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2022 世界五大名校毕业演讲精华集锦
英文演讲全文
It is one of my great honors, as Stanford’s president, to address our graduates on Commencement day.
Graduates, today we honor your achievements during your time at Stanford. Your years here have been marked by intellectual exploration, deep immersion in your chosen field, and extraordinary hard work, all undertaken during a time of great challenge.
Today’s ceremony marks the culmination of all you have accomplished at Stanford. We are so proud of you, and we celebrate you as you embark on the next stage of your journey. The first time I met with many of you was to celebrate Convocation on a very hot September day in the Main Quad in 2018.
That day, I described how you would begin to realize, during your years at Stanford, that life is not a straight path from beginning to end. It has twists, turns, and departures that you cannot foresee.
Little did I – or any of us – foresee those that would arise during your years here, as the pandemic closed our campus and forced us all to learn new ways of working together, of creating community, and of supporting one another during an extraordinary time.
All of us learned a hard-won lesson in disruption and adaptability, in how our world can change in an instant, and in how every one of us is called on to adapt throughout our lives.When I think about the unexpected directions that our lives can take, I often like to say that life is long and lived in chapters.
Your life – and every life – has distinct eras. Some you will see coming, and others will begin suddenly and unexpectedly.Childhood is one, and your college years are another. This Commencement marks the end of an important chapter as a trainee and the beginning of a new chapter out in the world.But you’ll experience distinct eras throughout your lives and professional careers, too.
The career you begin right after college is not likely to be the one you have forever. In fact, I predict that the vast majority of you, if not all of you, will have multiple chapters in your professional life.
You may begin a family, and parenthood and family life will be a new chapter. You may move to new places in our country or in the world. You will enter eras of personal and career growth, of uncertainty, of caretaking, and of loss and of sudden change.
Those changes and evolutions will continue throughout your life – as will the sudden, unexpected twists and turns that are a part of every life. I’d like to tell you the story of Stanford alum Milt McColl, whose own path exemplifies the idea that life is lived in chapters.Milt was a talented student athlete.
He played linebacker for the Cardinal from 1977 to 1980, as he earned his bachelor’s degree in biology.Graduating in 1981, Milt signed with the San Francisco 49ers. That same week, he was accepted into the Stanford School of Medicine.
From 1981 to 1987, he played with the 49ers as an outside linebacker, including on two Super Bowl championship teams. In the off-season, he attended medical school here at Stanford, graduating with an MD in 1988.
After completing his NFL career, Milt planned to devote himself entirely to medicine. But with a couple of months to fill before his residency was set to begin, he was offered a job at a medical device startup. He accepted, delaying his residency for what he thought would be a year.
It ended up being nearly 30 years.Over those three decades in the medical device industry, Milt built a hugely successful career. He eventually became CEO of Gauss Surgical, which developed a real-time blood loss measuring device for operating rooms.
Throughout all of those years, Milt continued to make use of his medical license by volunteering at a free clinic in San Francisco. And eventually, he realized that he looked forward to his days in the clinic above all else.So after much thought and reflection, Milt stepped down as CEO.
He left his career and returned to Stanford Medicine at the age of 56 to begin a residency in family medicine.It was hard work. Milt had been away from medical school for a long time, and he needed to put in extra time, accompanying doctors on additional rounds and studying in his spare moments.But he found it deeply rewarding.
Milt completed his residency in 2019 – with impeccable timing – just in time for the arrival of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, he has treated COVID patients in a community-based clinic at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, where he works with a traditionally underserved population.Or take the example of Sylvia Jones, an award-winning journalist from the Class of 1993.
Sylvia began her career as a TV news producer, covering everything from Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the U.S., to 9/11, to President Obama’s election.Then she entered a chapter of caregiving, first for her mother, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Then for two young relatives, whom she took in when they had nowhere else to go.
Sylvia went from single and unattached to parenting two children in an almost an instant.When that chapter was resolved, for the first time in years, she had the space to focus on herself and what she wanted.And she realized that what she wanted was to write movies and TV shows. Sylvia applied to UCLA’s screenwriting program and was accepted off the waitlist nine days before classes began.
