Text of Zakarias Commencement address 'We live in an age of progress' Thursday, May 24, 2012 Thank you so much,

President Faust, Fellows of the Corporation, Overseers, Ladies and Gentlemen, and graduates. To the graduates in particular, I have to tell you, youre way ahead of me already. I never made it to my commencement, either from college or graduate school. I went to college south of here, in a small town called New Haven, Connecticut. And, well, I celebrated a bit the night before the ceremony. The honest truth is, I slept through much of my commencement. Then, after I had finally made it to Harvard for graduate school, I took a job before I had finished my Ph.D., and wrote the final chapters while working in New York. I couldnt get away from work for Commencement, and I got my degree in the mail. So, 19 years later, it is a great honor to receive, in person, a Harvard degree. Harvard was, for me, a revelation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on this campus, it is possible to receive a fine education at Yale, and I did. But Harvards great graduate programs have an ambition, energy, and range that, for me, made it a dazzling, electric experience. Getting a Ph.D. involves many hours of grueling work, but, if you do it right, also many hours of goofing off with friends, acquiring new hobbies and interests, and working your way through the great resources here from the libraries to cafes. I fully availed myself of these opportunities, and the time spent not working (in a formal sense) was as valuable as the hours in seminar rooms. I learned from students, faculty, and visitors. Harvard is really where I learned to think, and I owe this University a deep debt of gratitude, as most of you do as well something the University will remind you of from time to time. I have always been wary of making commencement speeches because I dont think of myself as old enough to have any real wisdom to impart on such an august occasion. Id like to think Im still vaguely post-graduate. But theres nothing like having kids to remind me of how deeply uncool I am. So I accept this task, with some trepidation. The best commencement speech I ever read was by the humorist Art Buchwald. He was brief, saying simply, Remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Dont screw it up. You are not going to hear that message much these days. Instead, youre likely to hear that we are living through grim economic times, that the graduates are entering the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. The worries are not just economic. Ever since 9/11, we have lived in an age of terror, and our lives remain altered by the fears of future attacks and a future of new threats and dangers. Then there are larger concerns that you hear about: The Earth is warming; were running out of water and other vital resources; we have a billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty. So, I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical context, the world as I see it. The world we live in is, first of all, at peace profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in

arms races or cold wars. This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history, and he must be right because he is a Harvard professor. The political stability we have experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economic system, in which countries around the world are participating and flourishing. In 1980, the number of countries that were growing at 4 percent a year robust growth was around 60. By 2007, it had doubled. Even now, after the financial crisis, that number is more than 80. Even in the current period of slow growth, keep in mind that the global economy as a whole will grow 10 to 20 percent faster this decade than it did a decade ago, 60 percent faster than it did two decades ago, and five times as fast as it did three decades ago. The result: The United Nations estimates that poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. And much of that reduction has taken place in the last 20 years. The average Chinese person is 10 times richer than he or she was 50 years ago and lives for 25 years longer. Life expectancy across the world has risen dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy every day without even exercising! A third of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be 100. All this is because of rising standards of living, hygiene, and, of course, medicine. Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor who is also a practicing surgeon, and who also writes about medicine for The New Yorker, writes about a 19th century operation in which the surgeon was trying to amputate his patients leg. He succeeded at that but accidentally amputated his assistants finger as well. Both died of sepsis, and an onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical procedure to have a 300 percent fatality rate. Weve come a long way. To understand the astonishing age of progress we are living in, you just look at the cellphones in your pockets. (Many of you have them out and were already looking at them. Dont think I cant see you.) Your cellphones have more computing power than the Apollo space capsule. That capsule couldnt even Tweet! So just imagine the opportunities that lie ahead. Moores Law that computing power doubles every 18 months while costs halve may be slowing down in the world of computers, but it is accelerating in other fields. The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moores Law. A Third Industrial Revolution, involving material science and the customization of manufacturing, is yet in its infancy. And all these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities that we cannot really foresee.

The good news goes on. Look at the number of college graduates globally. It has risen fourfold in the last four decades for men, but it has risen sevenfold for women. I believe that the empowerment of women, whether in a village in Africa or a boardroom in America, is good for the world. If you are wondering whether women are in fact smarter than men, the evidence now is overwhelming: yes. My favorite example of this is a study done over the last 25 years in which it found that female representatives in the House of Congress were able to bring back $49 million more in federal grants than their male counterparts. So it turns out women are better than men even at pork-barrel spending. We can look forward to a world enriched and ennobled by womens voices. Now you might listen to me and say This is all wonderful for the world at large, but what does this mean for America? Well, for America and for most places, peace and broader prosperity the rise of the rest means more opportunities. I remind you that this is a country that still has the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, that dominates the age of technology, that hosts hundreds of the worlds greatest companies, that houses its largest, deepest capital markets, and that has almost all of the worlds greatest universities. There is no equivalent of Harvard in China or India, nor will there be one for decades, perhaps longer. The United States is also a vital society. It is the only country in the industrialized world that is demographically vibrant. We add 3,000,000 people to the country every year. That itself is a powerful life force, and it is made stronger by the fact that so many of these people are immigrants. They I should say we come to this country with aspirations, with hunger, with drive, with determination, and with a fierce love for America. By 2050, America will have a better demographic profile than China. This country has its problems, but I would rather have Americas problems than most any other place in the world. When I tell you that we live in an age of progress, I am not urging complacency far from it. We have had daunting challenges over the last 100 years: a depression, two world wars, a Cold War, 9/11, and global economic crisis. But we have overcome them by our response. Human action and human achievement have managed to tackle terrible problems. We forget our successes. In 2009, the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico. Now, if you looked back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses, it is quite conceivable this one would have spread like the Asian flu in 1957 or 1968, in which 4,000,000 people died. But this time, the Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the information with the WHO, learned best practices fast, tracked down where the outbreak began, quarantined people, and vaccinated others. The country went on a full-scale alert, banning any large gatherings. In a Catholic country, you couldnt go to church for three Sundays. Perhaps more importantly, you couldnt go to soccer matches either. The result was that the virus was contained, to the point where, three months later, people wondered what the big fuss was and asked if we had all overreacted. We didnt overreact; we reacted, we responded, and we solved the problem.

