哈佛大学校长德鲁
哈佛大学校长德鲁·福斯特在哈佛大学2015年毕业典礼上的演讲
译、校:张少军
2015 Commencement Speech
2015年毕业典礼上的演讲
May 28, 2015
Tercentenary Theatre, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
马萨诸塞州,剑桥,哈佛大学,三百周年纪念剧院
Thank you, President Torres. Welcome, Governor Patrick. Thank you, everyone, for being here. 谢谢你,托雷斯校长。欢迎你,帕特里克州长。谢谢你们,来到这里的各位。
The 146th annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association at the 364th Commencement of Harvard University. It’s a particular pleasure to welcome former Governor Deval Patrick of the College Class of 1978 and the Harvard Law School Class of 1982. Throughout his distinguished career in government, he forcefully argued for the power of education to transform lives. Nothing made that case more persuasively than his own remarkable life — from Chicago’s South Side to the Massachusetts State House. When he was sworn in as governor, he took the oath of office with the Mendi Bible, presented in 1841 by the African captives who had seized the slave ship Amistad to the man who had won their legal right to freedom, John Quincy Adams. Governor Patrick can claim connection with both the African heritage of the Amistad rebels and the institutional roots of their defender. Adams, as you heard before from President Torres, was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1787, and was both the first president of this alumni association, and himself the son of an earlier alumnus, John Adams, of the Class of 1755. That kind of continuity across the centuries is not the least of the reasons that we congregate here every spring to renew and reinforce our ties to this extraordinary place.
在哈佛大学第364届毕业典礼时欣逢第146届校友会召开,我特别高兴能够在这里欢迎本科1978届、哈佛法学院1982届校友,前州长德瓦尔•帕特里克(美国第一位非洲裔州长)。穷其整个杰出的政治生涯,他始终在为“教育改变生活的力量”作强有力的辩护。没有任何东西比他非凡的一生——从芝加哥南部走进马萨诸塞州议会——能更令人信服地说明这个道理。当宣誓成为州长时,他手按 “门代圣经”,一本1841年由贩卖奴隶的船只阿米斯塔德号上的反叛的非洲黑奴(来自塞拉利昂门代地区)送给约翰•昆西•亚当斯(美国第六任总统)的圣经。作为律师,亚当斯为他们赢得了合法的自由权利。帕特里克州长能够很好地说明在阿米斯塔德号反叛者的非洲遗产与他们辩护者的制度根源二者之间的联系。亚当斯,正如你们以前听托雷斯校长说过的那样,是哈佛大学1787届校友中的一员,同时也是我们校友会的第一任主席。而他自己又是我们更早的校友,1755届毕业生约翰•亚当斯的儿子。这种跨世纪的连续性,就是我们每年春天都聚集在这个特别的地方来重申和加强我们之间联系的最大理由。
Let me start by noticing what is both obvious, and curious: We are here today together. We are here in association. It is an association of many people, and many generations. We celebrate a connection across time in these festival rites, singing our alma mater, adorning ourselves in medieval robes to mark the deep-rooted traditions of Harvard, and of universities more generally. Even in the age of the online and the virtual, an institution has brought us together, and brings us back.
让我从关注最显著最美妙的两个事实开始:我们今天在此聚会,我们同属一个协会。这是一个包括许多人许多时代的协会。在这个喜庆的节点,我们赞扬跨时代的联系,歌唱我们的母校,我们穿上中世纪的长袍,以展示我们哈佛大学——从更普遍的意义上说,展示所有大学的源远流长的传统。甚至在互联网时代与虚拟的时代,一个机构(指哈佛大学)曾经把我们聚合在一起,又将我们召唤回来。
We have also sung — or rather the magnificent Renée Fleming has sung — “America the Beautiful,” to honor another institution, our democratic republic, which the men and women whose names are carved in stone in Memorial Church right behind me — and Memorial Hall just behind that — gave their lives to protect and uphold.
