Selected Speeches
2005 Opening Exercises Greeting and Address
President Shirley M. Tilghman
September 11, 2005
Greeting
Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to the
beginning of the 259th academic year at Princeton University. To the
undergraduate Class of 2009 and the newly matriculated graduate
students, I would like to extend my special greetings. To the faculty,
staff and students who are returning, it is good to have you back.
The banners and drums you have just heard signal that this is
traditionally a festive occasion, in which we anticipate the year
ahead, filled as it is likely to be with the discovery of new
friendships, the understanding of new problems and new insights into
old ones. However it is impossible to wholeheartedly celebrate in light
of the tragic events that have been unfolding in Louisiana, Alabama and
Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The degree of devastation
and the magnitude of the human suffering is staggering and beyond my
comprehension. As we gather on this beautiful and secure campus, we are
mindful of the thousands of students, teachers and faculty who are
displaced from their own beloved schools, colleges and universities,
and our own students from the Gulf Coast whose families have lost
everything in the hurricane. To the displaced students who have joined
us from universities and colleges in New Orleans, I extend on behalf of
everyone in the Princeton community a heartfelt Tiger welcome. Some of
you and your families have endured enormous loss, and I hope that you
will find at Princeton a safe haven in which to regroup and move
forward, as well as to continue your education. We are so happy that
you are with us.
The campus community is saddened today by the very serious accident
that befell an Outdoor Action group leader in the Class of 2006 on
Friday. He is being airlifted to a national spinal cord trauma center
in Philadelphia today, and our thoughts and our prayers go out to his
family, along with our hopes for a speedy recovery and return to
Princeton.
Today is also the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington, reminding us that conflict and hostility still afflict our
world. But it's an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the principles
of free inquiry and mutual respect that represent our strongest answer
to the forces of intolerance, to those who would assert that
differences — be they racial, ethnic, religious or philosophical — are
something to be feared. Happily for us, diversity is a hallmark of our
student body, and this is especially true of the 1,223 members of the
Class of 2009. You hail from the four corners of the United States and
all points on the globe. Together, you represent 49 of the 50 states —
don't ask me what happened in Nebraska last year! — and 35 countries,
with hometowns like Snowflake, Arizona, and Kingston, Australia. As for
our 530 new graduate students, more than 36 percent have come to us
from other nations, and their multicultural perspective will enrich the
scholarly conversation on our campus in immeasurable ways.
I am also delighted to welcome 43 new members of our faculty, whose
collective contribution to teaching and scholarship is truly
remarkable. I hope that many of you will have an opportunity to work
with these accomplished scholars in the years ahead. There are also new
faces to be found among our staff, including Lianne Sullivan-Crowley,
who joined us last month as Princeton's new vice president for human
resources. As Lianne knows better than anyone, we have a large and
multi-talented staff that plays a crucial role in sustaining our
commitment to excellence and making this University — as all of you, I
hope, will discover — "the best old place of all."
I now invite Dean of the College and Professor of History Nancy Weiss
Malkiel to recognize the academic achievements of five outstanding
undergraduates.
Address: "Becoming a Princetonian"
Today marks the official beginning of the academic year. We
celebrate your arrival and congratulate ourselves on exercising the
good judgment to have offered you a place in the class. We also
celebrate the equally good judgment you have shown in accepting our
offer. You are now fledgling Princetonians, on the path to earning the
right to claim that you are not just a member of the Class of 2009, but
a member of the Great Class of 2009.
