哈佛大学校长2018年毕业典礼演讲：希望与真理是一所大学的本质（视频+文稿）

哈佛大学校长德鲁·福斯特2018年毕业典礼演讲

（无字幕练听力）

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=v0665k2og9k&width=500&height=375&auto=0

哈佛大学校长德鲁·福斯特2018年毕业典礼演讲

（英文字幕）

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=m0669ylavha&width=500&height=375&auto=0

猛戳视频！

中文翻译：

谢谢苏珊，感谢那些非常慷慨的人，并感谢大家的欢迎。衷心祝贺我们所有的毕业生和他们家人的辛勤工作，并带来今天的许多成就。我特别感谢约翰·刘易斯与我们分享他鼓舞人心的话语，并且与我们同在。没有比约翰·刘易斯更好的生活方式的例子，约翰·刘易斯的勇气......他的勇气和奉献精神，无私和是非分明，在这半个世纪以来为所有人挑战了这个国家实现自由和正义的承诺。站在他身边的舞台上是一种难以言表的荣誉和荣幸。

大约十一年前，我站在这里发表我的作为哈佛大学第28任校长就职演说。今天的话就像一本书的结尾——一种告别词，字面意义上的告别词。当我在2007年发言时，我观察到，就职演讲是“由那些还不知道他们在谈论什么的人定义的宣言”。现在，我不能再援引这个借口了。我几乎知道我作为哈佛校长的所有想法。

但是我接着说了一些关于就职演讲的独特类型的话：我们可以把它们重复一下，就像我之前所说的那样，“不被经验之杖改变的对希望的表达。”现在，我应该知道那个杖。在我的脑海里，我听到我年轻时的吉米·亨德里克斯问道：“你有经验吗？”我必须肯定地回答。也许并不像查尔斯·威廉·艾略特那样有经验，他在哈佛大学任职40年，但是11年对我来说已经是很长的一段时间。

想想吧：我发表就职演讲和iPhone在2007年夏天发布的时间间隔在48小时之内。我们所有人现在都非常依恋我们的设备，这看起来几乎不可想象，他们并不总是在那里。智能手机发起了一场关于我们如何沟通，如何互动，如何组织我们生活的革命。我们才刚开始理解这种数字化转型对我们社会、经济和政治的影响 - 甚至对我们的大脑。

2008年金融危机带来近三分之一的捐赠损失 - 促使我们在随后的几年中推翻自1650年以来在哈佛大学实施的治理体系，并改变我们的财务状况 - 并最终改变我们的投资- 流程和政策。

五年前，我们经历了马拉松爆炸事件和恐怖袭击，我们凝聚在一起就像“波士顿之强”。

我们经历了恶劣的天气，从飓风到雪崩到轰炸，我们已经减少了对气候变化的承诺。

我们面临欺诈危机，电子邮件危机，灵长类危机以及性侵害和性骚扰危机 - 而且我们对每个危机做出了重大而持久的改变。

我们曾直面H1N1、埃博拉、寨卡，甚至腮腺炎。

我们受到激发和激励的挑战 - 更新和充满激情的学生行动主义：占领；黑人有所谓（黑人的生活不能遭到无视.....基本的意思是：大家是平等的，不要侵犯黑人群体的生活。）；放弃哈佛；我,也是哈佛（I, Too, Am Harvard国际会话）；无证在哈佛；我也是。

我们面临的政治和政策环境越来越敌视专业知识，并对高等教育持怀疑态度：我们估计，去年12月通过的史无前例的捐赠税将在明年向我们征收相当于每名学生2,000美元的税。

确实有一个很好的惩戒措施。 但是今天，我不想把注意力集中在那个“经验棒”上，而是关于我之后定义为就职信息的本质的东西：表达希望。现在，正如那时一样，这正是我对哈佛和我的思想和心灵的看法，关于它的现在和未来。过去的十一年里，我对高等教育的信心越来越强。我了解到，希望不仅来自于缺乏经验的天真，而且来自于日常现实，领导和热爱这所大学的日常工作。在日益增长的对机构的不信任和对高校的不断攻击下，我想确认我的信念，那就是对于我们渴望的未来，它们是希望的灯塔——我认为我们最大的希望是为了我们所向往的未来。大学的希望和未来，而这正是我们今天庆祝的核心。

