2017年哈佛校长福斯特哈佛大学毕业典礼演讲 0627

哈佛校长福斯特2017年哈佛大学毕业典礼演讲

Address by President Drew Faust at Harvard University Commencement

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 research, 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 based in位于.... Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, 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 sea 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, whose wizardry (巫术、魔法) takes a different form, one that has changed the world, and although he doesn’t seem to have inspired an outbreak of hoodies, we certainly do have some costumes 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 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 purposes 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 these values. It is one that has provoked debate, dissent, confrontation , and even violence on campuses 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 course, talking about issues of free speech on university campuses. 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 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 address these challenges by moving beyond just defensively protecting free speech –which, of course, 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.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. Veritas is inspiration and aspiration. We assume there is always more to know and discover so we open ourselves 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. Universities must be places open to the kind of debate that can change ideas and committed to standards of reason and evidence that form the bases 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 see how repressing 抑制seemingly 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 see here at Harvard how our inattentiveness漫不经心to the power and appeal of conservative 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 discourse 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, assessment, and even 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 those 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 prosecuted, who is to decide which words? Freedom of expression, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said long ago, protects not only free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate. We need to hear those hateful ideas so our society is fully equipped to oppose and defeat