哈佛大學校長演講

哈佛大學校長演講 08.6.3

這位是哈佛2007年2月11日宣布并于7月份正式上任的校長Drew G. Faust給哈佛大學2008年的大學畢業生做的演講的講稿，DrewG.Faust是哈佛曆史上第一位女性校長，第一位非哈佛畢業生校長，傑出的曆史學家，2001年從賓西法尼業大學到哈佛的Radcliffe學院任教，之前的哈佛上一任校長曾因為公開發表“歧視女性”的言論被迫辭職

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Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008 The Memorial Church Cambridge, Mass. June 3, 2008 As prepared for delivery Inthe curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myselfstanding before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here Iam in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition thatwould have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhapsrededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches. This momentwould 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 forVeritas. You have been undergraduatesfor four years. I have been president for not quite one. You have knownthree presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the voice ofexperience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our rolescould be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do coldcalls for the next hour or so. We all do seem to have made itto this point — more or less in one piece. Though I recently learnedthat we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I know we needto wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we took itquite so literally. Butlet’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imaginethis were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and youwere asking the questions. “What is the meaning of life, PresidentFaust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust, youmust have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it out loud since every detail of mylife — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to bepublicly available. But please remember I was young for my class.) In away, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. Onjust these questions, although you have phrased them a bit morenarrowly. And I have been trying to figure out how I might answer and,perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking. Letme explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after myappointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questionscontinued when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, whenI met with students in my office hours, even with some recent graduatesI encountered abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t thecurriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. Infact, 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 suchnumbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking? High salaries, the all butirresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of youthat you will be in New York working and living and enjoying lifealongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there arelots of ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is acommitment for only a year or two in any case. Others believe they willbest be able to do good by first doing well. Yet, you ask me why youare following this path. I find myselfin some ways less interested in answering your question than infiguring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz haveit right; if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keepraising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choicestrike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational,as in some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Whydoes 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 theobservable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice ratherthan the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm ofmetaphysics. 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 thesubject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one woulddare admit to harboring serious concern. But let’s for a momentabandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense ofinvulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to yourquestion. Ithink you are worried because you want your lives not just to beconventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not surehow those two goals fit together. You are not sure if agenerous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organizationtogether with the promise of future wealth will feed your soul. Whyare you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from themoment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible forthe future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will alldepend, that you will change the world. We have burdened you with nosmall expectations. And you have already done remarkable thingsto fulfill them: your dedication to service demonstrated in yourextracurricular engagements, your concern about the future of theplanet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, yourreinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’spresidential contests. But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice. Isit necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work?If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way tohave 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 questionto 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 justone career path. These are issues that in one way or another will atsome point face you all — as you graduate from medical school andchoose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decidewhether to use your law degree to work for a corporate firm or as apublic defender, as you decide whether to stay in teaching after yourtwo 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 findhappiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older. Turns outthat survey data show older people — that is, my age — reportthemselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t want towait. As I have listened to you talk about the choices aheadof you, I have heard you articulate your worries about the relationshipof success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately, how to definesuccess so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not justmoney and prestige. The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not bethe most meaningful and the most satisfying. But you wonder how youwould ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public servant or ahigh school teacher? Howwould you ever figure out a path by which to make your way injournalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after youfinished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertationwriting? Theanswer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do whatyou love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’tpursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Lifeis 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’tpark 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll neverfind a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where youhave to be. Youmay love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be justright for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch atKirkland who had just returned from an interview on the West Coast witha prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “Ihate 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 hoursdoing 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, ourfault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you canlive it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the mostvaluable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. Aliberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It preparesyou to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has madeyou an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremelyequipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It isin this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — tofree. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, ofdiscovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have ameaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it.Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the impossibleexpectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they areimpossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding youtoward something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning ofyour life is for you to make.

