Thank you, Provost Zappe. Chair Brennan, President Iuliano, Faculty, Students, Staff, Friends of Gettysburg College and of higher education –

I am delighted to be part of this important occasion. I am myself a graduate of a Pennsylvania liberal arts college – one founded a half century later than yours – and I am also a Civil War historian, so I feel especially honored to help celebrate this College’s long traditions of learning, scholarship and service to the world.

I am also a former Harvard president – a fact that might induce a pang of anxiety among those of you who share my interest in history. A little more than 150 years ago, not far from where we gather today, Gettysburg became well acquainted with another Harvard ex-president. Extremely well acquainted. He spoke non-stop to his audience for more than two hours. I’m referring, of course, to the unfortunate Edward Everett, who ever since has been best known not as a Harvard president, or as the senator, governor, and diplomat he also was. Instead he is remembered as the hapless orator who droned on endlessly and forgettably before Abraham Lincoln came to the podium and in 272 words delivered one of the greatest speeches of all time. To Everett’s credit, he recognized this and congratulated Lincoln: “I should be glad,” he said, “if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Please rest assured. While I could happily speak all day about your new president, I have promised him that I will not pull an Everett. I know full well that the most important words uttered today – the “central idea of [this] occasion” –will be President Iuliano’s words, not mine. But before I cede the podium – and before you hear his own 272 or so well-chosen words – I do want to say something about your new leader and the values of higher education he embodies so well.

We live in a time of enormous challenges for colleges and universities, and I can think of no one better suited to confront them. It was my great privilege to work closely with Bob and to rely on his dedication and exquisite judgment throughout my 11 years as Harvard’s president. He has now been your president for barely more than 11 weeks. But I hope it is already becoming evident to you just how fortunate you are.

Bob is here today, taking on these new responsibilities, because he believes so strongly in the value – and the values – of a liberal arts education. At a time when pressures come from all sides to transform college into an increasingly narrow form of vocational training, colleges like Gettysburg stand for something precious – a commitment essential for us both to carry forward and to continually reimagine. The commitment to an education that leads not only to good jobs but to good lives. An education that provides students with the tools and the spirit to separate truth from untruth, fact from fiction. An education that nurtures habits of mind such as critical inquiry and reasoned argument, generous listening and openness to varied points of view, empathy for others and a will to pursue causes larger than ourselves These are just some of the fruits of liberal arts education at its best, and we have never needed them more.

Higher education must enable us to understand a world beyond the inevitable limits of our own lives – through the pursuit of fields as varied as literature, anthropology, astronomy – and through the experience of interacting with others who differ from us – in origins, identities, and intellectual perspectives. A residential liberal arts college is ideally designed to do just that – in your classrooms, in your dormitories, in the Servo as you share not just meals but food for thought.

The many monuments that fill this campus, this town, this battlefield remind us that this is hallowed ground. Let it also be common ground. This was the place where we as a nation almost came apart. Let it now be a place that models ways of coming together, a place that draws strength from all that makes us different, even as it reveals and reinforces our common humanity. Gettysburg has been witness in the past to acts of extraordinary courage. Learning in our own times requires courage as well – the courage to abandon a preconception, to open a mind, to listen to an unsettling point of view, to risk disagreement, to dare to be wrong – in order to confront the difficult questions that permit us to come ever closer to real truth and understanding. I know “there are no bystanders here.”

Your president understands these challenges well. As Harvard’s General Counsel he was at the epicenter of just about every difficult issue the institution faced. But he was always much more than a General Counsel. In fact, I kept trying to invent additional titles that could encompass the scope and centrality of his work. What matters, of course, was never the title, but the reality. He was not just playing defense—responding to the crises a General Counsel must face. He played an indispensable role in envisioning the future. A future in which college is affordable for all. A future in which the campus community is fully inclusive, and all students can thrive. A future in which free speech can flourish and debate is a means not of scoring points or settling scores, but of bridging differences and seeking truth. A future in which human dignity is nourished and ennobled, not assaulted and belittled.

At a time when education is not perhaps the last but is certainly the best hope for our future, Gettysburg College has vital work to do in pursuit of these ideals. Few endeavors could be more worthy. And no human being could be more deeply dedicated than your new president to leading you forward. My congratulations to Gettysburg College for its inspired choice. And my very best wishes for what I know will be the brilliant success of the Iuliano Era. Together, I know you will do great work. And good work, too.

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It is a great pleasure for me to be here today to celebrate your achievements and to send you on your way into the world that awaits you. But even as we honor you, let us begin by recognizing that no one does this alone. Let us thank the families that supported and encouraged you, the teachers who inspired and challenged you, and the university that created the opportunity for you to expand your minds and pursue your dreams.

The 632 of you receiving your degrees in this ceremony represent achievement in a wide range of fields in humanities, social sciences, STEM, engineering and nursing. Each of you has chosen to seek advanced work in a field of specialization beyond what is often called the “first”—or bachelor’s degree. Some of you have worked for today’s degree for many years. The average time to degree for Ph.Ds in the humanities nationally is currently about 7 years. Others of you receiving masters’ degrees have been here for a much shorter time. But all of you will for the rest of your lives proudly hold a U of M degree. And all of you will carry the imprint of this place on your lives in ways that extend beyond your enhanced expertise in the field you have studied.

For the next few minutes I want to talk about what that entails—what I hope you will take with you from your time here in this special place, in what the UM mission statement describes as “a global university” with a “hemispheric strategy,” “a bridge across the Americas to the rest of the world,” “an exemplary university offering a model to society”—all those things that make up what you affectionately know as the U [do the sign here].

As the highly educated people you are, you will lead lives of influence and impact. It is my hope that your years here at UM will have shaped you to use that influence to serve others in ways that grow out of your experience in this unique community.

Today each of you receives an advanced degree acknowledging specialized work in your particular field of endeavor. One of you has written a PhD thesis on preventing bullying, violence and suicide among bisexual adolescents; one of you has studied grief among caregivers of cancer patients; one of you is a writer receiving an MFA who explores the complexities of the Puerto Rican and Polish communities that shaped him; one of you is a philosopher who has studied offensive uses of language; one of you has written about Argentine music; another explores our ethical obligations to animals. Across these varied areas of endeavor you have all committed yourselves to the importance of knowledge and the nurturing of expertise. Today in the United States only 9.3% of adults over 25 have a masters’ degree and only 2% a doctoral degree. You are not just specialized; you are special. And you have special responsibilities. By devoting yourself to the work that brings you a diploma today, you have affirmed your belief in learning, in the life of the mind and the pursuit of truth as a means to build a better life and a better society. And you have affirmed your belief in the power of education. I ask that you continue to defend these commitments in the world beyond UM. Research, learning, knowledge, critical thinking, facts—We have seen that we cannot take their importance for granted. As educators and the educated—as those who have pursued learning and understand its significance—it is our special responsibility not just to defend these values but to advance and enhance their influence. And it is our responsibility to commit ourselves to making access to the kind of education we have been privileged to enjoy more widely available to those whose lives it can transform. I have often quoted the inspiring and memorable words of early 20th century Civil Rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs and let me do so again: “Education is democracy’s life insurance.” As its beneficiaries, we must be its defenders and its advocates.

As I stand here before you, I can see with my own eyes another important dimension of your time here at UM. You have been part of an extraordinarily diverse community—one that includes and celebrates many sorts of difference as foundational to its educational goals. Differences of race, of ethnicity, of religion, of financial circumstances, of political viewpoint, of sexual orientation and gender identity. Differences of national origin—I understand you represent 35 countries. The opportunity to learn from one another, from interacting with people different from yourself has been an essential component of what you have learned here at UM.

And you have lived these past years in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities on the planet—the US city known as the capital of Latin America, a city proud to think of itself not as a melting pot but a multicultural mosaic; a global city where almost 3/4s of its residents speak a language other than English at home. This is a community where you cannot walk outside for 20 feet without hearing 2 and often 3 or 4 different languages. It is a place where gearing up for a long night in the lab is more likely to involve a Cafecito and a croqueta than a Red Bull. You have learned from this diversity both within and beyond the classroom. You are prepared—positioned—to help the world beyond this university’s walls benefit as you have from the kaleidoscope of human identities and cultures that enrich our lives. You are all skilled in generating the energy unleashed by cultural translation. You build on your experiences beyond the classroom or lab to enhance your intellectual experience and, in turn, use the knowledge and expertise you gain there to serve the wider community and the world. Having lived in this global crossroads, you see beyond national borders; you have experienced our global interdependence.

Perhaps that interdependence was most forcefully illustrated for you nearly two years ago now when Hurricane Irma demonstrated her disregard for borders as she swept across Caribbean nations, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and South Florida. She closed UM for more than 3 weeks, even as her impact here thankfully proved less devastating than originally feared. She left not just destruction but some important lessons in her wake. Let me mention two of those lessons that I think are worth taking with you as you graduate today.

The first is the power of nature and the fragility of what we too often take for granted about our planet. It would be difficult to live in South Florida and not develop a kind of awe and humility in face of both nature’s wonders and its terrors. It would be hard to spend time here, to see sunny day flooding in Miami Beach or seagrass meadows disappearing in Biscayne Bay and not believe in climate change. It would be hard to learn of dead manatees found stuffed with plastic bags and bottles and not care about pollution and worry about biodiversity. I hope you will take from your time here a deep awareness of the way humans are interdependent not just with one another across the globe but with our natural environment. Here at UM you have lived this; you know it now in both your heads and your hearts. I hope as you leave this place you will make that knowledge a central part of your lives. And I hope you will share it with those who did not have the opportunity to be here and learn it firsthand.

I said I wanted to mention 2 lessons from Irma. The second is a defining attribute of being a Cane. Your mascot is the ibis, the symbol of resilience. There are few more important strengths in a human life. When Irma threatened, the university and all of you prepared, working together as a community, using your knowledge of science, medicine, public health, communications, organizational behavior—expertise from across the university. And then you repaired and restored, supporting one another, depending on one another, and determined to emerge stronger. Every job, every career, every life has its hurricanes. But you have weathered storms and are ready for those that inevitably lie ahead.