There are other examples. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, industrial production fell by as much as it did in the first year of the depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more. Yet this time, no Great Depression followed. Why? Because of the coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9/11 did not usher in an age of terrorism, with al-Qaida going from strength to strength. Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and other terror groups, with considerable success. When we can come together, when we cooperate, when we put aside petty differences, the results are astounding. So, when we look at the problems we face economic crises, terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity keep in mind that these problems are real, but also that the human reaction and response to them will also be real. We can more easily map out the big problem than the thousands of individual actions governments, firms, organizations, and people will take that will constitute the solution. In a sense, Im betting on the graduates in this great audience. I believe that your actions will have consequences. Your efforts will make a difference. And turning to the graduates, I know I am expected to provide some advice at a commencement. Should you go into nanotechnology or bioengineering? What are the industries of the future? Honestly, I have no idea. But one thing I do know is that human beings will reward and honor those talents of heart and mind they have always honored for thousands of years: intelligence, hard work, discipline, courage, loyalty and, perhaps above all, love and a generosity of spirit. Those are the qualities that, at the end of the day, make you live a great life, one that is rewarded by the outside world, and a good life, one that is rewarded only by those who know you best. These are the virtues that people honor, that they built statues for 5,000 years ago. Well, nobody builds statues anymore. They build weird, modernist sculptures with strange pieces of metal falling off of them, but you get my idea. Trust yourself; you know what you should do. You know the kind of life you should live. You dont need an ethics course to know what you shouldnt do. Just trust in your instincts, be true to them, and you will make for yourself a great and a good life. And, in doing so, you will change the world. I said that at my age I dont feel competent to give you much advice, but I will give you one last piece of wisdom that comes with age. For all of you who are graduating students or, really, anyone who is still young, trust me. You cannot possibly understand the love that your parents have for you until you have children of your own. Once you have your own kids, their strange behavior will suddenly make sense. But dont wait that long. On this day of all days, give them a hug, and tell them that you love them. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and to the graduates of Harvard Universitys Class of 2012, Godspeed.

Remarks by the President at Barnard College Commencement Ceremony Barnard College Columbia University New York, New York

1:28 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you. Please, please have a seat. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you, President Spar, trustees, President Bollinger. Hello, Class of 2012! (Applause.) Congratulations on reaching this day. Thank you for the honor of being able to be a part of it. There are so many people who are proud of you -- your parents, family, faculty, friends -- all who share in this achievement. So please give them a big round of applause. (Applause.) To all the moms who are here today, you could not ask for a better Mothers Day gift than to see all of these folks graduate. (Applause.) I have to say, though, whenever I come to these things, I start thinking about Malia and Sasha graduating, and I start tearing up and -- (laughter) -- it's terrible. I don't know how you guys are holding it together. (Laughter.) I will begin by telling a hard truth: Im a Columbia college graduate. (Laughter and applause.) I know there can be a little bit of a sibling rivalry here. (Laughter.) But Im honored nevertheless to be your commencement speaker today -- although Ive got to say, you set a pretty high bar given the past three years. (Applause.) Hillary Clinton -- (applause) -- Meryl Streep -- (applause) -- Sheryl Sandberg -- these are not easy acts to follow. (Applause.)