2008屆大學畢業典禮上的講話 紀念教堂 麻省劍橋市 2008年6月3日 準備稿 在這所久負盛名的大學的别具一格的儀式上，我站在了你們的面前，被期待着給予一些蘊含着恒久智慧的言論。站在這個講壇上，我穿得像個清教徒教長——一個可能會吓到我的傑出前輩們的怪物，或許使他們中的一些人重新緻力于鏟除巫婆的事業上。這個時刻也許曾激勵了很多清教徒成為教長。但現在，我在上面，你們在下面，此時此刻，屬于真理，為了真理。 你們已經在哈佛做了四年的大學生，而我當哈佛校長還不到一年。你們認識了三個校長，而我隻認識了你們這一屆大四的。算起來我哪有資格說什麼經驗之談？或許應該由你們上來展示一下智慧。要不我們換換位置？然後我就可以像哈佛法學院的學生那樣，在接下來的一個小時内不時地冷不防地提出問題。 學校和學生們似乎都在努力讓時間來到這一時刻，而且還差不多是步調一緻的。我這兩天才得知哈佛從5月22日開始就不向你們提供夥食了。雖然有比喻說“我們早晚得給你們斷奶”，但沒想到我們的後勤還真的早早就把“奶”給斷了。 現在還是讓我們回到我剛才提到的提問題的事上吧。讓我們設想下這是個哈佛大學給大學生的畢業服務，是以問答的形式。你們将問些問題，比如：“福校長啊，人生的價值是什麼呢？我們上這大學四年是為了什麼呢？福校長，你大學畢業到現在的40年裡一定學到些什麼東西可以教給我們吧？”（40年啊，我就直說了，因為我人生中的每段細節——當然包括我在布林茅爾女子學院的一年——現在似乎都成了公共資源。但請記住在哈佛我可是“新生”） 在某種程度上，在過去的一年裡你們一直都在讓我從事這種問答。從僅僅這些問題上，即使你們措辭問題都傾向于狹義，而我除了思考怎麼做出回答外，更激發我去思考的，是你們為什麼問這些問題。 聽我解釋。提問從2007年冬天我的任職被公布時與校方的會面就開始了。然後提問一直持續，不論是我在KirklandHouse（哈佛的12個大學生宿舍之一）吃午飯還是在LeverettHouse（哈佛的12個大學生宿舍之一，大學高年級學生使用）吃晚飯，或是當我在辦公時間與學生會見，甚至是我在與國外認識的剛考來的研究所學生的談話中。你們問的第一個問題不是關于課業，不是讓我提建議，也不是為了和教員接觸，甚至是想向我提建議。事實上，更不是為了和我讨論酒精政策。相反，你們不厭其煩問的卻是：為什麼我們之中這麼多人将去華爾街？為什麼我們大量的學生都從哈佛走向了金融，理财咨詢，投行？ 也許是為了高薪——難以抵抗的招聘誘惑，也許是為了留在紐約然後和朋友們一起工作生活和享受人生，也許是為了做自己感興趣的工作——對于這些選擇可以有各種各樣的理由。對你們中的一些人，無論如何那也隻是個一兩年的契約。其他的一部分人相信他們隻有在過得“富有”了以後才有可能過得“富有”價值。不過，你們依然會問我，為什麼要走這條路？ 我發現我自己有時候對于回答你們的問題并沒有多大興趣，比較而言更感興趣的卻是捉摸你們為什麼提那些問題。如果果真如Goldin和Katz教授所說；如果去搞金融确實是一個“理性”的選擇，為什麼你們會不停地向我提出這類問題？為什麼看似理性的選擇卻讓你們當中相當一部分人認為是令人費解的，僞理性的，或出于某種需求和強迫所作出的并不自由的選擇？為什麼這個問題似乎困擾着你們當中的很多一部分人？ 我想，你們問我的是：關于人生價值的問題。雖然你們問得比較隐晦——即是些可以觀察和衡量的大四學生職業選擇的問題，而不是那抽象的，晦澀的，甚至會令人難堪的形而上學範疇的問題。人生價值，要人生？還是要價值？作為MontyPython那部片子（指的是六人行裡《人生的價值》那一集）的諷刺意味的片名是不難了解的，作為《辛普森一家》（美國特别受歡迎的動畫連續劇）的其中一集的主題也是不難了解的，可是當關系到“生存問題”的時候，就是不那麼好辦了。 那讓我們還是暫時摘下那戴着的哈佛面具，收起那缺乏熱情的冷漠，卸下我們看似刀槍不入的僞裝，讓我們嘗試去探尋你們問的一些問題的答案。（我覺得校長能說出這句話真太棒了！我想她當時面對的聽衆的表情和我們在聽課時的表情差不多。） 我覺得，你們之是以擔憂，是因為你們不想僅僅是獲得傳統意義上的成功，而且要活得有價值。可是你們不清楚“魚”與“熊掌”怎樣才能“兼得”。你們不清楚是否，一家擁有著名品牌的企業提供的數目可觀的并且預期着你未來财富的起薪，可以讓你們的靈魂得到滿足。 然而，你們為什麼擔憂呢？這部分地是我們的責任。當你們一踏進這個學校，我們就告訴你們：你們将成為上司未來的中堅人物，你們将成為美國人民依賴的最頂尖、最傑出的精英，你們将改變整個世界。我們“望子成龍”的期望使你們背上了負擔。