What an astonishing coincidence! My friends and I have set out for a stroll, and who should we run into but the Yale College class of 2001! By yet more amazing chance, we had decided to try out our academic casualwear, and you too have gone in for an elegant formality! What could this massive fashion statement mean? We have put on non-customary outfits to mark an extra-ordinary occasion: the start of a great new life. Think of it. You are released forever from the stressful and absorbing work of getting into college. No more standardized testing for you, no more essays requiring you to explain, with becoming modesty, why you are the most impressive person you've ever known. More seriously, you are crossing the threshold into a space of wildly enriched possibility, a world where opportunities for discovery and self-discovery will assault you at every turn. And since you have reached the age of reason, the restrictions needful for the immature will now be very largely suspended, so that you will confront these opportunities with expanded freedom and responsibility. On this occasion, when I name the new school you have come to, I mean to indicate the new chances and powers you've come for. You will now understand me when I say (when I say it it's official, so prepare yourself for a life-altering pronouncement): Men and women of the class of 2001, welcome to Yale College.
2001 is a resonant number here even without its futuristic associations. Yale College having been founded in 1701, you have the distinction of being Yale's tercentennial class, and we will celebrate Yale's 300th birthday together with your graduation. This fact could remind you that in entering Yale you are stepping into a long-running history. When the personal computer was born, Yale was already 280 years old. When electric power was first commercially available and telephone networks first established, Yale was already nearly 180. The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation are nearer to the present than they are to Yale's beginning. To go back to the great early landmark of the American women's movement, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, is to cross just half the distance between 1997 and 1701. Among more venerable rivals, Yale is older than the American nation and modern democratic government; older than the industrial revolution; older than modern capitalism, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" having appeared so recently as 1776.
What you are coming into has been going on for a long time. But when people come here as students, whoever Yale may have belonged to before, it becomes their place -- theirs to enjoy and theirs to help create. I wonder if you have any idea how much Yale is about to be in your power. Every year when we admit a class we put this place at risk. The joyous creativity of students here, their high-spirited pursuit of excellence in a thousand forms of work and play, helps make the supremely interesting world that Yale-lovers love. But what if some year Yale fell into the hands of dullards and lethargiacs? This whole place could go dead. In the discussion classes that are so common here each student has the power to help co-create a deepening group awareness, to join the inquiry and lead it to unexpected turns. If some year students fell into docility or torpor, just wanted to be told the answer and go back to bed, there would be a stiff price for us: the whole activity of understanding would have been diminished. This is now your place, and it is now for you to give it life and realize its promise. My first message to you was a joyful welcome, but I follow it with a stern command: Now get to work; make this place happen.
But what is it that happens here? Let me approach an answer by going back in history. In the 17th century New England was settled by religious dissidents whose brand of Protestantism attached crucial importance to the idea of a learned clergy. For this reason, these immigrants had already established a college in New England (Harvard; you may have heard of it) within six years of their settlement at Boston. By 1700, colonists who had pushed on from Massachusetts to Connecticut had formed the idea of founding a college of their own, to save the expense and difficulty of travel to then-distant Cambridge but also to rescue education from the spiritual morass Harvard was thought to have descended into, that school being judged to have become a scene of "riot and pride, profuseness and prodigality" and creeping open-mindedness on religious issues.
The early history of this new college is a record of fragile survival among almost unimaginable vicissitudes. I have known day care centers that were institutionally much more formidably established than Yale in its first 30 years. Were time not short I would tell you how the Collegiate School of Connecticut (as it was first called) met in the home of a teacher with another full-time job as pastor, in a settlement so remote that the 13 students threatened not to stay; how, having lost its first rector, this school limped along without a leader for more than a decade; how in this time dissension among Yale's sponsors became so aggravated that its trustees allowed its minuscule operation to break up into three separate fragments, one meeting in Wethersfield, one in New Haven, and one in Saybrook; how, once it was decided to regather the school in New Haven, the custodian of the Saybrook operation refused to send along the school's only asset, a library, which then had to be seized by sheriffs and forcibly transported.
The school so founded was a place for training and the transmission of knowledge, with both governed by a strong belief in the rightness of an established order. The earliest Yale was organized to prepare young men for relatively fixed social roles in a fixed social hierarchy. What the founders called "perpetuating the Christian Protestant Religion, by a succession of Learned and Orthodox men" -- replicating the congregational ministry, the role of highest professional status and spiritual authority in this culture -- was at the center of this school's mission, though Yale did open its sights more broadly. (An early document speaks of the intention to found a school "wherein Youth ... may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.") Yale further showed its loyalty to a fixed order through the custom (preserved through the 1760s) of "ranking" its student body, that is, compelling them to sit in assigned places mirroring the hierarchical order of their parent's social stations.
