哈佛大学校长德鲁·福斯特2015年毕业典礼演讲_演讲

哈佛大学校长德鲁·福斯特2015年毕业典礼演讲

Let me start by noticing what is both obvious and curious: We are here today together. We are here in association. It is an association of many people, and many generations. We celebrate a connection across time in these festival rites, singing our alma mater, adorning ourselves in medieval robes to mark the deep-rooted traditions of Harvard, and of universities more generally. Even in the age of the online and the virtual, an institution has brought us together, and brings us back.

We have also sung – or rather the magnificent Renée Fleming has sung – “America the Beautiful,” to honor another institution, our democratic republic, which the men and women whose names are carved in stone in Memorial Church right behind me – and Memorial Hall just behind that – gave their lives to protect and uphold.

When the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived on these shores in 1630, they came as dissenters – rejecting institutions of their English homeland. But I have always found it striking that here in the wilderness, where mere survival was the foremost challenge, they so rapidly felt compelled to found this seat of learning so that New England, in the words of William Hubbard of the Class of 1642, so the New England “might be supplied with persons fit to manage the affairs of both church and state.” Church, state, and College. Three institutions they deemed essential to this Massachusetts experiment. Three institutions to ensure that the colonists, as Governor John Winthrop urged, could be “knit together as one” in a new society in a brave new world.