而你們為了實作這些期望也已經做得很好：在對課外活動的從事中，你們展示出對于服務性工作的奉獻精神；從對可持續發展的熱情擁護，你們表達出對這個星球的關懷；通過對今年總統競選的參與，你們做出了希望使美國政治重新恢複活力的實際行動。 但你們中的很多人現在會問，“怎樣才能把做這些有價值的事情和一個職業選擇結合起來呢？”“是否必須在一份有報酬卻沒價值的工作和一份有價值卻沒報酬的工作間做出抉擇呢？”“如果是一個單選題，您會選哪一個？”“有沒有折中的辦法？” 你們在問我，也是問你們自己問題，即關于價值觀的根本性的問題。你們在試圖調解兩個商品潛在的互相競争，承認也許不可能兼得兩者。你們在經曆一次人生的轉折，而這個轉折需要你們自己做出一些決定。選擇一條道路——一份工作、一項事業或一個研究所學生課題——不單單是在選擇東西。每個決定都意味着“得”與“失”——過去與未來的種種可能。你們問我的問題其實有幾分是關于“失”，即你放棄的那條道路讓你失去了什麼。 金融、華爾街，“招聘”一詞已經成了這種博弈的符号，代表着比僅僅選擇一條職業道路更廣更深的一系列問題。這些問題早晚将面臨着你們每個人——如果你是從醫學院畢業，你将選擇一個具體從醫方向——做私人醫生還是專攻皮膚病，如果你學的是法律，你将決定是用你的法律知識為一個公司法人賣命還是成為公衆的正義化身，或是在 “教育美國人”兩年後你決定是否繼續從教。你們之是以擔憂，是因為你們想擁有充滿價值的同時又是成功的人生；你們知道，你們被教育要有大的作為，不僅僅是為了個人，為了自己生活地舒适，而是要讓周圍的世界是以而改變。是以你們才不得不思考怎樣才能讓其成為可能。 我認為你們之是以擔憂有第二個原因——和第一個有關系但不是完全一樣。你們希望過得幸福。你們蜂擁着去修“積極心理學”這門課——課程代号“心1504”——和“幸福的科學”這門課，不就是為了聽點人生“小貼士”？可是，我們怎樣才能獲得幸福？在這兒，我可以提供一個啟發性的答案：變老。調查資料顯示年長的人——也就是我這把年紀的人——覺得自己比年輕人更幸福。不過，很可能你們沒有人願意去等着去看這個答案。 在聊天時我聽過你們談到你們目前所面臨的選擇，我聽到你們一字一句地說出你們對于成功與幸福的關系的憂慮——也許，更精确地講，怎樣去定義成功才能使它具有或包含真正的幸福，而不僅僅是金錢和榮譽。你們害怕，報酬最豐厚的選擇，也許不是最有價值的和最令人滿意的選擇。但是你們也擔心，如果作為一個藝術家或是一個演員，一個人民公仆或是一個中學老師，該如何才能生存下去？然而，你們可曾想過，如果你的夢想是新聞業，怎樣才能想出一條通往夢想的道路呢？難道你會在讀了不知多少年研，寫了不知多少畢業論文終于畢業後，找一個英語教授的工作？ 答案是：你不試試就永遠都不會知道。但如果你不試着去做自己熱愛的事情，不管是玩泥巴還是生物還是金融，如果連你自己都不去追求你認為最有價值的事，你終将後悔。人生路漫漫，你總有時間去給自己留“後路”，但可别一開始就走“後路”。 我把這叫做我的關于職業選擇的“泊車”理論，幾十年來我一直都在向學生們“兜售”我的這個理論。不要因為怕到了目的地找不到停車位而把車停在距離目的地20個路口的地方。直接到達你想去的地方，哪怕再繞回來停，你暫時停的地方隻是你被迫停的地方。 你也許喜歡做投行，或是做金融抑或做理财咨詢。都可能是适合你的。那也許真的就是适合你的。或許你也會像我在KirklandHouse見到的那個大四學生一樣，她剛從美國西海岸一家著名理财咨詢公司的面試回來。“我為什麼要做這個？”她說，“我讨厭坐飛機，我讨厭住飯店，我是不會喜歡這份工作的。”找到你熱愛的工作。如果你把你一天中醒着的一大半時間用來做你不喜歡的事情，你是很難感到幸福的。 但是我在這兒說的最重要的是：你們在問那些問題——不僅是問我，而是在問你們自己。你們正在選擇人生的道路，同時也在對自己的選擇提出質疑。你們知道自己想過什麼樣的生活，也知道你們将行的道路不一定會把你們帶到想去的地方。這樣其實很好。某種程度上，我倒希望這是我們的錯。我們一直在标榜人生，像鏡子一樣照出未來你們的模樣，思考你們怎麼可以過得幸福，探索你們怎樣才能去做些對社會有價值的事：這些也許是文科教育可以給你們“裝備”的最有價值的東西。文科教育要求你們要活得“明白”。它使你探索和定義你做的每件事情背後的價值。它讓你成為一個經常分析和檢討自己的人。而這樣的人完全能夠掌控自己的人生或未來。從這個道理上講，文科——照它的字面意思——才使你們自由。（英語裡文科是Liberal Art，照字面解釋是自由的藝術）學文科可以讓你有機會去進行理論的實踐，去發現你所做的選擇的價值。想過上有價值的，幸福的生活，最可靠的途徑就是為了你的目标去奮鬥。

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