希望是学习的基础。今天我们尊敬的6989位毕业生来到这里，渴望教育能成为可能，梦想着他们的生活将如何改变，因为他们会在这里度过。学院院长Rakesh Khurana定期向学生们讲述他们应该从本科经历中寻求的知识，社会和个人转变——他敦促他们表达自己的希望并为实现目标确定一条道路。我们的确对他们有着如此高的期望：他们发现有意义和目的的生活，他们发现一种激发他们活力的激情，他们为真理而奋斗，他们用他们的教育在世界上做好事。

世界上从来没有如此需要这些毕业生，我认为他们明白这一点。 大约一个月前，我与十几位大学生共进午餐，我让他们在这里描述他们的四年。他们谈到了他们改变和成长的方式，但更有针对性的是，他们谈到了他们身边的世界似乎已经改变了。他们担心地球的健康和可持续性；他们担心我们的民主和公民社会的健康。他们描述了他们的态度和计划是如何改变的，因为这些变化的环境。他们不再把他们的世界视为理所当然；我们的社会，我们的国家，我们的星球的未来不能得到保证；这取决于他们。 他们的事业和人生目标已经转移到拥有更广泛的责任感上，超越自我，包含对他们认识到的共同利益的义务，如果没有他们，他们将可能无法生存下去。

我认为这些学生就像炼金术士一样——面对黑暗的现实，并创造一条为人们提供希望的黄金道路——关于他们自己的生活，但对我们所有人来说，就像我们想象这些非凡的毕业生会为这个受损的世界做些什么，我们提供他们作为他们的继承。当这些学生在哈佛大学度过的时光没有充满希望的时候，他们将不可能被这些学生所包围。为了解释埃德学院的竞选口号，他们在这里学习改变世界。

当然，建立一个更开明的世界也是教师的基本工作，也是哈佛作为研究型大学的核心。 我们在考虑任命一位教授时所要求的基本问题是，“这个人做了什么来改变和增强我们对世界的理解？”也许他们已经揭示了微生物组的运作方式，或者国际贸易协定如何影响经济繁荣，或者无证学生面临的教育挑战。也许他们已经解开了识别导致精神分裂症的基因的实际位置的方法，或者他们已经发现了如何设计一种外衣以使人能够走路。 哈佛学者探索历史和文学来帮助我们理解暴政；艺术来阐明正义的基础；法律和技术来解决关于隐私假设的基本攻击。

着眼于创造一个不同的未来，所有这些工作都建立在希望的基础上——更清晰地看到某些东西，影响他人改变他们的理解甚至是他们的行为。 从定义上讲，我们是一个理想主义者的共同体，超越现在和现状思考如何以及何时可能会有所不同。

与哈佛卓越的学生和教职员工以及支持他们工作的专职人员相互交流的特权使我在过去的11年中每天都有所提升。几乎不可能不相信他们打算建立的未来。 但哈佛还有另一种方式让我充满希望，那就是我们作为一个社区的方式——在这些围墙内共同生活和共同努力——正在努力应对分裂和威胁世界的具有挑战性的力量——气候变化等力量 或者对我们的社会和政治产生毒害的分裂，或者对事实和理性话语的破坏，或者言论自由的冷嘲热讽。

在某些方面，我们可以看到我们共同致力于可持续性的工作是这些更广泛努力的象征。我们开始认为自己是一个活的实验室。我们对环境问题的研究和参与当然远远超出了我们的工作范围：例如，我们的教师在制定国际气候协议方面发挥了关键作用，设计了创造和储存可再生能源的创新方法，影响了监管框架。从华盛顿到北京，探讨了气候变化对健康的影响。但与此同时，我们努力使我们自己的社区成为可能的模式 ——我们想象未来的希望。我们将温室气体排放量减少了30％，垃圾减少了44％；我们生产1.5兆瓦的太阳能——足以为300个家庭提供燃料。我们有试验健康建筑材料、绿色清洁、食物垃圾的项目，并且我们构建了HouseZero，这是一个能源中性结构，实质上是一台巨大的计算机，可以生成有关其运行和设计各个方面的数据，他们为未来而建造。

