The following is the test of the Freshman Address presented by Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead on Aug. 31.
Mr. President, colleagues, families and friends, please join me in welcoming the Yale College Class of 2000. Men and women of the Class of 2000, I rejoice to greet you, and to administer the mystic gestures that admit you to citizenship in Yale College. I'm told that in some places this occasion is used to inspire new recruits with the all- but-incapacitating rigor of the ordeal that lies ahead. "Look to the right; look to the left," the designated authoritarian is supposed to say; "the program you're entering is so strenuous that only one of every two of you will make it through alive." I've always wanted to try that line, but honesty compels me to admit that Yale expects for you to succeed here, not to fail. You'll find plenty of rigor, but you've shown yourselves to be people who delight in the demanding and in your power to meet it. So at the risk of disappointing the masochists among you, I can only say at your initiation: Look to the left; look to the right. You are now in the company of talented people. Rejoice in one another's gifts and in the opportunities you'll seize together. I know that you will flourish.
There is a subject that I seem doomed to take up with you, much though I would like to avoid it. I refer to the astonishing date of your expected graduation. The impending arrival of the 21st century has already become such a cliche that one reason to look forward to it is that people will stop exhorting us toward it: no longer will we be asked to seek leadership for the 21st century, or telecommunications for the 21st century, or vinyl siding for the 21st century, or other nostrums that come clothed in this appeal. Still, even such a cliche-averse person as myself has to admit that the Class of 2000 has a certain ring to it. Chance facts -- the year you happened to be born --and unremarkable procedures -- our habit of designating classes by the year of their expected completion -- have joined to lift your class into the category of the extraordinary. 1996 is just another four-digit number; 2000 is emphatically not.
Let's recall why this is so. First, 2000 partakes of that sense of occult significance that has always attached to numbers and their mysterious regularities. I remember in my distant childhood sitting in the hot back seat of my family's car during endless drives toward distant vacations, then becoming riveted by the discovery that the odometer was at some mileage like 59,998.4, or 79,999.2. Boredom turned at once to fascination: we were on the verge of a mega- turnover! In a few short minutes I would get to watch five digits turn simultaneously and one number sign fill five adjacent columns! Now you know how I spent my youth. The year you graduate will possess this potent aura of the mathematical occult, its three consecutive zeroes promising not another year but some huge new beginning, its weird and insistent repetitions -- 0, 0, 0 -- seeming the work of no mere chance or mundane arithmetic but of a hidden providential hand.
Compounding this effect, the year 2000 will also put a new digit in the thousand column, and so will activate profound cultural expectations attached to the idea of the millennium. In a religious tradition going back 2,000 years -- Revelations 20 is its major biblical articulation, though the idea has antecedents in ancient Zoroastrianism -- the millennium is the time when this world, seemingly so final, will be abolished, replaced by a world freed from Satan's power where redeemed souls will reign with the messiah for a thousand years. Belief in the millennum has a particularly intense tradition in this country. When Father William Miller calculated that the world would end between March 1843 and March 1844, one historian tells us, "well over fifty thousand people in the United States became convinced that time would run out in 1844, while a million or more of their fellows were skeptically expectant." So intense were the expectations of Miller's followers that some donned glory robes and gathered on high places to be ready for their ascent into heaven, and others refused to plant or harvest crops in 1844, since this world would soon be no more. Among their other accomplishments, graduates of your college have made major contributions to American millennarian history. Timothy Dwight, now a residential college but once a Yale President, made millennial calculations in his spare time. John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of 19th-century America's most elegant utopian community, came to his vision of millennial perfectionism while a student at Yale. Jonathan Spence has found that a Yale College graduate, the missionary Edward Stevens, gave Hong Xiuquan the religious materials that sparked his millenarian and messianic visions, visions that fueled the Taiping Rebellion in mid-19th-century China.
I have no doubt that millennial expectation will break out with increasing virulence in even the most secular parts of our culture as we approach the year 2000, unleashing waves of hope, dread, and strange behavior. This anticipation is what seems to mark you, vaguely uncanny Class of 2000, with an air of special promise or special destiny. I know this feeling; I share it to some extent; but I doubt that the coming calendar shift will do all that we expect. When I watched the odometer in my overheated youth, I would often forget and look away when the zeroes all came up, but when, by practicing a strict attentiveness, I would see the numbers actually shift, would catch the magic moment in the very act of occurring, I would learn that nothing very thrilling attended this change -- that mile 50,000 proved one more number in a rising numerical sequence, not a transcendence of that sequence. Father Miller's followers got ready for the end of the world, and when it failed to happen they recalculated the date and got ready again, but when the millennial moment came and passed it had not brought the redeemed new order. "Still in the cold world," one Millerite wrote with awful pathos the day after the appointed change. Though I may be proved wrong, I am expecting the year 2000 to prove a thumping anticlimax -- a year pretty much like any other. So while I'm tempted to elate you with the rhetoric of your special promise, it seems more prudent to guess that when you leave here it will be to enter not a brave new world but a new phase of our same old world: a world just as constricting and just as rich in possibility, just as resistant and just as susceptible to human creativity, as the one we now know.