So, now in her early 40s, she picked up and moved from Chicago to Los Angeles.She figured she had no time to lose, so she knocked on every door in Hollywood she could think of. Today, she’s an Emmy-winning writer and producer of TV shows like The Endgame … The Chi … and Cherish the Day.
Milt and Sylvia’s stories are wonderful illustrations of the idea that life is lived in chapters. And what inspiring chapters they have been.The important thing about these examples is this: We each have this ability to pivot through the years, to use our skills in new and different ways, to find new meaning, and to help solve the problems that our world faces.
Let me be clear: Each of you has that ability to pivot. I know, because each of you had to pivot as the pandemic upended your plans – yet you pushed through to complete your studies and graduate today.
As the story of your own life continues to unfurl, I am confident that each of you will adapt as our world changes and as your own priorities and goals evolve, too.Reflecting on the examples of Milt and Sylvia, I’d like to offer you three thoughts about the foundation you have built here at Stanford and how that foundation will support you through the chapters to come.
First is the importance of lifelong learning and of continuing to explore.In your years here, you have acquired the tools and skills to continue learning, exploring, and adapting as the world changes.
You’ve learned to experiment with ideas, explore challenging issues, and test solutions to problems in every field. And beyond what you’ve learned in the classroom, you’ve used your skills to address real-world problems through hands-on service work.Like Milt, who kept up his medical skills through volunteer work, I hope you continue to use your skills and knowledge to serve your community.
Beyond the fulfillment it will provide you, it will allow you to keep your skills sharp and to explore new ideas, now and in the years to come. That brings me to my second point: As you keep up your knowledge and skills, you should also continue to seek out different perspectives and hold space in your mind for competing views.Throughout your time here at Stanford, you’ve encountered a diversity of perspectives and engaged in conversations across areas of disagreement. It hasn’t always been easy.
But as you look beyond Palm Drive to the division and polarization that grip our country and our world, it’s clear that this is a skill that our world desperately needs.The friends and mentors you have met here at Stanford have broadened your perspective.
As you enter the next chapter of your lives, I encourage you to continue to engage with many voices and to seek out discussion and debate. Honor your own values, but keep an open mind to learning from others’ perspectives and continue to bring the best version of yourself to those discussions.
Third, I urge each of you to imagine a brighter future and to figure out what your own unique contribution will be.Our world faces many challenges – from emerging and chronic diseases, to disinformation, to the climate crisis and geopolitical tensions.
Each of you has the knowledge and the ability to rise to these challenges and to help transform our world for the better, for your own future and for the generations that follow.I know you are up to the challenge. I’ve seen it.
As just one example, this spring, I’ve been so proud of the ways in which the Stanford community has responded to the war in Ukraine – from our scholars at the Freeman-Spogli Institute and across the university, who have played a major role in advising U.S. policymakers and providing knowledge and insight into the conflict, to our Stanford students, who worked with a local nonprofit to organize a shipment of more than $120,000 worth of medical and humanitarian relief to Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia was another stark reminder of how the world can change in an instant and how each of us – each of you – can contribute, in ways big and small.So I encourage each of you to reflect on the challenges we face and to consider what your own contributions will be.
Through the disruption of the last two years, each of us has had an opportunity to reassess our values and to reflect on what pursuits give us true meaning and fulfillment.
So even as you celebrate all that you have accomplished, I urge each of you to take time to reflect and to ask yourself:How can I shape a future that reflects what I’ve learned about my values and priorities?
And how can I help create a brighter future for my own community and for the world? As you take your next steps along your own path, you’ll carry Stanford with you. The work you’ve done here will ripple forward through your life, propelling you through the early years of your career and providing you a foundation for a life of change and transformation.
Welcome, members of the Class of 2022—and soon-to-be-graduates of Harvard College.
Exactly 1,359 days ago, we met at Convocation, and we began our first year together—you as undergraduates, me as president. I spoke about the merits of academic regalia, and I challenged you to use your waking hours as undergraduates—some 21,000 of them—to explore all that the University had to offer.
Little did we know then that we would all confront a global pandemic that would test us in ways that we could not have imagined. I find it fitting that we are gathered here in these billowing robes, a symbol not only of our membership in a community of learning but also of our experience these past four years, our experience of a Harvard—of a world—blown about by winds that never existed before. And all of us carried along with them—and into the unknown.It has been a wilder ride than any of us could have expected.