But what does this mean — to be a member of a class; to be a
Princetonian? As a member of a class, you are here not just to learn
from this place and its faculty, but from each other. And you are here
not just to learn together, but to live together—to share experiences
and form friendships that in many cases will last a lifetime. As a
Princetonian, you suddenly will have an explosion of orange and black
in your wardrobe, colors that you had relegated to Halloween costumes
in the past. You will find yourself singing "Old Nassau" without the
slightest self-consciousness that you are waving an imaginary hat
around for half the song. A stranger who sits beside you in an airplane
becomes an instant connection for a summer job when you discover that
you have Princeton in common. When you leave this chapel, you will join
a Pre-rade that will foreshadow the P-rade of Princeton's annual
Reunion gathering, a parade in which such august figures as our Provost
Christopher Eisgruber of the Class of 1983 and Dean of the Woodrow
Wilson School Anne-Marie Slaughter of the Class of 1980 can be seen
marching in reunion regalia that would, in the words of Lerner and
Lowe, "make a sailor blush." That's one part of being a Princetonian —
it is having a deep, emotional and lifelong attachment to your alma
mater, and making no bones about it!
However, becoming a Princetonian means a great deal more than costumes
and songs. The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men
and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of
course, the word "leadership" conjures up images of presidents and
CEOs, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader
than that. A leader is someone who has that powerful combination of
determination, intellect and strength of character to make a positive
difference in the world. A leader can be a teacher who inspires
students in a first-grade classroom to love learning, or a doctor who
cares for the indigent, or an engineer who devises a new technology
that connects remote African villages to the Web. What sets leaders
apart from others is their ability to get things done, to put the needs
of others before their own, and to accomplish both with a finely
calibrated ethical compass. Last spring, during the Baccalaureate
service for the graduating class, Professor Toni Morrison articulated
these ideals when she told the senior class that "there is serious,
hard and ennobling work to do, and bit by bit, step by step, you can
change the things that need changing." That aspiration lies at the
heart of our informal motto, "Princeton in the nation's service and in
the service of all nations."
The Princeton ideal of leadership is not for the weak of heart. It
requires that you take a bold and adventuresome approach to your
education, for make no mistake; this is your education to make of what
you will. Princeton can be a four-year way station between adolescence
and adulthood or it can be the defining years of your life, upon which
you will look back and say, as so many have before you, "Princeton
changed my life." In making choices about how you spend your time, I
hope you will seek out opportunities and individuals you know nothing
about, and not just stay within the safe confines of your comfort zone
where you excelled in high school. These four years will fly by with
lightning speed, and I can assure you from my 20 years of experience at
Princeton that if you show no courage now, in the spring of your senior
year you will be regretting all the missed opportunities you had to
explore uncharted territory.
Our expectation is that you will place more emphasis on developing
lifelong habits of critical thinking than on acquiring a large body of
knowledge. Both are important to have at one's command at various
times, but if you have a disciplined and curious mind, you will always
find a way to acquire the information you need to move forward.
Critical thinking requires an openness to the "other;" the ability and
the receptivity to explore all sides of a complex question, and having
done so, the self-confidence to select among the possibilities without
ignoring or denigrating the positions you reject. There are issues that
may be rightfully described as black or white, right or wrong, but in
my experience the most interesting questions are never that
straightforward, but require a subtlety and flexibility of mind that I
hope you will hone over the next few years.
Beware of the ideologue with whom discussion is a shouting match.
Universities and colleges cherish the right of each individual to speak
freely and openly and to defend positions with dispassionate reason,
not closed minds or contemptuous attitudes. There is too much empty
rhetoric in the world today; this country and the world need more
individuals who can navigate the complex waters around deep and
fundamental questions of what it means to be human, what it means to be
a citizen of a country and what it means to be a citizen of the world.
We desperately need more individuals who ask questions, listen to
others, absorb information, think and then, quite possibly, change
their minds.
This is one of the reasons why Princeton places such a strong emphasis
on independent work — for developing critical thinking requires the
continual application of your cognitive abilities to new and often
difficult problems and issues. Gone are the days when you will be
rewarded for dutifully memorizing and regurgitating what you have read.
