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Men and women of the Class of 2010--the Double Dimes, as
my Internet spies tell me you have dubbed yourselves: If
this day is harsh for others, it's great for you. Today you
are promoted. You are the premier attraction here, the person
it's all about. This summer I've run into a number of you
as you whiled away the days waiting for school to start.
I met future Dukies in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in Korea, and
in Beijing. I spent an evening with seventy or eighty of
you from the slightly less distant Durham and Wake counties.
I've greeted many of you as you tromped off on pre-orientation
trips to the woods, or to the ocean (welcome back, Pirates
of the Carolinas), or to do good works in Durham. On all
the migratory routes that brought you here, I've seen one
thing in your faces: pride that you are about to enroll in
one of the world's great universities; a look of shining
promise and eager anticipation; a sense that some great thing
is about to begin.
Some great thing is about to begin. But what, exactly? In
coming to college you're traveling through a great transition.
What's on the other side of that transition is, or could
be, a great transformation. I don't exaggerate. The chapters
of childhood are now behind you. This is where your adult
self will take strength and disclose its shape. You've done
a lot of development and preparation. Now you can forge the
knowledgeable, capable self you'll carry forward into later
life. Your larva or creepy stage is past; your pupa or cocooned
days are done. Now it's time to emerge in splendid maturity--and
Duke is here to help realize the empowered version of yourself.
If you have any lesser idea of what's in store for you in
college, then you're underestimating the meaning of this
day. But unlike moths and butterflies, this transformation
is not guaranteed by the action of genetic switches. The
main fact about the possibility that's now before you is
that to be actualized, it requires you to want it and actively
to seek it. What Duke could give you won't be impeded by
any lack of ability on your part: Having chosen you over
many thousand others, we know you have the requisite strength
and promise. You also won't be hindered by lack of opportunity:
You'll search a long time before you find the thing you can't
do at Duke. But what could diminish the value of your years
here is your failure to reach for the self-enlargement that
could await you, and your clinging to ways you're now free
to outgrow.
You are women and men who made exceptional use of the opportunities
of high school. But unless the world has changed a great
deal, even the best experience in high school tends to come
framed with certain habits and limits. In high school, standard
subjects tend to be laid out for you year by year in fixed
array, as by the action of fate. Students often think of
their work with these subjects as a chore or job (as in: "I
have to do my physics"), a tedious task to be whipped
through as fast as you can, so you can move on to something
more engaging. Even when you did achieve academic excellence,
there was usually an ancillary motive propelling that drive.
For one great fact presided over your school life these past
two or three (or twelve or thirteen) years: namely, the fact
that you needed to get into college. This meant that every
good thing you did had some admixture of the desire to create
an impression, to make you look outstanding so some admissions
officer would think you were the kind of superior person
they were hunting for and let you in.
Clever you! It worked! And one great life trial is now definitively
behind you: You will never need to get into college again.
But you won't get either the pleasure or the profit of this
new opportunity if you take that same old approach. Your
new life will have appearances that seem continuous with
your old one--a schedule of classes, course assignments,
all the familiar forms of school--but college has a crucial
difference. It expects a new attitude, requires you to find
a way to engage the objects of study with an authentic personal
interest, not as an externally appointed task. As for the
voices telling you that it's still your primary mission to
Do Well, they are not totally wrong. I too wish you to continue
to succeed, and it is not my plan to render you unemployable.
But take it from me: The people who go on to the greatest
success aren't those with showy transcripts only. They are
people who are able to convince others--convince them because
it's true!--that they have an active, creative intelligence
living within them, taking in the facts around them and converting
them into a continually growing, continually deepening knowledge
of the world.
Now's your chance to build this power. So please, take seriously
your new chances to advance your mental growth. You live
at the historical moment when the meaning of the human genome
is being unraveled. You've come to a school that's leading
the way, not just in decoding genetic information but in
discovering how that knowledge can lead to therapies to save
and improve the quality of lives. So which makes better sense:
learning something about this while you're at Duke and expanding
your growing body of understanding? Or perpetuating your
ignorance in the place of possible illumination?
Much of the international news in recent months has to do
with Muslim peoples and radical Islamic fundamentalism, which
threatens to supply the world-organizing external menace
for your generation that Communism embodied in the Cold War.
You in your wisdom have come to a university that's building
a new Islamic Studies Center. Is it absurd to think that
you might actually try to learn something about Islam while
you're at Duke and so avoid passing through life armed with
ignorant attitudes in place of informed understandings?