Candidly, when I made the difficult decision to send you all home on such short notice in March of 2020, I never imagined that two years later—and after one million people had succumbed to this virus in the US alone—we would still be dealing with this public health crisis. Your class has been tested as few others have been. You have demonstrated extraordinary resilience and patience, both skills that will serve you well as you prepare for life after Harvard.
Based on what I have seen of you and how you have met this moment, I have great faith that you, like those who came before you, will find your way, and will make your mark on the world. Let me take this moment to thank you for your perseverance, for your flexibility and your understanding. I don’t think I have ever been prouder of any graduating class at any university than I am of the Harvard College Class of 2022.
One day, there will be enough distance for us to contemplate the enormity of what we have been through as a community, but that day is not today—and that is okay. For now, we can share a quiet moment to say goodbye to whatever we imagined these last 1,359 days might have held for us. For now, we can be grateful that we are here—together—on the verge of your commencement and all that awaits you in the years ahead.
It is quite common for students at this precise moment in time—a day before your College graduation—to feel a combination of excitement and anxiety. Excitement for all that awaits you as you begin the next chapter in the journey called life, and anxiety over where that journey is likely to take you. Some of you entered Harvard convinced of exactly where you wanted to go—law school, medical school, a career in public service, for example.
Some of you found your passion on this campus and are now going to pursue academic careers or opportunities in journalism, the arts, or entertainment. And some of you are still searching. You may have a job lined up that will pay you well, but, if you are honest with yourself, you are still worried if it is the right path for you or if you will succeed.One of the problems in trying to plan your career is that a career is only knowable in retrospect.
On the day you retire you can look back and it all makes sense. You can identify the inflection points, the decisions, that brought you to where you ultimately wound up. But when confronting these decisions in real time, you will struggle. You will make lists of pros and cons. You will consult with friends and family. And you will agonize over these choices long into the night.
I know what I am talking about because I have been there.As I was completing my PhD here at Harvard, Adele and I thought we were headed to Washington, DC. It was the start of the Carter administration, and we were excited by the prospect of getting in on the ground floor. But then an unexpected opportunity came up:Would I like to return to my alma mater, MIT, to fill in for someone going on leave for two years?
The salary was a fraction of what I would have made in DC and there was no guarantee of a job two years hence.A number of years later, I was still at MIT—now on the tenure track but disheartened because my fabulously talented co-author didn’t get tenure.
I had concluded that if he did not get it, I wouldn’t either, and I had just made up my mind to leave MIT and academia altogether when my department chair came calling:Would I consider taking on major administrative responsibility to launch a new academic program?Flash forward 35 years. I was a member of a presidential search committee, trying to find a leader for a university I care a lot about.
I had been comfortably semi-retired—more or less—for almost seven years when the chair of the search committee approached me on behalf of the group:Would I consider becoming a candidate for the job?If I had said “no” to any one of those questions, I would not be standing here today. This is not to say that I am prescient or wise, or brave—just that I was open to seeing where roads I hadn’t considered might lead me. That way of moving through the world has taken me to some pretty interesting places—being here, behind this podium, is one of them.
You, too, will have chances to consider other paths for yourself, paths that will appear to you unexpectedly—even inconveniently. Be willing to take those chances. Believe in yourself. And don’t be too concerned about failure. My late mother, Ruth, was a very wise woman.
Whenever I worried about a decision, she would always say, “What’s the worst that can happen? Can you live with that? If you can, go for it.” I hope you are as liberated by this advice as I have been throughout my life.
Other discrete moments will influence you so profoundly that denying them would be a tragedy.Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric, was once an undergraduate at NYU with her heart set on filmmaking. One day, walking past an open door of a poetry class, she heard lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.” But sing they did—and, because of that moment, Jorie went on to become one of America’s most distinguished poets, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of Harvard’s most beloved faculty members.
Rubén Blades, a musical giant and this year’s Harvard Arts medalist, was once a law student in Panama. One weekend, the dean of the school he attended saw him performing with his band. The dean took him aside and told him that if he wanted to be a lawyer—to reflect the dignity of that profession—he would have to quit singing. Rubén ended up in Miami with a demo album—a wild talent and ambition—and, eventually, seventeen Grammys.
