In his Freshman Address, Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead told students "The unknown, what lies outside your current ken, is the place for discovery and self-enlargement -- that is, for education. What Yale offers you, as a great educational institution, is a million doors out of the prison of your insularity."

What Country, Friends, Is This?

The following is the text of the Freshman Address delivered by Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead on Sept. 2 in Woolsey Hall. Mr. President, colleagues, parents, friends of the shining youth sitting here before me, I welcome you to this great event. Members of the Class of 2004, the 300th class to enter this school, I welcome you to Yale. Judging by the imposing setting and the plumage of the rare birds up on this stage, this is a moment for high pomp and ceremony. I won't deny its solemnity, but I would have thought the right mood for this occasion was festive, and I could hardly blame you, Yale's newest recruits, if you were to let out a whoop of joy. As of this moment, you have a fresh start, a fresh page on which to write the story of your life. Everything you've worked for all those years lies open before you. Everything you're proud of from your previous life comes forward with you as a tested strength, and everything you'd just as soon forget is left far, far behind, never to be even suspected by your new friends. For us the pleasure is no less. This is a school that rejoices in its students and the energy and creativity they bring to our collaboration. The advent of your vitality brings this school its annual rebirth. Men and women of the Class of 2004, enter, enjoy, and invigorate this place. By chance or fate, when I first began thinking about this gathering three or four weeks ago, an image came to mind that has continued to haunt me, supplying my first vision of you and your arrival. At the beginning of the second scene of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," as I trust you'll remember -- those of you who have learned the classics through popular culture will know the scene from the end of "Shakespeare in Love" -- a young woman comes ashore at a place she's never been and says: "What country, friends, is this?" I recognize the limits of Viola's entrance as an image for your arrival. There are differences, I admit. Shakespeare's heroine was cast ashore by a shipwreck that only she and a few companions (or so it would seem) survived. In the Yale rewrite of "Twelfth Night," we would have to imagine Viola being delivered in some oversized motor vehicle, and outfitted not with a stick of driftwood but with box upon box of personal necessities, including uncountable CDs. Viola arrives on the sands of Illyria with no idea where she is and no one to greet her. In the Yale version she would be received with an almost ludicrous hospitality. She might already have spent a weekend or two in the preceding spring testing out this possible future home in some version of Future Freshman Days. (Called what: Impending Illyria Days?). She might already have tromped around the outskirts of Illyria with pleasant and reassuring companions on any of several preorientation programs or preseason warm-ups. She would certainly have had her ship greeted by teams of grinning upperclassmen who ran out to make sure she didn't have to carry the least splinter of driftwood to her room. She would then be further welcomed by freshman counselors, honored at multiple receptions, and treated to days of formal orientation, in case any questions remained. I speak with humor of Yale's nuclear-powered welcome wagon but I'm happy that it exists. Among other things, it conveys a message it's important for you to learn: though this is indeed a place for the high-powered and overachieving, it's also a place where people look out for each other and take the trouble to be kind. But behind this barrage of hospitality, and behind your air of already seeming completely at home here, I'll wager that what you are at bottom is what Shakespeare showed in Viola: a young person on the edge of a terra incognita, a person crossing to a strange new land and life. What could be more natural at this point than to engage in a kind of orgy of reacculturation, struggling to make this place a well-known, even native, land! But what I want to say to you, as you crawl up the shores of Yale, is not to be so dismissive of the experience of foreignness. You'll find Yale to be quite a homey place, but in some serious sense disorientation, defamiliarization, is the most valuable thing Yale has to offer. Humans are innately curious, which means that we have a positive craving for expanded knowledge and deepened understanding. But this urge is opposed by countervailing drives that are no less deeply human -- not least, our urge to cluster into communities of local consensus, little worlds of shared understanding where questions can't be grasped as questions because some answer has been accepted as self-evident. Education proceeds through the reopening of closed questions, and this requires the breaking of preconceptions and the incorporation of alien points of view. Human creativity has always been strongest where groups with different mental horizons have collided, their interaction enabling a breakthrough that neither side could achieve on its own. John Darnell, who teaches Near Eastern languages and cultures at Yale, found evidence last year of the oldest-known use of a phonetic alphabet, a use 200 or 300 years earlier than any documented before. But quite as interestingly, Darnell's discovery also suggests that the alphabet came into being through the crossing of cultural bounds. His find evokes an image of Egyptian military scribes coming into contact with outlanders, a Semitic people who had come into Egypt from elsewhere in the Middle East. In the exchange that followed, it would appear, the scribes drew on a technology their people knew, the written hieroglyphic, but altered it in order to register the alien names of foreigners, who could then learn this easily-mastered, rough-and-ready writing system and put it to their own uses. We could find a comparable history of cross-cultural collaboration in the birth of the great new technology of this time, the World Wide Web. In an abbreviated version of this story, the computer scientist who originated the notion of packet-switching -- a form of communication that could send chunks of a message through a distributed network rather than passing it in one lump through a dedicated line -- sold the American military on this concept. The military developed this idea by building the ARPANET, whose use was then extended to certain research universities. (Dot edu, in the address your friends will now know you by, was originally not the companion of the famous dot com and dot org but of dot mil: this was the educational component of what was primarily a military system.) This highly specialized creation achieved the potential for a much more general life when a scientist at CERN, the high-energy particle physics facility in Geneva, Switzerland, developed a new adaptation, hypertext markup language, that allowed easy use of this system and freer communication across networks. As this invention was further elaborated by people from yet other origins working for other purposes, the ARPANET built to exchange esoteric government-funded research was transformed into the Internet we know -- a collaborative creation that no single party had seen the possibility of on its own. Having myself come to this strange new place as a freshman some years ago, I know how eager you might be to fit in and catch on. (I am a person who almost missed meals in my first freshman hours