This oldest Yale was hardly interested in free thinking. It meant to teach what was true and right to know (note that Yale's founders use "Learned" and "Orthodox" as parallel adjectives), and it mandated respect for authority through a thousand daily practices. It will interest you to learn that when your 18th-century predecessors entered Yale, they wrote out a copy of the college regulations as a sign of their acceptance. In 1741 the Yale College faculty voted that students who called the President or faculty members Hypocrites should be punished on the first offense by public confession, and on the second by expulsion. My favorite ancient regulationn suggests a fearvirtually of undergraduate speech itself, ruling that "All students shall be slow to speak and avoid ... profane swearing, lying, needless asseverations, foolish garrulings, chidings, strifes, railings, gesting, uncomely noise, spreading ill rumor, divulging secrets, and all manner of troublesome and offensive behavior."
I call up this distant original to help mark some features of this place today. Let me note some striking contrasts. Modern Yale is not very interested in your ascribed or inherited attributes. We seek and will continue to seek students of ability from every social origin; but wherever you come from, please do not expect others to be unduly impressed by that fact. Who you are at Yale will be a function of what you make of yourself here, not who you or your family were back home. Second, contemporary Yale is and long has been a secular institution, a place that gives equal welcome to all sincere convictions and enforces no one belief. So far from aiming at the transmission of orthodoxy, this is now a place of the open question, a place that exists for exploration and the testing of received ideas. Third, and just for this reason, Yale now not only tolerates but actively requires your speech, putting up even with your needless assevertions and foolish garrulings to create a space for your fresh thinking and sincere inquiring.
So different is this school from what its founders had in mind that they would probably recoil from it in horror. But if they could master their outrage and dismay, they might recognize a deeper continuity; for in a broad interpretation of the phrase we are still in the business of "fitting youth for Publick employment in Church and Civil State." Yale still seeks students with the promise to be social leaders -- by which we mean not just the people who will monopolize the prestige, make the big money, and boss people around, but men and women who in every activity, in every community, will bring some large measure of imagination, dynamism and thoughtfulness to the collective life.
Yale is here to help "fit" you for "publick employment" in this expansive sense; but let me pause a little over this interesting word "fit." In one of its meanings "fit" describes the extent to which one thing approximates the size and shape of another, and the process by which it is made to conform to that size and shape. Those nice clothes fit you; if they didn't, you went into the fitting room to have them fitted. I can't accept the idea that you have come here to be fitted in this sense. I hope you will not leave here unfit, but it would be quite uninspiring to think that you had come here to be snipped at and restitched, sawed, planed, and sanded, the more smoothly to slip into the existing array of worldly careers. You will have a job, no doubt you will even excel at it, but your life will require more of you than being securely employed: will require you to rise to the now-unforeseeable challenges and to grasp the as-yet-unimaginable opportunities that your world will confront you with. In her new book on the Declaration of Independence Pauline Maier cites Thomas Jefferson writing late in life to John Adams: "It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of colonial subservience, and of riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it." Who can say what crises or chances you'll be the one to face? But in whatever history awaits you, you will want to be able to be an actor, someone who helps face the problems and contrive the solutions. This is what makes me think that if Yale's work is the work of fitting, it must be fitting in another sense. "Fitting" also means "to put in a condition of readiness," and "fit" means strong, ready, able to bring one's powers to bear because those powers have been well trained.
As you enter it, I urge you to think of Yale as a giant fitness center in this sense of the word. What you can do here is to build your strengths: the stored knowledge, the powers of analysis and articulation, the disciplined creativity, the habits of communal involvement that will let you be effective in your world. You should think of Yale's multitudinous resources and activities as the exercise apparatus that could make you fit. Maybe you've seen those machines with signs affixed saying how they are to be used and which muscles they build. To get the good of them, you should compose such signs for the resources now around you. Do so and you'll see each of your potential courses in terms of the corner of reality it could open up for you and the powers of analysis it could develop; a much better ground for choosing classes than whether they have an allegedly cool teacher or meet at a convenient hour. Heed my advice and you won't approach your new classmates by just seeking out the compatible and shunning the annoying. You'll understand each of them, exactly to the extent that they are not like you, as embodying an aspect of experience previously closed to you, a knowledge their friendship could open up. Your residential college and your new city could be just your new backdrop, a place for you to live in. But if you looked at them as strength-builders you'd see them as places to exercise your powers of citizenship, the skills of living together so as to improve each private lot. The debates that will enliven this campus could give you the chance to air preprogrammed attitudes; or they could be your chance to enter into hard issues and fathom their complexities, the better to work out solutions not now in sight.
Women and men of the Class of 2001: I have no trouble imagining that when you go forth from here as Yale's 300th class, you will be magnificently capable, ready for anything. This place opens itself to you to assist you toward this goal. But please remember the oldest lesson of fitness centers: you don't get their benefit by taking out a membership and paying the dues. You have to work out there, to exert yourself with strenuous energy: this place will build your strengths just in the measure that you engage it with your full powers. Mark Twain said that he never recognized an opportunity until it has ceased to be one, but this need not be your fate. Enter into this place, exercise yourself freely and vigorously, engage its challenges with your most generous energy, and you'll be fit enough for what lies beyond. If you don't, I'll have a fit.