Ray Hammond, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, was a very successful surgeon. Then he heard another voice calling him. Today he is Reverend Ray Hammond, one of Boston’s most influential spiritual leaders.I chose these examples because they demonstrate the randomness with which new roads will appear to you.
Neither Jorie nor Rubén nor Ray could dream of where a single voice would take them, but they listened nonetheless, paying close attention to the world around them as they imagined how and where they wanted to focus their attention and time.Now, I will say something that you may shrug off as nostalgia.
But I hope you will remember it: Random events of profound influence don’t happen on a screen. Think of a person stopping in her tracks to listen to lines of unfamiliar poetry. Think of a person recognizing his desire in an unexpected and unwelcome ultimatum. Think of a person tuning into something greater than himself.
Think of where and how those things happen—and where and how they can’t or won’t. Engage and embrace the world personally with passion and enthusiasm and, if you are lucky, you too will someday be inspired by the unexpected. Members of the Class of 2022: May you consider fully the paths that reveal themselves to you in the years ahead.
May you experience the sweetness of both poetry and song, and marvel at the refrains that emerge as you make your way through life. May you be spared anxiety, dread, and uncertainty—and may you always be surrounded by people who love you.
Best of luck to each of you—and Godspeed.
我们常将事实置于预设的解释之下。我们常乐于接受观点，而不愿思考。但历史告诉我们：确信不疑带来的严重危害以及滋生的狂妄。
英文演讲全文
Graduates of the Class of 2022, family members, friends, and colleagues. It is a special pleasure to be here with you today, a day made doubly meaningful by our ability to celebrate our graduates in person. I am delighted to welcome you to Yale’s first on-campus Baccalaureate ceremony since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.And after a three-year hiatus, there is a wonderful Yale tradition that I would now like to reinstitute:May I ask all the families and friends here today to rise and recognize the outstanding—and graduating—members of the Class of 2022?
And now, may I ask the Class of 2022 to consider all those who have supported your arrival at this milestone, and to please rise and recognize them?Thank you!***Our excitement today is tempered by global turbulence. We can see the perils of conflict and crisis around the world. Yet, as I look out onto this courtyard, I also can see the promise of those well prepared to better our collective future.
Old Campus is filled anew with the boundless potential of graduates who offer cause for hope.Throughout the country on this weekend and those weekends surrounding it, presidents of colleges and universities are inspiring their graduating seniors by telling them that have received the very best education possible, and that as educated adults they are now ready to go out and make the world a better place. This is, of course, true in many respects, and I have certainly spoken on other Commencement weekends of the importance of improving the world for this and future generations.
But I would like you, graduating seniors from Yale College, to depart from this place with a somewhat different mindset. I am going to urge you to recognize that your excellent education allows you to listen to others carefully, consider what they have to say, and sometimes come to a new point of view. I am suggesting today—a day filled with pride of accomplishment—to recognize, at the same time, the value of intellectual humility. Today, I wish to focus on the courage to acknowledge all we do not know, to admit when we are wrong, and to change our minds.Sixty years ago, President John F. Kennedy spoke to a capacity audience seated right where you are now. He saw a similar state of unrest as the specter of war loomed. And I suspect he gained a similar sense of optimism atop this platform from members of the Class of 1962. President Kennedy’s historic Commencement address at Yale was sweeping in its rhetoric and in its scope. And more than a half-century later, there is still much for us to heed from his message, including the abiding but now especially relevant value of seeking new perspectives.“Too often,” President Kennedy told the graduates in a rousing appeal for intellectual humility, “we subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations.” Too often, he continued, “we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”History teaches us the grave hazard of certitude and the hubris from which it germinates.When I was a graduate student here, Professor Irving Janis, a social psychologist, was one of my teachers. He formulated the concept of groupthink and linked the suppression of dissent to a series of foreign policy debacles such as the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion.The Bay of Pigs invasion—a decision by Kennedy to have the CIA lead a group of armed Cuban exiles in a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro—was described by Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger as rooted in a “curious atmosphere of assumed consensus, [in which] not one spoke against it.”And as President Kennedy himself disclosed to TIME magazine, “there were 50 or so of us, presumably the most experienced and smartest people we could get, to plan such an operation. Most of us thought it would work…I wasn’t aware of any great opposition.” Yet “when we saw the wide range of the failures,” Kennedy continued, “we asked ourselves why it had not been apparent to somebody from the start. I guess you get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much.”The invasion