As you leave UM to take up your work as nurses, engineers, teachers, scholars, scientific researchers, writers, caregivers, remember that you have learned much more here than what was required to qualify for your degrees. Remember the broader responsibilities that the learning and education you have received entail and share that commitment with the world. Remember that facts and truth matter, and must undergird any just and enduring society. Remember the human connections and contrasts that created the context in which learning thrived. And remember the combination of respect and resilience that the natural environment has required of you and let those qualities serve as touchstones in all you do in life. Remember to be Canes even as you leave this place to serve and uplift a wider world. Congratulations and godspeed.

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It is hard to find words to convey how honored and grateful I am to receive the Kluge Prize and how humbled I feel to be included in the pantheon of its recipients. I am delighted to be awarded this recognition by the Library of Congress, an institution that has meant so much to me throughout my scholarly career. From the papers of 19th century South Carolina Congressman and Senator James Henry Hammond, a key figure in my first two books, to the diaries and letters of Clara Barton and the searing Mathew Brady photographs so central to my last, the Library’s collections have been essential to my explorations of the American South and the nation’s experience of Civil War.

That this award comes from the Library of Congress is a signal honor. That it is awarded for achievement in the “study of humanity” is a recognition I could scarcely have dreamed of. It affirms what I have seen as a vocation, a calling, a life purpose—both in my own dedication to such study, but also in my efforts on behalf of the institutions, especially universities, that have enabled and encouraged this pursuit.

The path I have chosen into the study of humanity has been history. From my earliest years growing up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the 1950s and 60s, I felt the presence of the past all around me. I lived on a farm on the Lee-Jackson highway, amidst fields where Confederates and Yankees had skirmished, and played Civil War with my brothers in the woods near our house. But I also knew, even as a young child, that my own era was a historic time in its own right, one of controversy and of challenge to the entrenched order of segregation that had replaced slavery after the Civil War. History seemed to surround me even as a new history was being created before my eyes.

The past of slavery, war, and racial injustice so present in my childhood would later become the focus of my scholarly work. But the questions I would ask of the 19th century had implications for my own world as well. I sought through research and writing to understand how human beings had come to create the slave society of the Old South, and how slavery’s oppressions had become for millions of white southerners not just an accepted way of life, but what they justified as a “positive good” and what they ultimately, in the hundreds of thousands, died to defend. A century later, I had grown up amongst adults who supported segregation, a system that had seemed to me even as a young child at odds with the democratic and Christian values those same adults taught me to espouse. If I could understand the southern past, perhaps I could better comprehend the southern present.

My PhD dissertation and first book were about the proslavery argument. You might say I wanted to understand inhumanity—how men and women throughout history have persuaded themselves to defend ideas, practices, societies, governments that we of a different era see as indefensible. I wanted to know how humans can become blind to evil. Perhaps if we could understand their processes of denial and rationalization we might gain insight into our own failures of vision, the shortcomings of our own time.

History, in other words, can expand our awareness of ourselves. It releases us from the confines of our own individual lives; it offers us other ways of seeing that cast our assumptions into relief. It reminds us of choices people have made—or not made—and thus illuminates realms of possibility. It shows us that things have been otherwise and reminds us they can be different once again. By documenting contingency and agency, history undermines any acceptance of crippling inevitability. And contingency means opportunity. It means that we can change things and that what we do matters. To my mind this may be history’s most important lesson.

Although I at first focused my attention on the society and culture of the old South, the implications of the questions I was exploring in my writing and teaching led me inexorably toward the Civil War. It seemed I had been steeped in that war from my earliest days. As I began my deeper scholarly explorations into its history, I soon came to understand Ernest Hemingway’s observation to F. Scott Fitzgerald. “War,” he said, “is the best subject.” For me it proved irresistible to study humanity when it is under maximum pressure, when decisions and choices are literally matters of life and death, when the possibility for the best of humanity—courage, sacrifice—and the worst of humanity—cruelty, brutality—collide.

And I found myself drawn to explore with my students other wars as well—Vietnam, the two World Wars—What was different and what unchanging about the human response to combat and conflagration? What was the product of time and circumstance and what the result of an essential and enduring humanity? How did the inhumanity of war compel its participants to reaffirm and reassert what humanity truly meant? How did war extend beyond the battlefield to engulf the lives of civilians, of women and of children? What, as we might put it, is the human face of war?

It was in war’s foregrounding of death that I encountered an unparalleled line of sight into the human condition and the subject for my most recent book. Mortality is a defining feature of humanity, and our recognition and anticipation of our inevitable end is a key element differentiating us from animals. All of life—and all of philosophy—Montaigne observed—is about learning to die. Yet we do so in different ways in different eras and different places. Facing the unprecedented slaughter of Civil War—more than 2 percent of the population died in the course of the war—the equivalent of about 7 million people today—Americans confronted death in a manner both old and new. The widely shared Christian ideology of the Good Death provided lessons in how to die that shaped the response to unimaginable and unfathomable industrialized slaughter. The insistence of our forbears on adapting the rituals and practices that preserved their humanity even in the face of catastrophe seemed to me an affirmation of the power and resilience of the human spirit. Even in almost impossible circumstances, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to bury, name and honor the dead in ways that affirmed the value of each human life. The national cemetery system that emerged from the war represents the expression of this impulse on a national level. For me, the research and writing for this book served as an excursion into the past with powerful resonance for a future that awaits us all. I have been deeply moved and gratified to learn that readers ranging from hospice workers to clergy, to active and veteran military have found that this book has spoken to them and to their experience.

That is just a brief glimpse into what the study of humanity—and inhumanity—has meant for me and into the kinds of questions that collections like the ones here at the Library of Congress have enabled me to ask.

Other institutions have of course also supported this work, which would never have been accomplished without the rich intellectual environment of teaching and research nurtured by American higher education. Universities have served as the locus for humanistic inquiry from the time of their founding in the 11th century; society has assigned primary responsibility for this stewardship to them. It has been the unique role of the university both to serve the immediate and urgent present and at the same time to look beyond it to pose larger questions of meaning—not just to propel us towards our goals but to ask what those goals should be, to understand who we are, where we came from, where we are going and why.

Yet we find ourselves in a time when the value and legitimacy of these questions—and of the fields that embody them—are being criticized, weakened, marginalized. Increasingly, education is seen as instrumental. We expect it to provide a direct path to a specific job. We fail to ask how it will produce a thoughtful citizen or a person who can imagine beyond the moment in which we find ourselves to see and build the changing world ahead, or a leader who can begin to address the profound impact of our extraordinary technological advances on our culture, our society and our very understanding of what it is to be human. We see results of this neglect all around us. We have invented the marvels of social media, but not figured out the ethics of the profound challenges its poses. We have made torrents of information available to almost everyone but not equipped them with the skills of analysis and habits of discernment to separate truth from falsehood—or perhaps most alarmingly, to believe that this distinction matters. We are a society enthralled by the notion of innovation. But how can we imagine a new future without grasping how things were once different and can be different again?

We are witnessing sharp declines in the fields designed to ask such questions and nurture such skills. I speak, of course, of the humanities and what are known as the “qualitative”—non mathematical—social sciences . Languages, literatures, history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, parts of sociology and political science are at the core of the endeavor, and their departments, majors, jobs and enrollments are plummeting. At Penn State, for example, the five years from 2010 to 2015 saw a 40% decline in humanities majors. At the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana there were 414 English majors in 2005 and 155 in 2015. Nationwide, numbers of history majors are down 45% since 2007. Since the 1990s, English majors have declined by half. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point announced it would abolish 13 departments, including French, German, Spanish, Philosophy and political science. One state governor listed the specific fields to be favored with state support, explicitly tying educational resources to job outcomes. “I want to spend our dollars giving people sciences, technology, engineering, math degrees…. So when they get out of school they can get a job.” He observed that his state didn’t need any more anthropologists.

In fact, humanists do get jobs and over a lifetime earn only slightly less than their peers in social and natural sciences. Jobs are, of course, important. But they are not enough to serve as the exclusive purpose of higher education. When we define the role of learning as solely to drive economic development, we risk losing sight of the broader and deeper questions, of the kinds of inquiry that enable the critical insight, that build the humane perspective, that foster the restless skepticism and unbounded curiosity from which our profoundest understandings so often emerge. We should not forget Einstein’s words: “Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts.”

It seems to me telling that one set of higher education institutions has not shared in this recent decline in the importance of the humanities. These are our military academies. Take the example of West Point. From its origins as an engineering school, the United States Military Academy has evolved over two centuries to be a very special sort of liberal arts college, one that recognizes that many of the most significant lessons for the leadership it must foster emerge from the study of humanity. The Academy describes it this way: “the expansion of a person’s capacity to know oneself and to view the world through multiple lenses.” The distinguished Academy graduate General George Patton—whose papers are here at the Library of Congress—insisted that a successful soldier must know history. “To win battles,” he observed, “you do not beat weapons—you beat the soul of man.” Alexander the Great slept with two things under his pillow: a dagger and a copy of Homer’s Iliad.

To understand the human soul. No small aspiration. But one that has propelled my work for decades and the work of the humanities for millennia. In identifying what is distinctively human, we necessarily commit ourselves to its preservation and enhancement, to the appreciation of what unites us rather than the distraction of what divides us, to the advancement of the humane in a world that often seems bent on destroying it. We must support universities in their dedication to these efforts. And we must adopt a discourse that honors rather than disparaging these fields of inquiry.

But to make this possible and sustainable within universities, we must also build broader understanding of the importance of the study of humanity outside and beyond them. And so let me return to where I began, to where we find ourselves tonight. In serving as the Library of Congress, this institution also must serve all the people that Congress represents—not just scholars but the curious citizens of an entire nation. All of us are in this room because we are in some way connected to that work. Because we are somehow invested in that endeavor. The extraordinary advances of science and technology that lie before us must be shaped by human and humane purposes if those values and perhaps even human kind are not to be destroyed. Let me invoke the historian’s sense of contingency that I earlier described: it is up to us to define the nature and quality of human possibility. The contents of this Library can help inspire us to inspire others to understand what those possibilities can be.

Let me make this point by closing with a treasure from the Library. I spoke earlier of the face of war. The Library of Congress possesses a remarkable collection of more than 2000 Civil War faces which has been assembled and donated by Tom Liljenquist and his three young sons. Inspired by newspaper photographs of US servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Liljenquists regard their collection of tintypes and ambrotypes as a memorial to the soldiers of the Civil War.

Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters. Ambrotype by unidentified photographer, between 1863 and 1865. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Part of the , Library of Congress.

Here is one of the ambrotypes from the collection. It has been tentatively identified as Sergeant Samuel Smith, his wife Mollie and daughters Mary and Maggie. The image was found in Cecil County Maryland, so it is likely that this soldier was in one of 7 regiments of United States Colored Troops raised in that state.

Like all of the portraits in this collection, it speaks eloquently to us across the century and a half that separates us. For this soldier and his family, the message is one of pride, an affirmation of the new freedoms war had enabled him to claim. Slavery would have denied him the right to legally marry or to protect his wife and children from sale. This portrait is of a free man; it proclaims a new day for black families, a new respectability of fine clothing and of daughters in matching coats and bonnets. And it portrays a soldier, an African American who under slavery would have been prohibited from bearing arms and until 1863 could not have enlisted in the army. Now he has joined what would be nearly 200,000 other black Americans to fight for freedom, to risk enslavement if captured and to establish a claim to full citizenship and humanity as the republic’s bold defenders. In this photograph, Sergeant Smith—or whoever this might be—makes a statement about a new order of things. It is his own declaration of independence, his personal affirmation that all men—that he—has been created equal that he is fighting for a new birth of freedom.

Union Case Four of the Last Full Measure Exhibition, Library of Congress.

But these 2000 portraits and the thousands more like them are intended to send us another message as well, one that speaks directly to the meaning of the study of humanity across time and space. These soldiers staring into the photographer’s lens are self-consciously reaching through history. They are documenting their faces and their uniforms partly because they know they may be killed in the battles ahead. But they also know they are making history in this war, and they want to capture it for us. Attention must be paid, they are saying. Don’t forget who we were and what we did. Let us give you the means to see us, to understand us long after we are gone.

The present is delivered to us at a price paid by those who came before. History helps us remember our accountability to them as well as our obligations to more than just ourselves and more than just our own time. It is a way of knowing and of valuing that has never mattered more.

The post Remarks upon receiving the Kluge Prize appeared first on Harvard University President.

As delivered.

Thank you, Susan, for those generous words, and thanks to everyone for that generous welcome. Heartfelt congratulations to you, our graduates, and to your families for the hard work and many accomplishments that have brought you to this day. I am especially grateful to John Lewis for sharing his inspiring words and presence with us. There can be no finer example of how to live a life than that of John Lewis, whose courage, dedication, selflessness, and moral clarity have for more than a half-century challenged this country to realize its promise of liberty and justice for all. It is an inexpressible honor and privilege to stand on this stage beside him.

Almost eleven years ago I stood on this platform to deliver my inaugural address as Harvard’s twenty-eighth president. Today’s remarks represent something of a bookend — a kind of valedictory — valedictory, literally, farewell words. When I spoke in 2007, I observed that inaugural speeches are “by definition pronouncements by individuals who don’t yet know what they are talking about.” By now I can no longer invoke that excuse. I am close to knowing all I ever will about being Harvard’s president.

But I then went on to say something else about the peculiar genre of inaugural addresses: that we might dub them, as I put it then, “expressions of hope unchastened by the rod of experience.” By now I should know that rod. In my mind I hear Jimi Hendrix of my youth asking: “Are you experienced?” I would have to answer affirmatively. Perhaps not as experienced as Charles William Eliot, who made it through forty years as Harvard president. But eleven years is a long time. 

Think about it: The iPhone and I were launched within forty-eight hours of each other in the summer of 2007. All of us are now so attached to our devices that it seems almost unimaginable that they were not always there. The smartphone initiated a revolution in how we communicate, how we interact, how we organize our lives. And we are only beginning to understand the impact of this digital transformation on our disrupted society, economy, politics — even on our brains.

Two thousand and eight brought the financial crisis and the loss of close to a third of our endowment — prompting us in the ensuing years to overturn a system of governance that had been in place here ����ר�� since 1650, and to transform our financial — and ultimately our investment — processes and policies.

Five years ago, we lived through the Marathon bombings and the arrival of terror in our very midst — and we came together as Boston Strong.

We have experienced wild weather, from hurricanes to Snowmageddon to Bombogenesis, and we’ve doubled down on our commitment to combat climate change.

We have confronted a cheating crisis, an email crisis, a primate crisis, and sexual assault and sexual harassment crises — and we’ve made significant and lasting changes in response to each.

We have faced down H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and even the mumps.

We have been challenged — as well as often inspired and enlightened — by renewed and passionate student activism: Occupy; Black Lives Matter; Divest Harvard; I, Too, Am Harvard; Undocumented ����ר��; and #MeToo.

We have faced a political and policy environment increasingly hostile to expertise and skeptical about higher education: The unprecedented endowment tax passed last December will, we estimate, impose on us a levy next year equivalent to $2,000 per student.

There has indeed been a good measure of chastening. But today I want to focus not on that “rod of experience,” but on what I then defined as the essence of an inaugural message: the expression of hope. Now, as then, that is what fills both my mind and my heart as I think about Harvard, about its present and its future. These past eleven years have only strengthened my faith in higher education and its possibilities. Hope, I have learned, derives not just from the innocence of inexperience, but from the everyday realities, the day-to-day work of leading and loving this University. At a time of growing distrust of institutions and constant attacks on colleges and universities, I want to affirm my belief that they are beacons of hope — I think our best hope — for the future to which we aspire. In their very essence, universities are about hope and about the future, and that is at the heart of what we celebrate today.

Hope is the foundation of learning. The 6,989 graduates we honor today arrived here with aspirations about what education could make possible, with dreams about how their lives would be changed because of the time they would spend here. Dean Rakesh Khurana of the College regularly speaks to students about the transformations — intellectual, social, personal — they should seek from their undergraduate experience — he urges them to articulate their hopes and define a path toward realizing them. And we do have such very high aspirations for them: that they find lives of meaning and purpose, that they discover a passion that animates them, that they strive toward veritas, that they use their education to do good in the world.

Never has the world needed these graduates more, and I think they understand that. I had lunch with a dozen or so seniors about a month ago, and I asked them to characterize their four years here. They spoke of the ways they had changed and grown, but, more pointedly, they spoke of how the world seemed to have changed around them. They worried about the health and sustainability of the Earth; they worried about the health of our democracy and of civil society. And they described how their attitudes and plans had altered because of these changed circumstances. They no longer took their world for granted; the future of our society, our country, our planet could not be guaranteed; it was up to them. Their careers and life goals had shifted to embrace a much broader sense of responsibility extending beyond themselves to encompass an obligation to a common good that they had come to recognize might not survive without them.

I thought of these students as something akin to alchemists — confronting dark realities and forging a golden path that offered hope — to themselves about their own lives, but to all of us as we imagine what these extraordinary graduates will do with and for the damaged world we offer them as their inheritance. It would be impossible to be surrounded by these students as they move through their time ����ר�� without being filled with hope about the future they will create. To paraphrase the Ed School’s campaign slogan, they are here learning to change the world. 

Building a more enlightened world is, of course, the fundamental work of the faculty as well, and at the core of Harvard’s identity as a research university. The fundamental question we ask as we consider appointing a professor is, “What has this person done to alter and enhance our understanding of the world?” Perhaps they have revealed how the microbiome works, or how international trade agreements affect economic prosperity, or how undocumented students confront educational challenges. Perhaps they’ve unlocked ways to identify the actual location of genes that cause schizophrenia, or perhaps they have discovered how to engineer an exosuit to enable a person to walk. Harvard scholars explore history and literature to help us understand tyranny; art to illuminate the foundations of justice; law and technology to address fundamental assaults on assumptions about privacy.

With its eye cast on creating a different future, all of this work is founded in hope — of seeing something more clearly, of influencing others to change their understanding and perhaps even their actions. We are by definition a community of idealists, thinking beyond the present and the status quo to imagine how and when things could be different, could be otherwise.

The privilege of interacting with Harvard’s remarkable students and faculty, and the dedicated staff who support their work, has uplifted me every day for the past eleven years. It would be next to impossible not to believe in the future they are so intent to build. But there is another way th����ר�� fills me with hope, and that is the way that we as a community — living and working together within these walls — are endeavoring ourselves to grapple with the challenging forces dividing and threatening the world — forces like climate change, or the divisiveness that poisons our society and polity, or the undermining of facts and rational discourse, or the chilling of free speech. 

We might in some ways see the work we have undertaken together on sustainability as emblematic of these wider efforts. We have come to consider ourselves a living laboratory. Our research and engagement on environmental issues of course stretches well beyond our walls: Our faculty, for example, have played critical roles in forging international climate agreements, have engineered innovative ways to create and store renewable energy, have influenced regulatory frameworks from Washington to Beijing, have explored the searing impact of climate change on health. But at the same time we have endeavored to make our own community a model for what might be possible — what we might hope for as we imagine the future. We have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, our trash by 44 percent; we produce 1.5 megawatts of solar energy — enough to fuel 300 homes. We have programs experimenting with healthy building materials, green cleaning, and food waste, and we have constructed HouseZero, an energy-neutral structure that is essentially an enormous computer generating data about every aspect of its operation and design, making information available to others as they build for the future.

We seek to be a living experiment in other ways as well. We gather here in Cambridge, face-to-face in a residential educational setting because we regard this very community as an educational machine. I have often observed th����ר�� is likely the most diverse environment in which most of our students have ever lived. We endeavor to attract talented individuals from the widest possible range of backgrounds, experiences, and interests, from the broadest diversity of geographic origins, socio-economic circumstances, ethnicities, races, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations, political perspectives. And we ask students to learn from these differences, to teach one another — and to teach us as well — with the variety of who they are and what they bring. This isn’t easy. It requires individuals to question long-held assumptions, to open their minds and their hearts to ideas and arguments that may seem not just unfamiliar, but even disturbing and disorienting. And it is an experiment that becomes ever more difficult in an increasingly polarized social and political environment in which expressions of hatred, bigotry, and divisiveness seem not just permitted but encouraged. But in spite of these challenges all around us, we ����ר�� strive to be enriched, not divided, by our differences.