But I will point out Hillary is doing an extraordinary job as one of the finest Secretaries of State America has ever had. (Applause.) We gave Meryl the Presidential Medal of Arts and Humanities. (Applause.) Sheryl is not just a good friend; shes also one of our economic advisers. So its like the old saying goes -- keep your friends close, and your Barnard commencement speakers even closer. (Applause.) There's wisdom in that. (Laughter.) Now, the year I graduated -- this area looks familiar -- (laughter) -- the year I graduated was 1983, the first year women were admitted to Columbia. (Applause.) Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Music was all about Michael and the Moonwalk. (Laughter.) AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do it! (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: No Moonwalking. (Laughter.) No Moonwalking today. (Laughter.) We had the Walkman, not iPods. Some of the streets around here were not quite so inviting. (Laughter.) Times Square was not a family destination. (Laughter.) So I know this is all ancient history. Nothing worse than commencement speakers droning on about bygone days. (Laughter.) But for all the differences, the Class of 1983 actually had a lot in common with all of you. For we, too, were heading out into a world at a moment when our country was still recovering from a particularly severe economic recession. It was a time of change. It was a time of uncertainty. It was a time of passionate political debates. You can relate to this because just as you were starting out finding your way around this campus, an economic crisis struck that would claim more than 5 million jobs before the end of your freshman year. Since then, some of you have probably seen parents put off retirement, friends struggle to find work. And you may be looking toward the future with that same sense of concern that my generation did when we were sitting where you are now. Of course, as young women, youre also going to grapple with some unique challenges, like whether youll be able to earn equal pay for equal work; whether youll be able to balance the demands of your job and your family; whether youll be able to fully control decisions about your own health. And while opportunities for women have grown exponentially over the last 30 years, as young people, in many ways you have it even tougher than we did. This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper. Politics seems nastier. Congress more gridlocked than ever. Some folks in the financial world have not exactly been model corporate citizens. (Laughter.) No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesnt get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore. Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal and stories with a message that suggest change isnt possible; that you cant make a difference; that you wont be able to close that gap between life as it is and life as you want it to be. My job today is to tell you dont believe it. Because as tough as things have been, I am convinced you are tougher. Ive seen your passion and Ive seen your service. Ive seen you engage and Ive seen you turn out in record numbers. Ive heard your voices amplified by creativity and a digital fluency that those of us in older generations can barely comprehend. Ive seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course. And that defiant, can-do spirit is what runs through the veins of American history. Its the lifeblood of all our progress. And it is that spirit which we need your generation to embrace and rekindle right now. See, the question is not whether things will get better -- they always do. The question is not whether weve got the solutions to our challenges -- weve had them within our grasp for quite some time. We know, for example, that this country would be better off if more Americans were able to get the kind of education that youve received here at Barnard -- (applause) -- if more people could get the specific skills and training that employers are looking for today.

We know that wed all be better off if we invest in science and technology that sparks new businesses and medical breakthroughs; if we developed more clean energy so we could use less foreign oil and reduce the carbon pollution thats threatening our planet. (Applause.) We know that were better off when there are rules that stop big banks from making bad bets with other peoples money and -- (applause) -- when insurance companies arent allowed to drop your coverage when you need it most or charge women differently from men. (Applause.) Indeed, we know we are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life -whether its the salary you earn or the health decisions you make. (Applause.) We know these things to be true. We know that our challenges are eminently solvable. The question is whether together, we can muster the will -- in our own lives, in our common institutions, in our politics -- to bring about the changes we need. And Im convinced your generation possesses that will. And I believe that the women of this generation -- that all of you will help lead the way. (Applause.) Now, I recognize thats a cheap applause line when you're giving a commencement at Barnard. (Laughter.) Its the easy thing to say. But its true. It is -- in part, it is simple math. Today, women are not just half this country; youre half its workforce. (Applause.) More and more women are outearning their husbands. Youre more than half of our college graduates, and masters graduates, and PhDs. (Applause.) So youve got us outnumbered. (Laughter.) After decades of slow, steady, extraordinary progress, you are now poised to make this the century where women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world. But how far your leadership takes this country, how far it takes this world -- well, that will be up to you. Youve got to want it. It will not be handed to you. And as someone who wants that future -- that better future -- for you, and for Malia and Sasha, as somebody whos had the good fortune of being the husband and the father and the son of some strong, remarkable women, allow me to offer just a few pieces of advice. That's obligatory. (Laughter.) Bear with me. My first piece of advice is this: Dont just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table. (Applause.) Its been said that the most important role in our democracy is the role of citizen. And indeed, it was 225 years ago today that the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia, and our founders, citizens all, began crafting an extraordinary document. Yes, it had its flaws -- flaws that this nation has strived to protect (perfect) over time. Questions of race and gender were unresolved. No womans signature graced the original document -- although we can assume that there were founding mothers whispering smarter things in the ears of the founding fathers. (Applause.) I mean, that's almost certain. What made this document special was that it provided the space -- the possibility -- for those who had been left out of our charter to fight their way in. It provided people the language to appeal to principles and ideals that broadened democracys reach. It allowed for protest, and movements, and the dissemination of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world -- a constant forward movement that continues to this day. Our founders understood that America does not stand still; we are dynamic, not static. We look forward, not back. And now that new doors have been opened for you, youve got an obligation to seize those opportunities. You need to do this not just for yourself but for those who dont yet enjoy the choices that youve had, the choices you will have. And one reason many workplaces still have outdated policies is because women only account for 3 percent of the CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. One reason were actually refighting long-settled battles over womens rights is because women occupy fewer than one in five seats in Congress. Now, Im not saying that the only way to achieve success is by climbing to the top of the corporate ladder or running for office -- although, lets face it, Congress would get a lot more done if you did.

