The following is the text of the address that Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead presented to the members of the Class of 2002 and their families on Aug. 29 in Woolsey Hall.
Mr. President, colleagues, parents, suspiciously well-dressed men and women sitting here before me: I am concerned because we have detected a defect in your college entrance. Here you are, already very successfully impersonating Yale students, indeed already acting as if you own the place. But I know you know, deep down, that you have failed to have the experience of officially entering Yale. You were admitted here, a fairly official act, but college was then still far ahead of you. All summer you have received our mailings, but as it drew nearer Yale was still at a distance. You have now arrived on campus, but you surely have not mistaken the combination summer camp, schmooze marathon, recruitment drive, and low-grade furniture mart you have seen so far for the real Yale. Soon classes will have started, but then you'll be too busy to watch for the moment of your official debut. So it is that the exact moment of your entry into Yale will at first seem to lie before you, then somehow already behind you, without having ever actually taken place.
If this has caused you worry, I hasten to bring relief. The purpose of this gathering is to mark some moment as the exact time when you became students of Yale College. Let's say that time is now. Men and Women of the Class of 2002, welcome to Yale College.
Your time here, which will include both the millennium and Yale's 300th birthday, should be exciting enough. But excitement sometimes brings anxiety in its train; and it occurs to me that, under your show of composure, you may have come with hidden apprehensions. I want to speak to these apprehensions, and having already lifted one massive burden from your minds, I will now direct my therapeutic powers to another.
In my current position, I have been approached by Yale graduates 10, 20, 30, even 50 years out who have wanted to confess to the Dean some undetected college sin that has gnawed at them for years. (I'm not making this up.) Though there is some variety in the list of hoarded iniquities, by far the most frequent confession I receive is this: "I wanted to tell you that I have always believed that I was admitted to Yale by mistake." "I, I alone among my Yale classmates, was there as a fraud," a more elaborate version runs; "while every one of my contemporaries was obviously qualified, I alone was secretly dubious." Varying specifics can then be added to the main body of this confession, as for instance: "I knew I was an impostor because I was really not the supernaturally gifted being my application essay had described." Further variants are then produced by taking any distinctive feature of oneself and construing it as a deficiency. "I probably just got in because I came from the area," I have heard; but also: "I probably just got in because I came from a remote area." Or again: "I went to a school with a lot of advantages, and I was probably admitted on the strength of those advantages, not my own attributes"; but also: "I went to a school with no advantages; I could never have been the equal of those people who went to really good schools"; "I was just an athlete"; "I was just an intellectual"; "I was just well-connected"; "they took me to have an outsider": such confessions have taught me that the one talent humans share is the talent for feeling insufficient, then believing their insufficiency is their unique possession.
Yale College Class of 2002, you look immensely self-assured. But my experience teaches that, 20 years from now, some future dean may be receiving confessions of this sort from any number of you. So if there are any present who share this fantasy in any form or to any extent, I bring you a message on the highest authority. If you have felt the slightest doubt about your presence here, I want to say to you: (1) I am appalled at your lack of originality. The real secret about this shameful secret is that it's an overwhelmingly common experience, as you'd learn if you were a little more candid with one another. (2) What low opinion do you have of your university, what level of incompetence do you attribute to us, that we would admit 1,300 students each by a separate act of mistake? As for the truth-inflation in your personal statement, rest assured: we had suspected it already. (3) You are in fact the very person we wanted to come here, the one we chose in place of many others. But further (4): Yale doesn't want students who are acceptable in the sense of barely clearing some fixed bar or minimally meeting some fixed criterion. We seek students endowed with the whole range of human gifts who share the drive to develop their gifts to the fullest extent, for their own pleasure and for the good of others; and we count on our students not just to be adequate to the demands of this place but to enrich its life, to help make it happen. When I welcome you to the Yale community, I mean that Yale welcomes the talents and energies you bring here, confident they will help you get the good of this place and enrich its collective life.
If you are nervous on entering Yale, please remember that the strength of anxiety is no proof of its accuracy as a diviner of future truth. To worry is just human: Those of you interested in artificial intelligence will know you have simulated the human mind when you can make machines capable of sickening themselves with worry for no discernible cause. Anxiety arises especially in transitions to new situations -- and you are now making one of the great threshold crossings life has in store: a crossing not just into college but into the freedoms of full adulthood. So what follows if you are occasionally daunted? That you should have stayed home? That you should go back to high school? While I would think you truly peculiar if you could enter Yale with absolutely no apprehension, I can't believe that you have no taste for a challenge. Anxiety is the negative experience of the mental energy released by unfamiliar situations; in other words, anxiety is the experience in negative form of the same energy that is positively experienced as excitement. That said, it cannot be my mission to wish to cure or relieve you of all disquiet. My mission is to urge you to embrace the nervous energy unleashed by a new beginning and convert it to positive form: the form that will make you seek, not flee, the challenge of your new life.
With this for a prelude, let me coach you in some right and wrong ways to worry. There are probably people in this room who have felt intermittent concern about whether they will do well at Yale. I assure you, we want and we expect you to succeed here. But what do you want me to tell you: that nothing will be a struggle? That as a kindness to you, we have been careful to admit only people who are your certifiable inferiors? Discovering new powers through the exercise of your strengths in the company of talented people will be the joy of your new life, if you remember not to regard it as an intimidation.