To sustain this vision of an educational community, we must be a living laboratory in another sense as well. We must be a place where facts matter, where reasoned and respectful discourse and debate serve as arbiters of truth. There has been much recent criticism of universities for not being sufficiently open to differing viewpoints. Protecting and nourishing free speech is for us a fundamental commitment, and one that demands constant attention and vigilance, especially in a time of sharp political and social polarization. The uncontrolled — and uncontrollable — cacophony that defines a university means that sometimes inevitably we will fall short; we cannot always guarantee that every member of this community listens generously to every other. But that must motivate us to redouble our efforts. Silencing ideas or basking in comfortable intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence blocks our access to new and better ideas. We must be dedicated to the belief that truth cannot be simply asserted or claimed, but must be established with evidence and tested with argument. Truth serves as inspiration and aspiration in all we do; it pulls us toward the future and its possibilities for seeing more clearly, understanding more fully, and improving ourselves and the world. Its pursuit is fueled by hope. Hope joins with truth as the as the very essence of a university. 

And so I come back to hope — the hope implicit in our efforts to model a different way for humans to live and work together, the hope in the ideas and discoveries that are the currency we trade in, the hope in the bright futures of those who graduate today. Yet as I step down from my responsibilities as Harvard president, I am keenly aware of another of hope’s fundamental attributes. It implies work still unfinished, aspirations not yet matched by achievement, possibilities yet to be seized and realized. Hope is a challenge.

I think of the words the beloved late crew coach Harry Parker once spoke to a rower — words I quoted often during the campaign: “This,” he said to the rower, “this is what you can be. Do you want to be that?” These are the words and the message I would like to leave with Harvard. The work is unfinished. The job remains still to be done in times that make it perhaps more difficult than ever. May we continue to challenge ourselves with the hope of all we can be and with the unwavering determination to be that.

May Harvard be:
As wise as it is smart
As restless as it is proud
As bold as it is thoughtful
As new as it is old
As good as it is great.

The post 2018 Commencement Speech appeared first on Harvard University President.

Last January I received a mysterious package in the mail. I opened it to find a gift from a Marine Corps captain who had been commissioned here on this stage in 2010. Capt. Shawna Sinnott wrote to explain that on the eve of her fourth deployment, she was sending me a flag she had flown in my honor when she was stationed in Afghanistan. I was deeply moved by her gift and her story, as I have been by the stories of sacrifice and service of all 74 Harvard students I have cheered on as they have taken their officer’s oaths in this ceremony over the past 10 years.

From the outset of my presidency, I have believed that it is imperative th����ר�� and the military maintain a close relationship. Military service and sacrifice are an important part of this University’s history — going back even before George Washington and his troops bivouacked on the hill just behind us and also used my office as a soldiers’ hospital. But more significantly, strong connections between Harvard and our armed forces are essential to Harvard’s — and the nation’s — present and future. Harvard students aspiring to be leaders and influencers in America and the world need to understand the military. And the military has and will continue to benefit from the contributions of the extraordinary leaders educated here. As Gen. David Petraeus, himself a soldier-scholar, reminds us, “The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind.”

Less than half of 1 percent of the American population currently serves in the armed forces. Christian Yoo, commissioned in the Navy in 2013, observed that — and I quote him — “For many of my classmates at the College … I was one of the only, if not the only, member of the military they had ever met.”

For her part, when Shawna began Marine basic training she discovered how odd her Harvard identity seemed to many around her. Her name became not Shawna but “Harvard” — used first as a kind of mockery or hazing, but soon emerging as a form of respect as she coolly demonstrated her physical and intellectual prowess. She notes that what she brought with her from Harvard proved in many ways invaluable in her new military environment. For example, the special concentration she pursued here on terrorism enabled her to be quickly approved as “uniquely qualified” for a Military Occupational Specialty in counterterrorism. 

Other recent ROTC graduates describe how their Harvard experience has aided them in their service to our country.

Colin Dickinson, an economics concentrator commissioned as a Navy officer in 2013, says of his liberal arts education: “I can honestly say that I have drawn upon my learning in everything from marine biology to the tales of Homer in my attempt to best serve my sailors and lead them to success.”

Catherine Brown, Class of 2014, observed that, “Much of a Marine Corps officer’s job … lies in receiving information, analyzing it, coming to a timely decision based on that analysis, and communicating a plan.” These tools for rigorous thinking were honed by her studies ����ר��.

Joshua Foote, commissioned in the Navy in 2010, served as a combat officer aboard the USS John McCain, where he found that the diversity of the Harvard community prepared him well. He said: “I met people ����ר�� from every kind of background and learned to interact with them and relate to them. This is essential for a naval officer.”

Those commissioned here ����ר�� over the past 10 years have pursued every imaginable field of study — physics, neurobiology, mechanical engineering, government, philosophy, applied math, history, chemical biology, East Asian studies, Near Eastern languages, and more. And they have entered every branch of the service in a wide variety of roles. We can claim a MEDCOM doctor, an Army dentist, a Black Hawk pilot, nuclear engineers, intelligence officers, submarine officers, language specialists, Naval and Air Force pilots, and at least one aspiring astronaut. 

A number have seen combat. Joseph Kristol, commissioned in 2009, served in Helmand province in Afghanistan during some of the toughest fighting there. Schools and markets had been abandoned and Taliban flags flew everywhere. Kristol wrote: “It is truly a privilege to serve with the Marines in combat. Unfortunately I learned firsthand that privilege has a huge price.”

We do not know yet what path will unfold for those of you on the stage today. We do not know what price might be asked. But we know th����ר�� has helped you to develop skills and capacities that will enable you to make significant contributions in the years ahead. And we know that the most important and fundamental of your contributions will be the selflessness and service that your decision to join the military represents.

James Brooks, commissioned in the Navy in 2014, put it this way: “You just have to live every second knowing that you are living for a bigger purpose, and you are living for someone else and for your country.” I thought about those bigger purposes when I received Shawna’s flag — and it is that flag from Shawna that is flying here for this ceremony today.

We honor your dedication to that bigger purpose and to your country. And we honor you and all those who have preceded you. Congratulations on joining the long Crimson line.

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Greetings, Harvard College Class of 2018! And congratulations! What a privilege it is to be here with you today, in this hectic, joyous, scary, hopeful, and glorious week, as you prepare to pass through the gates into the company of educated persons. Four years ago, under the threat of thunderstorms, we gathered for your convocation in a tent on the Science Center Plaza. It was broiling hot, and you sat fanning yourselves as Dean Khurana and I and a cloud of elders in dark robes welcomed you to the next four years. We told you that in fact a kind of alchemy was about to happen — that here, amidst the whomping willows and courses in the dark arts, as you wandered and connected and explored, Harvard would transform you, stir your hearts and minds perhaps as never before. At about that point, an alumnus at the back was overcome by either the rhetoric or the heat and actually fainted. And now here we are, just us, all upright (at least so far) in this strange medieval ritual we call the baccalaureate at a moment in your lives more suited for bacchanalia. It is one of my favorite events, although still, after 11 years, no less daunting, as I am to stand before you to impart the sober wisdom of age to the semi-sober impatience of youth.

Transformation. It is a word you have probably heard a lot over the past four years. Dean Khurana uses it at the outset of every meeting he convenes — affirming the mission of the College as, and I’m quoting him, a “commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.” At least some of you have remained dubious about this project. One of you captured that when you said you didn’t really know what “transformative power” meant, except that it was “vaguely evocative of finding yourself, in an amorphous college-y sort of way,” and that you were sure it lay ahead of you somewhere. We all, at some point, want to transform. But transformation is different from change. It has a direction. It creates a new form out of a familiar thing. It’s thorough, it’s often radical, and, when it’s about us, it’s usually positive. Nobody says, “I want to be Kafka’s character in ‘The Metamorphosis’ who wakes up as a cockroach” — the kind of change that may occur after 48 hours in Lamont drinking Red Bull, or one too many Jefe’s burritos at 4 a.m. I am pretty sure that’s not the transformation Dean Khurana had in mind.

So, what happened? How did our experiment in transformation work out? It’s a good question. At the very least, you entered a stream of change from the moment you arrived, experiencing, as a class, many firsts and lasts (and even though we are in a church, feel free to make some noise): 

You were first with a concentration in Theater, Dance & Media, and first to explore the reinvented art museums that reopened soon after you arrived. You were barely acclimated when you survived the Snowpocalypse — also known as Snowmageddon and SnOMG — Harvard’s first snow day closure in recent memory, bookended, of course, by four blizzards in March just in time for your senior theses. You were the first freshmen to have official voluntary composting in the dorms — outside of the involuntary composting in your mini-fridges.

Your food, if not transformative, evolved, as you inaugurated Saturday brunch; lasted through the first dining hall workers’ strike in 30 years, some of you joining the picket lines; and lined up — in a blizzard, naturally — to try Hawaiian food at Pokéworks.

You embraced new technologies, as you learned two-step verification. And you got to know each other in evolving spaces, like Tinder or The League waitlist — hoping for greater intimacy — swiping left and swiping right.

The campus itself transformed — as Cabot Library morphed the Smith Center was reimagined, Winthrop House reborn — and still won the Straus Cup for the third straight year, and Lamont stopped checking your backpacks. Our language shifted, along with our culture: House masters elided to “faculty deans”; the Law School lounge became “Belinda Hall”; final clubs, fraternities, and sororities became USGSOs; and entire Schools assumed new names. With your encouragement, the College adopted an Honor Code. You saw graduate students vote to unionize; and the entire campus agitate over sexual harassment and sexual assault. You welcomed the first Dean of Inclusion and Belonging, and after 174 years, because of your persistence, you likely witnessed the last all-male Hasty Pudding cast. 

As Harvard changed, you changed Harvard, in distinctive ways.

You revived old traditions — like the mumps — and the first Frozen Four appearance for men’s hockey in 23 years. And you closed out some other traditions. Alas, a string of nine football victories over a certain school in Connecticut came to an end. You saw the last seven minutes of Harvard Time and the last of free HBO.

And you started a few traditions of your own: How about the first “non-binary” gender option for the annual Valentine datamatch; how about a play called “Black Magic” about race and identity that shattered precedent on the Loeb main stage; and how about an 18th Howe Cup victory that gave the women’s squash team the most in the nation’s history? Not bad.

And in case anyone doubted your versatility and range, you produced prize-winning theses on Lassa virus detection; on misinformation in social network news; on Nigerian sex worker migration; on the cultural history of the helicopter in Vietnam; on Swedish-Muslim identity; on carbon storage in salt marshes — just to name a few.