(Laughter and applause.) That I think were sure about. But if you decide not to sit yourself at the table, at the very least youve got to make sure you have a say in who does. It matters. Before women like Barbara Mikulski and Olympia Snowe and others got to Congress, just to take one example, much of federally-funded research on diseases focused solely on their effects on men. It wasnt until women like Patsy Mink and Edith Green got to Congress and passed Title IX, 40 years ago this year, that we declared women, too, should be allowed to compete and win on Americas playing fields. (Applause.) Until a woman named Lilly Ledbetter showed up at her office and had the courage to step up and say, you know what, this isnt right, women werent being treated fairly -- we lacked some of the tools we needed to uphold the basic principle of equal pay for equal work. So dont accept somebody elses construction of the way things ought to be. Its up to you to right wrongs. Its up to you to point out injustice. Its up to you to hold the system accountable and sometimes upend it entirely. Its up to you to stand up and to be heard, to write and to lobby, to march, to organize, to vote. Dont be content to just sit back and watch. Those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo, have always bet on the publics cynicism or the public's complacency. Throughout American history, though, they have lost that bet, and I believe they will this time as well. (Applause.) But ultimately, Class of 2012, that will depend on you. Dont wait for the person next to you to be the first to speak up for whats right. Because maybe, just maybe, theyre waiting on you. Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Never underestimate the power of your example. The very fact that you are graduating, let alone that more women now graduate from college than men, is only possible because earlier generations of women -- your mothers, your grandmothers, your aunts -- shattered the myth that you couldnt or shouldnt be where you are. (Applause.) I think of a friend of mine whos the daughter of immigrants. When she was in high school, her guidance counselor told her, you know what, youre just not college material. You should think about becoming a secretary. Well, she was stubborn, so she went to college anyway. She got her masters. She ran for local office, won. She ran for state office, she won. She ran for Congress, she won. And lo and behold, Hilda Solis did end up becoming a secretary -- (laughter) -- she is Americas Secretary of Labor. (Applause.) So think about what that means to a young Latina girl when she sees a Cabinet secretary that looks like her. (Applause.) Think about what it means to a young girl in Iowa when she sees a presidential candidate who looks like her. Think about what it means to a young girl walking in Harlem right down the street when she sees a U.N. ambassador who looks like her. Do not underestimate the power of your example. This diploma opens up new possibilities, so reach back, convince a young girl to earn one, too. If you earned your degree in areas where we need more women -- like computer science or engineering -(applause) -- reach back and persuade another student to study it, too. If you're going into fields where we need more women, like construction or computer engineering -- reach back, hire someone new. Be a mentor. Be a role model. Until a girl can imagine herself, can picture herself as a computer programmer, or a combatant commander, she wont become one. Until there are women who tell her, ignore our pop culture obsession over beauty and fashion -- (applause) -- and focus instead on studying and inventing and competing and leading, shell think those are the only things that girls are supposed to care about. Now, Michelle will say, nothing wrong with caring about it a little bit. (Laughter.) You can be stylish and powerful, too. (Applause.) That's Michelles advice. (Applause.) And never forget that the most important example a young girl will ever follow is that of a parent. Malia and Sasha are going to be outstanding women because Michelle and Marian Robinson are outstanding women. So understand your power, and use it wisely. My last piece of advice -- this is simple, but perhaps most important: Persevere. Persevere. Nothing worthwhile is easy. No one of achievement has avoided failure -- sometimes catastrophic failures. But they keep at it. They learn from mistakes. They dont quit.

You know, when I first arrived on this campus, it was with little money, fewer options. But it was here that I tried to find my place in this world. I knew I wanted to make a difference, but it was vague how in fact Id go about it. (Laughter.) But I wanted to do my part to do my part to shape a better world. So even as I worked after graduation in a few unfulfilling jobs here in New York -- I will not list them all -- (laughter) -- even as I went from motley apartment to motley apartment, I reached out. I started to write letters to community organizations all across the country. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago answered, offering me work with people in neighborhoods hit hard by steel mills that were shutting down and communities where jobs were dying away. The community had been plagued by gang violence, so once I arrived, one of the first things we tried to do was to mobilize a meeting with community leaders to deal with gangs. And Id worked for weeks on this project. We invited the police; we made phone calls; we went to churches; we passed out flyers. The night of the meeting we arranged rows and rows of chairs in anticipation of this crowd. And we waited, and we waited. And finally, a group of older folks walked in to the hall and they sat down. And this little old lady raised her hand and asked, Is this where the bingo game is? (Laughter.) It was a disaster. Nobody showed up. My first big community meeting -- nobody showed up. And later, the volunteers I worked with told me, that's it; were quitting. They'd been doing this for two years even before I had arrived. They had nothing to show for it. And Ill be honest, I felt pretty discouraged as well. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought about quitting. And as we were talking, I looked outside and saw some young boys playing in a vacant lot across the street. And they were just throwing rocks up at a boarded building. They had nothing better to do -- late at night, just throwing rocks. And I said to the volunteers, Before you quit, answer one question. What will happen to those boys if you quit? Who will fight for them if we dont? Who will give them a fair shot if we leave? And one by one, the volunteers decided not to quit. We went back to those neighborhoods and we kept at it. We registered new voters, and we set up after-school programs, and we fought for new jobs, and helped people live lives with some measure of dignity. And we sustained ourselves with those small victories. We didnt set the world on fire. Some of those communities are still very poor. There are still a lot of gangs out there. But I believe that it was those small victories that helped me win the bigger victories of my last three and a half years as President. And I wish I could say that this perseverance came from some innate toughness in me. But the truth is, it was learned. I got it from watching the people who raised me. More specifically, I got it from watching the women who shaped my life. I grew up as the son of a single mom who struggled to put herself through school and make ends meet. She had marriages that fell apart; even went on food stamps at one point to help us get by. But she didnt quit. And she earned her degree, and made sure that through scholarships and hard work, my sister and I earned ours. She used to wake me up when we were living overseas -- wake me up before dawn to study my English lessons. And when Id complain, shed just look at me and say, This is no picnic for me either, buster. (Laughter.) And my mom ended up dedicating herself to helping women around the world access the money they needed to start their own businesses -- she was an early pioneer in microfinance. And that meant, though, that she was gone a lot, and she had her own struggles trying to figure out balancing motherhood and a career. And when she was gone, my grandmother stepped up to take care of me. She only had a high school education. She got a job at a local bank. She hit the glass ceiling, and watched men she once trained promoted up the ladder ahead of her. But she didnt quit. Rather than grow hard or angry each time she got passed over, she kept doing her job as best as she knew how, and ultimately ended up being vice president at the bank. She didnt quit.

