The following is the text of the remarks by Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead at the Freshman Assembly on Sept. 1 in Woolsey Hall.
I have a special message for each seating zone. To those behind me in the choice seats on stage: Mr. President, colorful colleagues, another year begins. Welcome back to our inspiring work.
Turning now to the first balcony and the yet more exalted nosebleed section of this great hall: Parents of our new class, I rejoice with you on this happy day. With your help and support, your young friend has got into one of the great universities in this land. More significant by far, with your loving assistance, this child has grown into the sort of a person who deserves the challenges of this place, a person of shining character and promise. So far so good! You've done your work well. I welcome you to the family of Yale.
Last I turn to this mass of youth who would already look just like Yale students if you weren't so curiously well dressed. What can I say to you? Only that I rejoice in your arrival and exult with you as you start your new life. If I remember right, you had an ordeal ahead at this time last year. You had grades to make, tests to take, the whole anxious task of trying to seem like the outstanding person you hoped we would take you for. Good news: it worked! And now you're here, with nothing to do but enjoy your prize. An almost inconceivable luxury is about to surround you: spacious accommodations no doubt already being turned into designer showcases; almost infinitely rich academic and extra-academic opportunities; and the greatest of luxuries, a selection of the most talented and high-spirited of your contemporaries to stimulate you and be your friends. We will celebrate Yale's 300th birthday this October, but though many cohorts have preceded you, as of this day, Yale is yours. Yale College Class of 2005, enjoy the riches of this place.
That was the easy part of this address; now I face a problem. I'm painfully aware that when officials speak on ceremonious occasions, what in their own minds reads like the generous gift of wisdom can seem to the audience like a blast of sententious wind. Being a literature professor, I know the great prototype of the well-meaning elder giving advice to the college-bound: it's Polonius, the tedious windbag in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But though I would never have chosen that role model, I do want to say something serious about your new venture -- so be prepared.
In the modern world, virtually every country has devised a means for sorting out youth of outstanding promise and sending them on for further training. In the great majority of places, this is a moment of specialization. It's assumed that you have already found the field that will provide the best outlet for your particular powers, and you go to college to master that domain. In a major university in Beijing, where I was two weeks ago, I learned that students not only apply to a major and are admitted to the study of a major when they apply to college but that they then live together with their fellow concentrators, avoiding distraction from the chosen point.
Yale embraces a different philosophy. Yale's version of education combines some measure of specialization with a countervailing breadth, multiple cross-trainings of the developing mind. The ideal of many-sided education appears in our distributional requirements but in a hundred other ways as well: witness Yale's frantic extracurricular scene, which supplements formal academics with many other kinds of training; witness our housing arrangements, designed to ensure that you live together with and learn from people who have nothing in common except their energy and talent. Further, though some of you may think you've found your life mission, we neither require nor expect that our students will already know the line their life will trace. Education is thought of here as a space of discovery. If, in the course of her studies, a student should change her mind about what matters to her and strike out in new direction, we would regard it a sign that education is taking place.
To eyes trained in a scheme like ours, the system that favors single focus and fixed direction will seem imprisoning, rigidifying, the training-ground of the narrow mind. But our system may seem comparably bizarre from a different point of view. Some foreigners see our plan of education as pointlessly indulgent, protracting the freedoms of adolescence when you should be in serious training for worldly careers. Liberal education comes in for criticism from our own culture as well. Two years ago, in the hottest days of the self-proclaimed New Economy, I was assured that no really intelligent college-age person would be found wasting his days in such pursuits when he could be out founding his own corporate empire. In times of economic downturn we're told that liberal education is all very nice but what students really need are marketable skills.
If we continue the practice of liberal education, it is not because we think its merits are beyond discussion. It is because, whatever challenges it is subjected to, this plan continues to show its power to meet deep personal and social needs.
Our version of education has two aims. First, it's our belief that in the future it will be important for you not just to get a decent job but also to lead a decent life, and we think that college should help toward both goals, not the first alone. It is a sad fact but true that people your age learn things relatively easily that can later be mastered only with great pain, and that the gifts we develop in our youth become permanent powers of the mature self. Psychologists tell us that the human self begins to consolidate itself (I assume this is a euphemism for harden) in the early and mid-20s, and that the more the potentialities of personality that have been activated by that point, the richer the selfhood that can be pulled together. If this is true, then it matters how vigorously and variously you exercise your powers, and it also matters what a school asks of you. When we encourage you to broaden your knowledge, act out your many talents, and expand the range of your human acquaintance and social sympathies, it's so that you can bring a more flexible, more capable self into the world.
Though we aren't narrowly fixed on it, we aren't uninterested in the question of your future careers. But here too it's our belief that a broad, exploratory education gives a superior preparation to one with a tight vocational aim. The crucial point here is that the world is characterized more and more by dynamism, instability and chronic and rapid change. If you wish to prepare for a life in such a world, then you should be getting ready to act in a world you can't foresee, amid opportunities and challenges that can't be even guessed when the preparation is made.
For an experiment, think back with me. I was born in 1947. What would a person starting out in 1947 have known of the coming world? At that point there was still uncertainty about whether the Great Depression would resume now that the Great War was over. Who foresaw that the history of the next 20 years would instead be one of an unexampled growth and unprecedentedly widespread prosperity? And if they had known that much, who would have known that this rising tide would be accompanied by powerful assaults on systems of official discrimination? A segregationist candidate made a strong showing in the presidential election of 1948; who would then have predicted the Brown v. Board of Education decision handed down in 1954, or the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, or the '60s Civil Rights movement -- the great historical event of my youth -- that delegitimated discrimination first on racial grounds, then also on grounds of gender? These things changed American life so profoundly that a person with a 1947 education would have been at complete loss in the world of my graduation year -- the year Yale College announced that it would open its doors to women.
