原文: Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008

 

　　In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the moment of and for Veritas.

 

　　You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not quite one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our roles could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for the next hour or so.

 

　　We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece. Though I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we took it quite so literally.

 

　　But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the questions. “What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was young for my class.)

 

　　In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking.

 

　　Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my appointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

 

　　There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it. There is the Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of student career choices since the seventies. They find it notable that, given the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still choose to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America; one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina; another will be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an honors degree in math, will study poetry; another will train as a pilot with the USAF; another will work to combat breast cancer. Numbers of you will go to law school, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finance and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. This year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.

 

　　High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots of ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is a commitment for only a year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be able to do good by first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.

 

　　I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in figuring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right; if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so many of you?

 

　　You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one would dare admit to harboring serious concern.

 

　　But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to your question.

 

　　I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together. You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth will feed your soul.

 

　　Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world. We have burdened you with no small expectations. And you have already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s presidential contests.

 

　　But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?

 

　　You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may not be possible to have it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices. And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate program — means not selecting others. Every decision means loss as well as gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your question to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.

 

　　Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma, representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one career path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to stay in teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you want to have both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were educated to make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the way to make that possible.

 

　　I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses like “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older. Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my age — report themselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t want to wait.

 

　　As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige. The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying. But you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing?

 

　　The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.

 

　　I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.

 

　　You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just right for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be happy if you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.

 

　　But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there. This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.

 

　　I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.

 

　　In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the moment of and for Veritas.

 

　　You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not quite one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our roles could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for the next hour or so.

 

　　We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece. Though I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we took it quite so literally.

 

　　But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the questions. “What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was young for my class.)

 

　　In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking.

 

　　Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my appointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

 

　　There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it. There is the Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of student career choices since the seventies. They find it notable that, given the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still choose to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America; one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina; another will be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an honors degree in math, will study poetry; another will train as a pilot with the USAF; another will work to combat breast cancer. Numbers of you will go to law school, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finance and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. This year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.

 

　　High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots of ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is a commitment for only a year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be able to do good by first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.

 

　　I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in figuring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right; if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so many of you?

 

　　You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one would dare admit to harboring serious concern.

 

　　But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to your question.

 

　　I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together. You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth will feed your soul.

 

　　Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world. We have burdened you with no small expectations. And you have already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s presidential contests.

 

　　But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?

 

　　You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may not be possible to have it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices. And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate program — means not selecting others. Every decision means loss as well as gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your question to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.

 

　　Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma, representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one career path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to stay in teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you want to have both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were educated to make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the way to make that possible.

 

　　I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses like “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older. Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my age — report themselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t want to wait.

 

　　As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige. The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying. But you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing?

 

　　The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.

 

　　I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.

 

　　You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just right for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be happy if you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.

 

　　But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there. This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.

 

　　I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.

 

　　In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the moment of and for Veritas.

 

　　You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not quite one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our roles could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for the next hour or so.

 

　　We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece. Though I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we took it quite so literally.

 

　　But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the questions. “What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was young for my class.)

 

　　In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking.

 

　　Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my appointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

 

　　There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it. There is the Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of student career choices since the seventies. They find it notable that, given the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still choose to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America; one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina; another will be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an honors degree in math, will study poetry; another will train as a pilot with the USAF; another will work to combat breast cancer. Numbers of you will go to law school, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are selecting finance and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. This year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.

 

　　High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots of ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is a commitment for only a year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be able to do good by first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.

 

　　I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in figuring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right; if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so many of you?

 

　　You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one would dare admit to harboring serious concern.

 

　　But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to your question.

 

　　I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together. You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth will feed your soul.

 

　　Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world. We have burdened you with no small expectations. And you have already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s presidential contests.

 

　　But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?

 

　　You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may not be possible to have it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices. And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate program — means not selecting others. Every decision means loss as well as gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your question to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.

 

　　Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma, representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one career path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point face you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to stay in teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you want to have both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were educated to make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the way to make that possible.

 

　　I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses like “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older. Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my age — report themselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t want to wait.

