[讨论]哈佛校长给2008届本科毕业生的致词

林帆发表于 2008-7-7 14:30:04

哈佛校长给2008届本科毕业生的致词 纪念教堂马 萨诸塞州的教堂 2008年6月3日 在这个庄严的时刻有一个奇怪的习惯，我发现我自己站在你们前面并且被希望告知你们一些永恒智慧的言语。 我站在这个讲坛上，像一个主教一样致词，这就像一个幻影，它可能使我的那些杰出前辈感到恐惧，也可能让我追随他们来消除这种迷惑。这个时刻很可能使Increase和Cotton变成一个真正的“马瑟泡沫。”但是站在这儿的我和站在那儿的你们在此刻都是为了追求真理。 你们已经在这儿读了四年书。我也一直是你们那位没辞职的校长。你们已经知道了三个校长，一个毕业班，哪儿有对经验的声音的谎言？可能你们应该提供智慧。或许我们应该调换一下角色，而且可能我会在下一个小时以哈佛法学院的风格给你们来一个意外的恶作剧式电话。我们似乎已经做到了这一点---或多或少做到了一些。尽管最近我了解到自从5月22号以后我们就没再给你们提供晚餐。 我知道我们需要以这种方式送别哈佛的你们。但我不知道我们做的如此的缓慢。现在让我们回到冷电话的概念中一会儿。让我们设想这是Q & A形式的毕业生服务社，你们正在问一些问题。“福斯特校长，生命的意义是什么？在哈佛的四年意味着什么？ 福斯特校长，从你四十年前毕业到现在，你一定学到了一些东西”（40年，我将大声的说出来，因为我生活中的每一个细节----自从我获得Bryn Mawr学位以来—现在看来似乎都是公开的，但请记住，我在我们班上是年轻的）。从去年以来，我就一直在从事Q & A这种工作。尽管在这些问题上，你们的问题有些狭隘。我一直在试图想出我能如何回答，或许更有趣的是指出你们为什么这样问。 让我来解释一下，这实际上发生于我在07年冬天被任命为校长后遇到UC时。然后当我在苏格兰教会吃午饭时以及在Levrett用晚餐时，当我在办公室遇到学生时，甚至是在国外遇到一些最近的毕业生时，这些疑问仍继续着。他们问我的第一件事不是课程，不是建议，不是教员的合同，也不是学生的空间。事实上，甚至不是饮酒的政策。而是反复问我：为什么我们中的很多人都跑到华尔街去了？ 为什么哈佛有如此多的人从事金融，咨询和银行。这儿有很多方式思考和解答这个问题。有一个威利.萨顿方式。你可能知道当他被问到为什么偷银行时，他回答的是“因为那儿有钱。” Claudia Goldin 和Larry Katz教授，这两位是你们在经济学研究时可能会遇到的，他们根据70年代以来学生职业生涯选择的研究而得出了相近的结论。他们发现尽管从事金融行业有较高的回报，但是很多学生仍然选择做其他事情。 事实上，你们中的37个人可能当老师；一个人可能在阿根廷跳探戈为舞蹈治疗服务；一个人可能去肯尼亚的农业发展部；另一个在拿了数学荣誉学位后可能去研究诗歌；还有一个可能去USAF作为航天员接受培训；还有一个为解决乳腺癌而战斗。你们中的一些人将去法学院，医学院和研究生院。但是和Claudia Goldin 和Larry Katz教授研究一致的是，你们中有相当一部分人要选择金融和咨询。去年Crimson报道的这一数据是男生58%，女生43%。今年，尽管经济形势严峻，但是仍高达39%. 高的薪水，对你们中的很多人来说是个无法拒绝的诱惑，这将确保你们中的大多数在纽约能工作、生存以及和你的朋友享受生活，以及有趣工作的许诺-----有很多方式来解释这种选择。对你们中的一些人来说，这仅仅是一年或两年的义务。而他人则认为他们一做就能做得很好。然而，你们却问我为什么你们要选择这条路。我发现自己感兴趣的不是回答你们这些问题，而是指出你们为什么要考虑这些。 如果Claudia Goldin 和Larry Katz教授的研究是正确的，如果金融确实是一个理性的选择，为什么你们仍要向我提出这个问题？为什么这个理性的选择被你们认为不可理解，被认为是完全非理性的，被认为是被迫或必须的选择而不是自愿的选择？为什么这个问题困扰了你们中的很多人？我想你可能问我生命的意义，尽管你已经解构了你的问题---- ---伴随着看得见的可衡量的高级职业选择前景而不是抽象的、难衡量的、尴尬的形而上学领域。生命的意义----字母S和M---一个陈词滥调很容易作为一个Monty Python电影或辛普森事件而不是作为一个关于敢承认怀有严肃关注的事件来处理。但是现在让我们抛弃哈佛的基因，抛弃我们的冷静，抛弃我们的坚强，让我们试着去寻找这些问题答案的序曲。