Delivered by Shirley M. Tilghman
June 6, 2006
It is a
Princeton tradition to allow the president to have the first word at
Opening Exercises and the last word at Commencement. I honor this
tradition this year with a fair degree of trepidation, knowing that I
come immediately upon the heels of the hilarious David Sedaris at
Baccalaureate, and none other than the 42nd President of the United
States, Bill Clinton, surely one of the most compelling speakers of our
time, yesterday at Class Day. If discretion were truly the better part
of valor, I would simply say, congratulations, good luck, don't forget
Annual Giving, and sit down.
But (you knew there was going to be
a "but") I have had a vantage point that neither David Sedaris nor Bill
Clinton enjoyed: I have witnessed your voyage through Princeton
University, and thus I have a very personal sense of the challenges
that you have faced and overcome, your remarkable accomplishments
inside and outside the classroom, and the transformations you have
undergone. I know, for example, that some of you actually thought the
University should provide spaces so that you could study 24 hours a
day, even as we were publishing a report emphasizing the importance of
a healthy work-life balance; that some of you actually believe that
every B on your transcript was personally inscribed by Dean Malkiel;
and that we actually engaged in extensive planning to guarantee that
you would be awakened every morning by the beep, beep, beep of a large
construction truck in reverse gear.
I also have seen first-hand
the many ways in which you have contributed to the energy and the
vitality of this community. You have thrilled us on the playing fields
and the courts, as members of teams that combined athletic prowess with
intelligence and seamless teamwork, and you have doubled us up with
laughter and moved us to tears on stages and in studios all around
campus. Last fall you opened your hearts, your residential colleges,
your eating clubs and your student organizations to the displaced students
from New Orleans, and you have contributed both time and resources to
the restoration of Dillard University in that city. You have shown your
concern for the victims of genocide in Darfur and called upon us to
adopt a policy of divestment in Sudan, which we have done. You have
found concrete ways to enhance the lives of residents in a number of
our surrounding communities, and I know that many of you will continue
to devote your time and your talent to the service of others as you
leave this beautiful campus. Academically, you have met and usually
exceeded the high expectations we had for you when you matriculated.
Your Ph.D. dissertations and master's and senior theses have blazed new
intellectual trails and enriched the body of knowledge on which society
depends for its well-being. In short, you have fully earned the
privilege of going out into the world as Princetonians.
Now this
year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Woodrow Wilson,
Princeton's 13th president, and the 75th anniversary of the founding of
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. We have
been celebrating these anniversaries on campus, around the country and
indeed around the world. As a consequence, I have been reading a great
deal about Wilson and thinking about the mark he left on Princeton.
This, of course, is not an entirely positive story: Wilson clearly was
unable to overcome his upbringing when it came to issues of gender and
race. But like all mortals, he had many positives that overcame those
shortcomings. It was Wilson who lifted this University from a small
college bearing a striking resemblance to a country club onto a path
that would turn it into the world-class University it is today. His
educational initiatives, considered by some to be the most significant
curricular reform in American higher education of the 20th century, had
enormous impact in his time, and they demonstrated remarkable staying
power as they became woven into the fabric of the Princeton you
experienced. Wilson instituted rigorous academic standards for students
and faculty alike -- leading one disgruntled student to complain,
"Princeton is becoming nothing but a damned educational institution."
And he offended alumni by insisting that the goal of a Princeton
education should be to make sons as unlike their fathers as possible.
The
departmental structure we know today was conceived by Wilson, and he
brought coherence to the undergraduate curriculum by instituting
requirements for a mix of elective and required courses and providing
for upper-class concentration, setting an example that many colleges
and universities across the country followed. The preceptorial method
of instruction, which remains a defining feature of a Princeton
education, was a Wilsonian invention. First as a faculty member and
then as president he was deeply committed to giving the Graduate School
a central place on campus, both physically and metaphorically, and to
integrating the social and intellectual lives of Princeton's
undergraduates and graduate students in residential colleges he called
quadrangles. He ultimately failed to achieve that vision, the Graduate
College was constructed by the golf course, and his "quadrangle plan"
was rejected by the trustees. Yet, I think he would be pleased by the
growing engagement of today's graduate students in the day-to-day life
of the campus, which will increase further with the introduction of the
four-year residential college in the fall of 2007.
Today you are
entering a world in which two of Wilson's legacies seem particularly
important. The first was his insistence that universities foster lively
and unfettered dialogue between students and faculty -- the seminal
idea behind both the preceptorial system and the quadrangle plan.
Wilson conceived of precepts as opportunities for young men (as they
all were in those days) to debate, discuss and consider the important
concepts that arose in their course of study, but precepts were not
intended to be restricted to those topics. Rather, Wilson hoped the
conversations that took place in these informal settings would roam
freely across the entire intellectual landscape and broaden the
exposure of students to the important ideas of the day. He considered
the quadrangle plan, in which members of the University community --
from the most senior faculty member to the youngest freshman -- would
live and study together in a four-year setting, to be an extension of
the preceptorial system. Underlying both was a deep commitment to the
importance of discourse, conducted with mutual regard for the views of
others.
As your valedictorian said a few minutes ago, you are
about to enter a world in which the nature and quality of public
discourse has been impoverished, with too many people closed off from
serious intellectual inquiry and the ideas of others, listening only to
those who are of like mind on TV news shows, radio talk shows and
Internet blogs; circling the wagons around entrenched positions and
heaping scorn on those with whom they disagree. It used to be possible
to describe the range of public opinion as a bell curve, with the
majority finding common purpose in the middle ground, but
increasingly our nation's voices are more accurately portrayed as two
bell curves, separated by a deep and bitter divide. Never has the world
seemed so adamantly polarized to me, and I fear we are at risk of
losing an essential ingredient of a vital democracy and a humane
worldwide community -- listening to one another with open minds and
mutual respect.