Meantime, the world beyond Harvard Yard grew less stable and more uncertain — “so different,” as one of you said, “than when we entered.” Now, in case you were feeling special, I am obliged to state the well-worn truth that every class and every generation faces a precarious world. Consider just two of your forerunners: By commencement, roughly half of the Harvard Class of 1918 had left to fight in World War I, many never to return; or think about the Class of 1968 — that was my college graduation year, and not so long ago, at least compared to 1918 — we confronted a seemingly apocalyptic world of war, riots, and assassinations, which we were convinced we would set right before our fifth reunion, rallying behind the cry, “Never trust anyone over 30!”

And yet you, Class of 2018, have a claim in this contest — as you enter a roiling and turbulent world, where every day feels bizarrely dangerous, as if the other shoe is about to drop. In four years you have witnessed calamitous violence nationwide, cast your first votes for president in a divisive and polarizing election, and observed the fraying cords of civility and trust. By the end of 2016, as juniors, you found yourselves at the heart of an institution whose motto is “veritas,” in a climate where “alternative facts” fuel public discourse, and “post-truth” was the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. And all this amidst a technological revolution, begun in no small part right here ����ר��, propelling a transformation as complex and disruptive as any in human history. No matter what your politics, the jolt of these experiences threw you into the public sphere, with a new sense of responsibility.

You became, as one of you put it, a class of “movements” for change. You marched for causes of every kind, challenged one another over free speech by inviting and protesting the same speaker, and you advocated for global gender equality with stand-up comedy. You won a Marshall scholarship to use art as activism, created a college admissions website for students from all backgrounds, and supported DACA students in a candlelight vigil here on the steps of Memorial Church. You’ve encouraged girls to change the world with computer science and technology, and you boosted health and education for kids in your native Rwanda, where, homeless and alone at age 9, your one request — to go to school — changed your life.

And so we have a partial answer to our question: You did transform. Writer Lawrence Weschler calls it “catching fire,” when people, or sometimes whole places just going about their business, suddenly ignite. They become, as he puts it, “intensely focused and alive,” and “their lives bec[o]me different than they thought they would be.” Thursday’s Commencement speaker, John Lewis, caught “on fire” — the exact words he used — when he was a student just about your age, and the injustice of segregation came to seem no longer tolerable. He describes it as the Spirit of History descending upon him, compelling him to risk beatings and even his own life in the struggle for Civil Rights. “I came to believe,” he writes, “that this force is on the side of what is right and just … [A]t certain points in life, in the flow of human existence, this spirit finds you or selects you, it chases you down, and you have no choice; you must … carry out what must be done.” This describes the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s; it also describes the Parkland students who have determined that school shooting deaths must stop, that there can be no further excuses for letting more people like their 17 schoolmates and teachers lose their lives.

Many of you have caught fire as well during your time here. Perhaps it was that day in your sociology course when you learned that deaths from breast cancer were 37 percent higher for black women than for white, and you resolved to change health inequities and organized Harvard’s first Black Health Matters Conference. Perhaps it was your faith in God that inspired you to start a weekly gathering to discuss how to live a life of joy and purpose. Or perhaps it was the death of a friend that led you to push legislation to prevent gun-related suicides and inspire a crowd of thousands against gun violence at the Boston March for Our Lives. Or perhaps it was the injury of a teammate that inspired you to partner with a local business to raise funds for him and his family. You ignited. Some might even say you’re “lit.”

And here’s the first of three points I want to make about transformation before you head to Widener’s hallowed steps to take your class photo. Let’s call them the Three Essential Principles of Transformation.

Principle 1 — Flip the Story (It’s Not About You)

Point one is that while we were all somehow expecting Harvard to transform you, you became transformative agents yourselves. To paraphrase John Lennon, transformation is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Surprise yourselves, I said at convocation four years ago. You did. You flipped the story. You realized, as Steve Jobs once put it, that you could “poke” the world, right through its walls, and make it better. But it was not just that you could make it better; you had to make it better. That moment came for me when I was a freshman in college, and it was because of John Lewis. As I watched on a flickering black-and-white TV as he and hundreds of others seeking their constitutional rights were tear-gassed and clubbed on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, I knew I had to do something. I heard the voice of Martin Luther King declare that “No American is without responsibility.” We must all, he said, “help bear the burden,” and he called for a second march. I knew I had to go. I felt a moral imperative to act — it was as if there was no other choice. Congressman Lewis calls it making “necessary trouble,” a willingness to “get in the way.” I hear in your stories that same imperative, arrived at, and expressed, as I have just suggested, in a thousand new and different ways.

Every year I have told students: Do what matters to you. Find what you love. It might be stem cell research, or writing screenplays, or cryptocurrency finance. But don’t settle for Plan B, the safe plan, until you have tried Plan A, even if it might require a miracle. I call it the Parking Space Theory of Life. Don’t park 10 blocks away from your destination because you think you won’t find a closer space. Go to where you want to be. You can always circle back to where you have to be. It’s about doing what fulfills you. And that is important. But you have been telling me something more, and it might be time for me to amend and expand the Parking Space Theory of Life. Not just because of Uber and Lyft and the imminent arrival of driverless cars. But because during these four years you have not only come to see your own lives differently. You have developed a more expansive goal — a broadening sense of “where you want to be,” based on a new set of questions: not just “What are my passions?” but “How can I help?” and “What is necessary at this time and place in the world?” It is not just about your passions; it is about your purpose. Your expectations changed: The transformation promised at your convocation turned out to be less about you, and more about everything around you.

Principle 2 — See With Fresh Eyes

The truth is — and this is my second point — that’s exactly what a liberal arts education prepares you to do. It enables us to see the world in order to understand how we can transform it. Think of the habits of mind that underpin every field of knowledge: the imperative to seek out diverse points of view when we lack perspective; the patience to deliberate in disorienting strangeness; the capacity to improvise in the face of the unexpected — including when to listen, and when to do nothing. From literature and the arts we gain imagination and empathy, a second sight on our common humanity. From history we draw courage against all hope, understanding that things were once different, and can be different again. From science we learn humility and persistence, knowing that a sudden insight can re-frame the universe.

Most of us come to Harvard believing in merit — that talent, combined with hard work and a little luck, pays off. Rightly so. And yet the spark of learning, the thing that catches us on fire, feels less like our own achievement and more like a gift — less earned than bestowed, touching any one of us at any moment. Some may call it insight, others may call it genius. But here’s the rub: Personal transformation is the easy part. The harder part is what comes next — to light the world, when we feel a responsibility to change it.

As leaders, as young people, you bear a special burden of that responsibility. There was a reason we in the ’60s were loath to trust anyone over 30. It is the same reason that led the Parkland students to determine that adults had failed them, that they themselves must be the ones to stop gun violence in schools. It is the reason that I invest so much hope and faith in all of you to use your talents and education to fix this broken world. It will, after all, be your world far longer than it remains ours. More than a century ago, Harvard philosopher William James described that spirit of responsibility as “the true Harvard,” alive in its most “undisciplinable” sons, as he put it — they were all sons then — “… intoxicated and exultant with the nourishment they find here.” And he went on to say, “Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world … all things then have to rearrange themselves.”

Principle 3 — Take It With You

I want to leave you with one last point, Transformation Principle 3, as you enter your lives beyond Harvard College. As we let you loose upon the world, take this spirit of transformation with you. Keep the fire fueled by your education burning. Catching fire may be a momentary flare, but transforming the world is a long haul. One of you put it this way: “I don’t think there is anything that makes me or anyone special in the way we succeed, except having that spirit that tells us to keep going.” Don’t lose that spirit.

Take it from your professors — from Arthur Kleinman, who showed you caregiving social science; from Sarah Lewis, who inspired you toward equal justice; from Alyssa Goodman, who encouraged you to map the universe, no matter what your background. Take it from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who recently told us at the Kennedy School that life isn’t only about being in the room where it happens — that famous “Hamilton” line from your freshman year — it’s also about bringing your whole self into the room, especially the parts of you that don’t fit in, because then you just might transform the whole place. Take it, always, from each other — because Harvard never leaves you, and your connection is just beginning.

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was chosen as Harvard’s very first Class Day speaker, an appointment he could not keep. But he left us with a call to action that still rings out today, and I’d like to leave it with you now. He said: “Transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. Transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.”

Go well, Class of 2018. Catch fire. Swipe right. Look outward together, and truly light the world. 

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May Harvard be as wise as it is smart,
as restless as it is proud,
as bold as it is thoughtful,
as new as it is old,
as good as it is great. 

With these words, these five lines of fervent aspiration, we marked the public launch of this remarkable, and remarkably successful, Harvard Campaign.

That was five years ago, in 2013. On one hand, that is mere moments in the context of a university well into its fourth century. On the other hand, it feels like a lifetime when I think of all the ways in which the world has been altered since then.

This campaign has been about the future — the future of Harvard, and the future of the world. Throughout this afternoon and evening you’ll see dizzying glimpses of that future unfold in ways that only Harvard makes possible. You’ve heard over the last hour about domains of knowledge being advanced and transformed through research and teaching across the University. We are, as tonight’s celebration will attest, composing the future together.

Now, I’m all for composing the future. But the historian’s impulse, this historian included, is also to look back: to examine who we’ve been and where we’ve been, to understand where we are and discern where we must go. For me, the past and the future intertwine — especially if we hope to get that future right.

I think that’s one reason I’m so attached to those five lines, those paired attributes, because they capture so well the dance between Harvard’s past and its future, between the enduring and the emerging, between constancy and change.

This campaign has helped shape and secure Harvard’s future by investing in both the enduring and emerging … sustaining what we have always been, and indeed must always be, as well as challenging us and enabling us in who we must become.

The support you’ve given to Harvard through this campaign has allowed us to meet the central challenge we laid out when we publicly launched the campaign: to seize an impatient future. Today is to thank you and to celebrate how you have made this hallowed institution stronger, nimbler, more in the world and of the world. There are many ways to explore that as we gather today to mark what we’ve accomplished together, but I can think of none better than through the lens of those 10 adjectives, those twinned testaments to constancy and change.

This campaign has made us smarter … and also wiser.