我们也试图以其他方式做一个活生生的实验。我们聚集在剑桥，面对面的住宿教育环境，因为我们认为这个社区是一个教育机器。我经常观察到，哈佛可能是我们大多数学生曾经生活过的最多样化的环境。我们努力吸引来自最广泛的背景、经验和兴趣的优秀人才，包括地理来源、社会经济环境、种族、宗教、性别身份、性取向、政治观点等最广泛的多样性。我们要求学生从这些差异中学习，互相教导，并教我们，以及他们是谁和他们所带来的多样性。这并不容易。它要求个人质疑长期存在的假设，打开他们的想法和论点，这些想法和论点似乎不仅仅是陌生，甚至令人不安和迷惑。这是一个在日益两极化的社会和政治环境中变得越来越困难的实验，在这个环境中，仇恨、偏执和分裂的表现似乎不仅被允许而且被鼓励。但尽管我们身边都有这些挑战，但哈佛大学力争通过我们的努力，让我们因差异而变得丰富，而不是分裂。

为了维持教育共同体的愿景，我们必须在另一个意义上成为一个活生生的实验室。我们必须成为一个事实重要的地方，理性和尊重的地方⋯⋯理性和尊重的话语和辩论充当真理的仲裁者。最近有很多批评大学没有充分开放对不同观点的看法。保护和滋养言论自由是我们的根本承诺，需要不断的关注和警惕，特别是在政治和社会两极分化的时代。定义一所大学的不受控制和不可控制的杂音，意味着有时我们不可避免地会失败；我们不能总是保证这个社区的每个成员都慷慨地倾听彼此的声音。但这必须激励我们加倍努力。沉默思想或沉溺于独立于事实和证据的舒适的知识正统，阻碍我们获得新的更好的想法。我们必须致力于相信不能简单地断言或声称真理，但必须建立证据并经过论证测试。真理服务于......谢谢......真理在我们所做的一切中充当灵感和愿望；它将我们带向未来，并使我们更清楚地看到，更充分地理解，改善我们自己和世界的可能性。它的追求充满希望。希望与真理是一所大学的本质。

所以我回过头来希望——我们为人类生活和工作的不同方式而努力的希望，希望是我们所交易的思想和发现的希望，是今天毕业的人的光明未来的希望。然而，当我退出哈佛大学校长的职责时，我清楚地意识到希望的另一个基本属性。这意味着工作仍未完成，愿望尚未与成就相匹配，可能性尚未被抓住和实现。希望是一个挑战。

我想到了亲爱的已故船员教练哈里帕克曾经对运动员说过的话——我在竞选期间经常引用的话：“这，”他对赛艇运动员说，“这就是你的可能。 你想成为那个吗？“这些是我想留给哈佛的文字和信息。工作未完成。 这个工作仍然需要完成，这可能比以往更困难。愿我们继续以我们的一切希望和坚定不移的决心来挑战自我。

希望哈佛

不仅聪明，而且智慧，

不仅骄傲，而且求变，

不仅深思熟虑，而且勇往直前，

不仅古老，而且日日新，

不仅优，而且善。

谢谢。

Thank you, Susan, for those very generous words, and thanks to everyone for a generous welcome. Heartfelt congratulations to all our graduates and their families for the hard work and many accomplishments that have brought you to this day. And 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…his courage and dedication, selflessness, and moral clarity have for more than half a century challenged this country to realize its promise of liberty and justice for all. It’s 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 28th 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.

2008 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 at Harvard 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’ve experienced wild weather, from hurricanes to Snowmageddon to Bombogenesis, and we’ve doubled down on our commitment to combat climate change.

We’ve 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’ve 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 at Harvard; 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 – that 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 at Harvard 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 that Harvard 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’ve 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, 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 that Harvard 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, religion[s], 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 at Harvard 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…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…thank you…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 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.

Thank you. 

每天一杯咖啡吸收宇宙能量！
重构思维方式，
AI+时代，读互联网思想（wanging0123)

联系方式：投稿及内容合作｜[e-mail]