was an embarrassment to the United States, and in those Cold War days, it pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union.In the many years since President Kennedy spoke at Yale, the silos in which unchecked opinion can find refuge have become both ubiquitous and more easily accessed; they act as echo chambers that reaffirm beliefs in real-time. Within these silos, speculation travels great distances without scrutiny. And the spirit of discord between these silos discourages the honest exchange of ideas across them. In short, clinging to our circles of consensus has grown more comforting—and questioning them, more difficult.I encourage you to reject that comfort, because a willingness to explore new ideas is what makes all the difference. You know this perfectly well, I realize. The diversity of academic experiences available here at Yale ensured that you were not limited to learning from those who already shared your outlook. Indeed, President Kennedy chose to speak of such matters at Yale “because of the self-evident truth that a great university is always enlisted against the spread of illusion and on the side of reality.”Another social psychologist, Mark Leary, who recently retired from the faculty of Duke University, closely examined the intellectual humility I seek to nurture in higher education generally and in you today. His review of this attribute—a recognition that “one’s beliefs and opinions might be incorrect”—reveals that it is associated with gratitude, altruism, empathy, and more satisfying relationships. And intellectually humble people are more likely to be forgiven by others for their mistakes.As extremism, polarization, and resulting gridlock plague our politics at a time when pressing challenges call on us to harness our shared humanity, Professor Leary details equally substantial advantages of intellectual humility for society, including “lower acrimony that is based on differences in beliefs and ideology…[and] greater negotiation and compromise.”When we first met four years ago in Woolsey Hall, I described a series of obligations that would accompany your Yale education, including the responsibility to be constantly curious—and to listen carefully to others. At that 2018 Opening Assembly, I encouraged members of this class to remember that “you have come to Yale because you don’t know everything—not yet.”Now, even as you prepare to depart Yale four years later, I will again declare that your acquisition of knowledge is unfinished. You will leave Yale despite not knowing everything. The transformative power of a liberal education lies not in a promise to teach you everything but in the preparedness to meet presumptions—including those we harbor ourselves—with a healthy measure of doubt. It lies not in the ability to answer but in the audacity to question.As graduates, it behooves you to carry forth the inquisitive attitude you have forged here at Yale into the world; to carry forth your insistence on pushing opinions—including your own—beyond the confines of comfort; your resolve to strengthen your reasoning through personal investigation and civil discourse.In thinking of these trademarks of the academic enterprise, I am reminded of a dictum from Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the great medieval philosopher known as Maimonides. In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, Ethics of our Fathers, Maimonides urges readers to “accept the truth from whoever speaks it.”Indeed, wisdom is rooted in this willingness—this responsibility—to entertain ideas brought to you by others. To listen carefully. To think critically. To challenge your views—and then to change them when the discovery of truth demands it. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor said recently, “It is, I fear, too easy for people to fail to listen when what they’re hearing is different than what they think.As we know, engaging with those who hold profoundly different perspectives threatens not to betray our beliefs, but to broaden them. Listening to that with which we may disagree is an act not of conciliation, but of fidelity to truth. And admitting what we got wrong is no sign of failure, but a necessary step toward knowledge.The mark of a great education consists not only of the new frontiers of knowledge we reach, but of the existing viewpoints we reconsider; not necessarily of the understanding we gain, but of the assumptions we shed. For only when we subject the “prefabricated set of interpretations” President Kennedy spoke of here at Yale to scrutiny,can we elevate our limitations into points of strength. Indeed, humility—that willingness to say we are wrong—enables us to scale otherwise unattainable heights in the lifelong pursuit of knowledge.***As Yale graduates, you are allegiant to truth. You know that breakthroughs are byproducts of the questions you raise, the conventions you dispute, the fallacies you uncover. But, also, the mistakes you own. You know that the “new ideas and solutions” I spoke of when we first assembled as a class four years ago—ideas and solutions to fight disease, alleviate suffering, and find justice—are made better when they endure the rigors of critical inquiry.Perhaps now more than ever, the world into which you will soon enter needs you to search for these solutions. It needs your expertise. But it also needs your example as a graduate of this inspiring learning environment. It needs you to continue probing the preconceptions held by others and, with equal vigor, those you hold yourself. It needs your answers and your questions. It needs your scholarship and your skepticism. It needs your intellectual prowess. And it needs your intellectual humility.It needs you, Class of 2022.