For centuries Harvard scientists have asked “How?” and “Why?” and “What if?” — and the answers to those questions have made the world smarter and changed the course of human history. The questions we need to get smarter about today are mind-boggling: Where can the tools of genomics and computation take us? How will machine learning and artificial intelligence alter our lives? How will emerging energy technologies alter our planet.

We are only now beginning to fully realize the promise of genomics, neuroscience, imaging, quantum physics, therapeutics, immunology. Thanks in part to this campaign, researchers from Harvard are working together to connect disciplines, ask better questions, and conquer disease. Scientists ����ר�� Medical School have identified genetic variants associated with synaptic pruning — offering the first real insights into the genetics and biology behind schizophrenia. Xiaowei Zhuang just described to you how her lab in the Department of Chemistry has developed an imaging method that enables analysis of fundamental biological problems, including virus-cell interactions. Social scientists have mapped the decline of violence, and education faculty have transformed our understanding of early language acquisition. At the GSD, as you just heard, the Center for Green Buildings and Cities has just opened HouseZero, both the embodiment of what is possible and a laboratory to help get us there.

Harvard has been home to extraordinary minds — and excellence across the disciplines and professions — forever. As my predecessor Charles William Eliot said in his installation speech nearly a century and a half ago: “We would have them all, and at their best.” Thanks to this campaign, we have continued to attract the brightest students and faculty from across the globe.

But what about wise? Wisdom is borne of something different than just smarts, and it ripens through different influences, and different means. For this, the breadth of learning embodied in the humanities and social sciences is essential. They instill in students habits of mind and skills of analysis that transcend the present. They create the capacities to confront circumstances of life with a combination of realism and creativity. An alumnus in London described Harvard as having “handed him a looking glass,” an invaluable perspective that stretched beyond himself and yet at the same time cast his own life into new view. Another alum in Boston told me that a Harvard course called “Thinking About Thinking” continues to influence all that he does.

The humanities are where we find our bearings. Philosophy, ethics, history, literature enable students to think about their lives in context, to create their own spaces in a world defined by the complexity of the issues that challenge us.

We have seen in the press in recent weeks vivid examples of how the remarkable breakthroughs of science and technology require us to ask broader questions about society, culture, and the responsibilities of government. Privacy issues raised by the digital revolution cannot be answered by technology alone. That is, for example, why the Berkman Klein Center — expanded as part of this campaign — supports programs on the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, on ethical frameworks for big data research, and on the many dilemmas raised by autonomous vehicles. 

Smart, and wise. In the end, smart functions like a magnet: the more concentrated our collection of smart thinkers, the more powerful our attraction to more smart thinkers. Wisdom, on the other hand, is a set of lenses through which we might view the world clearly, and deeply, even through the fog of technological change. This campaign has strengthened our magnet and widened our looking glass.

This campaign has fueled our restlessness, and deepened our pride.

Harvard has always nurtured restlessness and a sense of exploration. It was founded, after all, by settlers who’d ventured far from home in search of a new world. Through this campaign, we have created new pathways for connecting our students’ learning to activity in the world beyond campus, both locally and globally. No longer is thinking for now and doing for later.

More than 930 Harvard Business School students work and study abroad each year as part of FIELD: a requirement for M.B.A. candidates that places them in small teams around the world to help solve problems with partner organizations. The Law School has greatly expanded its clinical programs, and nearly 80 percent of last year’s graduates had participated in at least one clinic. The new Medical School curriculum places students into our hospitals from the very first day they arrive. And, in the College, more than 2,800 undergraduates have spent time studying or doing research abroad during their time ����ר�� thanks to our donors. Two wonderful new gifts support public service opportunities and link internships to coursework. We are now far more able to match our students’ commitment to think with their urgent desire to do.

Doing also means making, and here, too, we have significantly expanded opportunities. 

Establishing engineering as its own school in 2007 has obviously been central, and the biggest gift to this campaign is the gift from John Paulson to endow the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. There are now three times as many students in the College concentrating in engineering as there were a decade ago, and there are a dozen new slots for computer sciences faculty. We eagerly anticipate the opening of the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, which will put our commitment to discovery and creation on display — quite literally — as the state-of-the art Stefan Behnisch building will feature what we’re calling a “making lab,” which will be fully visible to the public from outside the building.

It is the same restless desire to make, to create, to be hands-on that has fueled not just engineering, but a revolution in the place of the arts ����ר��. The College now offers a concentration in Theater, Dance & Media, and we have expanded faculty in musical performance, creative writing, sculpture, and video installation, as well theater and dance. The Harvard Art Museums have been reimagined and reconstructed as a teaching machine, connecting art to coursework across the University. And alongside the entrepreneurial iLab, Launch Lab, and Pagliuca Life Lab in Allston, an Art Lab is taking shape. All are designed to capture creativity and translate it into the world, to encourage the imagination that builds a tangible link to the future.

Thanks to this campaign, our pride in wh����ר�� has long stood for has fueled a new belief in wh����ר�� can do. And our community’s restless desire to make, and build, and create — in the lab, on a canvas, at a drafting table — is being nurtured and encouraged in countless new ways.

This campaign has emboldened us, and reaffirmed our commitment to being thoughtful.

We are often told these days that progress comes from taking risks. I fear th����ר��’s history and age are sometimes regarded as evidence that we are stodgy and risk-averse. But I would argue our pre-eminence is in fact the result of taking thoughtful risks over centuries — the risk inherent in Harvard’s very founding only six years after the English settlement of Massachusetts Bay; the risk Charles William Eliot took in transforming Harvard from a college into a research university, the risk Lowell embraced in establishing the House system in face of objections and doubt; the risk Conant took in democratizing Harvard through his system of Harvard National Scholarships. Leadership is about boldly taking risks when risk-taking is called for, and it has been a foundation of Harvard’s greatness.

This campaign has enabled us to continue to be bold — in ways suited to this time, its needs, and its opportunities.

This campaign has supported a dramatic expansion in financial aid, so that now 20 percent of students in the College come from families with incomes of less than $65,000 a year, and pay no family contribution to tuition or room and board. The campaign has enabled us to reach more than 6 million learners across the globe through edX and HarvardX and to experiment with new forms of pedagogy through the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning. It has enabled us to break down ancient intellectual barriers across the University and create new collaborations, courses, degree programs, and even fields. And this campaign has emboldened us to envision a campus in Allston that will nurture such connections across Schools and disciplines, as well as ties between Harvard, industry, and the wider Boston community.

This campaign has made us new, and allowed us to remain old, to both build on our history and compose our future. Nowhere is this more evident than in the very physical structures around us. The campaign has supported significant new construction — the Science and Engineering Complex now rising over Allston, the new Wexner, Ofer, and Rubenstein Buildings at the Harvard Kennedy School, teeming with students and faculty. And Tata Hall, Chao Center, and soon Klarman Hall at HBS. But it is notable that the campaign has also enabled a burst of renewal — the very word itself representing the union of old and new. House renewal envisions the renovation and re-imagination of the House system through the reconstruction of more than 1.4 million square feet of space in eight undergraduate Houses. And close your eyes and picture this: the magnificently restored and expanded Harvard Art Museums, with Renzo Piano’s lantern atop a structure itself both old and new. Or envision the Smith Campus Center, opening in the fall as the first real University-wide common space. Or Pritzker Commons welcoming us to the Science Center. Or Lavietes Gymnasium, where we gather to rock the roof in support of the Crimson. Or the Schlesinger Library and Knafel Center at Radcliffe, both to be reconfigured to strengthen the institute’s outreach. Or Andover Hall at the Divinity School, now slated for renewal as the hub of a School that has become a model of interfaith learning. 

When I think about these spaces, both the old and the new, so many of them are intended to bring us together in new ways, to enable us to fully realize the potential of being here and learning from one another, to build a community across the diversity of our origins, identities, talents, our fields of study and our different Schools. To be One Harvard.

This campaign has helped us remain great, and made us better at being good.

There’s no disputing it: Harvard is great. We are great because of the legacy that draws to our community those who want to lead and those who strive for excellence in all they do. You saw the brilliance of our faculty on stage here this afternoon. You see our alumni lead countries and companies and cabinet agencies. Maybe you attended the Harvard Law School anniversary event earlier this year, right on this stage, featuring six Supreme Court justices — each with a Harvard degree. We claim eight presidents of the United States. We celebrate countless Emmy and Oscar winners, even some Grammy winners. We hail the Nobel, Pulitzer, Breakthrough, and Holberg Prize winners, the MacArthur Geniuses on our faculty, and among our alumni. We congratulate our students as they are awarded Rhodes Scholarships, Marshall and Fulbright Scholarships.

The campaign has helped us sustain this greatness in several important ways; and here are just two: We have raised support for 130 professorships, which help us attract the great in every field and do all we can to keep them here despite fierce competition from peer institutions. And your generous commitments to financial aid in every School permits us to do the same for our students — recruit the very best.

Greatness begets more greatness, and that long Crimson line of excellence from those first students enrolled in 1636 to the 1,962 extraordinary individuals offered a coveted place in the Class of 2022 last week, this campaign has positioned us to keep gathering great minds and generating great scholarship.

Thanks to this campaign, Harvard will continue to set the standard for what it means to be a great university.

But what about good? 

We live in a time when people increasingly question who and what is good. Lack of trust is widespread, and lack of trust in institutions is particularly strong. And yet a world without trusted institutions — particularly a democracy — risks fractures that threaten its very survival.

We ����ר�� are in the facts business. We produce experts, and we value expertise and we think that knowledge should guide decision-making. If we want to be listened to, if we want to be believed, we need to be trusted. To be trusted, we need to be trustworthy. And to be trustworthy, we need to be clear about our values. As Dov Seidman, HLS ’92, recently put it: “Sustainable values are what anchor us in a storm.”

So what is the compass that we steer by? Where is our North Star? What are the convictions that motivate all we do and bind us together as a community?

Let me endeavor to state it straight out: We believe in the pursuit of truth as our common purpose. We believe in the power of learning and discovery to enhance human capacity — and in our responsibility to develop that capacity to serve the world.

We believe in the value of every member of this community and in each person’s potential to contribute to the common good.

We believe that our diversity offers us the strongest possible foundation for our strength because it enables us to enrich, to educate, and to challenge one another. We believe in the obligations that each of us bears toward one another and toward something greater than ourselves. 

