哈佛校长福斯特2017年哈佛大学毕业典礼演讲
老槐树Address by President Drew Faust at Harvard University Commencement
江米酒Tercentenary Theatre, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
May 25, 2017
哈佛大学背景补充：
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in 致力于在....领域追求卓越teaching, learning, and rearch, and to developing leaders 培养领袖in many disciplines who make a difference globally享誉世界.
Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The University, which is bad in 位于.... Cambridge and Boston, Massachutts, has an enrollment of 在校学生多达over 20,000 degree candidates, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Harvard has more than 360,000 alumni around the world.
哈佛校长演讲全文如下：
Good afternoon. My remarks at this moment in our Commencement rituals 毕业典礼仪式 are officially titled a “Report to the Alumni.” The first time I delivered them, in 2008, I was the only obstacle between all of you and J.K. Rowling JK罗琳. I looked out on a a of 许多；人山人海 eager children, costumed Dumbledores（阿不思·邓布利多是哈利波特系列丛书中的人物，他是霍格沃茨魔法学校校长，被公认为是当代最伟大的巫师。）, and Quidditchbrooms (魁地奇扫帚，魁地奇是电影《哈利波特》中的一种对抗运动。) waving impatiently in the air. Today, you await Mark Zuckerberg, who wizardry (巫术、魔法) takes a different form, one that has changed the world, and although he doesn’t em to have inspired an outbreak of hoodies, we certainly do have some costumes in this audience today. I e we are now handing out blankets.
This is a day of joy and celebration, of happy endings and new beginnings, of families and friends, of achievements and hopes. It is also a day when we as a university perform our most important annual ritual, affirming once again the purpos that animate 激励 us and the values that direct and inspire us.
I want to speak today about one of the most important – and in recent months, most contested 争议的– of the values. It is one that has provoked debate, disnt, confrontation , and even violence on campus across the country (可拆开翻译，处理为：激起争论、造成不满和导致对抗，甚至在全国各大校园引发暴力), and one that has attracted widespread public attention and criticism.
I am, of cour, talking about issues of free speech on university campus. The meaning and limits of free speech are questions deeply embedded in 深深地植入到our legal system, in interpretations of the First Amendment and its applications. I am no constitutional lawyer, indeed no lawyer at all, and I do not intend in my brief remarks today to address complex legal doctrines. Nor, clearly, can I in a few brief minutes take on even a fraction of the arguments that have been advanced on this issue. Instead, I speak as one who has been a university president for a decade in order to rai three questions:
First: Why is free speech so important to and at universities?
Second: Why does it em under special challenge right now?
聊斋志异之胭脂And, third: How might we better address the challenges by moving beyond just defensively protecting free speech – which, of cour, we must do – to actively and affirmatively enabling it and 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 up with the newly arrived first-year students 一年级新生in the College when I welcomed them at Convocation last fall. For centuries, I told them, universities have been environments in which knowledge has been discovered, collected, studied, debated, expanded, changed, and advanced through the power of rational argument and exchange.歌舞伎 We pursue truth unrelentingly 不断追求真理, but we must never be so complacent as to believe we have unerringly attained it. 黑洞炸弹Veritas is inspiration and aspiration. We assume there is always more to know and discover so we open ourlves to challenge and change. We must always be ready to be wrong, so being part of a university community requires courage and humility勇气与谦逊. Universiti
es must be places open to the kind of debate that can change ideas and committed to standards of reason and evidence that form the bas for evaluating them.
Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy 正统知识 independent of facts and evidence impedes 阻碍our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits 抑制a full and considered rejection of bad ones. From at least the time of Galileo, we can e how repressing 抑制 emingly heretical ideas 歪理邪说has blinded societies and nations to the enhanced knowledge and understanding on which progress depend. Far more recently, we can e here at Harvard how our inattentiveness 漫不经心to the power and appeal of conrvative voices left much of our community astonished – blindsided 攻其不备by the outcome of last fall’s election. We must work to ensure that universities do not become bubbles isolated from the concerns and discour of the society that surrounds them.
Universities must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, but must be established – established through reasoned argument, asssment, and eve
n sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth. The legitimacy of universities’ claim to be sources and validators of fact depends on our willingness to actively and vigorously defend tho facts. And we must remember that limiting some speech opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own. If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even procuted, who is to decide which words? Freedom of expression, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said long ago, protects not only free thought for tho who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate. We need to hear tho hateful ideas so our society is fully equipped to oppo and defeat them.
Over the years, differences about the implementation of the University’s free speech principles have 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 generated protest and the invitation was ultimately canceled by the Corporation. Bertrand Rusll’s appointment as William James Lecturer just a year later divided the Corporation, but President Conant broke the tie and Rusll came. Campus conflicts over
游公园作文invited speakers are hardly new.
小兔子作文300字三年级Yet the vehemence 激烈with which the issues have been debated in recent months, not just on campus but in the broader public sphere, suggests there is something distinctive about this moment. Certainly, the controversies reflect a highly polarized political and social environment – perhaps the most divisive since the era of the Civil War. And in the already fractious circumstances, free speech debates have provided a fertile substrate into which anger and disagreement could be planted to nourish partisan outrage and generate media clickbait. But that is only a partial explanation.