because I thought Freshman Commons was the New Haven train station. Orientation has its privileges!) But having been here awhile, I know that the great gift this place extends to you is ready access to the unfamiliar. The unknown, what lies outside your current ken, is the place for discovery and self-enlargement -- that is, for education. What Yale offers you, as a great educational institution, is a million doors out of the prison of your insularity. But let's not pretend that living in the neighborhood of the foreign is an automatic route to education. For every case where the crossing of cultures has produced an alphabet or an Internet, there are a dozen where it has created reciprocal dread, hostility, and a recoil into a tight, narrow version of one's own side. In ways less harmful but not much less stupid, many moderns have learned to venture into the space of the foreign and even pretend to take a little interest in it, all the while -- like the American tourists who rush to find Kentucky Fried Chicken as soon as they land in Beijing -- keeping their insularity studiously intact. For the unfamiliar to become a source of education, it has to be approached with authentic openness. Openness involves removing mental obstacles to what's outside, like prejudice and preconception. But the openness I'm speaking of is not only a matter of passive accessibility. It requires an active reach outside, a willingness to project yourself out into the unfamiliar, to enter into it sufficiently to see the different way things look from its different position. It then requires you to bring a once-alien outlook back to bear on your initial understanding -- so as to highlight the limits of your assumptions, to supplement them with fuller knowledge, or to give a more conscious, tested sense of why you think the things you do. You got into Yale, but to get a Yale education you'll need to practice the arts of self-opening: to learn to tolerate and even cultivate the leaving of known worlds. It occurs to me there may be people in this room who will warmly agree with everything I've said but then go out and defy my teachings with no awareness that they are doing so. To make my message harder to mistake, I will stoop to a few particulars. You've taken the trouble to get into a school that offers nearly 2,000 undergraduate courses, and where virtually every subject can be studied in extraordinary depth. Now, I suppose, some of you will set to work to figure out how much of this rich offering you can succeed in avoiding. My colleagues and I have known students to hope to excuse themselves from entire domains of knowledge with profundities like "I'm not a science person" or "I read a poem once and didn't like it" or "I'm not good at languages" or "I'm just not good with numbers." (To which I reply: You should have told us this before!) Avoiding everything that doesn't comes easy would be a good way to pick your courses if the point of college were to be pleasant, but if you want an education, then you'll need a different approach. Then you'll need to seek out the things you haven't already mastered, to look for new chances and challenges, even to take some risks -- and I certainly hope you will. At Yale your classmates can give you an education quite as powerful as any formal coursework. But again, that depends on how you approach them -- how willing you are to venture into newfound lands. We've all looked at distant parts of the world where people can't figure out how to get along and have felt sadness but also secret smugness, knowing that we would never be guilty of such stupidity. Now it's for you to actually see if you can live together in a better way. You've just come together in a community of strangers. Your rooms, I know, are delightfully spacious, but for all that, you're packed together with a certain density. To make the best of your new state, you're going to need to practice tolerance for people you might initially find strange or annoying, and to figure out how to be less annoying to those you yourself might annoy. But tolerance and courtesy are limited virtues and should be seen as minimal goals. To get an education out of those who surround you, you're going to need to go out to them and enter into their point of view, the more the merrier and the more different from yours the better -- also, to make yourself available as an education for them. Like the travelers I mocked before, you could manage to remain quite insular at Yale if you confine your friendships to human flavors you already know you like. But if you'd come to a place where you could share the company of bright, energetic people from every origin, of every belief, with every known interest, who are right there around you for you to enjoy, how could you want to miss that chance? Unless you were very foolish, you couldn't -- but you have to actively extend yourself to seize this opportunity. Last let me note that there is another provincialism quite as impoverishing as any social or academic one. In our world there are all kinds of people willing to pay tribute to diversity who have no intention of letting difference ever change their minds. "Conviction" is a name for our most deeply held values and beliefs, but conviction can bring limits along with its values, since conviction can breed the certainty that you are right and those so benighted as to disagree with you are wrong -- so wrong that you would scarcely even want to know such people, let alone engage them or listen to them. I trust that you have convictions and I applaud you for them, but I hope you don't come here with the assumption that you already know the final answer to any interesting question and have nothing to learn from the not-like-minded. Learned Hand said of the First Amendment that "it presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any authoritative selection," and this University emphatically shares this belief. In this conception, truth requires searching, an act of open, unforeclosed inquiry, that is best conducted in the midst of plural and competing possibilities, since (as Hand also said) "it is only by cross-lights from varying directions that full illumination can be secured." For the sake of your growing wisdom, instead of insulating yourselves with those who already exactly agree with you, you will need not just to tolerate but to seek the company of those who differ from you, and find out what they actually think. Argument and exchange are the stuff of education; well-guarded unanimity is not. What country, friends, is this? When Viola came ashore and asked that question, a grizzled veteran, a sea captain, was there to fill her in a little. But you know what? She scarcely needed his advice, as you scarcely need mine. The place she landed was an unknown land, but she was plucky and resourceful, and by the end of a short scene she had sized up this new place and set out to get the good of it. I choose her as your emblem because I think no less of you. Bright, energetic, enterprising, inquisitive, who if not you could do this place right? Friends, this is a good country, with much to offer you and no requirement but that you exploit it to the fullest. Come determined to explore new territory with a certain adventurousness and your story will have a happy ending. When we meet here again at the end of the fifth act of your Yale career, you'll have a strengthened grasp of your world and your own powers and will be ready to play an active, constructive part in the life of your times. Confident that you want the very thing I've required of you, I can deliver my exit line. Men and women of the Yale College Class of 2004, you are welcome to these shores. 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