哈佛女校长：“那么我们还是来聊聊真理吧”

哈佛校长Drew G. Faust，是哈佛历史上第一位女校长，第一位非哈佛毕业的校长，杰出的历史学家。



根据这所古老学府的传统，我该慷慨激昂地传授你们一些终生受用的智慧。而现在我站在讲坛上，这身鬼打扮也许已经吓坏了那些声名显赫的祖先们，说不定某些先人还会因此得出巫婆灭绝的根源。可我既然来了，你们也都在，那么我们还是来聊聊真理吧。

其实，早在2007年冬我刚上任那时，就已经开始准备这次讲话了。

当我在克克兰学舍吃午饭、在莱弗里特吃晚饭时，当我在办公时间接见同学们时，甚至当我在国外偶遇刚毕业不久的学生时，同学们都会问我一个问题:为什么我们哈佛的学生中，有那么多人会投身到金融、咨询和电子银行领域中去?

我今天就引用威利·萨顿的话来回答你们。当他被问到为什么抢银行时，他说:“银行里有钱。”高薪，无可抗拒的盲从应聘心理，到纽约和众多朋友一起工作、生活，享受人生的那种踏实感，以及做自己感兴趣的工作的成就感，使大家奋不顾身地投入到那些领域。

比起回答你们的问题，我更有兴趣知道你们为什么会这么问，为什么这个问题会困扰那么多人?

我想，你们之所以会忧心忡忡，是因为你们不想仅仅取得传统意义上的成功，还想让人生过得有意义，可你们不知道怎么把这两个目标结合起来。你们不确定，是不是在一家大名鼎鼎的名牌企业中拥有一份起薪丰厚、前途光明的工作，就能得到精神上的满足。

其实你们一直在问的都是一些最基本的问题:关于价值、关于怎样去调和有可能存在竞争的事物之间的关系、关于鱼和熊掌不可兼得的领悟。你们现在正处于一个需要作出选择的过渡阶段。选择了其中任何一项—比如工作、事业或者读研究生—就意味着要舍弃其他选择。每一个决定都意味着取舍—拥抱一种可能性的同时也得放弃另一种可能性。你们的问题就是你们对于未选择的路的失落感。

你们之所以焦虑，是因为你们不仅想让此生过得有意义，而且还想获取成功。你们很清楚，受教育不仅仅是为了改变自己的现状，让自己过得舒坦、满足，而是为了改变你们周围的现状。现在，到了你们去设法实现这个可能的时候了。

我想，你们焦虑的第二个原因是你们想过得幸福。你们扎堆选修《乐观心理学》和《幸福学》，就是想从中找到一点秘诀。可怎样才能找到幸福呢?我给你们一个鼓舞人心的答案:成长。调查数据表明，年纪越大的人—比如说我这个岁数的人—就比年轻人的幸福感更

强烈。不过，你们大概是不愿意等的。

每当听到你们谈论自己面临的选择时，我听得出来，你们非常担忧处理不好成功与幸福的关系，确切地说，怎么样去定义成功才能让它带来或者包含真正的幸福，而不只是金钱和名望。你们担心报酬高的工作不一定最有意义、最令人满足。

答案是:只有试过了你才知道。如果你不试着去做自己喜欢做的事，如果你不去追求你认为最有意义的东西，你会后悔的。人生路漫漫，选择第二志愿的机会多的是，但不要把它作为首选。

我把这个叫做职业选择中的停车位理论:不要因为怕没有停车位就把车停在距离目的地20个街区远的地方。想去哪儿就去哪儿，之后再折回到你该去的地方。

最重要的是牢记我们对于你们高得不可能再高的期望。就算你们觉得我们的期望高得不可能再高，也要记住，我们的期望像北极星一样，可以指引你们到达对自己、对这个世界都有意义的彼岸。你们的人生意义几何，全在乎你们自己。

我都迫不及待地想看到你们取得的成就了。有时间的话，回来看看，和我们分享你们的成就。
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Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
Cambridge, Mass.
June 3, 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.