And later on, I met a woman who was assigned to advise me on my first summer job at a law firm. And she gave me such good advice that I married her. (Laughter.) And Michelle and I gave everything we had to balance our careers and a young family. But lets face it, no matter how enlightened I must have thought myself to be, it often fell more on her shoulders when I was traveling, when I was away. I know that when she was with our girls, shed feel guilty that she wasnt giving enough time to her work, and when she was at her work, shed feel guilty she wasnt giving enough time to our girls. And both of us wished we had some superpower that would let us be in two places at once. But we persisted. We made that marriage work. And the reason Michelle had the strength to juggle everything, and put up with me and eventually the public spotlight, was because she, too, came from a family of folks who didnt quit -- because she saw her dad get up and go to work every day even though he never finished college, even though he had crippling MS. She saw her mother, even though she never finished college, in that school, that urban school, every day making sure Michelle and her brother were getting the education they deserved. Michelle saw how her parents never quit. They never indulged in self-pity, no matter how stacked the odds were against them. They didn't quit. Those are the folks who inspire me. People ask me sometimes, who inspires you, Mr. President? Those quiet heroes all across this country -- some of your parents and grandparents who are sitting here -- no fanfare, no articles written about them, they just persevere. They just do their jobs. They meet their responsibilities. They don't quit. I'm only here because of them. They may not have set out to change the world, but in small, important ways, they did. They certainly changed mine. So whether its starting a business, or running for office, or raising a amazing family, remember that making your mark on the world is hard. It takes patience. It takes commitment. It comes with plenty of setbacks and it comes with plenty of failures. But whenever you feel that creeping cynicism, whenever you hear those voices say you cant make a difference, whenever somebody tells you to set your sights lower -- the trajectory of this country should give you hope. Previous generations should give you hope. What young generations have done before should give you hope. Young folks who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat in, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, didnt just do it for themselves; they did it for other people. (Applause.) Thats how we achieved womens rights. That's how we achieved voting rights. That's how we achieved workers rights. That's how we achieved gay rights. (Applause.) Thats how weve made this Union more perfect. (Applause.) And if youre willing to do your part now, if you're willing to reach up and close that gap between what America is and what America should be, I want you to know that I will be right there with you. (Applause.) If you are ready to fight for that brilliant, radically simple idea of America that no matter who you are or what you look like, no matter who you love or what God you worship, you can still pursue your own happiness, I will join you every step of the way. (Applause.) Now more than ever -- now more than ever, America needs what you, the Class of 2012, has to offer. America needs you to reach high and hope deeply. And if you fight for your seat at the table, and you set a better example, and you persevere in what you decide to do with your life, I have every faith not only that you will succeed, but that, through you, our nation will continue to be a beacon of light for men and women, boys and girls, in every corner of the globe. So thank you. Congratulations. (Applause.) God bless you. God bless the United States of America. (Applause.) END

2008 Commencement Address by Barbara Kingsolver The following remarks by Barbara Kingsolver, titled "How to be Hopeful," were prepared for delivery at Duke's 2008 commencement ceremony May 11 at Wallace Wade Stadium. Editor's Note: Barbara Kingsolver is a novelist, essayist, non-fiction and short-story writer. An audio version of her speech is available on iTunes. DURHAM, NC - The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides. Let me begin that way: with an invocation of your own best hopes, thrown like a handful of rice over this celebration. Congratulations, graduates. Congratulations, parents, on the best Mother's Day gift ever. Better than all those burnt-toast breakfasts: these, your children grown tall and competent, educated to within an inch of their lives. What can I say to people who know almost everything? There was a time when I surely knew, because I'd just graduated from college myself, after writing down the sum of all human knowledge on exams and research papers. But that great pedagogical swilling-out must have depleted my reserves, because decades have passed and now I can't believe how much I don't know. Looking back, I can discern a kind of gaseous exchange in which I exuded cleverness and gradually absorbed better judgment. Wisdom is like frequent-flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you're trying to do something else. And wisdom is what people will start wanting from you, after your last exam. I know it's true for writers - -- when people love a book, whatever they say about it, what they really mean is: it was wise. It helped explain their pickle. My favorites are the canny old codgers: Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing. Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise. If I stopped there, you might have heard my best offer. But I am charged with postponing your diploma for about 15 more minutes, so I'll proceed, with a caveat. The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new. This tends to dawn on us in revelatory moments, brought to us by our children. For example: My younger daughter is eleven. Every morning, she and I walk down the lane from our farm to the place where she meets the school bus. It's the best part of my day. We have great conversations. But a few weeks ago as we stood waiting in the dawn's early light, Lily was quietly looking me over, and finally said: "Mom, just so you know, the only reason I'm letting you wear that outfit is because of your age." The alleged outfit will not be described here; whatever you're imagining will perfectly suffice. (Especially if you're picturing "Project Runway" meets "Working with Livestock.") Now, I believe parents should uphold respect for adult authority, so I did what I had to do. I hid behind the barn when the bus came. And then I walked back up the lane in my fly regalia, contemplating this new equation: "Because of your age." It's okay now to deck out and turn up as the village idiot. Hooray! I am old enough. How does this happen? Over a certain age, do you become invisible? There is considerable evidence for this in movies and television. But mainly, I think, you're not expected to know the rules. Everyone knows you're operating on software that hasn't been updated for a good while. The world shifts under our feet. The rules change. Not the Bill of Rights, or the rules of tenting, but the big unspoken truths of a generation. Exhaled by culture, taken in like oxygen, we hold these truths to be self-evident: You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that's what counts. How could it be otherwise? And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you're not paid to do a thing, it can't be important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, "Think there's a lot of money in that?" You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these. Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It's called your coefficient of Drag. The ideal number is zero. This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency. Now, the rule of "Success" has traditionally meant having boatloads of money. But we are not really supposed to put it in a boat. A house would the customary thing. Ideally it should be large, with a lot of