我们也曾歌唱——或者,更准确地说高贵的蕾妮•弗莱明曾经为我们歌唱——《美丽的美国》,来赞美另一个机构,我们的民主共和政体。为捍卫、支持这个政体而献出生命的英雄男女们的名字就镌刻在我身后的追思教堂以及再后面纪念堂的石碑上。
When the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived on these shores in 1630, they came as dissenters — rejecting institutions of their English homeland. But I have always found it striking that here in the wilderness, where mere survival was the foremost challenge, they so rapidly felt compelled to found this seat of learning so that New England, in the words of William Hubbard of the Class of 1642, “might be supplied with persons fit to manage the affairs of both church and state.” Church,state, and College.Three institutions they deemed essential to this Massachusetts experiment. Three institutions to ensure that the colonists, as Governor John Winthrop urged, could be “knit together as one” in a new society in a brave new world.
1630年,当我们的开国者来到马塞诸塞湾的这片海岸时,他们是作为持异见者来的——他们摒弃了家乡英国的体制。但是一直令我惊讶的是,在这片荒野里,当简单的生存还是最重大的挑战之时,这些开国者竟然很快就意识到了建立(哈佛大学)这所高等学府的必要性,以便新英格兰——用我们1642届校友威廉•哈伯德的话来说——“能够提供适合管理教堂与政府事务的人才”。教堂、政府、大学,这就是他们认为马萨诸塞这个实验的三大基本要素。正如约翰• 温斯罗普所主张的那样,在一个新社会一个无畏的新世界,只要有这三大机构,就能确保所有殖民者“团结得像一个人”。
Dozens of generations have come and gone since then, and the University’s footprint has expanded considerably beyond a small cluster of wooden buildings. But we have never lost faith in the capacity of each generation to build a better society than the one it was born into. We have never lost faith in the capacity of this College to help make that possible. As an early founder, Thomas Shepard put it, we hope to graduate into the world people who are, in his words, “enlarged toward the country and the good of it.”
自那以后,一代代人来了又离去,哈佛的校园已大大扩展,不再局限于当年的几间小木屋。但我们从未失去这样的信念:我们每一代人都有能力去建设一个比我们出生时更好的社会;我们从未失去这样的信念:这所大学有能力使这种愿望成为可能。正如一位早期创始人托马
斯• 谢帕德所说,我们希望向世界输送这样的毕业生,他们将发展壮大自己的国家,成为对国家有益的人。
Yet now, nearly four centuries later, we find ourselves in a challenging historical moment. How do we “enlarge” our graduates in a way that benefits others as well? Shepard spoke of enlarging “toward” — toward, as he put it, “the country and the good of it.” Are we succeeding in educating students oriented toward the betterment of others? Or have we all become so caught up in individual and personal achievements, opportunities, and appearances that we risk forgetting our interdependence, our responsibilities to one another and to the institutions meant to promote the common good?
而今天,将近四个世纪后,我们发现我们处在一个充满挑战的历史时刻。我们应如何鼓励我们的毕业生去造福他人?我们是否培养出了,如谢帕德所说的,“发展壮大自己的国家,对国家有益的”的毕业生?我们是否成功地教育出了以促进他人的完善为目标的学生?或者,我们所有人都已变得如此痴迷于个人成就、机遇和形象,以至于甘愿冒险,忘记我们的互相依赖,忘记我们对于彼此的责任,忘记我们对于这所旨在促进公共利益的大学的责任? This is the era of the selfie — and the selfie stick. Don’t get me wrong: There is much to love about selfies, and two years ago in my Baccalaureate address I concluded by urging the graduates to send such pictures along so we could keep up with them and their post-Harvard lives. But think for a moment about the implications of a society that goes through life taking its own picture. That seems to me a quite literal embodiment of “self-regarding” — a term not often used as a compliment. In fact, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers “egocentric,” “narcissistic,” and “selfish” as synonyms. We direct endless attention to ourselves, our image, our “Likes,” just as we are encouraged — and in fact encourage our students — to burnish resumes and fill first college and then job or graduate school applications with endless lists of achievements — with examples, to borrow Shepard’s language, of constant enlargements of self. As one social commentator has observed, we are ceaselessly at work building our own brands. We spend time looking at screens instead of one another. Large portions of our lives are hardly experienced: They are curated, shared, Snapchatted and Instagrammed — rendered as a kind of composite selfie.