 

　　As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige. The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying. But you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing?

 

　　The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.

 

　　I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.

 

　　You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just right for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be happy if you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.

 

　　But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there. This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.

 

　　I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.

 

　　譯文: 哈佛校長給2008屆本科畢業(yè)生的畢業(yè)演講

 

　　按照這所古老大學(xué)的奇怪的傳統(tǒng)，我應(yīng)該是站在這兒，告訴你們那些永恒的智慧。我就站在這個講壇上，穿得像個清教徒牧師一樣——這個打扮也許已經(jīng)嚇到了我那些高貴的先人們，讓他們以為是巫婆現(xiàn)身（校長是女的，譯者注）。這會讓英克利斯（Increase）和考特恩（Cotton）父子倆（他們反對清教，譯者注）忍不住想審判我的。但是，我還是要站在這兒，跟你們聊聊。

 

　　你們已經(jīng)上了四年的大學(xué)了，我當(dāng)校長還不到一年；你們認識三任校長，我只認識大四一個班的學(xué)生。那么，經(jīng)驗是什么？也許你們應(yīng)該搞清楚。也許我們可以互換一下角色，我可能就會以哈佛法學(xué)院慣有的風(fēng)格，在接下來的一個小時里自說自話。

 

　　從這一點上說，我們似乎都做到了——不管程度多少。但我最近才知道，從5月22日開始你們就沒有晚飯吃了。雖然我們會把你們比作已經(jīng)從哈佛斷奶的孩子們，但我從沒想到會這么徹底。

 

　　再讓我們來說說那個“自說自話”吧。讓我們把這個演講看作是一個答疑式的畢業(yè)生服務(wù)，你們來提問題?！案∈康滦ｉL，生活的意義是什么？我們?yōu)槭裁匆诠鹱x四年？校長，四十年前你從學(xué)校畢業(yè)的時候，肯定學(xué)到不少東西吧？”（四十年了。我可以大聲地說出我當(dāng)時生活的每個細節(jié)，和我獲得布林莫爾學(xué)位的年份——現(xiàn)在大家都知道這個。但請注意，我在班里還算歲數(shù)小的。）

 

　　其實，這個答疑環(huán)節(jié)你們早就從我這兒預(yù)定了。你們問的問題也大概就是這類的。我也一直在想該怎么回答，還在想：你們?yōu)槭裁礊檫@么問。

 

　　聽我的回答。2007年冬天，助理就告訴我要有這么一個演講。當(dāng)我在Kirkland聽中午飯的時候，在Leverett吃晚飯的時候，當(dāng)我在我上班時和同學(xué)們見面的時候，甚至當(dāng)我在國外碰見我們剛畢業(yè)的學(xué)生的時候，同學(xué)們都會問我一些問題。你們問我的第一個問題，不是問課程計劃，不是提建議，也不是問老師的聯(lián)系方式或者學(xué)生的空間問題。實際上，也不是酒精限制政策。你們不停地問我的問題是：“為什么我們的學(xué)生很多都去了華爾街？為什么我們哈佛的學(xué)生中，有那么多人到金融、咨詢和電子銀行領(lǐng)域去？”

 

　　這個問題可以從好幾個方面來回答，我要用的是威利薩頓（一個美國銀行大盜，譯者注）的回答。你們可能知道，當(dāng)他被問到為什么要搶銀行時，他說“因為那兒有錢”。我想，你們在上經(jīng)濟學(xué)課的時候，都見過克勞迪亞·戈丁和拉里·凱茲兩位教授，他們根據(jù)七十年代以來他們所教學(xué)生的職業(yè)選擇，提出了不同的看法。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)，雖然金融行業(yè)在金錢方面有很高回報，但還是有學(xué)生選擇了其它的工作。實際上，你們中有37個人選擇做教師，有一個會跳探戈的人要去阿根廷的舞蹈診療所上班，另一個拿了數(shù)學(xué)榮譽學(xué)位的人要去學(xué)詩歌，有一個要在美國空軍受訓(xùn)作一名飛行員，還有一個要去作一名治療乳房癌癥的醫(yī)生。你們中有很多人會去學(xué)法學(xué)、學(xué)醫(yī)學(xué)、讀研究生。但是，根據(jù)戈丁和凱茲的記錄，更多的人去了金融和咨詢行業(yè)。Crimson對去年的畢業(yè)生作了調(diào)查，參加工作的人中，58%的男生和43％的女生去了這兩個行業(yè)。雖然今年的經(jīng)濟不景氣，這個數(shù)字還是到了39%。

