哈佛校长演讲

Installation address: Unleashing our most ambitious imaginings Cambridge, Mass.

Oct. 12, 2007

I stand honored by your trust, inspired by your charge. I am grateful to the Governing Boards for their confidence, and I thank all of you for gathering in these festival rites. I am indebted to my three predecessors, sitting behind me, for joining me today. But I am grateful to them for much more – for all that they have given to Harvard and for what each of them has generously given to me – advice, wisdom, support. I am

touched by the greetings from staff, faculty, students, alumni, universities, from our honorable Governor, and from the remarkable John Hope Franklin, who has both lived and written history. I am grateful to the community leaders from Boston and Cambridge who have come to welcome their new neighbor. I am a little stunned to see almost every person I am related to on earth sitting in the front rows. And I would like to offer a special greeting of my own to my teachers who are here – teachers from grade school, high school, college and graduate school – who taught me to love learning and the institutions that nurture it. We gather for a celebration a bit different from our June traditions. Commencement is an annual rite of passage for thousands of graduates; today marks a rite of passage for the University. As at Commencement, we don robes that mark our ties to the most ancient traditions of

scholarship. On this occasion, however, our procession includes not just our Harvard community, but scholars – 220 of them – representing

universities and colleges from across the country and around the world. I welcome and thank our visitors, for their presence reminds us that what we do here today, and what we do at Harvard every day, links us to universities and societies around the globe.

Today we mark new beginnings by gathering in solidarity; we celebrate our community and its creativity; we commit ourselves to Harvard and all it represents in a new chapter of its distinguished history. Like a congregation at a wedding, you signify by your presence a pledge of support for this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution. As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals have meanings and purposes; they are intended to arouse emotions and channel

intentions. In ritual, as the poet Thomas Lynch has written, “We act out things we cannot put into words.” But now my task is in fact to put some of this ceremony into words, to capture our meanings and purposes. Inaugural speeches are a peculiar genre. They are by definition

pronouncements by individuals who don’t yet know what they are talking about. Or, we might more charitably dub them expressions of hope unchastened by the rod of experience.

A number of inaugural veterans – both orators and auditors – have proffered advice, including unanimous agreement that my talk must be

shorter than Charles William Eliot’s – which ran to about an hour and a half. Often inaugural addresses contain lists – of a new president’s

specific goals or programs. But lists seem too constraining when I think of what today should mean; they seem a way of limiting rather than unleashing our most ambitious imaginings, our profoundest

commitments.

If this is a day to transcend the ordinary, if it is a rare moment when we gather not just as Harvard, but with a wider world of scholarship, teaching and learning, it is a time to reflect on what Harvard and institutions like it mean in this first decade of the 21st century.

Yet as I considered how to talk about higher education and the future, I found myself – historian that I am – returning to the past and, in particular, to a document I encountered in my first year of graduate school. My cousin Jack Gilpin, Class of ’73, read a section of it at

Memorial Church this morning. As John Winthrop sat on board the ship Arbella in 1630, sailing across the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he wrote a charge to his band of settlers, a charter for their new beginnings. He offered what he considered “a compass to steer by” – a “model,” but not a set of explicit orders. Winthrop instead sought to focus his followers on the broader significance of their project, on the spirit in which they should undertake their shared work. I aim to offer such a “compass” today, one for us at Harvard, and one that I hope will

have meaning for all of us who care about higher education, for we are inevitably, as Winthrop urged his settlers to be, “knitt together in this work as one.”

American higher education in 2007 is in a state of paradox – at once celebrated and assailed. A host of popular writings from the 1980s on have charged universities with teaching too little, costing too much,

coddling professors and neglecting students, embracing an “illiberalism” that has silenced open debate. A PBS special in 2005 described a “sea of mediocrity” that “places this nation at risk.” A report issued by the U.S. Department of Education last year warned of the “obsolescence” of higher education as we know it and called for federal intervention in service of the national interest.

Yet universities like Harvard and its peers, those represented by so many of you here today, are beloved by alumni who donate billions of dollars each year, are sought after by students who struggle to win admission, and, in fact, are deeply revered by the American public. In a recent survey, 93 percent of respondents considered our universities “one of [the

country’s] most valuable resources.” Abroad, our universities are admired and emulated; they are arguably the American institution most respected by the rest of the world.

How do we explain these contradictions? Is American higher education in crisis, and if so, what kind? What should we as its leaders and

representatives be doing about it? This ambivalence, this curious love-hate relationship, derives in no small part from our almost

unbounded expectations of our colleges and universities, expectations that are at once intensely felt and poorly understood.