bathrooms and so forth, but no more than four people. If two friends come over during approved visiting hours, the two children have to leave. The bathroom-to-resident ratio should at all times remain greater than one. I'm not making this up, I'm just observing, it's more or less my profession. As Yogi Berra told us, you can observe a lot just by watching. I see our dream-houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you're successful, it will be a large, empty-ish office you don't have to share. If you need anything, you can get it delivered. Play your cards right and you may never have to come face to face with another person. This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation. And so we find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside. Because it's looking that way. We're a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Our climate, our oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that unlimited carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, we need to think about that. About ten years later, nations of the world wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The US said, we still need to think about it. Now we can watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient orders. A few degrees looked so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts and push new diseases like denge fever onto our doorsteps? It's an emergency on a scale we've never known. We've responded by following the rules we know: Efficiency, Isolation. We can't slow down our productivity and consumption, that's unthinkable. Can't we just go home and put a really big lock on the door? Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. The world will save itself, don't get me wrong. The term "fossil fuels" is not a metaphor or a simile. In the geological sense, it's over. The internal combustion engine is so 20th Century. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy, or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it's running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they're sorry but that's not even the point. We won't get time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent, within a decade. Heaven help us get our minds around that. We're still stuck on a strategy of bait-and-switch: Okay, we'll keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But -- we use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill up the tank, there is a math problem: it takes nearly a gallon of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. By some accounts, it takes more. Think of the Jules Verne novel in which the hero is racing Around the World in 80 Days, and finds himself stranded in the mid-Atlantic on a steamship that's run out of coal. It's day 79. So Phileas Fogg convinces the Captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. "On the next day the masts, rafts and spars were burned. The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition." The Captain remarked, "Fogg, you've got something of the Yankee about you." Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the last word, even when they are dead. How can we get from here to there, without burning up our ship? That will be central question of your adult life: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time. You'll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend, Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. Imagine it. Nations have already joined together to rein in global consumption. Faith communities have found a new point of agreement with student activists, organizing around the conviction that caring for our planet is a moral obligation. Before the last UN Climate Conference in Bali, thousands of U.S. citizens contacted the State Department to press for binding limits on carbon emissions. We're the five percent of humans who have made 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases up there. But our government is reluctant to address it, for one reason: it might hurt our economy.

For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery. We can't grant humanity to all people, it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We don't care. You have to find another way. Enough of this shame. Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, you will be told to buy into business as usual: You need a job. Trade your future for an entry level position. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption, at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate -- the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it. Is anyone thinking this through? In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, "Your money or your life," that's not supposed to be a hard question. A lot of people, in fact, are rethinking the money answer. Looking behind the cash-price of everything, to see what it cost us elsewhere: to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? Previous generations rarely asked about the hidden costs. We put them on layaway. You don't get to do that. The bill has come due. Some European countries already are calculating the "climate cost" on consumer goods and adding it to the price. The future is here. We're examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We're even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations will have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. We've done it before. That was the Marshall Plan. Generosity is not out of the question. It will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency. But we can retool. We can also rethink the big, lonely house as a metaphor for success. You are in a perfect position to do that. You've probably spent very little of your recent life in a free-standing unit with a bathroom-toresident ratio of greater than one. (Maybe more like 1:200.) You've been living so close to your friends, you didn't have to ask about their problems, you had to step over them to get into the room. As you moved from dormitory to apartment to whatever (and by whatever I think I mean Central Campus) you've had such a full life, surrounded by people, in all kinds of social and physical structures, none of which belonged entirely to you. You're told that's all about to change. That growing up means leaving the herd, starting up the long escalator to isolation. Not necessarily. As you leave here, remember what you loved most in this place. Not Orgo 2, I'm guessing, or the crazed squirrels or even the bulk cereal in the Freshman Marketplace. I mean the way you lived, in close and continuous contact. This is an ancient human social construct that once was common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bubaneshwar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community. You can take that to the bank. I'm not sure what they'll do with it down there, but you could try. You could walk out of here with an unconventionally communal sense of how your life may be. This could be your key to a new order: you don't need so much stuff to fill your life, when you have people in it. You don't need jet fuel to get food from a farmer's market. You could invent a new kind of Success that includes children's poetry, butterfly migrations, butterfly kisses, the Grand Canyon, eternity. If somebody says "Your money or your life," you could say: Life. And mean it. You'll see things collapse in your time, the big houses, the empires of glass. The new green things that sprout up through the wreck -- - those will be yours.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, "We already did. We have made the world new." The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won't give in, burn what's left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children's only shot. You have to love that so earnestly -- - you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky. Like showing up at the bus stop as the village idiot. You may be asked to stand behind the barn. You may feel you're not up to the task. But think of this: what if someone had dared you, three years ago, to show up to some public event wearing a big, flappy dress with sleeves down to your knees. And on your head, oh, let's say, a beanie with a square board on top. And a tassel! Look at you. You are beautiful. The magic is community. The time has come for the square beanie, and you are rocked in the bosom of the people who get what you're going for. You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world. Look at you. That could be you.