 

　　高薪、不可抗拒的招聘的沖擊、到紐約和你的朋友一起工作的保證、承諾工作很有趣——這樣的選擇可以有很多種理由。對于你們中的一些人，也許只會在其中做一到兩年。其他人也都相信這是他們可以做到最好的一份工作。但，還是有人會問：為什么要這樣選擇。

 

　　其實，比起回答你們的問題來，我更喜歡思考你們?yōu)槭裁磿?。戈丁和凱茲教授的研究是不是正確的；到金融行業(yè)是不是就是“理性的選擇”；你們?yōu)槭裁磿煌５貑栁疫@個問題？為什么這個看似理性的選擇，卻會讓你們許多人無法理解、覺得不盡理性，甚至有的會覺得是被迫作出的必要的選擇？為什么這個問題會困擾這么多人呢？

 

　　我認為，你們問我生活的意義的時候，是帶著指向性的——你們把它看成是高級職業(yè)選擇中可見、可量度的現(xiàn)象，而不是一種抽象而深不可測的、形而上學(xué)的尷尬境地。所謂“生活的意義”已經(jīng)被說濫了——它就像是蒙提·派森（Monty Python）電影里可笑的標(biāo)題，或者說是《辛普森一家》里的那些雞零狗碎的話題一樣，已經(jīng)沒有任何嚴肅的涵義了。

 

　　讓我們暫時扔掉哈佛人精明的處世能力、沉著和不可戰(zhàn)勝的虛偽，試著來尋找一下你們問題的答案吧。

 

　　我想，你們之所以會焦慮，是因為你們不想只是做到一般意義上的成功，而且還想過得有意義。但你們又不知道這兩個目標(biāo)如何才能同時達到，你們不知道在一個大名鼎鼎的公司中有一份豐厚的起薪，并且前途很有保障，是不是就可以讓你們自己滿足。

 

　　你們?yōu)槭裁匆箲]？說起來，我們學(xué)校這方面也有錯。從你們進來的時候，我們就告訴你們，到這里，你們會成為對未來負責(zé)的精英，你們是最棒的、最聰明的，我們都要依靠你們，因為你們會改變這個世界。這些話，讓你們個個都胸懷大志。你們會去做各種不平常的事情：在課外活動中，你們處處體現(xiàn)著服務(wù)的熱情；你們大力倡導(dǎo)可持續(xù)發(fā)展，因為你們關(guān)注地球的未來；在今年的總統(tǒng)競選中，你們也表現(xiàn)出了對美國政治改革的熱衷。

 

　　但現(xiàn)在，你們中的許多人迷惘了，不知道這些在做職業(yè)選擇時都有什么用。如果在有償?shù)墓ぷ骱陀幸饬x的工作之間做個選擇，你們會怎么辦？這二者可以兼顧嗎？

 

　　你們都在不停地問我一些最基本的問題：關(guān)于價值、試圖調(diào)和那些潛在競爭的東西、對魚與熊掌不可兼得的認識，等等。現(xiàn)在的你們，到了要作出選擇的轉(zhuǎn)換階段。作出一個選擇——或工作、或讀研——都意味著失去了選擇其他選項的機會。每次決定都會有舍有得——放棄一個可能的同時，你也贏得了其他可能。對于我來說，你們的問題差不多就等于是站在十字路口時的迷茫。

 