In your time at Princeton you have been
encouraged -- and indeed sometimes you've been exhorted -- to develop
the suppleness of mind to see what lies between black and white; to
reject knee-jerk reactions to ideas and ideologies; to recognize the
nuance and complexity in an argument; to differentiate between
knowledge and belief; and to appreciate that changing your mind is a
sign not of weakness but of strength. We have asked that you be open to
new ideas, however unorthodox; to shun the superficial trends of
popular culture in favor of careful analysis; and to recognize
propaganda, ignorance and baseless revisionism when you see it. This
spirit of inquiry into both the familiar and the unknown is imbedded in
the fabric of universities -- from the art historian delving into the
meaning of a fourth-century vase to the literary critic finding new
insight in a poem; from the social scientist trying to understand
school shootings to the cosmologist grappling with dark energy or the
engineer applying her creativity to the task of building a sustainable
environment. None of that is possible with a closed mind, or a mind
that is not prepared to be proven wrong.
Professor Toni Morrison, in her address 10 years ago on the occasion of our 250th anniversary, said:
"There
are few places, very few places left, other than great universities,
where both the wisdom of the dead coupled with the doubt of the living
are vigorously encouraged, welcomed, become the very stuff of
education, the pulse of teaching, the engine of research, the
consequence of learning. No faculty member worth the profession has
ever taken for granted as fixed truth or fiat all he or she has
learned. The nature of our profession is to doubt, to expand, to
enhance, to review, to interrogate."
As Toni said, that is the
stuff of which universities are built, and that is what we have
endeavored to pass on to all of you. I hope that this inclination to
doubt, to expand, to enhance, to review, to interrogate has become part
of your lives, and that you relish every opportunity to exercise these
qualities.
This does not mean that you should not hold strong
views; just the opposite. I hope you have found ideas and causes that
are profoundly meaningful to you, and that you will not shy away from
adding your voice to the public discourse. But we also hope that you
have developed the capacity to imagine, even if for only a moment, what
must be in the mind of a person with whom you profoundly disagree. If
you have learned to do this, you will never be able to hate or defame
that person, for you will have looked into, and seen first-hand, the
humanity in the other that unites us all.
This brings me to
Wilson's second enduring legacy -- his call to define our lives in
terms of service to causes that are larger than ourselves. For Wilson,
this clearly included service to the nation -- a concept deeply
ingrained in Princeton's history from its earliest days and recently
expanded to encompass all nations -- but his vision went beyond
national service to embrace a broader definition of engagement in
public life. The modern cacophony of voices shouting past one another
is so troubling and dangerous precisely because the world is in dire
need of well-educated men and women who are willing to join together to
undo the deeds that should not have been done and to accomplish those
that were left undone -- not only by earlier generations, but by my
own. Jon Stewart captured this imperative in his characteristically
irreverent way at Class Day two years ago when he quipped, "Let's talk
about the real world for a moment. I don't really know how to put this,
so I'll be blunt. We broke it. Please don't be mad. I know we were
supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one
we were handed. So, sorry. ..."
The challenges we leave for your
generation are truly daunting, but not insurmountable, at least not
insurmountable if you are able to find a way to rise above partisanship
and polarization; to find common ground and keep your eye on the prize.
We will not be able to preserve this extraordinary planet for future
generations if one side refuses to acknowledge the compelling
scientific evidence that the climate is changing as a result of
excessive burning of fossil fuels while the other side proposes
solutions that would cripple the economy. This is a recipe for the
inaction we have today. We cannot hope to conquer the scourge of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic unless we are prepared to mobilize every weapon at
our disposal, including condoms, but at the same time we must recognize
that the abstinence movement grew out of a deep unease about the ways
in which our culture has undermined the meaning of human intimacy. We
must find a bridge over the gaping divide that has opened in the public
discourse between religion and science. Scientists must learn to speak
about the Big Bang or Darwin's theory of evolution without appearing to
demean the deeply held religious beliefs of others, just as those of
faith must be prepared to open their minds to the nature of scientific
evidence and what it tells us about the natural world. The welcome
voices of moderation in the debate over immigration are too often
overwhelmed by louder voices that call for sealing the borders of a
country born of immigrants or opening the floodgates without regard to
the rule of law, thus leaving the nation at a stalemate. And we must
find common purpose to confront the erosion of quality in our system of
K-12 public education before we lose another generation of students,
particularly African-American boys. This national scandal will not be
remedied with one side demanding accountability without resources and
the other proposing resources without accountability. Public education
is clearly an area where both accountability and resources are needed
-- along with the national will to address these needs in a sustained
and meaningful way.
Despite these monumental challenges, I
remain an optimist. I am optimistic because sitting before me on this
magnificent historic lawn are men and women who have the intelligence,
the will and the education to confront and solve the problems my
generation has handed you. You have lived in a community that is
committed to the service of others; that purposefully seeks out and
embraces diversity as part of its educational mission. And why? Because
such a rich and outward-looking community creates an environment in
which you can have real conversations, conversations that challenge you
as much as the person with whom you are conversing. I am confident that
these exchanges, whether they have taken place in a dorm room at 2
a.m., around a lab bench or a precept table, or in the editorial pages
of The Prince, have opened your minds and hearts and prepared you to
make this world a better place.
And so, as you walk or skip or
run through the FitzRandolph Gates today, I hope you will carry with
you the spirit of Princeton and all that this place has aspired to
teach you -- a determination to follow your passions in service to the
common good, an openness to new ideas, and a willingness to engage in
civil discourse with integrity and mutual respect. I also expect you
will continue to do what you have done so well at Princeton -- to aim
high and be bold.
My warmest wishes go forward with you all!
