which universities have long cherished.
Prof White told graduates that scarfie days, toga parties, Hyde St and Carisbrook were perhaps far from "managed".
"But on the positive side, they are part of the boldness and free-ranging spirit that characterises your learning."
For the past several years, Otago graduates had studied in an open environment where research and scholarship were taken seriously and where there was "considerable freedom to choose different paths".
"Unlike the nation's Crown Research Institutes, the university does not have a research agenda determined for it by the Government, although the university does attempt to respond to national needs."
CRIs and universities were governed by two different acts of parliament, and, as currently conceived, "it would not make sense to merge the two entities", he said.
Universities and CRIs had useful complementary roles, both contributed to the national interest, and they sat alongside one another in "constructive collaboration", he said.
The university's main contribution was through its graduates and not through more managed and direct plans.
Sometimes the managed plans for technology development could miss the mark.
For example, President Roosevelt's 1937 commission to advise on the most likely innovations of the succeeding 30 years had failed to identify: nuclear energy, lasers, computers, photocopying, jet engines, sonar, antibiotics, genetic code and many others.
"These new technologies were the unpredicted result of serendipity and creativity, germinated by the open research and learning environment of the university," he said.