　　金融業(yè)、華爾街、“招聘”就是這個困境的標(biāo)志，它帶來了比職業(yè)選擇更廣更深的一系列問題。不管你是從醫(yī)學(xué)院畢業(yè)當(dāng)了全科醫(yī)生或者皮膚科醫(yī)生，從法學(xué)院畢業(yè)進了一家公司或者作了一名公設(shè)辯護律師，還是結(jié)束了兩年的Teach for America項目，在想要不要繼續(xù)教書，這些問題總會在某種程度上困擾你們。你們之所以焦慮，是因為你們既想活得有意義，又想活得成功；你們知道你們所受的教育，讓你們不只是為自己的舒適和滿足而活，而且還要為你們周圍的人而活?，F(xiàn)在，到了你們想辦法實現(xiàn)這個目標(biāo)的時候了。

 

　　我想，還有一個原因使你們焦慮——這個原因和第一個原因相關(guān)，但又有所不同。你們想過得幸福。你們一擁而上地去選修“成功哲學(xué)”和“幸福的科學(xué)”，想從中找到秘訣。但我們怎么樣才能幸福呢？我可以提供一個不錯的答案：長大。調(diào)查數(shù)據(jù)說明，越老的人——比如我這個歲數(shù)的人——比年輕的人感到更幸福。但可能你們都不愿意等。

 

　　當(dāng)我聽著你們說你們面前有如何的選擇時，可以聽出來，你們在為搞不明白成功和幸福的關(guān)系而煩惱——或者更確切地說，什么樣的成功，不僅能帶來金錢和名望，還能讓人真正地幸福。你們擔(dān)心工資最高的工作，不一定是最有意義、最令人滿足的工作。但你們想過沒，藝術(shù)家、演員、公務(wù)員或者高中老師都是怎么過的？你們有沒有思考一下，在媒體圈里該怎么生存？你們是否曾試想過，在經(jīng)過不知道多少年的研究生學(xué)習(xí)、寫了不知道多少篇論文之后，你們能否找到一個英語教授的工作？

 

　　所以，答案就是：只有試過了才知道。但是不管是畫畫、生物還是金融，如果你都不試著去做你喜歡做的事，如果你不去追求你認為最有意義的東西，總有一天你會后悔的。生活的路還很長，總有機會嘗試別的選擇，但不要一開始就想著這個。

 

　　我把這個叫作職業(yè)選擇中的停車位理論，幾十年來我一直在和同學(xué)們說這些。不要因為你覺得會沒有停車位，就把車停在離目的地20個街區(qū)遠的地方。先到你想去的地方，然后再到你應(yīng)該去的地方。

 

　　你可能喜歡投資銀行、喜歡金融、喜歡咨詢，它們可能是最適合你的。也許你和我在Kirkland碰到的一個大四學(xué)生一樣，她剛從西海岸一家很有名的咨詢公司面試回來，她問：“我為什么要做這行？我討厭坐飛機，我不喜歡住酒店，我不會喜歡這個工作的?！蹦蔷驼覀€你喜歡的工作吧。要是你醒著的時間里，都在做你不喜歡的事情，你也不會感到幸福的。

 

　　但是，最最最最重要的是，你們要問出這個問題——問我或者問你們自己。你們選擇了一條路，也就選擇了一份挑戰(zhàn)。你知道自己想要什么樣的生活，只是不知道該怎樣到達那兒。這是好事。我覺得，從某種程度上說，這也是我們的錯。關(guān)注你的生活，思考怎樣才能把它過好、怎樣才能把事情做對：這些也許是博雅教育給你最寶貴的東西。通識教育讓你自覺地生活，讓你在你所作的一切中尋找、定義價值。它也讓你成為一個自我的分析家和批評家，讓你從最高水平上掌握你生活的展示方式。從這個意義上講，博雅教育讓你自由。它們賦予你行動、發(fā)現(xiàn)價值和作出選擇的能力。不要靜止不動，要隨時準備接受改變。牢記那些我們告訴你們的遠大理想，就算你覺得它們永遠不可能實現(xiàn)，也要記?。核鼈兛梢灾敢銈?，讓你們到達那個對自己和世界都有意義的彼岸。你們的未來在自己手中。

 

　　我都迫不及待地想知道你們會做出什么樣的成就了。無論如何，常回家看看，和我們分享你的幸福生活。