1、1Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008The Memorial ChurchCambridge, Mass.June 3, 2008As prepared for delivery 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
2、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 h
3、ave 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 col
4、d 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 le
5、ts return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Lets imagine this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q 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 po
6、etry; 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
7、. The Crimsons survey of last years 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
8、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 b
9、y 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
10、 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
11、, 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 clich easier to deal with as the ironic title
12、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 lets for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers t
13、o 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 promis
14、e 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
15、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
16、 of American politics through engagement in this years presidential contests. 3But 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
17、 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 c
18、areer, 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,
19、 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
20、 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 co
21、mfort 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
22、 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 dont want to wait. As I have listened to y
23、ou 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
24、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 y
25、ou finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing? The answer is: you wont know till you try. But if you dont try to do what you love whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you dont pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is lo
26、ng. There is always time for Plan B. But dont 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. Dont park 20 blocks from your destination because you think youll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circl
27、e 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 4West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?”
28、she asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I wont 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 dont. But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question not just of me but of yourselves. You are
29、 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
30、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.
31、 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
32、, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Dont 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 cant wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.
