哈佛校长2016毕业演讲

第一篇：哈佛校长2016毕业演讲

哈佛校长2016毕业演讲：谁来讲述你的故事? 只有你自己

当你告诉别人你的故事，是为了发现真正的你，而不是那个别人认为你应该成为的那个你!听别人的建议，但是做你自己的决定!——哈佛校长 Drew Gilpin Faust 去从事你真正关心的事业吧，无论是物理还是神经科学，无论是金融还是电影制片。如果你想好了目的地，就直接往那里去吧。这就是我的“停车位理论”：不要因为觉得肯定没有停车位了，就把车停在距离目的地10个街区远的地方。直接去你想去的地方，如果车位已满，你总可以再绕回来。

哈佛校长2016毕业演讲：谁来讲述你的故事? 只有你自己 人们也许会说哈佛是天堂，充满了各种难以想象的机遇和好运——确实，我们每个人都有幸在她漫长而成功的历史中占有一席之地。但这也对我们提出了要求：我们有责任走出自己的舒适区，寻找属于我们的挑战，践行哈佛奋斗不息的精神。

在我准备今天演讲的时候，我想到了音乐剧《汉密尔顿》中最后那首歌里的问题： 谁来讲述你的故事? 我想这个问题奠定了你们过去四年大学生活的基调，也将对你们未来作为哈佛毕业生和校友的生活产生深远的影响，无论是作为公民或是领袖—— 谁，来讲述你的故事? 是你，你要来讲述你的故事!这就是今天我要对你们说的话：讲你自己的故事，一个充满了无限可能性和新秩序的崭新故事，这是每一代人的任务，也是现在摆在你面前的任务。你在哈佛所接受的文理博雅教育，将会用以下三种重要方式，帮助你去完成这项任务。听别人的建议，做你自己的决定

讲述你的故事意味着发现你自己是谁——而不是成为别人认为你的谁。你要参考别人的意见，但要做出自己的决定。讲述一个别人定义好的或别人希望听到的故事，那太容易了。哈佛的传奇人物之

一、可敬的彼得·戈麦斯教授曾说：“不要让任何人替你把话说完。”戈麦斯教授自己经常“自相矛盾”，令人难以捉摸，但永远忠于他自己：他是一位剑桥市的共和党人(注：在哈佛所在的剑桥市，共和党是少数派);他是一位浸礼会的牧师，但同时是个同性恋(注：基督教大多不支持同性恋);他是朝圣者协会的会长，同时又是一位黑人(注：朝圣者协会白人居多)。

他对自己的信仰坚定不移，他不为外人的期望牵挂束缚。他说：“我的不同寻常，让开启新的对话变为可能。”

开启与他人的对话，倾听他人的故事

开启新的对话，这是我的下一个重点。讲述我们自己的故事并不意味着只关注我们自己。讲故事是与他人对话，借此探寻更远大的目标、探索其他的世界、探究不同的思维方式——你所受的教育不是一个真空的大泡沫。

如果我们只讲述单一的故事，那将是危险的，就像诺大的场地只有一个逃生口，令所有人变得异常脆弱。单一的故事不一定是假的，但它是不完整的。所有的故事都很重要，不能把单一角度的故事变成唯一的故事。

过去四年，你们感受到了倾听他人故事的益处，也体验到了忽略他人故事所带来的危险。只有意识到，世界上充满了各种各样的故事，我们才能想象一个不一样的未来。21世纪的医疗是什么样?能源是什么样?移民是什么样?城市将如何设计?面对这些问题，你要问的不是“我会成为什么样的人”，而是 我能解决什么问题? “在不安和不确定中，不断修正你的故事” 这也引出了最后一个重点：不断修正。每个故事其实都只是一个草稿，我们连最古老的传说都会不断拿来重提——不管是汉密尔顿将军的故事、美国独立战争的史诗、亦或是哈佛自己的历史。

好的教育之所以好，是因为它让你坐立不安，它强迫你不断重新认识我们自己和我们周遭的世界，并不断去改变。

斯蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格将在毕业典礼上为我们演讲，他就曾经这样解释他创作的基石：“恐惧是我的动力。当我濒临走投无路的时候，那也是我遇见最好的想法的时候。”

大学，不正是这样一个让每一个人都接受挑战、让每一个人都产生不确定性的地方吗? 就这样，大学四年间，你都一直在学习重新讲述你的故事：寻找你自己的声音，将自己放入一个故事中——无论是对气候变化采取反抗行动，发现你对统计学的热衷，还是发起了一项有意义的运动，你亲眼目睹故事不断被重新讲述。不要妥协，直奔你的目标

这些年，我一直在告诉大家：追随你所爱!去从事你真正关心的事业吧，无论是物理还是神经科学，无论是金融还是电影制片。如果你想好了目的地，就直接往那里去吧。这就是我的“停车位理论”：不要因为觉得肯定没有停车位了，就把车停在距离目的地10个街区远的地方。直接去你想去的地方，如果车位已满，你总可以再绕回来。

所以在这里，我想祝贺你们，2016届的哈佛毕业生们。别忘了你们来自何处，不断改变你的故事，不断重写你的故事。我相信这项任务除了你们自己，谁也无法替你们完成!