英文演讲全文
In a few minutes, all of you will walk out of this stadium as newly minted graduates of this University. Before you do, however, it is my privilege to say a few words about the path ahead.
That privilege feels even more special than usual this year. It is an honor to speak to the Great undergraduate and graduate Classes of 2022. Earning a Princeton degree is an exceptional achievement in any year, but you have overcome challenges that none of us could have imagined when you began your studies here.You, your families, and your friends can be very proud of what you have accomplished. And you can be sure that the strength you have demonstrated will serve you well in the years ahead.Earlier this year, a Princeton alumnus in Atlanta asked me what quality or characteristic I considered the best predictor for success in college and beyond.
I began by saying that I was reluctant to generalize across a very diverse student body with a dazzling array of talents. Princeton students succeed in many and inspiring ways, a fact that all of you have vividly confirmed during your time here.Still, I said to our alum, if I had to name one quality that mattered across the many dimensions of achievement and talent, it would be persistence: the ability and drive to keep going when things get hard. All of us go through difficult times. To achieve our goals we have to find ways to continue even when—indeed, especially when—obstacles seem insurmountable or endless, and pressing onward feels exhausting, daunting, or just plain dull.Persistence is, I admit, a rather unglamorous virtue by comparison to, say, genius, creativity, or courage.
An old adage, often but perhaps erroneously attributed to the nineteenth century humorist Josh Billings, praises persistence by comparing it to the postage stamp, which achieves success simply by “sticking to one thing until it gets there.”Modest though it may be, however, persistence is at least as important to achievement, including academic achievement, as are any more celebrated characteristics.You earned your degrees today in many ways and for many reasons, but not least because you persisted brilliantly throughout your time on this campus and away from it.
You persisted not only through a world-altering pandemic, but through problem sets, writing assignments, laboratories, midterms, finals, senior theses, dissertations, and the personal crises and doubts that are an inevitable part of college life and, indeed, of life more generally.Getting to and crossing the finish line is hard, which is why we celebrate college degrees so enthusiastically.The degree you earn today matters tremendously. And it really is the degree that matters most, far more than the honors or other decorations that go with it. I do not know if this comes as welcome news or bad tidings, but I must tell you that there is surprisingly little correlation between grade point average and success in later life.
But getting a college degree? That correlates with everything from higher incomes to better health to greater civic engagement—and the list goes on.Persisting through college matters, which is why we celebrate Commencement day with admiration and exuberant joy.At Princeton, students have taken different paths through the challenges of the pandemic. Some took a year off, some did not. One way or another, however, graduation rates for Princeton students remain sky-high.We should recognize, however, that is not true everywhere.
At college Commencements around the country, there are missing chairs and missing students this year, and there will likely be more missing chairs in the years to come.Some students left school during the pandemic and have not returned. Some high school students who might have gone to college have made other choices instead. Though the data is incomplete, both problems appear to have a disproportionate effect on students from less advantaged backgrounds and those who attend community colleges and other public, two-year institutions. That is a tragedy. A tragedy because, as I said a moment ago, the degree matters. All of us who attend ceremonies like this one, all of us who celebrate students who have earned a college degree, should recognize the urgent need to bring back those who have found the path to a college degree blocked or unpassable.
It is especially damaging when students drop out of college after incurring debt, even if the amount of debt is small. When media outlets cover student debt, they like to focus on the eye-popping loans some students accumulate. In fact, though, most student loan defaults involve students with small debts who leave college without getting a degree. If students persist to graduation, their earning power goes up, and they can often pay back even large loans.