这是一个自拍——还有自拍杆的时代。不要误会我:自拍真是有太多的乐趣,两年前的毕业典礼演讲,我就在结束时鼓励毕业生们多给我们发送一些自拍照,让我们与他们保持联系,了解他们后哈佛时代的生活。但是仔细想想,一个人人自拍的社会将意味着什么?在我看来,那就是 “利己主义”地地道道的传神写照。这通常不是一个恭维人的术语。事实上,在韦氏词典里,把“自我中心的”、“自恋的”和“自私的”作为它的同义词。我们直接地无休止地关注我们自己、我们的形象、我们的爱好——如同我们被鼓励的那样,并且事实上也鼓励我们的学生。就像我们用就读的第一所大学、用工作经历、用我们研究生院的申请,用我们一串串无止境的成就来美化我们的简历。——借用谢帕德的话说,就是“持续地自我放大”。正如一位社会评论家所观察到的那样,我们都在不停地运作以打造自己的品牌。我们花很多时间紧盯屏幕,却忽视了身边的人。我们生活中的很大一部分不是被我们去经历去体验,而是被编辑、分享并用Snapchat 和Instagram 等应用程序上传的——最终它们呈现出的是一种复合的自拍照。
Now, a certain amount of self-absorption is in our nature. As Harvard’s own E.O. Wilson has recently written, and I quote him, “We are an insatiably curious species — provided the subjects are our personal selves and people we know or would like to know.” But I want to underscore two troubling aspects of this obsession with ourselves.
当然,适度的自我关注是我们天性的一部分。正如我们哈佛自己的生物学教授E.O. 威尔逊最近所写的那样:“我们是一个充满无穷好奇心的物种——只要对象是我们自己以及我们自己所知道或想知道的人。” 但是我想强调的是,这种自我迷恋会有两个令人忧虑的方面。 The first is it undermines our sense of responsibility to others — the ethos of service at the heart of Thomas Shepard’s phrase describing Harvard’s enduring commitment to graduate students who are “enlarged” to be about more than themselves. Not just enlarged for their own sake and betterment — but enlarged toward others and toward the world. This is part of the essence of what this university has always strived to be. Our students and faculty have embodied that spirit through their work to serve in our neighborhood and around the world. From tutoring at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston to working in Liberia to mitigate the Ebola crisis, they make a difference in the lives of countless individuals. The Dexter Gate across the Yard invites students to “Enter to grow in wisdom. Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” Today some 6,500 graduates go forth. May each of them remember that it is in some way to serve.
首先,它削弱了我们对于他人的责任感——一种服务他人的意识。 服务的精神正是托马斯•谢帕德用以描述哈佛大学之承诺的那个短语的核心:让毕业生们不断发展壮大,超越自我。这并非仅仅是为了每个人的自身利益自我完善的发展壮大,更是为了他人和整个世界的发展壮大——这也是这所大学一直努力为之奋斗的使命。我们的学生和教授已经通过服务周围的社区以及整个世界,具体地践行了这种精神。从Allston 小镇的哈佛•波特尔教育中心开展的课外辅导与社区教育,到去利比亚帮助缓解埃博拉病毒危机,哈佛人改变了无数人的生活。 在院子对过的哈佛的德克斯特校门,它邀请学生们“进来,增长智慧;离去,更好地服务你的国家和你的同胞。” 今天,我们约有6500名毕业生将要出发,愿他们每个人都记得自己服务的使命。
There is yet another danger we should note as well. Self-absorption may obscure not only our responsibilities to others but our dependence upon them. And this is troubling for Harvard, for higher education and for fundamental social institutions whose purposes and necessity we forget at our peril. Why do we even need college, critics demand? Can’t we do it all on our own? Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has urged students to drop out and has even subsidized them — including several of our undergraduates — to leave college and pursue their individual entrepreneurial dreams. After all, the logic goes, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out and they seem to have done OK. Well, yes.
还有一种危险也是我们应当注意的。自我关注不仅可能模糊了我们对于他人的责任,它还掩盖了我们对于他人的依赖。对于哈佛大学、对于高等教育、对于各种社会基础机构,这将非常麻烦:一旦我们自己处于危险的境地,我们便会忘了它们存在的目的与必要性。为什么我们还需要大学,批评家们问道,我们就不能全靠自学吗?皮特• 泰尔(Peter Thiel),硅谷企业家,曾鼓励学生们辍学,甚至还给予他们经济补助,让他们辍学,去追逐他们个人的企业家之梦——这其中也包括我们哈佛的几个肄业生。毕竟,从逻辑上来讲,马克•扎克伯格和比尔•盖茨都辍学了,他们似乎都很成功。事实如此,没错。
But we should remember: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had Harvard to drop out of. Harvard to serve as the place where their world-changing discoveries were born. Harvard and institutions like it to train the physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, business analysts, lawyers, and thousands of other skilled individuals upon whom Facebook and Microsoft depend. Harvard to enlighten public servants to lead a country in which Facebook, Microsoft, and companies like
them can thrive. Harvard to nurture the writers and filmmakers and journalists who create the storied “content” that gives the Internet its substance. And we must recognize as well that universities have served as sources of discoveries essential to the work of the companies advancing the revolutions in technology that have changed our lives — from early successes in creating and programming computers to development of prototypes that laid the groundwork for the now-ubiquitous touchscreen.