From the time of its founding, the United States has tied its national identity to the power of education. We have long turned to education to prepare our citizens for the political equality fundamental to our national self-definition. In 1779, for example, Thomas Jefferson called for a national aristocracy of talent, chosen “without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance” and “rendered by liberal education ... able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow-citizens.” As our economy has become more complex, more tied to specialized knowledge, education has become more crucial to social and economic mobility. W.E.B. DuBois observed in 1903 that “Education and work are the levers to lift up a people.” Education makes the promise of America possible.

In the past half century, American colleges and universities have shared in a revolution, serving as both the emblem and the engine of the

expansion of citizenship, equality and opportunity – to blacks, women, Jews, immigrants, and others who would have been subjected to quotas or excluded altogether in an earlier era. My presence here today – and indeed that of many others on this platform – would have been

unimaginable even a few short years ago. Those who charge that

universities are unable to change should take note of this transformation, of how different we are from universities even of the mid 20th century. And those who long for a lost golden age of higher education should

think about the very limited population that alleged utopia actually served. College used to be restricted to a tiny elite; now it serves the many, not just the few. The proportion of the college age population enrolled in higher education today is four times what it was in 1950; twelve times what it was before the 1920s. Ours is a different and a far better world. At institutions like Harvard and its peers, this revolution has been built on the notion that access should be based, as Jefferson urged, on talent, not circumstance. In the late 1960s, Harvard began sustained efforts to identify and attract outstanding minority students; in the 1970s, it gradually removed quotas limiting women to a quarter of the entering college class. Recently, Harvard has worked hard to send the message that the college welcomes families from across the economic spectrum. As a result we have seen in the past 3 years a 33 percent increase in

students from families with incomes under $60,000. Harvard’s dorms and Houses are the most diverse environments in which many of our students will ever live.

Yet issues of access and cost persist – for middle-class families who

suffer terrifying sticker shock, and for graduate and professional students,

who may incur enormous debt as they pursue service careers in fields where salaries are modest. As graduate training comes to seem almost as indispensable as the baccalaureate degree for mobility and success, the cost of these programs takes on even greater importance.

The desirability and the perceived necessity of higher education have intensified the fears of many. Will I get in? Will I be able to pay? This anxiety expresses itself in both deep-seated resentment and nearly

unrealizable expectations. Higher education cannot alone guarantee the mobility and equality at the heart of the American Dream. But we must fully embrace our obligation to be available and affordable. We must make sure that talented students are able to come to Harvard, that they know they are able to come, and that they know we want them here. We need to make sure that cost does not divert students from pursuing their passions and their dreams.

But American anxiety about higher education is about more than just cost. The deeper problem is a widespread lack of understanding and agreement about what universities ought to do and be. Universities are curious

institutions with varied purposes that they have neither clearly articulated nor adequately justified. Resulting public confusion, at a time when higher education has come to seem an indispensable social resource, has produced a torrent of demands for greater “accountability” from colleges and universities.

Universities are indeed accountable. But we in higher education need to seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for. We are asked to report graduation rates, graduate school admission statistics, scores on standardized tests intended to assess the “value added” of years in college, research dollars, numbers of faculty publications. But such measures cannot themselves capture the achievements, let alone the aspirations of universities. Many of these metrics are important to know, and they shed light on particular parts of our undertaking. But our purposes are far more ambitious and our accountability thus far more difficult to explain. Let me venture a definition. The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the future – not simply or even primarily to the present. A university is not about results in the next

quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future. A university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that must – that even ought to – conflict with a public’s immediate concerns or demands. Universities make commitments to the timeless, and these investments have yields we cannot predict and often cannot measure. Universities are stewards of living tradition – in Widener and Houghton and our 88 other libraries, in the Fogg and the Peabody, in our departments of classics, of history and of literature. We are uncomfortable with efforts to justify these endeavors

by defining them as instrumental, as measurably useful to particular

contemporary needs. Instead we pursue them in part “for their own sake,” because they define what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.