我认为你担心是因为你希望你的生活不是传统意义上的成功，而是充满了意义，而你不确定这两者是否能一起实现。你不确定在一个有威望的大公司拿着一份丰厚的薪水，并且有着光明的前景的状况能不能滋养你的灵魂。你为什么这样担心？ 部分是因为我们的错误。从此刻起我们已经告诉你，你来到这儿，你就将是一个负责将来的领袖，你是最好的也是最有前途的，是我们将来最能依靠的，你将改变世界。我们赋予你的不是小的期望。你已经做了显著的事情来实现这些期望：在课外活动中展示了你对服务的献身精神；在你持久的、精力充沛夺冠时表达的你对地球将来的关注，在参与今年的总统选举时你对美国政治的鼓舞。但是你们中的很多人正想知道这些公益活动适合职业选择吗？是否有必要在有利的工作和有意义的工作之间做出选择？如果是二选一，你该选哪一个？ 是否有办法二者都选。你在问我和你自己一些基本型问题，它是关于价值，关于试图融合潜在的竞争性物品、关于认识到你不可能有这些。你在此时此刻需要做出选择。而且只有一个选择—一个工作，一个职业，一个研究生项目—不能多选。每一个决定都意味着在得到的同时也要失去---------在拥抱的同时也有放弃。对我来说，你的问题就是关于什么东西也不带的路上损失了什么。金融，华尔街，“征募”已经变成了进退两难的象征，代表了一些更宽泛、更深入的问题而不仅仅是职业道路。这些问题将以不同的方式出现，使你（毕业于医学院选择了特别的专业）面对家庭的实践或皮肤病学，当你决定是否选择用你的法律专业为你的公司工作或作为公共保护者，当你决定是否在你拥有TFA两年后呆下来教书时。你担心是因为你想既拥有有意义的生活，又拥有成功的生活；你知道你被教育来做出不同决定不仅仅是为你自己，为你自己的舒适和满足，也为了你周围的世界。现在你必须指出做出这个可能性的方式。我认为你担心的第二个原因是你想快乐。 你们已经涌进了积极心理学的课程中—心战1504—和快乐的科学。但是我们如何能发现快乐呢？我能提供一个令人鼓舞的答案：变老。调查的资料显示---- 我的年龄----报道显示他们比年轻人更快乐。但是或许你根本不想等待。当我听到你在我面前谈论选择时，我听到你勾画了你关于成功和快乐关系的担忧--- 或许，更精确的说，如何定义成功以致它能产生和拥有真实的快乐，不仅仅是为了钱和尊严。你担心，报酬最高的选择可能不是最有意义的和最满意的。但是你不知道作为艺术家、演员、公益服务者或高校教师是否能存活？在你完成了多年的研究生学习和博士论文写作后，你是否发现作为一个英语教师的工作。答案是：你不尝试的话你是永远不知道的。但是你不去尝试你所爱---无论是绘画、生物还是金融；如果你不去追求你认为最有意义的事情，你将遗憾。 生命是很长的。由时间实行B计划，但是不要从B计划开始。我认为这个是作为职业选择的停车位理论，我已经在几十年中和学生分享了这个理论。不要把车停在离你目的地还有20条街区那么遥远的地方，因为你认为你将不会发现空间。去你想去的地方，然后返回你不得不到的地方。你很可能喜欢投资银行、金融或咨询。这对你来说很可能是正确的。或者，你可能像我在苏格兰教堂吃午饭时遇到的刚从西海岸的一家有名的咨询公司面试回来的大四学生.“我为什么要做这个？”她问。“我讨厌飞行，我讨厌宾馆，我不喜欢这个工作”寻找一个你爱的工作。如果你花费超过你醒着时一半的时间去做你不喜欢的事情，你是很难快乐的。但是最后最重要的事情是你们问的这个问题---不是为我，而是为了你们。你正选择道路，与此同时你也在挑战你的选择。你知道你想要的生活，但是不确定你选择的路是否能把你带到那儿。这就是最好的消息。 我希望从某种程度上来说，它也是我们的错误。关注你自己的生活，思索一下，考虑你如何能过好它，扪心自问一下如何能做好它。或许文科教育赋予你能做一些有价值的事情。文科教育要求你活在自我意识中。它使你求索和定义你所做事情的内在含义。它使你能进行自我剖析和批评，一个人如果能以这种方式生存他就能做到收放自如。文学科目是自由的。他们赋予了你实践、发现意义和做出选择的可能性。拥有一个有意义的、快乐的生活的最有效方式就是努力去争取它。不要犹豫，准备好改变路线吧。记住那些我们要求你的不切实际的期望，甚至认识到他们是不可能的，记住当他们作为北极星引导你朝你自己的世界前进时是多么的重要。你生活的意义是你自己创造的。我迫不及待的想看到你们将如何绽放。到时候一定要回来告诉我们，让我们知道你活得是多么的精彩
[此贴子已经被作者于2008-7-9 8:33:29编辑过]