As a wise counsellor looking out for your future, then, I want to advise you: do plant your fields; do harvest your crops; enjoy your millennial associations, but don't be taken in by them. But since none of us will escape the force of these expectations, I propose this revision of my counsel. The approach of the millennium has always inspired an urgent desire to use the short interval that remains to get ready, to be prepared. My pre-millennial counsel to you is: don't expect to be done with this world anytime soon; but do keep alive the sense that you are headed toward a critical future; and use this sense to help make your Yale years a serious season of preparation. What are you going to be after college? What are you going to want to do in the world for which your time here could help equip you? Please do not mistake me to be asking what future job you're heading for -- a rude question on this occasion and by no means a sufficient guide to how your education should be shaped. In a world so fraught with transformation as ours, you will need the skills to seize the multiple, continually emerging and currently unforeseeable, opportunities that a changing world will put before you: those who prepare too narrowly now are likely to find themselves prepared, in time, for a career that no longer exists. In any case, I trust that even the most job-ocentric of you will want to have a life, in which case you'll want to be prepared for other things in addition to your career.
I've asked myself what would be a comprehensive enough name for the preparation you could seek here and my summer reading has supplied an answer. In Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey the hero is called with magnificent iteration "resourceful Odysseus." When I ask myself what will you need to be, in order to be continuingly effective in a changing world, I light with pleasure on this word "resourceful." It carries at least these meanings: 1. capable of generating sources of interest and action from within; 2. mentally well-furnished, equipped with knowledge won from wide experience, and able to use stored understandings to meet new situations; 3. "capable of devising ways and means" -- the good dictionary definition -- one who embraces situations as challenges to his or her ingenuity, not immutable dooms, an active contriver of ways to avert the worst and to find opportunities where none are apparent.
Isn't this what you would wish to become -- Resourceful ... add your own name? I can hardly believe that you want to be the opposite of resourceful: inert, inept, helpless, clueless. And if you agree that you'd like to be resourceful eventually, wouldn't this be the time to begin building your resources? You could be doing so every day you're here if you seek all occasions to multiply and fortify your powers -- and if you resist all temptations to incomplete development.
In particular, let me beg you not to let your addiction to being good at things confine you to the things you're already good at -- a sure route to self-limitation. I have heard of students who, having simulated daunting skills at certain subjects while applying here, upon arrival suddenly decide that they have all along been afflicted with a profound inability in that area, and so should be excused from further contact. But the joys of exemption would be less appealing to you if you took yourself seriously as a candidate for resourcefulness. You live at a time when the origin of the universe is becoming available for preciser dating and viewing; when new information technologies annually transform the nature of information; when genetic processes wholly mysterious a short while ago have become so well understood that genetic alteration is a growing possibility. In face of such developments, whether you "like" science hardly seems the right question. Would you really be willing to have these dimensions of reality remain forever opaque to you when they could lie open to your powers of mind? On the other hand, who will best help us think through the moral quandaries that will be raised by genetic engineering: someone trained only in science, or one who has also had some exercise in ethical reflection? Living as you will in a global society, where events at any one point are determined by multiple developments in regions spatially remote, will you really be competent to your world if you don't learn multiple languages -- and also the cultural histories that give world-integrating forces their very different local spins? And as we speak of a global future let's not pretend that nearer problems now hold no further interest. 1996 is the 100th annversary of the Supreme Court decision that legitimated racial segregation in American schools. Our country has again grown tired of caring about problems of inequality and social division, but it's unlikely that irritable dismissal of these problems will rid us of their consequences. We must hope that some of you will craft new approaches to such issues that can achieve a new social persuasiveness. But if you're going to have good ideas about these problems later, wouldn't it help to start thinking about them now?
I don't intend to list every power that you could develop. I only want to remind you that your enablement, the richer or thinner development of your powers, is at stake in what you choose to do here. Your new home is endowed with magnificent resources to support the work of self-development -- massive collections; a distinguished faculty; lively and talented classmates best of all. But living in proximity to resources can't be expected to make you resourceful. For that you'll need to engage the opportunities that surround you: Yale will only build your strengths to the extent that you exercise yourself upon its facilities.
Women and men of Yale's newest class, we won't all meet together again until the next time you gather en masse on this spot, at your graduation. By then it will be 2000, which may or may not prove a year of wonders. But we'll have wonders enough to celebrate if you take my advice. Engage yourself in the life of this place, seize all occasions to test out your powers, and on that great day I'll be able to say: Look to the left; look to the right; admire with me this company of resourceful people. I might confer an even better Homeric epithet upon you. Robert Fitzgerald, a freer translator than Lattimore and a greater poet, has Homer call Odysseus "that man skilled in all ways of contending." Men and women skilled in all ways of contending: that could be you! And will be, if you use this place in the right spirit.