We pursue them because they offer us as individuals and as societies a depth and breadth of vision we cannot find in the inevitably myopic present. We pursue them too because just as we need food and shelter to survive, just as we need jobs and seek education to better our lot, so too we as human beings search for meaning. We strive to understand who we are, where we came from, where we are going and why. For many people, the four years of undergraduate life offer the only interlude permitted for unfettered exploration of such fundamental questions. But the search for meaning is a never-ending quest that is always interpreting, always

interrupting and redefining the status quo, always looking, never content with what is found. An answer simply yields the next question. This is in fact true of all learning, of the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities, and thus of the very core of what universities are about. By their nature, universities nurture a culture of restlessness and even unruliness. This lies at the heart of their accountability to the future. Education, research, teaching are always about change – transforming individuals as they learn, transforming the world as our inquiries alter our understanding of it, transforming societies as we see our knowledge

translated into policies – policies like those being developed at Harvard to prevent unfair lending practices, or to increase affordable housing or avert nuclear proliferation – or translated into therapies, like those our researchers have designed to treat macular degeneration or to combat anthrax. The expansion of knowledge means change. But change is often uncomfortable, for it always encompasses loss as well as gain,

disorientation as well as discovery. It has, as Machiavelli once wrote, no constituency. Yet in facing the future, universities must embrace the

unsettling change that is fundamental to every advance in understanding. We live in the midst of scientific developments as dramatic as those of any era since the 17th century. Our obligation to the future demands that we take our place at the forefront of these transformations. We must organize ourselves in ways that enable us fully to engage in such

exploration, as we have begun to do by creating the Broad Institute, by founding cross school departments, by launching a School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. We must overcome barriers both within and beyond Harvard that could slow or constrain such work, and we must provide the resources and the facilities – like the new science buildings in both Cambridge and Allston – to support it. Our obligation to the future makes additional demands. Universities are, uniquely, a place of

philosophers as well as scientists. It is urgent that we pose the questions of ethics and meaning that will enable us to confront the human, the

social and the moral significance of our changing relationship with the natural world.

Accountability to the future requires that we leap geographic as well as intellectual boundaries. Just as we live in a time of narrowing distances between fields and disciplines, so we inhabit an increasingly transnational world in which knowledge itself is the most powerful connector. Our lives here in Cambridge and Boston cannot be separated from the future of the rest of the earth: we share the same changing climate; we contract and spread the same diseases; we participate in the same economy. We must recognize our accountability to the wider world, for, as John Winthrop warned in 1630, “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

Harvard is both a source and a symbol of the ever expanding knowledge upon which the future of the earth depends, and we must take an active and reflective role in this new geography of learning. Higher education is burgeoning around the globe in forms that are at once like and unlike our own. American universities are widely emulated, but our imitators often display limited appreciation for the principles of free inquiry and the culture of creative unruliness that defines us.

The “Veritas” in Harvard’s shield was originally intended to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the unassailable verities of Puritan religion. We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a

possession. Yet in this we – and all universities defined by the spirit of debate and free inquiry – challenge and even threaten those who would embrace unquestioned certainties. We must commit ourselves to the

uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand.

The kinds of accountability I have described represent at once a privilege and a responsibility. We are able to live at Harvard in a world of

intellectual freedom, of inspiring tradition, of extraordinary resources, because we are part of that curious and venerable organization known as a university. We need better to comprehend and advance its purposes – not simply to explain ourselves to an often critical public, but to hold ourselves to our own account. We must act not just as students and staff, historians and computer scientists, lawyers and physicians, linguists and sociologists, but as citizens of the university, with obligations to this commonwealth of the mind. We must regard ourselves as accountable to one another, for we constitute the institution that in turn defines our possibilities. Accountability to the future encompasses special

accountability to our students, for they are our most important purpose and legacy. And we are responsible not just to and for this university, Harvard, in this moment, 2007, but to the very concept of the university as it has evolved over nearly a millennium.

It is not easy to convince a nation or a world to respect, much less support, institutions committed to challenging society’s fundamental assumptions. But it is our obligation to make that case: both to explain our purposes and achieve them so well that these precious institutions survive and prosper in this new century. Harvard cannot do this alone. But all of us know that Harvard has a special role. That is why we are here; that is why it means so much to us.

Last week I was given a brown manila envelope that had been entrusted to the University Archives in 1951 by James B. Conant, Harvard’s 23rd president. He left instructions that it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of the next century “and not before.” I broke the seal on the mysterious package to find a remarkable letter from my predecessor. It was addressed to “My dear Sir.” Conant wrote with a sense of imminent danger. He feared an impending World War III that would make “the destruction of our cities including Cambridge quite possible.”

