哈佛大学校长演讲全文（三）

2017-08-23 1513浏览

Harvard, one might say, is a bastion of opportunity and unimaginable good fortune—for all of us, who find a place, with varying degrees of comfort, at the center of its long and successful narrative. And yet the burden is on us—to locate the discomfort, to act on the restless spirit of that legacy. As I thought about speaking to you here today, it occurred to me how much the question in that final song has framed your time here, and how much it will continue to affect your lives, as college graduates, as Harvard alumni, as citizens and as leaders. Who will tell your story?

　 You. You will tell your story. That is the point that I want to leave you with today. Telling your own story, a fresh story, full of possibility and a new order of things, is the task of every generation, and the task before you. And that task is exactly what your liberal arts education has prepared you to do, in three vital ways:

　First, telling your own story means discovering who you are, and not what others think you should be. It means being mindful of others, but deciding for yourself. It’s easy to tell a tale that others define, the one they expect to hear. A moment ago I sketched your Harvard history. But what did I leave out? One of Harvard’s legendary figures and Reverend Walton’s predecessor, the Reverend Peter Gomes, used to put it this way: “Don’t let anyone finish your sentences for you.” He loved being a paradox, an unpredictable surprise, but always true to himself: a Republican in Cambridge; a gay Baptist preacher; black president of the Pilgrim Society—Afro-Saxon, as he sometimes put it. Playful. Unapologetic. Unbounded by others’ expectations. “My anomalies,” he once said, “make it possible to advance the conversation.”

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　　Advance the conversation. This is my next point. Telling our own stories is not just about us. It is a conversation with others, exploring larger purposes and other worlds and different ways of thinking. Your education is not a bubble. Think of it as an escape hatch, from what Nigerian novelist and former Radcliffe Fellow Chimamanda Adichie calls “The Danger of a Single Story.” She has observed, “[h]ow impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story.” Not because it may be untrue, but because, in her words, “[stories] are incomplete. They make one story become the only story,” even though “[m]any stories matter.” For four years you have learned the rewards of other stories, and the risk of critical misunderstandings when they go unheard—whether those stories emerge from the Office for LGBTQ Life, or the Black Lives Matter movement, or the international conversation on sexual assault—and perhaps most powerfully, from one another. This is precious knowledge. Only by knowing that other stories are possible can we imagine a different future. What will medicine look like in the 21st century? Energy? Migration? How will cities be designed? The question, as one of you wrote in the Crimson, is not “What am [I] going to be,” but “What problem do [I] solve?” 　

　Which brings me to my final point: keep revising. Every story is only a draft. We re-tell even our oldest sagas—whether of Hamilton and the American Revolution or of Harvard itself. The best education prepares you because it is unsettling, an obstacle course that forces us to question and push and reinvent ourselves, and the world, in a new way. Steven Spielberg, who will speak to us on Thursday, has explained the foundation of his powerful storytelling. He says: “Fear is my fuel. I get to the brink of not knowing what to do and that’s when I get my best ideas.”

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