Without a degree, they see no increase in earning power, and often find no way to pay back even small loans. Half a degree does not get you half the earning power: unfortunately, it gets you almost nothing.We need policies to help those who have left college. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, for example, has proposed a new “Some College, No Degree” program to assist the more than 700,000 New Jerseyans who left school without finishing. I hope that the legislature will fund the proposal. At the federal level, a bipartisan group of senators sponsored legislation, called the “ASPIRE Act,” that would have provided colleges and universities with incentives to improve their graduation rates and to increase their representation of low-income students. That bill did not pass; no proposal is perfect. One way or another, however, we need to make sure that talented students from low-income families get the support they need to make it to and through college.
One way or another, we need to add back the chairs missing from graduation ceremonies around the country.I hope that today and in the week ahead, as you celebrate your degree, you will take time to thank the friends, family members, teachers, mentors, and others who helped you to persist across the finish line. None of us succeed on our own, in normal times or in difficult ones.
And, in that spirit, I hope, too, that as all of you pursue quests and adventures beyond this campus, you will help others to persist across the finish line as you have done so remarkably yourselves.I know that, whatever you do, you will make Princeton proud, and that you will put your talents, creativity, and character to work in ways that we can scarcely imagine today.All of us on this platform are thrilled to be a part of your celebration. We applaud your persistence, your talent, your achievements, and your aspirations. We send our best wishes as you embark upon the path that lies ahead, and we hope it will bring you back to this campus many times.
We look forward to welcoming you when you return, and we say, to the Great Class of 2022, congratulations!
英文演讲全文
To the graduates of 2022: Congratulations! My job today is to deliver a “charge” to you… and I will get to that in a minute. But first, I want to recognize the people who helped you charge this far!
To everyone who came here this morning, to celebrate our graduates – welcome to MIT!
To everyone joining us online, from around the world – we are so happy you could be with us!And to the parents and families of today’s graduates, here and everywhere: A huge “Congratulations” to you as well! This day is the joyful result of your loving support and sacrifice. And for that, you have our deepest respect and admiration.I also know that a few years ago, many of you may have thought that you had succeeded in sending your offspring away for college or graduate school. But things did notturn out exactly that way. So please know how much we appreciate you!Now, to our new graduates.
It has always puzzled me when events like this are referred to as “Commencement Exercises,” because they involve so much sitting down! So I am going to start with a little something to get our hearts moving.At MIT, one thing we understand is the importance of distinguishing the signal from the noise. But sometimes, if the noise is noisy enough, it actually becomes the signal!We all know that getting through MIT is not a “solo performance.” In fact, it usually takes an orchestra of loving assistance! So I would like each of you to hold in your mind now all the people who helped you along the way: your family, your role models, your professors and teaching assistants, your friends. In a moment, I hope that, together, we can send them a signal – in a very noisy way.
To do that, you will need to say two words, as loud as you can: “Thank you!” You got it? Just those two words, “Thank you!” OK, now, ready? On the count of three: One, two, three – THANK YOU!Hmm. You are lucky I had already agreed to grade this Pass/No Record. That first attempt was pretty good, but you can do better. I believe in you! so I am going to give you another chance.And this time, let’s try it with your hands up in the air! All the way up!
Now, nice and loud, so it’s even noisy for the people online. OK – one, two, three: THANK YOU!And thank you right back!So, why did I ask you to do that? I knew it would create a brief pleasant sensation for the people you love. But I was also after something deeper. Just ask anyone from Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Course….? That’s right, Course 9!). As anyone from Course 9 can tell you, research indicates that simply expressing gratitude does wonderful things to your brain.It gets different parts of your brain to act in a synchronized way! It lights up reward pathways! It even gives you a little shot of dopamine! In other words, expressing gratitude and appreciation for other people is good for our brains – and it is very good for our hearts.We are living in a difficult and complicated moment in history.
All of us could use a reliable device for feeling better. So now – thanks to brain science! – you have one! The Gratitude Amplifier is unbreakable. Its battery never dies, and it will never try to sell you anything. You can use it every day, forever – and it’s free! It is a graduation present you can take with you anywhere, even if all your moving boxes are already taped shut.