Stephen Colbert's Address to the Graduates 2006 'Outsourcing is so easy that I had this speech today written by a young man named Panjeeb from Bangalore.' Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, I'm facing a little bit of a conundrum here. My name is Stephen Colbert, but I actually play someone on television named Stephen Colbert, who looks like me, and who talks like me, but who says things with a straight face he doesn't mean. And I'm not sure which one of us you invited to speak here today. So, with your indulgence, I'm just going to talk, and I'm going to let you figure it out. I wanted to say something about the Umberto Eco quote that was used earlier from "The Name of the Rose." That book fascinated me because in it these people are killed for trying to get out of this library a book about comedy, Aristotle's commentary on comedy. And what's interesting to me is one of the arguments they have in the book is that comedy is bad because nowhere in the New Testament does it say that Jesus laughed. It says Jesus wept, but never did he laugh. But, I don't think you actually have to say it for us to imagine Jesus laughing. In the famous episode where there's a storm on the lake, and the fishermen are out there. And they see Jesus on the shore, and Jesus walks across the stormy waters to the boat. And St. Peter thinks, "I can do this. I can do this. He keeps telling us to have faith and we can do anything. I can do this." So he steps out of the boat and he walks for -- I don't know, it doesn't say -- a few feet, without sinking into the waves. But then he looks down, and he sees how stormy the seas are. He loses his faith and he begins to sink. And Jesus hot-foots it over and pulls him from the waves and says, "Oh you of little faith." I can't imagine Jesus wasn't suppressing a laugh. How hilarious must it have been to watch Peter -- like Wile E. Coyote -- take three steps on the water and then sink into the waves. Well it's an honor to be giving your commencement address here today at Knox College. I want to thank Mr. Podesta for asking me two, two and a half years ago, was it? Something like that? We were in Aspen. You know being people who go to Aspen. He asked me if I would give a speech at Knox College, and I think it was the altitude, but I said yes. I'm very glad that I did. On a beautiful day like this I'm reminded of my own graduation 20 years ago, at Northwestern University. I didn't start there, I finished there. On the graduation day, a beautiful day like this. We're all in our gowns. I go up on the podium to get my leather folder with my diploma in it. And as I get it from the dean, she leans in close to me and she smiles, and she says [train whistle] that's my ride, actually. I have got to get on that train, I'm sorry. [Heads off stage.] Evidently that happens a lot here. So, I'm getting my folder, and the dean leans into me, shakes my hand and says, "I'm sorry." I have