“We all wonder,” he continued, “how the free world is going to get through the next fifty years.” But as he imagined Harvard’s future,

Conant shifted from foreboding to faith. If the “prophets of doom” proved wrong, if there was a Harvard president alive to read his letter, Conant was confident about what the university would be. “You will receive this note and be in charge of a more prosperous and significant institution

than the one over which I have the honor to preside ... That ... [Harvard] will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of tolerance for heresy, I feel sure.” We must dedicate ourselves to making certain he continues to be right; we must share and sustain his faith.

Conant’s letter, like our gathering here, marks a dramatic intersection of the past with the future. This is a ceremony in which I pledge – with keys and seal and charter – my accountability to the traditions that his voice from the past invokes. And at the same time, I affirm, in compact with all of you, my accountability to and for Harvard’s future. As in Conant’s day, we face uncertainties in a world that gives us sound reason for disquiet. But we too maintain an unwavering belief in the purposes and potential of this university and in all it can do to shape how the world will look

another half century from now. Let us embrace those responsibilities and possibilities; let us share them “knitt together . . . as one;” let us take up the work joyfully, for such an assignment is a privilege beyond measure.

就职演讲常常会罗列一些新校长的具体构想或是计划。但是，当我在考虑今天意味着什么的时候，这样的罗列似乎过于束缚人，它们限制了而不是去放飞我们最富挑战性的想象力，限制了我们去思考我们最深远的责任和义务。

如果今天是超越普通日子的一天，如果今天是我们为数不多的、不仅是作为哈佛人聚集在一起、而是与一个更为广阔的学术、教学与学问的世界站在一起的一天，那么，现在就是哈佛以及像哈佛这类大学去思考的时候了：在这21世纪的第一个十年中，我们应该扮演什么样的角色。

大学的确是要承担责任 的。但我们从事高等教育的人需要首先搞清楚，我们为了什么去承担责任。人们要求我们报告毕业率、研究生院的入学统计数字、标准考试的分数，目的是为了在大 学评价中提高“附加值”，人们要看研究经费有多少，教师出版和发表论著的数量是多少。但这些硬性指标本身并不能说明所取得的成就，更不要提大学所渴望达到

的目标了。虽然了解上述指标很重要，它们也可以说明我们事业中一些特别的部分内容。但我们的目的要比这些宏大得多，因此，要解释我们的责任感，也更加困 难。

那么，让我斗胆提出一 个定义来吧。一所大学的精神所在，是它要特别对历史和未来负责——而不单单或着仅仅是对现在负责。一所大学关乎学问（learning ），影响终生的学 问，将传统传承千年的学问，创造未来的学问。一所大学，既要回头看，也要向前看，其看的方法必须——也应该——与大众当下所关心的或是所要求的相对立。大 学是要对永恒做出承诺，而这些投资会产生我们无法预测且常常是无法衡量的收益。大学是那些活生生的传统的管理员——在Widener 图书馆与 Houghton 图书馆以及我们另外的88个图书馆，在Fogg 与Peabody 博物馆，在我们的古典学科的系科，在历史与文学的系科，都有活生生的传 统。对于那些努力去证明这些传统不过是工具性的、不过是对某些当代需求有一定用处而已的说法和作法，我们会感觉很不舒服。恰恰相反，我们追寻传统，从某种 程度上讲，是“为了它们自身”，因为正是它们，千百年来界定了我们何以为人类，而不是因为它们可以提升我们在全球的竞争力。

我们追寻它们，因为它 们使我们的——无论是个人的还是社会的——洞察力增加了深度和广度，而这，则是我们在难以避免短视的当下所无法发现的。我们同样追寻它们，也因为正如我们 需要食物和房屋生存一样，正如我们需要工作和寻求教育来改善我们的运气一样，我们作为人类同样需要寻找意义。我们努力去理解我们是谁，从哪里来，到哪里 去，原因何在。对许多人来说，四年的大学生活不过是允许自己去自由自在地探索这类根本问题的一个插曲而已。但对意义的找寻，是没有尽头的探索，它在不断地 阐释，不断地干扰和重新阐释现状，不断地在看，从不会满足于已有的发现。事实上，这就是所有学问的真谛，自然科学、社会科学和人文学科，概莫能外，因此， 它也就成为了“大学是干什么的”之核心所在了。