While failure is the obvious thing to fear, the reality is that you have far more to fear from your addiction to success. The desire to do well is made by combining authentic love of excellence with the desire to be thought well of by others -- an alloy far inferior in value. I worry that your desire to be thought a success might tempt you to try only those things at Yale at which you are already confident of succeeding: a recipe, if not exactly for failure, then certainly for a very limited success. You are coming up to a moment when everything you have ever studied can be engaged at a more challenging and more interesting level and where a hundred things you never had the chance to study will be clamoring for your attention. If you approach this as a chance to do everything you're agreed to be good at and skip everything at which you might possibly be (as we now say) "challenged," the advantages to your record -- easily exaggerated -- will be hugely outweighed by the cost to your education. Are you confident there is any subject you'll be content to be ignorant of for the rest of your life? I promise you that no one will say of you when you are 40: "He is strangely ignorant, but I hear he got good grades at Yale."
I would make the same plea about your new social environment. It's scary to enter a world of strangers, and I don't suppose that we ever fully overcome the extraordinarily primitive reactions this state touches off: dread of exposure to unknown and possibly hostile glances, the deep urge to build some little personal world to shield us from threatening anonymity. As a once-shy person, I will never underestimate the power of these forces. But just for that reason, I implore you not to let anxiety turn your social life into a social self-enclosure. At a school like this, it is not a platitude to say that your classmates will be among your great teachers. We bring together intelligent and articulate people from different places, with different interests, who know different things and see things in different lights, so that each of you will have access, all day long, to a multiform presentation of what lies outside your current understanding. In consequence, at Yale, the normal processes of daily life will be perpetually subjecting your ways of thinking to other ways, and will give you the continual chance to learn the limits of what you know, to incorporate from others what you find lacking in yourself, and to win a deeper grasp of what you do know and how you know it. Reducing the stress of social encounter in a place like this is not the good thing it might seem. To the extent that you shut yourself in from the whole community, you will deprive yourself of the testing and enrichment that others could have given you--and deprive them of the education you could have given them in return.
Now let me say what is really on my mind. I have known students, upon arriving at Yale, to have worried about the most astonishing range of things, from the relatively humdrum phobias (will the clothes that looked great at home look weird here?) to worries that are more specialized but still not radically strange (will I die if it snows?) to ones that have given me new admiration for the inventive powers of the human mind. (A student from Texas confessed to me that before he got to Yale, he had the fear that all people in the East were very tall.) I can sympathize with every one -- almost -- of these anxieties. But I have rarely met a student who thought to worry about the one thing that would strike me as really worth worrying about at this point in your career: coming up with some answer to the questions, What is an education and how am I to get one?
I'll tell you what I know. Your education is not only the courses you enroll in, though they form a part of it. Your education is the ongoing process, fed in a hundred ways and never to be completed, by which you win the ability to understand the world in its multitudinous dimensions and to act in the world in a reflective, constructive way. My thinking on this matter has been haunted by a line I found in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams. Adams and Jefferson were the central figures in the drafting and enacting of the American Declaration of Independence; by an uncanny coincidence, they also both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, July 4, 1826. In the winter of their last year, Jefferson wrote Adams this summary of their early careers: "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." When we were young, Jefferson declares, we saw nothing around us but a stultifying world whose limitations seemed inescapable. But great changes did await us, and when history brought unforeseen possibilities toward us, we, who had been witnesses or spectators of a dull history, became instead historical actors, performers of the labors and averters of the dangers through which a new nation was created. How were they able to exert these powers? Not through raw talent alone. Jefferson could draft the Declaration in 1776 because he had mastered a compelling prose style at an earlier age and because he had read as a student -- no doubt on a day when it seemed mere homework -- the Declaration of Rights of 1689, which supplied the outline for his Declaration. In other words, he could perform the work of civic creativity at a later moment because he had done the work of education at an earlier moment -- without having the slightest idea how it might serve him later on.
The world you have known has been strangely immune to the crises that have dominated other parts of this century. But I have no doubt that you will live to face realities more challenging than high consumer confidence and low unemployment. Not for me to guess what the dramas of your time will be. But whatever they are, to face them we will need people who can help seize the opportunity and avert the danger. The people who will be able to act imaginatively and effectively then will be people who funded their minds well now -- which leads me back to you.
We didn't accept you because you got good grades and racked up long lists of accomplishments in high school; nor have we brought you here to perform those feats again. We picked you because we judged you to have the aptitude to lead a thoughtful and constructive life; and we brought you here to help you prepare your powers. But Yale can only do so much. We can offer you opportunities, and we can set minimum requirements for your use of them, but it falls to you to make an education of your time here. You will advance on this goal if you seek out every new domain of knowledge and every challenge that can be posed to your achieved understanding -- if you stay, that is, a little adventurous.
Women and men of the Yale College Class of 2002, since you only
became Yale students 15 minutes ago, I have the honor to be your first
Yale instructor. And behold! After only 15 minutes, you have advanced this
far in wisdom. You have learned that anxiety is excitement travelling
under a false name, and that the right use of anxiety is not to relieve it
but to rechannel it: to use it to fuel the embrace of challenges, not the
flight from them. Now that you have learned the right way to worry, I have
no further worries on your behalf. I see you here this day on the brink of
a great new chapter of your education, which is to say, your life. I know
that you will let no part of this opportunity escape you. On behalf of
Yale College, I salute you and I cheer you on.
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