I am so extremely grateful to have all of you here on Killian Court, on this wonderful day, for this tremendously important occasion.I expect that those of you graduating may come to this day with mixed feelings: with excitement for your next steps, but with the sense that you did not get enough time on campus – time with your professors, and especially with each other.For that reason, I am particularly grateful that you are here in person. And, looking back, I am also grateful for how much I have learned from members of this class.I want to focus on one effort that several of today’s graduates helped to lead – an effort to create an antidote to intensity.
We all know that MIT is intense. That is part of why we love it: MIT attracts intense people (like all of you!) – and then we push each other, and we inspire each other, intensely.But everyone needs a break from the intensity sometimes. Different students find different ways to relieve it – Music! Sports! Ballroom dancing! And some students even find relief by inventing ways to relieve stress for other people.A few years ago, before the pandemic, a group of students on the Undergraduate Association looked around and concluded that what MIT really needed was a casual place, in the middle of campus, where students could stop, relax, hang out, study if need be and get free food, 24 hours a day.When a space freed up in Room 26-110, the Banana Lounge was born!
Yes, the Banana Lounge. For those who have not been there yet: The Banana Lounge is a long, sunny room, near the main campus crossroads. It is full of colorful paintings, great big leafy plants, Lego sets, bean-bag chairs – and boxes and boxes of bananas.Now, as a native of Venezuela, I take certain things very seriously, and one of them is tropical fruit. If they had asked me, it would have been all about mangoes!
But of course, with a mango, there is that huge, slippery, ridiculous seed; as the students determined very quickly, the mango simply cannot compete with the elegant engineering of the seedless, self-packaged banana.In its charming quirkiness, the Banana Lounge is “very MIT.” And it turns out to be “very MIT” in every other way, too.The students began with a prototype lounge, tested it in real-world conditions and optimized it for efficiency and comfort.
They evaluated competing fruit for comparative nutritional content, analyzed alternative supply chains, determined the ideal green/yellow ratio in purchasing and worked to minimize the per-banana unit cost.They tracked and calibrated the temperature and humidity of their banana inventory in real time, online, and they established protocols to freeze excess supply and to capture the valueas banana bread.They secured funding from a very generous member of the Class of 1987, Brad Feld (who paid for all of this year’s bananas! Thank you, Brad!)
And they developed the cutting-edge concept of “free coffee,” which, in their words, was “critical to stimulating the lounge atmosphere and promoting conversation.”Already, the lounge has served more than five-hundred-thousand bananas! (Two of which were mine…) And it has generated a very significant number of banana-induced naps as well.The students have done all this essentially themselves… applying their MIT skills and the most delightful MIT values. They identified an unarticulated problem, dared to try a “crazy” idea, worked incredibly hard – and in the process, they built a wonderful, tropical, perfectly improbable new MIT institution.
And we could not be more grateful.So it is in that spirit that I deliver my charge to you. I’m going to use a word that feels very comfortable at MIT – although it has taken on a troubling new meaning elsewhere. But I know that our graduates will know what I mean.After you depart for your new destinations, I want to ask you to hack the world – until you make the world a little more like MIT: More daring and more passionate. More rigorous, inventive and ambitious. More humble, more respectful, more generous, more kind.And because the people of MIT also like to fix things that are broken, as you strive to hack the world, please try to heal the world, too.
Our society is like a big, complicated family, in the midst of a terrible argument. I believe that one way to make it better is to find ways to listen to each other with compassion, to focus on achieving our shared objectives and to try constantly to remind each other of our common humanity. I know you will find your own ways to help with this healing, too.This morning, we share with the world almost thirty-seven-hundred new graduates who are ready for this urgent and timeless problem set. You came to MIT with exceptional qualities of your own. And now, after years of focused and intense dedication, you leave us, equipped with a distinctive set of skills and steeped in this community’s deepest values: A commitment to excellence. Integrity.
Rising on your own merits. Boldness. Humility. An open spirit of collaboration. A strong desire to make a positive impact. And a sense of responsibility to make the world a better place.So now, go out there. Join the world. Find your calling. Solve the unsolvable. Invent the future. Take the high road. Try always to share your bananas! And you will continue to make your family, including your MIT family, proud.On this wonderful day, I am proud of all of you. To every one of the members of the graduating Class of 2022: Congratulations!!!! Please accept my best wishes for a happy and successful life and career.
Reference
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