就其本质而言，大学培 育的是一种变化的文化甚至是无法控制的文化。这是大学为未来承担责任的核心。教育、研究、教学常常都是有关变化的——当人们学习时，它改变了个人；当我们 的疑问改变我们对世界的看法时，它改变了世界；当我们的知识运用到政策之中时，它改变了社会。知识的扩充就意味着变化。但变化常常使人感到不舒服，因为它 在你得到的同时也会失去，在你发现的同时也会迷失方向。然而，当面对未来时，大学必须去拥抱那不稳定的变化，它对人类理解世界的每一点进步都至关重要。

我们对未来的责任还对 我们提出了更多的要求。大学既是哲学家也是科学家的所在地，这是独一无二的。对未来承担责任要求我们，要跨越地理与智力的界限。正如我们生活在田野与学科 正在缩小差距的时代，我们所居住的是一个逐渐跨越国家的世界，在这个世界里，知识本身就是最有力的连接体。

真理是渴望达到的目 标，而不是占有物。而在这其中，我们——和所有以思考和自由询问精神显示其特色的大学一道——向那些拥抱不容争辩的确定性的人们提出挑战乃至是提出警告。 我们必须将自己置于不断质疑（doubt ）这种令人不舒服的状态，使自己保持谦逊的态度，不断地相信：还有更多的知识需要我们去了解、更多的知识需要我们 去讲授、更多的知识需要我们去理解。

上述所承担的种种责任 既代表着一种特权，也代表着一种责任。我们能够生活在哈佛这样一个理性自由、传统激扬、资源非凡的王国，因为我们正是被称为是“大学”的这

样好奇而神圣的 组织的一部分。我们需要更好地去理解和推进大学的目的——不单单是向总持批评立场的公众加以解释，更要为了我们自身的价值而坚持自我。我们必须要付诸行 动，不仅是作为学生和教工、历史学家和计算机科学家、律师和医生，语言学家和社会学家，更是作为大学中的成员，我们对这个思想共同体负有责任。我们必须把 彼此看作是相互负有责任的，因为由我们所组成的这个组织，反过来界定了我们的潜在价值。对未来承担责任包含着我们对学生所承担的特殊职责，因为他们是我们 最重要的目的和财产。

想要说服一个国家或是 世界去尊重——不要说去支持了——那些致力于挑战社会最根本的思维设定，这很不容易。但这，恰恰就是我们的责任：我们既要去解释我们的目的，也要很好地去 达到我们的目的，这就是我们这些大学在这个新的世纪生存和繁荣的价值所在。哈佛大学不能孤独地为此奋斗。但我们所有人都知道，哈佛在其中扮演着特殊的角 色。这就是我们今天在这里的原因，这就是她对我们意味深长的原因。

上一周，我拿到一个深 黄褐色的信封，它是在1951年由哈佛的第23任校长詹姆斯·柯南特（James B. Conant）委托给哈佛档案馆保存下来的。他在留下的简短说明上称，请下一世纪开始时而“不是之前的”哈佛校长打开它。我撕开了这封神秘信件的封口，发 现里面是我的前任留下的一封不同寻常的信。它的抬头是“我亲爱的先生。”柯南特写作时给人一种危险迫在眉睫的感觉。他担心第三次世界大战一触即发，这将 “很有可能使我们所居住的城市包括剑桥在内遭到破坏。”

“我们都想知道，”他 继续写到，“自由世界在未来的50年里会如何发展。”但是，当他想象哈佛的未来时，柯南特就由不详之兆转向了坚定的信念。如果“厄运的预言”证明了是错 的，如果有一位哈佛校长能活着读到这封信，那么，柯南特就对哈佛的未来有信心。“你会收到这封信，会带领一个比我荣幸地执掌时更加繁荣、更有影响的大

学。„„[哈佛]将坚持学术自由、容忍异端的传统，我确信是如此。”我们必须致力于此，确信他在未来也是正确的，我们必须共同拥有和支持他的这种信念。

柯南特的信，就像我们 今天在此聚会一样，标志着在过去与未来之间，有一块引人注目的交汇地。在这个仪式上，我接受了我对他来自历史的声音所祈求的传统应付的责任。与此同时，我 也与你们大家一道，确认了我对哈佛现在和未来的责任。正如柯南特所处的时代一样，我们也处于一个使我们有充足的理由忧虑不安的世界，我们面对的是不确定。 但我们同样要对这所大学的目的和潜在发展保持一种不可动摇的信念，她终究会尽其所能地去设计从现在起之后的半个世纪内世界将会怎样。让我们拥抱那些责任和 各种可能性吧；让我们分享它们“紧密相联„„如一体；”让我们开心地去从事这项工作吧，因为这样的一项任务是一种难以衡量的特权。