第二篇：比尔盖茨哈佛毕业演讲

Bill Gates鈥� Commencement address at Harvard University,2007(extract)

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great

collections of intellectual talent in the world.What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the

benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world.But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors鈥攖he

intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask

yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world鈥檚 worst

inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty鈥he prevalence of world hunger鈥he scarcity of clean water鈥he girls kept out of school鈥he children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world鈥檚 most privileged people learn about the lives of the world鈥檚 least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions鈥攜ou will answer with your policies.When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given鈥攊n talent, privilege, and opportunity鈥攖here is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue鈥攁 complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it.If you make it the focus of your career, that would be

phenomenal.But you don鈥檛 have to do that to make an impact.For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get

informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.Don鈥檛 let complexity stop you.Be activists.Take on the big inequities.It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time.As you leave

Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had.You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have.And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you

abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.You have more than we had;you must start sooner, and carry on longer.Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy.I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world鈥檚 deepest inequities鈥n how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.Good luck.(words: 497)

第三篇：JKRowling哈佛毕业演讲

J.K.Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.Text as delivered follows.Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.The first thing I would like to say is „thank you.‟ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight.A win-win situation!Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world‟s largest Gryffindor reunion.Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility;or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation.The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock.Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can‟t remember a single word she said.This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the „gay wizard‟ joke, I‟ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.I have come up with two answers.On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called „real life‟, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become.Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels.However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree;I wanted to study English Literature.A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages.Hardly had my parents‟ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics;they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day.Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view.There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction;the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty.They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience.Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression;it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated;you have never known hardship or heartbreak.Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure.You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success.Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person‟s idea of success, so high have you already flown.Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun.That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution.I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected;I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone‟s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so.Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books.This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International‟s headquarters in London.There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them.I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends.I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries.I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments.Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland.He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him.He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child.I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since.The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her.She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country‟s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power.I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have.The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners.Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet.My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced.They can think themselves into other people‟s places.Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral.One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all.They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages;they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally;they can refuse to know.I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do.Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors.I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters.They are often more afraid.What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters.For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives.It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people‟s lives simply by existing.But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people‟s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities.Even your nationality sets you apart.The great majority of you belong to the world‟s only remaining superpower.The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders.That is your privilege, and your burden.If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice;if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless;if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.I am nearly finished.I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21.The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life.They are my children‟s godparents, the people to whom I‟ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships.And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.Thank you very much.

第四篇：哈佛校长给本科毕业生的毕业演讲

哈佛校长给本科毕业生的毕业演讲

Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008 The Memorial Church Cambridge, Mass.June 3, 2008

As prepared for delivery

In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom.Here I am in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches.This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the moment of and for Veritas.You have been undergraduates for four years.I have been president for not quite one.You have known three presidents;I one senior class.Where then lies the voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom.Perhaps our roles could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for the next hour or so.We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece.Though I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22.I know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense.I never knew we took it quite so literally.But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment.Let’s imagine this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the questions.“What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?”(Forty years.I’ll say it out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available.But please remember I was young for my class.)

In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year.On just these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly.And I have been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking.Let me explain.It actually began when I met with the UC just after my appointment was announced in the winter of 2007.Then the questions continued when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad.The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space.In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy.Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it.There is the Willie Sutton approach.You may know that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of student career choices since the seventies.They find it notable that, given the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still choose to do something else.Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America;one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina;another will be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya;another, with an honors degree in math, will study poetry;another will train as a pilot with the USAF;another will work to combat breast cancer.Numbers of you will go to law school, medical school, and graduate school.But, consistent with the pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finance and consulting.The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice.This year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots of ways to explain these choices.For some of you, it is a commitment for only a year or two in any case.Others believe they will best be able to do good by first doing well.Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in figuring out why you are posing it.If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right;if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so many of you?

You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm of metaphysics.The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one would dare admit to harboring serious concern.But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to your question.I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together.You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth will feed your soul.Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault.We have told you from the moment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world.We have burdened you with no small expectations.And you have already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s presidential contests.But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice.Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?

You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may not be possible to have it all.You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices.And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate program — means not selecting others.Every decision means loss as well as gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced.Your question to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma, representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one career path.These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to stay in teaching after your two years with TFA.You are worried because you want to have both a meaningful life and a successful one;you know you were educated to make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but for the world around you.And now you have to figure out the way to make that possible.I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely distinct from the first.You want to be happy.You have flocked to courses like “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips.But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older.Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my age — report themselves happier than do younger ones.But perhaps you don’t want to wait.As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige.The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying.But you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing?

The answer is: you won’t know till you try.But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance;if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it.Life is long.There is always time for Plan B.But don’t begin with it.I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades.Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space.Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.You may love investment banking or finance or consulting.It might be just right for you.Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm.“Why am I doing this?” she asked.“I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love.It is hard to be happy if you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of me but of yourselves.You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own choices.You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there.This is the best news.And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault.Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do.A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously.It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do.It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds.It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free.They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making choices.The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it.Don’t settle.Be prepared to change routes.Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world.The meaning of your life is for you to make.I can’t wait to see how you all turn out.Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.