When I was in China this summer, I learned that in the last
decade, more than a hundred million people had moved from
the countryside to the new cities thrown up by the expanding
global economy, the largest peacetime movement of humanity
in the whole of history. In Beijing I also learned that Duke
faculty members are known to be among the most acute students
of this transformation and the developments and dislocations
it entails. You'll live at a time when no dimension of the
world economy or political order will be immune from these
evolving stories overseas. So would you choose to miss this
chance to learn about contemporary China or the sustainability
of economic development or the blend of creations and dislocations
that globalization entails? These (and a hundred others)
are Duke strengths that could now become your strengths--if
you take the initiative to acquire them.
Once you start composing your life as an active seeker of
understanding rather than the duteous performer of appointed
chores, the boundary between formal course work and the rest
of your Duke experience will be less sharply drawn. The hundred
talks you'll see advertised every day will be a further chance
to test and expand your mind. Provost Peter Lange is organizing
a lecture series this year on privacy. You know why this
is an issue. In the high-tech world, previously concealable
information like cell-phone calls and global financial transfers
can be tracked in hitherto unimaginable detail. But to what
extent is this a vital defense against terrorist conspiracies,
to what extent a dangerous incursion on vital civil liberties?
And how are the right boundaries and protections to be established?
Nearer to home, you have probably learned that all that Internet
sharing that you and your classmates had so much fun doing
this summer opens the door to unexpected revelations about
you in contexts not originally intended. (I hope this is
not a shocking surprise! Personally, I have not peeked.)
But how are we to define the protocols that will give us
the new benefits of information-sharing without creating
new forms of intrusion and victimization?
These are questions that will be settled in your adult life,
and it is hugely consequential that our society get them
right. If you're like me, you're far from certain of the
correct answers now. But you could advance your thinking,
and even equip yourself to become a player in the ongoing
debate, if you went to hear and argue with the former heads
of national security, devisers of Internet sharing sites,
and others who will be parading through here for your personal
edification. This is a form of education Duke could give
you every day--but you have to seize it to win its gains.
It's also part of the distinctive character of Duke that
it offers rich access to real-world experience that can help
you test and amplify classroom learning and put it to human
use. You "have to" take a foreign language at Duke,
it's true. But which would have a better payoff: to do just
as much as you "have to" and call it a day? Or
to take your Spanish to the Durham public schools that are
experiencing a massive influx of Latinos, where you could
get real-world practice using your language, perform a real-world
service to people new to a very foreign land, and learn something
beyond frozen political slogans about contemporary American
immigration? Students in the Pratt School "have to" learn
all sorts of things to master the disciplines of engineering.
But you'll also learn the power that knowledge gives if,
like students I know, you bring classroom knowledge to bear
on the challenge of designing prosthetic devices for disabled
children or assisting victims of natural disasters, like
the students of Duke's Engineers Without Borders.
I'm pounding on you and you may already be converted, but
I don't want one of you to miss my point. You're about to
start a new life here. As you do so, you need to know that
there are choices about how you could put that life together,
and that some choices will yield a far richer experience
than others. If you want to hang a Do Not Disturb sign over
your brain--or if, like cabs I'm always hailing in New York,
you plan to turn on your mind's Off Duty sign whenever you
finish your required tasks--that would be one choice. But
it's not the one that will make life most interesting here
day by day; and it's not the one that does long-term justice
to your talents and potentials.
When I think about the resources here for you, high on my
list are your fellows, the women and men sitting here today.
With every one of you I've met, I've thought: Lucky classmates
to have you in their midst! You apparently share this view,
since even before arriving, you've been filling cyberspace
with your fast-evolving friendships. So far so good. But
here I remember something else about high school, which can
be a place of friendship, but of other facts as well. Those
years can be a time of painful self-consciousness and perceived
vulnerability, with all the demoralizing things they spawn:
desperate anxiety to be found acceptable; pressure to do
things to win acceptance that one would never have chosen
on one's own; mutual enforcement of highly reductive identities
based on a few salient social traits (X is cool, Y is dorky,
X is a jock, Y is a wimp--I doubt the current vocabulary
is any more humane); a profound if invisible hierarchy defining
who you should mix with, who you should not be caught dead
with, and so on.
On the day you enter Duke, you come to the blessed moment
when you can outgrow such things, step out of them and leave
them with the castoffs of your immaturity. However you've
been defined heretofore, here you can entertain a fuller,
freer version of yourself. And together, you can construct
a new community that will be at once more mutually liberating
and more humanly interesting--unless you are so benighted
as to wish to make college a second high school, and to re-erect
that social prison just when you are free to escape.