但是我们应该记取:比尔•盖茨和马克•扎克伯格都是从哈佛辍学的。哈佛是孕育他们改变世界想法的地方。哈佛以及其他像哈佛一样的学府培养了数以千计的物理学家、数学家、计算机科学家、商业分析师、律师和其他技巧娴熟的人,这些都是“脸书”和微软公司赖以生存的员工。哈佛培育了政府官员、公务员来领导国家,让脸书 、微软以及类似的公司可以在其中繁荣发展。哈佛大学还培养了无数的作家、电影制作人和新闻工作者,是他们的作品给互联网增添了“内容”。而且我们还要承认,大学是发明创造的源泉,而这些发明正是企业那些改变了我们生活的科技革新的前提与基石——从早期成功地创造计算机和编写计算机应用程序,到发展出如今已无处不在的触摸屏的雏型与基本原理。
We are told, too, that universities are about to be unbundled, disrupted by innovations that enable individuals to teach themselves, selecting from a buffet of massive open online courses and building do-it-yourself degrees. But online opportunities and residential learning are not at odds; the former can strengthen — but does not supplant — the latter. And through initiatives like edX and HarvardX, we are sharing intellectual riches that are the creations of institutions of higher learning with millions of people around the globe. Intriguingly, we have found that a highly represented group among these online learners around the world is teachers — who will use this knowledge to enrich their own schools and face-to-face classrooms.
我们还被告知,那让每个人自我教育成为可能的创新将使大学土崩瓦解。人们可以像吃自助餐一样在“慕课”(Massive Open Online Course大规模在线公开课)中选课,并设立DIY(自我教育)学位。但在线学习与在校学习并不矛盾,前者可以强化,却不会取代后者。通过类似像edX 和HarvardX 的这样的在线课程平台,我们哈佛正在与全球数百万人分享作为高等教育机构创造物的智力财富。有趣的是,我们发现,在遍及全球的在线学习者中,有一个极具代表性的群体,那就是老师——他们正用这些在线课程中的知识来丰富他们自己的学校和他们采用面对面教学方式的课堂。
Assertions about the irrelevance of universities are part of a broader and growing mistrust of institutions more generally, one fuelled by our intoxication with the power and charisma of the individual and the cult of celebrity. Government, business, non-profits are joined with universities as targets of suspicion and criticism.
声称大学已经无关紧要,没有存在价值,这种断言来源于人们对于机构的广泛的日益增长的不信任;而我们对于个人力量与魅力的陶醉以及对于名人的狂热崇拜更使得这种趋势火上加油。政府、企业、非营利组织和大学一样,都成了质疑和批评的标靶。
There are few countervailing voices to remind us how institutions serve and support us. We tend to take what they do for granted. Your food was safe; your blood test was reliable; your polling place was open; electricity was available when you flipped the switch. Your flight to Boston took off and landed according to rules and systems and organizations responsible for safe air travel. Just imagine a week or a month without this “civic infrastructure” — without the institutions that undergird our society and without the commitment to our interdependence that created these structures of commonality in the first place. Think of the countries in West Africa that lacked the public health systems to contain Ebola and the devastation that resulted. Contrast that with the network of institutions that so rapidly saved lives and contained spread of the disease when it appeared in the United States. Think about other elements of our civic infrastructure — the libraries, the museums, the school committees, the religious organizations that are as vital to moving us forward as are our roads and railways and bridges.