A significant number of you were born in 1983. What would a person at that time have seen ahead? American foreign policy was still largely fixed on Cold War enemies and the proxy wars the Cold War spawned. In 1983 who saw the end of Communist control of Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the birth of a new world order organized around not great power oppositions but transnational economic interdependences? In 1983 the computer literate at Yale did their work on the Yale mainframe. Who foresaw the personal computer, the then-uninvented Internet, and all the changes they have brought to global and personal life?
My point is simple. You're going to have a career after Yale. It's not for us to say what you'll do then; our only wish is that you give a thoughtful, constructive life to your times in any of the thousand forms in which such lives are needed. If we were to train you in the skills of some existing career, we would not only have severely delimited your future competence. In a world so full of changes, we might well have made you an anachronism, a well-trained practitioner of some vanished art. Our gamble is that we can best prepare you by developing deep skills that are specific to no work but of use in any work, which you can deploy in a versatile way on the changing facts of your world. What might these include? Such breadth of knowledge that whatever fact or problem you encounter, you'll be able to set it within a broader understanding; the ability to pay the kind of attention and apply the kind of analytical pressure that bring discoveries to light; the capacity to express your thoughts clearly and advance them with force; being imaginative and taking the initiative, and so creating a possibility where none was evident before; not least, being aware of yourself as a member of a community and using your powers for the common good.
If this sounds platitudinous, let me give an example. The first person from China to graduate from an American university was a Yalie: Yung Wing, of the Yale College Class of 1854. When he came here, Yung Wing had an offer to pay his full fare if he would agree to return to China as a missionary. He declined, on the grounds that he did not want his life's work delimited for him in advance. After he graduated, he returned to China, where he worked rather aimlessly as a translator, then as a clerk in a tea house, when -- in recognition of his verbal powers (he had been a star student of expository writing at Yale) -- he was asked to write an appeal for foreign aid after a major flood. This plus his entrepreneurial ventures getting tea out of rebel-held areas won him notice as a clever man. In consequence, Yung Wing was asked to advise the Chinese government on how to close the knowledge gap in the field of technology. He at this point returned to the United States (stopping at his 10th Yale reunion en route) to buy machine tools for China, equipment that, on Yung Wing's advice, could manufacture not just specific needs but the machinery to meet many further needs -- steamboats, for instance, in addition to rifles. Having established a base for technological education in China, he pioneered educational exchanges between the United States and China, and was then asked -- in an early human rights initiative -- to document abuses of Chinese migrant laborers in the New World, in a report that ended the slave-like trade in coolie labor with Peru. Later still, he drew up plans for a national bank.
Now I ask: How was he able to participate so constructively in so many different domains? Not by having been trained in a specialized way for any of them. He could move from one newly-arising situation to another and play a creative role in each because he was smart and plucky and had a highly various, highly mobile set of skills--just like you, when we get done with you!
You now know what we have in mind for you. But the main thing I need to tell you is, it takes you to make this happen. So let me beg you to use this place in the way that will give you the good of it. Polonius-like at last, let me offer some bits of advice. First, don't be passive. An anonymous sage has written that "Life is not a spectator sport" and still less is Yale: this place gives its rewards to those who take the initiative, those who seek out contacts and opportunities. Being a little forward won't be held against you here; being a little bashful is a way to rob yourself of interesting chances. Second, I hope you'll be venturesome in this new life. To build the broadly capable future, you need to open yourself up, to try new things, even things --horrors! -- at which you may not excel. If you stick to the safety of the things you're already good at, you'll develop powers, but not the range of powers that might be yours. I commend to you this motto from "Moby Dick": "I try all things; I achieve what I can."
In the same vein, you need the courage to take on things that may be hard for you. Every one of you who plays a sport or a musical instrument knows that discipline is the means to increased power, the price we pay to build a knack into a high-performing capacity. Since you've already learned so much the hard way, might I hope that you'll be a little scornful of the easy way -- and not, for instance, shun whole domains of knowledge because they feel like work? (For shame!) Finally, I urge you to have some ambitions of your own for your education and not to forfeit the task to us. You will not have lived up to our expectations if you merely meet our requirements. What we want of you is that you make some interesting personal use of this place: use Yale to build a distinctive self and life.
You have heard I'm sure of an enterprise zone -- a place where governments give tax breaks to encourage business to settle. In brooding on your coming, I thought to take this phrase in its radical sense. In its full meaning, an enterprise is a bold or momentous undertaking, and an enterprising person is someone energetic, high-spirited and willing to run risks for the sake of high rewards. You stand on the brink of a new life; it's yours to decide what to make of it. If you take my words seriously, you will make Yale College your personal enterprise zone: a place of energetic activity and spirited attempt. Men and women of the Class of 2005, I welcome you to this undertaking, which will pay off in proportion as you approach it boldly. This place is yours now. Come get the good of it.
1. Let me quote his reasoning since his words are little known: "I wanted the utmost freedom of action to avail myself of every opportunity to do the greatest good in China. If necessary, I might be obliged to create new conditions, if I found old ones were unfavorable to any plan I might have to promote her highest welfare." Yung Wing, "My Life in China and America" (New York 1909).
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