It matters which route you choose to take. It matters to
the experience you're opening or closing for yourself, and
it matters to the world. We all know what a fractured, stratified
world looks like extended into the world at large. Abroad,
it gives us the ethnic division and organized ethnic hostility
much too familiar in our time. Closer to home, it gives us
America's still imperfectly transcended history of racial
division, a problem it's still all of our work to solve and,
more largely, the residential separations into enclaves of
homogeneity that define so much American life. This, in spite
of the fact that such divisions are socially impoverishing
to all their parties, and that the most valuable human creations
have always come through collaborations across lines of division.
You may not know that, in the depth of the Depression and
the heyday of official segregation in the United States,
Duke's West Campus had as its principal designer a black
architect, Julian Abele, who helped create this place in
spite of the fact that he couldn't be seen on campus doing
so.
Over against the divisive tendencies of the outer world,
it is the nature of universities to bring people together,
as Duke has brought together the Class of 2010: men and women
of high promise drawn from every origin and background, from
forty-six states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia,
forty-one countries, and a whopping 1,094 secondary schools.
Now you'll be free to shape a new society. As you do so,
you have a choice: Are you going to recreate a system of
repressive identities and exclusions, or are you going to
build a better world of interaction, cooperation, and mutual
support?
I'm betting your answer is Option B, and I applaud you for
it. But it's going to take actual choices from you day by
day to make this happen. To make this better world, you'll
need to practice the arts of human respect. What would that
mean exactly? Stopping to recognize that each other person
is as fully human as you and requires as much consideration
as you would want in his or her place. Taking care not to
treat anyone boorishly or coercively or offensively. Not
blocking others out or writing them off based on superficial
judgment. Having the curiosity to wonder what things look
like from their point of view, and being willing to listen
in order to find out.
Respect will get us to civility, a value vastly underrated
in contemporary culture. But you came here for education,
and that will require something beyond the chilly-sounding
habit of respect. That will require active mutual engagement:
the willingness to reach outside the circle you're comfortable
with; the willingness to cross over into others' mental space
and open yourself to their different outlooks and experiences;
and the willingness to see how your own ideas might need
to be extended or revised to accommodate the human lessons
others give. If friction sometimes results from this engagement,
well, why shouldn't it? We haven't asked you to transcend
your humanity, just to get an education. And that requires
that, in the presence of difference, you be willing patiently
to teach those who don't yet understand where you are, not
write them off as hopeless or unforgivable; and patiently
to learn when the needy one is yourself.
Engagement will take you past civility to mutual enrichment,
which is a big gain. But from there you need to take the
further step to collaboration and learn to mesh your separate
talents to enact the good things none of you can accomplish
on your own. This valuable skill is practiced here wherever
you look. You'll see it in the fun that's so plentiful at
Duke: in the dance or improv comedy or intramural, club,
or varsity sports or (dare I say) ritual cheering at basketball
that are such exhilarating features of Duke communal life.
You'll see collaboration in the service activities that are
so powerful here--the important work students do in local
literacy projects, for instance, or disaster relief further
afield. And we count on your collaboration when there are
serious issues for this community to face.
As you know, Duke was visited by a great trouble last spring.
The resulting legal accusations remain unresolved, and we
pray that they will be resolved in speedy, fair, and decisive
fashion. But in addition to the contested legal charges,
larger questions were raised about responsible student behavior
and the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Not one of these
questions is unique to Duke, but we are not free to ignore
them. In working them through, in discovering how an animated,
high-spirited world can be made compatible with the requirements
of responsibility and respect, we'll be counting on your
partnership--the best exercise of your thoughtful intelligence.
If you get some experience here collectively imagining how
to define and implement a good society, you'll have learned
a form of intelligence of incalculable value for later life.
In addition, you'll have helped make this great university
better yet.
My friends, I've been speaking as if your future fate hangs
in the balance, depending on how you approach this place.
And I do believe there's a great and a merely good way you
could go to Duke--and I do believe that getting the choice
right is largely in your hands. But though I've enjoyed the
chance to lay a sermon on you from this great pulpit, I'm
not all that anxious about your souls. My guess is that you
came here intending to make magnificent use of Duke, and
it's your own best aspirations I've been voicing as I speak.
Just remember them when life gets hectic. When a weight of
custom threatens to dull your first hopes, recall what the
berobed man in the dazzling necklace told you in Duke Chapel
when you were starting out. This is your place. Help yourself
to its riches. Come here with the intention of being transformed.
I welcome you to Duke.
President Brodhead delivered this address
to freshmen and their parents at convocation in late August.
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