This campaign has encouraged us to assert these beliefs publicly, affirmatively. It has enabled us to support the work that links us together and projects our values and our value into the world. This happens in every School and every precinct of the University. We can find it in the work of the Harvard Chan School — named thanks to an extraordinary gift from Gerald Chan — as it improves health outcomes for entire populations by combatting scourges from opioids to obesity; we see it in Graduate School of Education’s commitment to learning to change the world through efforts like its Ed.L.D. degree or its new program for undergraduate Teacher Fellows; we see it in the Business School and its work on shared prosperity; we see it in the libraries’ digitization of more than 300,000 pages of rare documents in order to make the earliest history of North America available to anyone in the world with access to a computer. We find it in the Divinity School’s initiative on religious conflicts and peacemaking, in the Kennedy School’s commitment to making democracy work; in Law School students’ recent spring break programs in Boston, in Mississippi, and in Puerto Rico. Students from every School leave here ready and eager to contribute and serve.

These programs allow us to live our values — values that are fundamental to all we do. We have been reminded that we cannot take them for granted. We must not assume that our progress toward realizing them cannot be reversed. This campaign has allowed us to rededicate ourselves to their defense, and proclaim more boldly our fidelity to goodness as well as greatness.

I look forward to raising a glass with all of you this evening and toasting what we’ve accomplished together. But I want to close this afternoon by looking beyond tonight, to tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we will continue to be called upon to build trust in our actions, our words, and our purposes, to do good in the world. Tomorrow, we will endeavor to be that reliable compass that steers toward truth, towards Veritas. 

We are always learning, not just how to understand the world, but what to do with our understanding. I know that with your help Harvard can keep learning, keep being, keep doing. It can embrace both change and constancy. It can remain Harvard while still becoming Harvard. Smart, but also wise. Restless, as well as proud. Equal parts bold and thoughtful. At once both old and new. Committed to goodness as well as greatness. This was — this is — my wish for Harvard, our wish for Harvard. And this campaign has brought us closer to a wish come true.

The tensions between constancy and change are a good thing, a healthy thing. Any institution that has been committed to shaping the future, and future leaders, for as long as Harvard has, and as long as Harvard will, must embrace and master both. This is our inheritance. It must also be our legacy.

Others paved the way for the Harvard of today. Those of you who are gathered here, and the more than 150,000 other donors who have joined you in supporting Harvard so generously in this campaign — all of you have paved the way for the Harvard of tomorrow. If we sustain our responsibilities to both past and future and commit ourselves to advancing both our value and our values, we will model for a wary, skeptical world the importance of knowledge, the urgent necessity to be both thoughtful and daring, and the ability to be both great and good. You and those who have come before you have made this possible. You and those who follow you must continue to make it so.

Thank you.

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Thank you. That means so much to me. And it means so much to me to be here today with all of you to celebrate this extraordinary milestone for the university and for the Kennedy School.

At a time when reasoned public policy has never mattered more, and when it has perhaps never faced such profound challenges, we are here to mark a new era for a school that champions reasoned debate and informed governing. The Harvard Kennedy School will continue to advance this important mission in this new and glorious space—a space that will enable enhanced learning, enhanced community and enhanced vigorous and rigorous debate of the many issues that face us.  This day also affirms a past and a future. And the future that it highlights includes enduring commitments to scholarship, leadership and service that have characterized this school since its founding in the 1930s as the Graduate School of Public Administration.

As we cut the ribbon to open officially this new space, I want to invoke three quotations from the leader whose name now graces this school and whose commitment to public service has inspired so many: President John F. Kennedy.

He once remarked, “Things don’t happen. Things are made to happen.”  This is true in politics.  It is true in government.  It is also true in universities.  Let us remember today that this building did not just happen.  A lot of people made it happen: generous donors, Dean David Elwood, current dean Doug Elmendorf, and I have to mention John Haigh, sitting right here in front of me. I want to thank all of them for bringing us to this moment. 

Kennedy also wrote, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”  That is our commitment here: to generate the leaders the world so desperately needs through the education that takes place here at the Harvard Kennedy School. And that is the fundamental purpose of this new space we open today. That is our work as we go forward.

And a third quotation from JFK: “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”  As we thank all of those who made this building possible, let us remember that the real thanks lie ahead—in the work that we do here, in the ideas we create, in the better world we enable through the realization of the ideals of public service and the common good within these walls. Thank you very much.

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It so happens that today is a landmark anniversary of an event that changed the nation. And no, I don’t mean Harvard’s victory in the very first Harvard-Yale game, which happens to have been played on November 13, 1875. I’m referring to another victory, 61 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the segregation of public buses. Below us, on the second level of the museum, you can see a yellow dress, the dress Rosa Parks was carrying home from work the day she insisted on her right to an equal seat on a city bus. She was a seamstress whose courage restitched our social fabric. And she also prized education.

She recalled of her childhood in rural Alabama, “Our school term was five months while white students had classes for nine months and rode buses to well-equipped school buildings. While black students,” she said, “walked long, weary miles to uncomfortable shacks with no desks.” She wrote, “It was rare indeed [for a young, black person] to look forward to finishing his education.” And so, before she so famously rocked the bus, Rosa Parks spearheaded an effort to desegregate public libraries, organizing black students to enter white libraries to request volumes that black libraries didn’t have.

The long march toward equal access and opportunity in education, the link between liberty and learning, is a central story in the life of Rosa Parks. It’s also a central story of this museum and of this nation. And it’s a story in which Harvard has played a long and distinguished part.

In this great hall with three floors below us and three above we are surrounded by testaments to a passion for learning: the tattered Bible that Nat Turner carried into a slave rebellion, prompting laws that made it a crime to teach enslaved persons to read; the hymnal Harriet Tubman cherished, though we believe she could neither read nor write; the Celtics jersey of basketball great Bill Russell, whose most prized childhood possession was his library card to the Oakland Public Library. He said he taught himself there to memorize every detail of da Vinci and Michelangelo paintings. And then he discovered he could apply this same technique to his mental replays of action on the basketball court.

A traditional phrase for hope against impossible odds was “to make a way out of no way.” African-Americans have been making a way to education for centuries. As Booker T. Washington once observed, “It was a whole race trying to go to school.” Old and young, male and female, hiding books and pencils in the crannies of slave cabins, working extra hours at night for the one who could read, so he had time to study the Bible and read it to them; masses of children, walking miles to school, sometimes sharing shoes, begging to start early and to leave late. Between 1861 and 1900, African-Americans established more than 90 historically black colleges and universities. The bricks from some of them are downstairs.

And if those bricks weigh against the heavy past of a divided rail car and a segregated lunch counter, some of the museum’s smallest and lightest objects attest most poignantly to the liberating power of learning: a book, a library card, a diploma that no burden could completely suppress. You see them in every exhibit. There’s the pocket-sized Emancipation Proclamation, distributed from Boston to Union soldiers to read to black Southerners to inform them of their liberty. One of these occasions moved Harvard alum Thomas Wentworth Higginson, College class of 1841, to tears. On New Year’s Day 1863 he stood before thousands of people in Beaufort, S.C., gathered to hear the proclamation of their freedom read aloud. As Col. Higginson waved the American flag they burst into song, beginning with three quavering voices and then with the crowd joining in, singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” to a flag that was theirs for the first time. As Higginson put it, “I never saw anything so electric.” He wrote, “It made all other words cheap … the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.” He handed out hundreds of copies of the booklet to the formerly enslaved men under his command, the first Union regiment of its kind. There was liberty in the letter of the law.

You can find downstairs the “Blue Back Speller,” first published in 1824, an elementary spelling book with a blue cover about 6-by-5 inches, sold by the thousands, like a second Bible, the little book that every black person had to have. Freedman Lorenzo Ezel bought one with the first money he ever earned and he carried it wherever he went. “Plow[ing] a row,” he said, “and then stop[ping] to rest and overlook the lesson.” Frederick Douglass carried one in his pocket as an enslaved boy in Baltimore, burning with desire to read, using it to cadge lessons from white children. “Some men,” he said, “know the value of an education by having it. I know its value by not having it.”

And last, an item in the collection especially meaningful to a history teacher, a pamphlet from Freedom Summer, a program carried out by some 1,500 college student volunteers in Mississippi in 1964. At the same time they were registering thousands of first-time black voters they opened more than 40 “freedom schools” — a Harvard volunteer described one involving 60 people ranging in age from 4 to 70. They came from miles on foot or car or in the backs of pickups. And there they learned about the black past and about a heritage they’d never heard of, a foundation for belonging and not being merely present.

As Langston Hughes famously wrote, “I, too, am America.”

These artifacts embody the qualities of a liberal education, the ones I repeat to students and make a case for with Congressmen alike. Education liberates the mind, even when the body is oppressed. It gives us perspective as a passport to other times, other places, and other points of view as well, as a way to learn about ourselves, to reimagine our lives in ways that alter us forever.

What would have been the feeling? — to be told you have no culture, you have no heritage, your people had created nothing meaningful, and then to be united and uplifted by a different story, a new story of your past that becomes the new narrative of what is possible. History not only tells us that things were once different than we experience now. It tells us that they can and they will be different again. And perhaps, most important, it tells us that we can make it so. Learning instills agency.

That is why this museum is so important. It’s also why Harvard is so important.

President James Madison, who himself owned more than 100 enslaved laborers, wrote a letter in 1822 praising free and open access to education. “What spectacle,” he wrote, “can be more edifying … than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support.” These are words now inscribed on the Library of Congress. As our panel today attested, we are still wrestling with the legacy of that founding paradox, of slavery and liberty. What would Madison have said of Richard Greener, Harvard College’s first black graduate, class of 1870, who served as principal of an all-black high school just a few blocks north of here? Or what would he have said of Barack Obama, Harvard Law School class of 1991, president for eight years in a White House that enslaved persons helped to build? Both buildings were within a short walk of slave auction pens, active here until the 1850s. On the other hand, what Freedom Summer volunteer could have imagined that we would still be discussing today, in this museum, the persisting gap in the educational attainment in a nation where, after more than 50 years, access to education is still not equal?

