 | Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead told students "seldom has a class caught onto this place with greater ease." |
The following is the text of the Freshman Address delivered by Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead on Oct. 11 in Woolsey Hall.
In a custom observed since time immemorial, the Freshman Assembly is held on the first full day after students arrive at Yale. With its pomp and solemnity, this event serves at least three important ceremonial functions. First, it thanks parents for raising the prodigies who will now be our students and readies them for the hard work of saying goodbye. Second, it marks the official moment of entry of new students into Yale College, as a symmetrical ceremony four years later will mark their exit. Third and most crucially, this ceremony does the work of orientation, conjuring an inspiring vision to guide students in their education and give their life here point.
Funny thing: none of this happened this year! For reasons you may remember, this year's addresses have to take their model from the belated birthday card, genre of greetings that are very sincere but a little late. So with the blush of the delinquent, let me say to the families here assembled, six weeks after it would have been the right time to say it: Welcome to Yale! and to our students, long after you've begun to make yourselves at home, Make yourself right at home!
What does it mean for this ceremony to take place not upon arrival but half a term after the fact? For the families who are able to be present today, the difference is a good one. By a miracle of rescheduling, we've changed what would have been a day of doleful partings into a mass family reunion, the fifth act in some ultimate Shakespearean comedy. I trust that you have found the kid you left here six weeks ago to be basically the same yet mysteriously enhanced: already a little smarter and more mature. (And a little tidier? Perhaps that comes in the second term.) For you, though, my friends in the Class of 2007, the meaning of this rescheduling is far more troubling. For six weeks I have wondered in agony what has it meant for you to be deprived of the guidance the President and I were so superbly equipped to provide. Robbed of your Freshman Assembly, I can only assume you have been like kids given the car without benefit of driver's education: wreaking havoc on yourselves and others, doomed to run amok. In truth you seem to be doing fine -- seldom has a class caught onto this place with greater ease and less fuss; but this fact is to me more troubling still. Could it be that you were able to figure this place out perfectly well without wisdom from the likes of me? The notion would be shocking if it were not so obviously implausible.
Since we're together at last, I will not spare you a few words -- though since I've never addressed a class at this point in its career, you'll have to bear with me as I try to guess what's right to say. I have some sense of what the right message is on the day of arrival. When, after all that preparation and anxious waiting, students finally arrive at college, it's a time of almost miraculous expansion. So many new opportunities solicit your interest and engagement, so many new freedoms are suddenly yours. It's both completely exhilarating and completely daunting, so at that point my message to you would have been: take advantage of this place; plunge in; don't hang back; seize all the chances that now surround you.
But if you obeyed the orders I was not here to give, and you probably have, by now you've likely reached a second phase. You've got to know scores of people the likes of whom you've never met before; you've opened yourself to Yale's slightly overwhelming curricular riches; you've taken up tutoring or giving music lessons in local schools, and joined some team with a bizarrely demanding practice schedule, and tried out for a play or founded a comedy group or juggling troupe, in addition to all those further chances for education that high administrators barely suspect. (I have recently learned of the formidable expertise developing in Bingham in Dance Dance Revolution, not yet an accredited academic program.) This life is all extremely exhilarating; but it's cumulatively pretty exhausting, and you will not be the first person I've met who might be feeling, about now, that this new life is growing seriously untenable -- that it's all too much, there's just too much to do, that your choices have put demands on you that aren't compatible with one another or with any sort of a healthy life.
If you have reached such a pass, I have a message for you: It's going to be all right. You were not wrong to open yourself to the opportunities of this place: that's where education comes from. Now you're going to have to learn to cope with the consequences of all that opportunity, but that's an education too: an education in life-definition and in the arts of choice. Hard though it may be to believe at certain hours, you'll make a manageable version of your life at Yale, like thousands before you who felt the same way. But the moment of consolidation has its own dangers, so as you enter it, I'd offer this word of advice. By all means create a workable life at Yale; but don't make that life too insular or reductive. What you're establishing now should be your base camp -- something to support ongoing exploration, not the limit of your travel or the end of your road.
To be a little more particular: You have now successfully passed through the ordeal of Yale course selection. Faced with all those choices, you've put together (I trust) a schedule that's prudently composed and conformable to all known rules of schedule formation. So far so good! But I worry that the moves you made to master that challenge might harden into thoughtless habits, unconsciously robbing you of opportunities for your mind. When people come to this campus, they think they'll be lost in its physical vastness and complexity, but that never happens. They work out their personal routine, which dictates a personal itinerary, which means that they always go to certain places and never go to others -- which is excellent for the purposes of convenience, but not so great if you wanted to know what all lies around you. You are on the verge of forming your own academic routines, and as you do so, I urge you to recognize and resist the restrictions they embody. There's too much that's interesting to know out there for you to be content always taking certain subjects and never taking others. To get an education, you have to make a point of trying the things you have not yet mastered and exploring the things you don't yet understand. You'll get more good from your program of study if, in choosing your courses, you'll ask not just whether they meet at a comfortable hour and at a convenient distance but how they help build an educated mind.
