风流韵事出租影音先锋:2008年哈佛校长给本科毕业生的毕业演讲

Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
The Memorial Church

Cambridge, Mass.
June 3, 2008

As prepared for delivery

In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing
before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit,
dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many
of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the
extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton
into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the
moment of and for Veritas.

You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not quite
one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the
voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our roles
could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for
the next hour or so.

We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece. Though
I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I
know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we
took it quite so literally.

But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine this
were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the
questions. “What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four
years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since you
graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it out loud
since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree —
now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was young for my
class.)

In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just
these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have
been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why
you were asking.

Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my
appointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued
when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students
in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad. The
first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty
contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead,
you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we
going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it.
There is the Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he
robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors
Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your
economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of
student career choices since the seventies. They find it notable that, given the
very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still choose
to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America;
one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina; another will
be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an honors degree
in math, will study poetry; another will train as a pilot with the USAF; another
will work to combat breast cancer. Numbers of you will go to law school, medical
school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the pattern Goldin and Katz
have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finance and
consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58 percent
of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. This
year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.

High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance
for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying
life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots of
ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is a commitment for only a
year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be able to do good by
first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.

I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in
figuring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right;
if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue
with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you as not
understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free choice
than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so many of
you?

You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed
your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of
senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost
embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L —
is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python movie or
the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one would dare
admit to harboring serious concern.

But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability,
our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers
to your question.

I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be
conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those
two goals fit together. You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a
prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth
will feed your soul.

Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment
you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that
you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will
change the world. We have burdened you with no small expectations. And you have
already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service
demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future
of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your
reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s
presidential contests.

But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career
choice. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work?
If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?

You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about
trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may
not be possible to have it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires
making choices. And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate program —
means not selecting others. Every decision means loss as well as gain —
possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your question to me is
partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.

Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma,
representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one
career path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face
you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty — family
practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to work
for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to stay in
teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you want to have
both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were educated to make
a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but
for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the way to make that
possible.

I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely
distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses like
“Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of
tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get
older. Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my age — report
themselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t want to wait.

As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you
articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness —
perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and
encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige. The most remunerative
choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying. But
you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public
servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which
to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English
professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and
dissertation writing?

The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you
love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what
you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is
always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.

I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been
sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination
because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then
circle back to where you have to be.

You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just right
for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had
just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting
firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t
like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be happy if you spend more
than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.

But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question —
not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time
challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be
and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there. This is
the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault. Noticing your
life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how
you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts
education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live
self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all
you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way
supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this
sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free. They empower
you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making
choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself
to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the
impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are
impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward
something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for
you to make.

I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and
let us know.