很少有反对的声音来提醒我们这些机构是如何服务和支持我们的,我们常常认为它们的存在理所当然。你的食物是安全的;你的血液检查是可信赖的;你的投票站是开放的;当你按动开关时,一定会有电;你前往波士顿的航班的起飞降落都是根据航空安全规定进行的,会有机构为你的空中旅行安全负责。设想一下,假如所有的市政基础设施停摆一周或一个月,没有机构来支持我们的社会,没有对于从一开始就建立起来的互相依赖的社会公共体系的承诺,我们的生活会是怎样?想想那些西非国家,由于公共卫生系统不足以遏制埃博拉的爆发而导致的令人悲伤的后果。对比起来,当它出现在美国时,我们凭借机构的网络如此迅速地拯救了生命,遏制了疾病的传播。再想想我们市政基础设施的其他要素——图书馆、博物馆、教育委员会、宗教团体,这些在保证我们向前迈进时如同公路、铁路、桥梁一样至关重要的元素。
Institutions embody our present and enduring connections to one other. They bring our disparate talents and capacities to the pursuit of common purpose. At the same time, they link us to both what has come before and what will follow. They are repositories of values — values that precede, transcend, and outlast the self. They challenge us to look beyond the immediate, the instantly gratifying, to think about the bigger picture, the longer run, the larger whole. They remind us that the world is only temporarily ours, that we are stewards entrusted with the past and responsible to the future. We are larger than ourselves and our selfies.
机构体现了我们彼此间当下的与持久的联系。它们将我们不同的天赋和能力拧成一股绳,去追求共同的目标。同时,它们也将我们与过去和未来维系起来。它们是价值的金矿——这些价值先于自我,高于自我,比自我更恒久。机构促使我们放弃直接的眼前的快感,思考更大的图景,更远的目标,更宏大的全局。它们提醒我们世界只是暂时属于我们,我们肩负着过去和未来的责任,真正的我们要比我们自己和我们的自拍照要伟大得多。
That responsibility is quintessentially the work of universities — calling upon our shared human heritage to invent a new future — the future that will be created by the thousands of graduates who leave here today. Our work is about that ongoing commitment — not to a single individual or even one generation or one era — but to a larger world and to the service of the age that is waiting before it.
而大学的责任正是大学的典型工作——省视我们共同的人类遗产去创造未来——这个未来将由今天从这里毕业的数千名哈佛学生去创造。我们的工作是一个持续的承诺,它并不针对单一的个体,甚至不针对一代人或一个时代,它是对一个更大的世界的承诺,是一个对于正在等待它服务的时代的承诺。
In 1884, my predecessor Charles William Eliot unveiled a statue of John Harvard and spoke of the good that can come from the study of what we might call the “enlarged” life of the man whose name this university bears.
1884年,我的前任、查尔斯•威廉•艾略特校长为约翰•哈佛雕像揭幕,并谈到研究约翰•哈佛——这位冠名了这所大学的人——“发展壮大”的一生可能带来的教益。
Eliot said: “He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fructified and multiplied beyond all power of measurement or computation. He will teach that from the seed which he
planted … have sprung joy, strength, and energy ever fresh, blooming year after year in this garden of learning, and flourishing … as time goes on, in all fields of human activity.”
艾略特校长说:“他会教导人们善行将流芳百世,将以超越所有计量方式的速度和规模繁衍。他会告诉人们,他播下的种子,将迸发出喜悦、力量以及永远新鲜的能量,在这个教育园地里,年复一年,迎风怒放;并将随着时光的流逝,在人类活动的所有领域,花繁叶茂。” In other words, that statue we paraded past this afternoon is not simply a monument to an individual, but to a community and an institution constantly renewing itself. Your presence here today represents an act of connection and of affirmation of that community and of this institution. It is a recognition of Harvard’s capacity to propel you toward lives and worlds beyond your own. I thank you for the commitment that brought you here today and for all it means and sustains. I wish you joy, strength, and energy ever fresh.
换句话说,今天下午我们列队经过的那座雕像,它不仅仅是一座代表个人的纪念碑,更是代表一个不断自我更新的社区和机构的纪念碑。你们今天坐在这里,就代表了一种联系的努力与对哈佛这个社区和机构的认可。这种认可也是你对于哈佛推动你走向人生、惠及世界的能力的认可。我感谢你们,感谢那使你们今天聚集在这里的承诺,感谢那承诺所意味与维系的一切。祝你们每一位都快乐、健康并且永远充满活力!
Thank you very much.
谢谢你们,非常感谢。