littleman 发表于 2008-7-8 16:04:35

我记得这篇文章不久前才看过了，而且我还回复了，怎么又来发了？

林帆发表于 2008-7-9 08:34:07

<h2>Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008</h2><div class="t_msgfont" id="postmessage_1487212">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 be fore you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit, dr essed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the exti rpation 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 qui te one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies t he voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our r oles 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. Tho ugh 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 w e took it quite so literally. But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine th is 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 fou r 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 M awr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was yo ung for my class.) In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just t hese 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 appoint ment 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 m y office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad. The firs t thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty conta ct or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead, yo u 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 h e 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 econ omics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of stu dent 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 sch ool, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the pattern Gol din and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finan ce and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 5 8 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choi ce. 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 onl y 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 righ t; 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 m any of you? You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed y our question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon o f senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embar rassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — i s 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 d are 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 answ ers to your question. I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventiona lly 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 hav e already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service d emonstrated 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 preside ntial contests. But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choi ce. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? I f 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 try ing to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may no t 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 progra m — 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, r epresenting a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one care er path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face y ou 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 i n 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 t o make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfacti on, but for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the way to ma ke that possible. I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirel y distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses l ike “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging a nswer: 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 yo u articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — p erhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and encompass es 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 wond er 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 y our 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 wri ting? 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. The re 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 s haring it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destinati on because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and t hen circle back to where you have to be. You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just rig ht for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who ha d just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consult ing 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 sp end 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 t ime 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. Not icing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, won dering 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 tha t you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning in herent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a per son in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfo lds. 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 disco vering 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 c hange routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodes tar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world. The mea ning 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, an d let us know.</div>

yuwg 发表于 2008-7-10 12:46:02

不习惯，但说的是实话。

taoying830903 发表于 2008-7-10 13:42:58

eddyhe 发表于 2008-7-10 14:26:43

翻译的很烂啊

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[讨论]哈佛校长给2008届本科毕业生的致词