哈佛大学校长演讲全文（二）

2017-08-23 1259浏览

You won, with style and grace: as you captured the first national trophy for Harvard Mock Trial—by being funnier than Yale; and then you shellacked the Bulldogs in The Game for—yes—the 9th straight year; you produced the first Ivy “three-peats” in football and women’s track; and brought home the first Ivy crown in women’s rugby—how “Fierce and Beautiful” was that! 　　And, of course, all this was powered by HUDS, since 2012, powered with ceaseless servings of swai.

　　And you were just plain good: You wrote prize-winning theses on sea level change, a water crisis in Detroit; you engineered a better barbecue smoker—and tested it in a blizzard; you joined the fight to end malaria; and earned the award for best hockey player in the NCAA for strength of character as well as skill; you became well connected—to Alzheimer’s patients, to kids in Kenya, to homeless youth; and, as the inaugural class of Ed School Teacher Fellows, 20 of you are preparing to help high-need students rise. 　

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And I understand you even rested with ambition, as you tried to “Netflix and chill.” 　

　You made it all look easy—all while facing blows to the spirit that have tempered and tested you. You arrived just after a breach of academic trust that, by your senior year, produced the first honor code in Harvard’s history, events that raised hard questions for all of us: What is success? What is integrity? To whom, or what, are we accountable? 　

　When a hurricane prompted the first Harvard closing in 34 years, you rallied with generosity and goodwill—and did so again when we closed for snowstorm Nemo—the fifth largest in Boston history. And that was just a warm up, so to speak, for the Winter of Our Misery—the worst in Boston history—when you sledded the slopes of Widener in a kayak. 　

　And when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, in just your second semester, we considered still larger questions: Who are we? What matters most? What do we owe to one another? You told me that you became Bostonians that day, bonded to a city beyond Harvard Square, and to each other during the manhunt and lockdown, when the University closed for an unprecedented third time in 6 months. 　

　Who can forget the images—of the mayhem, of the people who ran, not for safety, buttoward the danger, into the chaos? The Army veteran, who smelled cordite, and expecting more bombs, saved a college student’s life; the man in the cowboy hat, who ripped away fencing in order to reach the most injured. And who can forget the moment when Red Sox first baseman David Ortiz stood in the center of Fenway Park and said in eleven words of fellowship and defiance that the FCC chose not to censor, though I will today—“this is our [bleeping] city and nobody[’s] gonna dictate our freedom.”

　A few months ago as I was lucky enough to be sitting in a Broadway theater, absorbing the final number of the musical Hamilton, I thought of you, and that fierce spirit of inclusion and self-determination. I watched as Eliza, center stage, sang, “I put myself back in the narrative,” and asked the question in the title of her song, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?,” the spirited summation of a production that, like you, has broken records. Like you, has created a new drama inside a very old one.

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