On another note, the admissions office has searched the four corners of the earth to find interesting contemporaries to be your companions. I'm sure you have not been immune to the excitement of their energy and talent. But all that novelty is exhausting too, and after awhile it's natural to begin to consolidate your personal world -- to run your own admissions process for inclusion in your inner circle. I don't doubt that you'll have great friends at this place, and no one who ever went to Yale will fail to understand that at a school like this, friendship is an essential medium of education. But before you hang out your No Vacancy sign, take care not to build your social world in too restrictive a fashion.
It's very easy to allow some one dimension of our existence -- the background we come from, the subject we study, the party we favor, the sport we play -- to shape our associations without realizing how much it is negating or excluding other possible associations. But the limits of social openness have both a social and a personal cost. History will remember the year you went to college as the year when the United States Supreme Court upheld the legality of affirmative action in college admissions. This policy was upheld on the grounds that it serves to create a convincing openness in the paths to social leadership as well as an enrichment in the experience of education itself. In a powerful dissent well worth your reading, affirmative action is derided as a "classroom aesthetics," a kind of interior decorating scheme masking as a philosophy of education. And it is truer than many like to admit that if the urge to create an inclusive student body were only a matter of adjusting visual appearances, the logic of the court's majority would be seriously eroded. A various student body -- and I have in mind a student body various not just along lines of race or ethnicity but along every conceivable human dimension -- is of educational value just to the extent that people actually teach each other through the play of difference, and that requires real, deep and continual interaction. The final guarantor of such interaction will never be the government or the courts. It is the openness toward others of actual individuals: men and women, you and me, making their choices day by day.
When I ask you to resist homogenizing your world, I have one thing in mind more than any other. Above all, don't limit your associations to people who agree with you. While thinking about this talk I was reflecting on the very different picture we saw when students came to school here three short years ago. In the palmy days of the New Economy, child investors were reported to make killings in the stock market during passing periods in high school, and an enchanted nation faced such agonizing issues as what to do with a massive federal surplus, what would happen when unemployment reached zero, and how quickly other nations would follow down the inevitable path to free market prosperity and Western-style democracy. Well, problems that were temporarily veiled then are back in plain sight now, and today's world poses very different questions. Economically, we live in a time of slow growth but not job growth. How can the engines of prosperity be reignited, and how can the global economy yield the most good for the greatest number with the least attendant social and environmental cost? It's our fate to wake up to almost daily news of bombings throughout the world. How can humans secure themselves against violence, and can they adequately secure themselves without fueling the very hatred they had hoped to quell?
These are damnably difficult questions, but another piece of recent news could make them even harder than they need to be. I read that American political parties are concluding that the old electoral strategy of first playing to the core adherents and true believers, then reaching out to the independent or unpersuaded, might now be passé, and that parties will succeed best by continuing to appeal to the party base. This may be good politics, but I doubt it's good for the quality of thought that will result from politics. Who do we suppose will be able to deal more constructively with the challenges of our time: people who have only ever experienced preaching to the converted, or people who tested their understanding against the countervailing understandings of others?
Though very new here, you have already been on campus for two periods of controversy. When you came for Bulldog Days last April, there was uproar from clashing responses to the Iraq War. This fall you arrived in the middle of a labor dispute. I might have preferred to show Yale in a calm, pastoral light, and I do regret any inconvenience that you suffered. (As for what you really did with those rebate checks, our inspectors are going through your rooms as I speak.) But you know what? Controversy is not an inappropriate activity on a campus; it is or at least it can be the very element of education. Controversy isn't educational when immutable positions batter one another with inflexible aggression. But I question whether things are more educational where there is no argument because people have shut themselves in with the like-minded and shut out the other side, and no one dissents because no one remembers there are questions to be asked.
Your growth could be furthered through controversy of the right sort. It will go to your strength and to the growing wisdom of all if you'll engage with difficult issues and say what you understand of them -- say it in a way that will not just win the applause of those you already agree with but possibly persuade those who don't yet see what you see. But for controversy to be instructive, you'll need to acknowledge the point where your understanding leaves off and open yourself to others' different, even opposite points of view -- and open yourself in the sincere belief that they may have something to teach. Since I became dean I've only heard one line from a student's lips that I found immitigably depressing: "I care so deeply about this issue that I wouldn't even want to know a person who didn't agree with me." Human, all too human, but profoundly anti-educational: since education comes not from hunkering down in well-defended camps of agreement but from facing the challenge of other points of view and being open to hear, in them, that part of the truth one's own point of view has not yet managed to contain.
Men and Women of the Yale College Class of '07, Yale's first excitement may be wearing off, but the best part of your time here lies all before you, not behind. Yale is an educational institution, but it's for you to help make this an educational community: a community whose members test and expand each other's powers of understanding through every interaction all day long. Does that sound like a lot to ask? Sure. But would you be content with less? And who if not you is fit to carry out the task? So finish your tests and papers (you will) and get a little rest, because there's bigger work to be done. Women and Men of the Class of 2007, we rejoice to have you as partners in the work of education. I wish you health, happiness, and magnificent self-enlargement in your years at Yale.
T H I S
Words at Midterm
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