第五篇：哈佛校长2016年毕业典礼演讲

哈佛校长2016年毕业典礼演讲

Greetings, alumni, graduates, families, and friends.It is such a pleasure to see you all here and offercongratulations on this day of celebration.I am in the unenviable role of warm-up act for one ofthe greatest storytellers of ourtime.Nevertheless, my assignment is to offer a fewreflections on this magnificent institution at this moment in its history.And what a moment it is!From comments of astonished pundits on television, in print, and online, to conversations withbewildered friends and colleagues, the question seems unavoidable and mesmerizing: What is goingon? What is happening to the world? The tumultuous state of American politics, spotlighted in thiscontentious presidential contest;the political challenges around the globe from Brazil to Brexit;theMiddle East in flames;a refugee crisis in Europe;terrorists exploiting new media to perform chillingacts of brutality and murder;climate-related famine in Africa and fires in Canada.It is as if we arebeing visited by the horsemen of the apocalypse with war, famine, natural disaster and, yes, evenpestilencefrom smallpox in the 17th century tothe devastating flu of 1918 to the H1N1 virus just a few years ago.Harvard has not just survivedthese challenges, but has helped to confront them.We sing in our alma mater about “Calm risingthrough change and through storm.” What does that mean for today's crises? Where douniversities fit in this threatening mix? What can we do? What should we do? What must we do? We are gathered today in Tercentenary Theatre, with Widener Library and Memorial Churchstanding before and behind us, enduring symbols of Harvard's larger identity and purposes,testaments to what universities do and believe at a time when we have never needed them more.And much is at stake, for us and for the world.We look at Widener Library and see a great edifice, a backdrop of giant columns where photos aretaken and 27 steps are worn down ever so slightly by the feet of a century of students andscholars.We also see a repository of learning, with 57 miles of shelving at the heart of a librarysystem of some 17 million books, a monument to reason and knowledge, to the collection andpreservation of the widest possible range of beliefs, and experiences, and facts that fuel free inquiryand our constantly evolving understanding.A vehicle for Veritasin thepresent moment, as a basis for the informed decisions of individuals, societies, and nations;and forthe future, as the basis for new insight.As James Madison wrote in 1822, “a people who mean tobe their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.” Or as early20th-century civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs put it, “education is democracy's lifeinsurance.” Evidence, reason, facts, logic, an understanding of history and of science.The ability to know, asformer dean Jeremy Knowles used to put it, “when someone is talking rot.” These are the bedrockof education, and of an informed citizenry with the capacity to lead, to explore, to invent.Yet thiscommitment to reason and truthseems increasingly aminority viewpoint.In a recent column, George Will deplored the nation's evident abandonment ofwhat he called “the reality principleeven when that process is uncomfortable.Universities do not just storefacts;they teach us how to evaluate, test, challenge, and refine them.Only if we ourselves model acommitment to fact over what Stephen Colbert so memorably labeled as ”truthiness“(and he alsoactually sometimes called it ”Veritasiness!“), only then can we credibly call for adherence to suchstandards in public life and in a wider world.We must model this commitment for our students, as we educate them to embrace theseprinciplesnot just the quality of men and women's thoughts, but, asmy predecessor James Conant put it, ”the radiance of their deeds.“ The more than 1,100 Harvardand Radcliffe students, faculty, and alumni whose names are engraved on its walls gave their livesin service to their country, because they believed that some things had greater value than theirown individual lives.I juxtapose Widener Library and Memorial Church today because we need thequalities that both represent, because I believe that reason and knowledge must be inflected withvalues, and that those of us who are privileged to be part of this community of learning bearconsequent responsibilities.Now, it may surprise some of you to hear that this is not an uncontroversial assertion.For thismorning's ceremony, I wore the traditional Harvard presidential robewe see a remarkable enthusiasm, forexample, for the field of global health because it unites the power of knowledge and science with adeeply-felt desire to do good in the worlddoctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, philosophers,business people, epidemiologists, public servants-into the world.For our youngest students, those just beginning to shape their adult lives, those who todayreceived what the ritual language of Commencement calls ”their first degree," for them, thesequestions of values and responsibility take on particular salience.Harvard College is a residentialcommunity of learning with a goal, in the words of its dean, of personal and social as well asintellectual transformation.Bringing students of diverse backgrounds to live together and learnfrom one another enacts that commitment, as we work to transform diversity into belonging.In aworld divided by difference, we at Harvard strive to be united by it.In myriad ways we challengeour students to be individuals of character as well as of learning.We seek to establish standards forthe College community that advance our institutional purposes and values.We seek to educatepeople, not just minds;our highest aspiration is not just knowledge, but wisdom.Reason and responsibility.Widener and Memorial Church.Harvard and the world.We have a veryspecial obligation in a very difficult time.May we and the students we send forth today embrace it.Thank you very much.