Good afternoon.My remarks at this moment in our Commencement rituals are officially titled a\"Report to the Alumni.\" The first time I delivered them, in 2008, I was the only obstaclebetween all of you and J.K.Rowling.I looked out on a sea of eager children, costumedDumbledores, and Quidditch brooms waving impatiently in the air.Today, you await MarkZuckerberg, whose wizardry takes a different form, one that has changed the world, andalthough he doesn\'t seem to have inspired an outbreak of hoodies, we certainly do have somecostumes in this audience today.I see we are now handing out blankets.
This is a day of joy and celebration, of happy endings and new beginnings, of families andfriends, of achievements and hopes.It is also a day when we as a university perform our mostimportant annual ritual, affirming once again the purposes that animate us and the values thatdirect and inspire us.
I want to speak today about one of the most important – and in recent months, mostcontested – of these values.It is one that has provoked debate, dient, confrontation, andeven violence on campuses acro the country, and one that has attracted widespread publicattention and criticism.
I am, of course, talking about iues of free speech on university campuses.The meaning andlimits of free speech are questions deeply embedded in our legal system, in interpretations ofthe First Amendment and its applications.I am no constitutional lawyer, indeed no lawyer atall, and I do not intend in my brief remarks today to addre complex legal doctrines.Nor,clearly, can I in a few brief minutes take on even a fraction of the arguments that have beenadvanced on this iue.Instead, I speak as one who has been a university president for adecade in order to raise three questions:
First: Why is free speech so important to and at universities? Second: Why does it seem under special challenge right now?
And, third: How might we better addre these challenges by moving beyond just defensivelyprotecting free speech – which, of course, we must do – to actively and affirmatively enabling itand nurturing environments in which it can thrive?
So first: Why is free speech so important to and at universities? This is a question I took upwith the newly arrived first-year students in the College when I welcomed them at Convocationlast fall.For centuries, I told them, universities have been environments in which knowledge hasbeen discovered, collected, studied, debated, expanded, changed, and advanced through thepower of rational argument and exchange.We pursue truth unrelentingly, but we must neverbe so complacent as to believe we have unerringly attained it.Veritas is inspiration andaspiration.We aume there is always more to know and discover so we open ourselves tochallenge and change.We must always be ready to be wrong, so being part of a universitycommunity requires courage and humility.Universities must be places open to the kind ofdebate that can change ideas and committed to standards of reason and evidence that formthe bases for evaluating them.
Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidenceimpedes our acce to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection ofbad ones.From at least the time of Galileo, we can see how repreing seemingly hereticalideas has blinded societies and nations to the enhanced knowledge and understanding on whichprogre depend.Far more recently, we can see here at Harvard how our inattentivene to thepower and appeal of conservative voices left much of our community astonished –blindsided by the outcome of last fall\'s election.We must work to ensure that universities donot become bubbles isolated from the concerns and discourse of the society that surroundsthem.
Universities must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, butmust be established – established through reasoned argument, aement, and evensometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.The legitimacyof universities\' claim to be sources and validators of fact depends on our willingne toactively and vigorously defend those facts.And we must remember that limiting some speechopens the dangerous poibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own.Ifsome words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or evenprosecuted, who is to decide which words? Freedom of expreion, as Justice Oliver WendellHolmes famously said long ago, protects not only free thought for those who agree with us butfreedom for the thought we hate.We need to hear those hateful ideas so our society is fullyequipped to oppose and defeat them.
Over the years, differences about the implementation of the University\'s free speech principleshave often provoked controversy.And we haven\'t always gotten it right.As long ago as 1939,an invitation from a student group to the head of the American Communist Party generatedprotest and the invitation was ultimately canceled by the Corporation.Bertrand Ruell\'sappointment as William James Lecturer just a year later divided the Corporation, but PresidentConant broke the tie and Ruell came.Campus conflicts over invited speakers are hardly new.
Yet the vehemence with which these iues have been debated in recent months, not just oncampuses but in the broader public sphere, suggests there is something distinctive about thismoment.Certainly, these controversies reflect a highly polarized political and socialenvironment – perhaps the most divisive since the era of the Civil War.And in these alreadyfractious circumstances, free speech debates have provided a fertile substrate into whichanger and disagreement could be planted to nourish partisan outrage and generate mediaclickbait.But that is only a partial explanation.
Universities themselves have changed dramatically in recent years, reaching beyond theirtraditional, largely homogeneous populations to become more diverse than perhaps anyother institution in which Americans find themselves living together.Once overwhelminglywhite, male, Protestant, and upper cla, Harvard College is now half female, majorityminority, religiously pluralistic, with nearly 60 percent of students able to attend because offinancial aid.Fifteen percent are the first in their families to go to college.Many of our studenttruggle to feel full members of this community – a community in which people like them haveso recently arrived.They seek evidence and aurance that – to borrow the title of a powerfultheatrical piece created by a group of our African-American students – evidence andaurance that they, too, are Harvard.
The price of our commitment to freedom of speech is paid disproportionately by thesestudents.For them, free speech has not infrequently included enduring a questioning oftheir abilities, their humanity, their morality – their very legitimacy here.Our values and ourtheory of education rest on the aumption that members of our community will take the riskof speaking and will actively compete in our wild rumpus of argument and ideas.It requiresthem as well to be fearle in face of argument or challenge or even verbal insult.And itexpects that fearlene even when the challenge is directed to the very identity – race,religion, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality – that may have made themuncertain about their right to be here in the first place.Demonstrating such fearlene ishard; no one should be mocked as a snowflake for finding it so.
Hard, but important and attainable.Attainable, we believe, for every member of ourcommunity.But the price of free speech cannot be charged just to those most likely tobecome its target.We must support and empower the voices of all the members of ourcommunity and nurture the courage and humility that our commitment to unfettereddebate demands from all of us.And that courage means not only resilience in face ofchallenge or attack, but strength to speak out against injustices directed at others as well.
Free speech doesn\'t just happen and require intervention when it is impeded.It is not aboutthe freedom to out-shout others while everyone has their fingers in their ears.For free speechto flourish, we must build an environment where everyone takes responsibility for the rightnot just to speak, but to hear and be heard, where everyone aumes the responsibility totreat others with dignity and respect.It requires not just speakers, but, in the words of JamesRyan, dean of our Graduate School of Education, generous listeners.Amidst the current soul-searching about free speech, we need to devote more attention to establishing the conditions inwhich everyone\'s speech is encouraged and taken seriously.
Ensuring freedom of speech is not just about allowing speech.It is about actively creating acommunity where everyone can contribute and flourish, a community where argument isrelished, not feared.Freedom of speech is not just freedom from censorship; it is freedom toactively join the debate as a full participant.It is about creating a context in which genuinedebate can happen.
Talk a lot, I urged the Cla of 2020 last fall; listen more.Don\'t stand safely on the sidelines;take the risk of being wrong.It is the best way to learn and grow.And build a culture ofgenerous listening so that others may be emboldened to take risks, too.A community in ashared search for Veritas – that is the ideal for which Harvard must strive.We need it nowmore than ever.
![哈佛大学校长演讲[优秀]](/templates/pc/static/images/icon_word.2.png){kind=icon}