Here you will be asked to absorb all that is known about a subject and
then come to your own conclusions about what it means. Woodrow Wilson,
our 13th president, said it best almost 100 years ago:
"What we should seek to impart in our colleges ... is not so much
learning itself as the spirit of learning. ... It consists in the power
to distinguish good reasoning from bad, in the power to digest and
interpret evidence, in a habit of catholic observation and a preference
for the nonpartisan point of view, in an addiction to clear and logical
processes of thought and yet an instinctive desire to interpret rather
than to stick in the letter of the reasoning, in a taste for knowledge
and a deep respect for the integrity of the human mind."
You will be relieved to know that you will not be asked to acquire
these habits alone. Throughout your years at Princeton you will be
working closely with distinguished members of the faculty who are among
the acknowledged leaders in their fields. They will pose questions that
matter and teach you how to dig deep for the answers, beyond the
material in your textbooks and the wonderful world of Google, to
unearth ancient manuscripts in the recesses of Firestone Library, or
learned articles in professional journals like World Politics, or DNA
sequences in genetic databases. The wondrous thing about this
archeological process of excavation for new information and learning is
that the more you know about a subject, the more interesting it
becomes. When I think back to my own university education, what remains
most interesting and vivid to me are the projects that were the most
challenging and on which I worked the hardest. Your teachers will also
encourage you to take and defend positions in seminars and precepts, as
well as in meetings about your junior independent work and senior
theses. They will be there for guidance and advice, but at the end of
the day, this is your education.
Of course, a Princeton education may begin in the classroom, but it
certainly does not end there. It happens everywhere — in the
dormitories and dining halls, on the playing fields and performance
stages, and in all the places in between. There are more than 200
student organizations that will welcome you with open arms and support
your aspirations: from tutoring disadvantaged children to singing
beneath the beautiful arches of our campus; from prancing across the
McCarter stage in an all-male kick line to making our University
community more environmentally friendly. Princeton is a closely knit
residential community, and much of your personal and intellectual
growth will come from knowing the people in this chapel. Look around
you. Somewhere in this chapel are the closest friends you will have for
the rest of your lives.
Some of these friends may act and think like you; it is only natural to
gravitate to people in whom we instinctively recognize ourselves. But
Princeton also offers you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to connect
with men and women whose lives have differed dramatically from your
own; who view the world from a different vantage point. Never again
will you live with a group of peers that was expressly assembled to
expand your horizons and open your eyes to the fascinating richness of
the human condition. After all Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye could
have saved herself and her colleagues a great deal of time and effort
by admitting the first 1,223 applicants who were class valedictorians,
or the first 1,223 with double 800 SAT scores, or 1,223 from the state
of New York. The reason she took such care in selecting all of you —
weighing your many talents, your academic and extracurricular
interests, your diverse histories — was to increase the likelihood that
your entire educational experience, inside and outside the classroom,
is as mind-expanding as possible. When you graduate you will enter a
world that is now truly global in perspective, and in which success
will require that you have a cosmopolitan attitude. You must be
equipped to live and work in not one culture, but in many cultures. As
Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote in his most recent
book, "The World Is Flat," globalization has "accidentally made
Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors." You will be prepared
to live in the new flattened world if you learn from and embrace the
diverse tapestry that makes up the globe through friendships born at
Princeton.
To be a Princetonian, then, is to take on the responsibilities of
leadership; to take a road less traveled as thousands of men and women
have done on this campus before you; to grow in ways that you cannot
predict today; to change without abandoning the outstanding qualities
that brought you here; and to use your talents and energies, on your
own and with others, to change the world for the better. Let me
conclude by paraphrasing what I said last spring at Commencement to the
graduating class: "I hope you will acquire the spirit of Princeton and
all that this place aspires to teach you — a determination to follow
your passions in service to the common good, a respect for tradition
and for progress, an openness to new ideas, the courage to stand up for
your beliefs and the rights of others, a global sensibility, and a
lifelong devotion to justice and freedom, all informed by the highest
standards of integrity and mutual respect." To do so, you will need to
aim high and to be bold.
Good luck to you all.