The year before he died in his mid-70s, Frederick Douglass gave a speech on the blessings of liberty and education. “Education,” he said, “means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.” Douglass said those words in 1894, to dedicate a school for colored youth near the first battleground of the Civil War in Manassas. It was the 56th anniversary of his escape from slavery, the day, he told the crowd, that he “ceased to be a chattel … and… bec[a]me a man.” I remember the day I heard the Brown v. Board decision announced on the radio. I lived on a farm in Clark County, Va., about 60 miles west of here. And I attended an all-white school. I was 7 years old. And I glimpsed then the aspiration toward justice through education that has come to shape my life. For more than two centuries Harvard shut its gates to black students and for more than three centuries to female students. And yet, here we are, and here I am.

Now, the liberty in learning is not just an American story. It’s a human story. And yet, in the long struggle for enlightenment there may be no story more compelling than the one we’ve touched on here tonight — the liberation of enslaved and once-enslaved African-Americans through education.

The history of Harvard itself began in 1636, just 17 years after the first, enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown. From then until now, for almost 400 years, the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of education have defined Harvard’s purpose. And that purpose has led inexorably — even if far too gradually and sometimes haltingly — toward increasing access and inclusion, toward opening the gates of learning. The way has not always been straight. We are only now coming to understand the importance of slavery in Harvard’s early years, and our past contains distressing instances of prejudice and cruelty, not just against African-Americans but against Jews, gays, women, and others.

But beginning with its first scholarships in 1643 Harvard has gradually opened its community to one individual and one group after another, widening its gates through financial aid, through its invention of merit-based testing and its merger with Radcliffe, through advocacy and outreach for first-generation and low-income and undocumented applicants, all in the effort to attract students of talent and promise from every background across the United States and across the world.

Sometimes by having it, to use Douglass’ phrase, we forget the value of education. We can lose sight of how precious it is, the smuggled book, the tattered hymnal, that speller propped against the plow. And now, in a national climate hostile to differences of perspective or experience or identity, where violence and threats replace rational discourse and exchange, we have our own call to action — to champion equal access to education, to foster discourse where facts and truth matter, to interrogate a past that has never been more important to our future. A liberal education is not only liberating, as Madison knew. It is an education vital to a free people. In the words of early 20th-century Civil Rights activist Nanny Helen Boroughs: education is “democracy’s life insurance.” We have never needed it more.

Advancing the critical role of education in promoting service, achieving social justice, enhancing understanding, and widening opportunity is fundamental ����ר�� and at the heart of The Harvard Campaign we launched in 2013. Let me give you just a few, brief examples: 

Financial aid has changed our student body, supporting more than 3,600 undergraduates, close to 60 percent of those enrolled. Fifteen percent of students are now the first in their families to go to college, boosted by our First Generation Program that is raising early College awareness, supporting prospective students, and fostering community. Twenty percent of our undergraduates come from families with incomes below $65,000 a year and make no familial contribution to tuition or room and board. And this fall for the first time the entering class is majority minority.

At the Graduate School of Education, as Dean Ryan described, our new Teacher Fellows program creates innovative pathways into teaching for students who are making a difference in high need, urban schools from Brooklyn to Oakland. And also at the GSE the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative, established last year through the largest gift in GSE history, supports our nation’s most vulnerable children through transformational research and leadership training.

Public Service Fellowships support students working to advance social justice, education, and human rights in communities across the country. And the new Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship links public service to the curriculum with new courses that foster socially engaged scholarship.

HarvardX, since its establishment in 2012, is an online, digital-learning program that has brought the University’s intellectual resources to more than 6 million eager online learners around the world. Individuals of all ages and all walks of life have enrolled. But I’m especially proud that the largest single category of HarvardX learners, one-third of the total, are teachers. What they are learning from our faculty will have an exponential impact as they share it with others.

At Harvard Law School, to give another example, clinical opportunities for students have expanded dramatically, from 20 clinics to 31 clinics over the last decade, enabling students to combine classroom learning with hands-on engagement in areas like human rights, criminal justice, or immigration and refugee law. The immigration clinic is, in fact, playing a critical role in aiding our DACA students, working to protect them so that they can continue to pursue their educational dreams.

Education and freedom are inseparably intertwined, as this museum so powerfully reminds us. We must continue to advance the hope and the reality of what education can achieve. We must continue to insist and to demonstrate that facts and knowledge matter. We must heed the call to action as we continue our work to open the gates and close the gap.

Last spring a Harvard College student was named the nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her name is Amanda Gorman. She is the daughter of a single mother who teaches English in inner-city Los Angeles. She recently described education, in her words, as a “life-or-death resource.” I would like to give the last words to Amanda, taken from a poem she read, wearing a yellow dress at the Library of Congress this fall.

… my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.

There’s …

a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells —
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.

Thank you very much.

The post “Liberty and Learning.” Remarks by Drew Faust at Your Harvard: Washington, D.C. appeared first on Harvard University President.

As I look out at this distinguished gathering, it is hard to picture an afternoon two centuries ago when Harvard Law School was that bold new experiment with a grand total of three rooms, two professors, and six students. Or to imagine that ten years later the experiment had yielded one remaining faculty member and a single student. The direction was not encouraging. But, things got better. Sometimes in unforeseeable ways. A few weeks ago, we launched this bicentennial celebration by memorializing some 60 enslaved laborers whose work enabled the founding donation for the first Harvard law professorship. Who among them could have pictured abolitionist Charles Sumner, class of 1834, or Barack Obama, class of 1991? And who, in 1944, could have predicted that the same institution that denied admission to the brilliant Pauli Murray, not because she was black, but because she was female, would in 2017 elect a female and African-American Law Review president, and its first female majority?

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said it is never easy to be a “stronghold of ideals,” to keep “the faith” that “sets [us] to an [endless] task.” Especially in the law, where, as he put it, we may “wear [our] heart[s] out after the unattainable.”

Yet from its earliest days, Harvard Law School was impelled by a new idea of what the law could be—not simply a craft, but a broadly and deeply-educated profession. When Chief Justice Story arrived in 1829 to rescue the young law school, he told his students that the perfect lawyer must make himself familiar with “every [subject of] study.” He must search the human heart (of course they were all “he”s at this point); explore every emotion, from the sources of sympathy and benevolence to the “cunning arts” of the hypocrite; he must understand history, and literature, and policy, and religion, and nature—nothing was irrelevant. Over time, Story told his students, the lawyer would come to know humanity as it is. And while learning to trust men less, a lawyer might also learn to “love man more,” and become, and I quote him again, “more wise, more candid, more forgiving, more disinterested.”

This last quality, especially, animates Harvard Law School. “Disinterested,” to Justice Story, of course, did not mean indifferent or lacking in passion. Quite the opposite. Disinterestedness is the quality that allows us to engage fully; to argue forcefully and listen generously, without taking offense; to come alive through the clash of ideas, and find friendship and even common purpose, over divergent views. The law teaches us how to disagree. As Justice Scalia often commented, if you take it personally, you’re in the wrong line of work. Or, as Chief Justice Roberts quipped in a unanimous Supreme Court decision, FCC v AT&T, “I hope AT&T doesn’t take this personally.” That line—the closing sentence of a 12-page opinion on why corporations as persons nonetheless cannot take things personally— is further evidence th����ר�� produces, not only the greatest number of Supreme Court justices, but the most thoroughly entertaining ones.

Now, if the law represents a disinterested intellectual search for solutions to complex problems, it is also a moral quest—to promote equality, expose corruption, advance fairness, preserve liberty, check the arrogance of power, and defend unalienable rights.

Today we celebrate that public spirit, and its legacy. Harvard Law School is unsurpassed in educating leaders in the highest echelons of public life, across the United States and around the world. It has trained heads of state, legislators, business leaders and educators, not to mention its share of generals, novelists, spies, artists, producers, musicians and Olympians. And that in addition to educating six sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices, so many of whom are here with us today.

We celebrate an institution, not only for its preeminence, but as a powerful force for change: the place where Louis Brandeis shaped a constitutional right to privacy; where Charles Hamilton Houston prepared to do battle against racial segregation; and where a whole host of people, beginning in the 1980s, helped to lay the groundwork for what is now a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. 

We celebrate a remarkable faculty that over the course of two centuries has dominated American legal literature and developed whole new forms of legal education. A faculty that takes on society’s most confounding legal and moral challenges, and leads and inspires students in 31 clinical programs, from criminal justice to cyberlaw.

And we celebrate the students, who master their coursework while running influential journals and contributing hundreds of thousands of hours of pro bono work each year. They help low-income clients close to home and across the world, in the nation’s oldest student-run legal aid bureau. They defend human rights, and advocate for tenants and refugees, students and religious minorities, and thousands of returning veterans. They fight for economic justice and humanitarian disarmament—including a nuclear weapons ban with a partner organization that has just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

No school can accomplish all this without great leadership. The former deans here with us today – Deans Clark, and Kagan, and Minow, are a testament to a remarkable succession—and I want especially to thank Martha Minow, whose just last June completed eight years of outstanding service. Martha’s deanship brought the Law School into its 200^th year a stronger, more diverse and more public-spirited place.

Which brings me to the dean who is now leading Harvard Law School into its next 200 years, John Manning. As I am sure you know by now, Dean Manning exudes a warmth and kindness that even might soften the veneer of Professor Kingsfield. He often beams, as if on the verge of discovery or delight. An eminent scholar, he is known for not taking himself too seriously. He recently told the entering class of 2020 that when he was a 1L, and a 3L asked a group if they wanted to become litigators, he sat there wondering what a litigator was. Beyond his openness, and his magnetic enthusiasm for the law, he is a great collaborator: as a teacher who is encouraging, eager to be challenged, striding the length and breadth of the classroom to involve everyone; in his ability to connect the diverse voices so vital to advancing the law; in his commitment to innovative teaching and a wide range of perspectives and methods. I cannot imagine, in a fractious and often frightening world, a more timely leader in the law.

But, before I give you Dean Manning, I’d like to make one final observation. When Justice Holmes was in his eighties, and still an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, he commented in a letter to a friend that age “is relative.” Ninety, he wrote, was old. But at age 87, he avowed that he was only “nearly old.” Now, a law school, we know, perhaps can’t take things personally any more than a corporation. But on this auspicious anniversary, the notion of being “nearly old” would seem a useful perspective. As novelist Rachel Cusk recently put it, I don’t feel I’m getting older; I’m getting closer. Let us celebrate Harvard Law School, not for getting older, but for getting closer: closer to reason and closer to justice, aspirations of the law that are among civilization’s most precious gifts.

Thank you.

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