no idea what she means. So I go back to my seat and I open it up. And, instead of having a diploma inside, there's a scrap -- a torn scrap of paper -- that has scrawled on it, "See me." I kid you not. Evidently I had an incomplete in an independent study that I had failed to complete. And I did not have enough credits. And, let me tell you, when your whole family shows up and you get to have your picture taken with them -- and instead of holding up your diploma, you hold the torn corner of a yellow legal pad -- that is a humbling experience. But eventually, I finished. I got my credits and next year at Christmas time, they have mid-year graduation. And I went there to get my diploma then. They said that I had an overdue library fine and they wouldn't give it to me again. And they eventually mailed it to me I think. I'm pretty sure I graduated from college. But I guess the question is, why have a two-time commencement loser like me speak to you today? Well, one of the reasons they already mentioned I recovered from that slow start. And I was recently named by Time magazine one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World ! Yeah! Give it up for me! Basic cable THE WORLD! I guess I have more fans in sub-Saharan Africa than I thought. I'm right here on the cover between Katie Couric and Bono. That's my little picture -- a sexy little sandwich between those two. But if you do the math, there are 100 Most Influential People in the World. There are 6.5 billion people in the world. That means that today I am here representing 65 million people. That's as big as some countries. What country has about 65 million people? Iran? Iran has 65 million people. So, for all intents and purposes, I'm here representing Iran today. Don't shoot. But the best reason for me to come to speak at Knox College is that I attended Knox College. This is part of my personal history that you will rarely see reported. Partly because the press doesn't do the proper research. But mostly because it is not true! I just made it up, so this moment would be more poignant for all of us. How great would it be if I could actually come back here -- if I was coming back to my alma mater to be honored like this. I could share with you all my happy memories that I spent here in Galesburg, Illinois. Hanging out at the Seymour Hall, right? Seymour Hall? You know, all of us alumni, we remember being at Seymour Hall, playing those drinking games. We played a drinking game called Lincoln-Douglas. Great game. What you do is, you act out the Lincoln-Douglas debate and any time one of the guys mentions the Dred Scott decision, you have to chug a beer. Well, technically three-fifths of a beer. [groans from audience] You DO have a good education! I wasn't sure if anybody was going to get that joke. I soon learned that a frat house -- oops -- divided against itself cannot stand. How can I forget cheering on the team -- the Knox College Knockers? The Prairie Fire. Seriously, the Prairie Fire. Your team is named after something that can get you federal disaster relief. I assume the "Flash Floods" was taken. Oh, yes, the memories are so fresh. It was as if it was just yesterday I made them up. And the history, you don't have to tell me the history of Knox College. No, your website is very thorough. The college itself has long been known for its diversity. I am myself a supporter of diversity. I myself have an interracial marriage. I am Irish and my wife is Scottish. But we work it out. And it is fitting, most fitting, that I should speak at Knox College today because it was founded by abolitionists. And I gotta say -I'm going to go out on the limb here -- I believe slavery was wrong. No, I don't care who that upsets. I just hope the mainstream media give me the credit for the courage it took to say that today. I know the blogosphere is just going to explode tomorrow. But enough about me. If there can be enough about me. Today is about you -- you who have worked so hard to pack your heads with learning until your skulls are all plump like -- sausage of knowledge. It's an apt metaphor, don't question it. But now your time at college is at an end. Now you are leaving here. And this leads me to a question that just isn't asked enough at commencements. Why are you leaving here? This seems like a very nice place. They have a lovely website. Besides, have you seen the world outside lately? They are playing for KEEPS out there, folks. My God, I couldn't wait to get here today just so I could take a breather from the real world. I don't know if they told you what's happened while

you've matriculated here for the past four years. The world is waiting for you people with a club. Unprecedented changes happening in the last four years. Like globalization. We now live in a hyperconnected, global economic, outsourced society. Now there are positives and minuses here. And a positive is that globalization helps us understand and learn from otherwise foreign cultures. For example, I now know how to ask for a Happy Meal in five different languages. In Paris, I'd like a "Repas Heureux." In Madrid a "Comida Feliz." In Calcutta, a "Kushkana, hold the beef." In Tokyo, a "Happy Seto" And in Berlin, I can order what is perhaps the least happy-sounding Happy Meal, a "Glugzig Malzeiht." Also globalization, email, cell phones interconnect our nations like never before. It is possible for even the most insulated American to have friends from all over the world. For instance, I recently received an email asking me to help a deposed Nigerian prince who is looking for a business partner to recuperate his fortune. Thanks to the flexibility of global banking, a Swiss bank account is ready and waiting for my share of his money. I know, because I just emailed him my Social Security number. Unfortunately for you job seekers, corporations searching for a better bottom line have moved many of their operations overseas, whether it's a customer service operator, a power factory foreman, or an American flag manufacturer. They're just as likely to be found in Shanghai as Omaha. In fact, outsourcing is so easy that I had this speech today written by a young man named Panjeeb from Bangalore. If you don't like the jokes, I assure you they were much funnier in Urdu And when you enter the work force, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you're all going to say, "Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America." Yes, but here's the thing -- it's built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it's a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spanish, the next thing you know, they'll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools. So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That's the answer. That may not be enough -- maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fireproof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we'll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we're at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we'll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It's time for illegal immigrants to go -- right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me. There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don't think you are. I don't know if you're tough enough to handle this. You are the most coddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products. My mother had 11 children: Jimmy, Eddie, Mary, Billy, Morgan, Tommy, Jay, Lou, Paul, Peter, Stephen. You may applaud my mother's womb. Thank you, I'll let her know. She could never protect us the way you all have been protected. She couldn't fit 11 car seats. She would just open the back of her Town & Country -- stack us like cord wood: four this way, four that way. And she put crushed glass in the empty spaces to keep it steady. Then she would roll up all the windows in the winter time and light up a cigarette. When I die I will not need to be embalmed, because as a child my mother hickory-smoked me. I mean even these ceremonies are too safe. I mean this mortarboard look, it's padded. It's padded everywhere. When I graduated from college, we had the edges sharpened. When we threw ours up in the air, we knew some of us weren't coming home.

But you have one thing that may save you, and that is your youth. This is your great strength. It is also why I hate and fear you. Hear me out. It has been said that children are our future. But does that not also mean that we are their past? You are here to replace us. I don't understand why we're here helping and honoring them. You do not see union workers holding benefits for robots. But you seem nice enough, so I'll try to give you some advice. First of all, when you go to apply for your first job, don't wear these robes. Medieval garb does not instill confidence in future employers -unless you're applying to be a scrivener. And if someone does offer you a job, say yes. You can always quit later. Then at least you'll be one of the unemployed as opposed to one of the neveremployed. Nothing looks worse on a resume than nothing. So, say "yes." In fact, say "yes" as often as you can. When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, "yes-and." In this case, "yes-and" is a verb. To "yes-and." I yes-and, you yesand, he, she or it yes-ands. And yes-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what's going to happen, maybe with someone you've never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you're doctors -- you're doctors. And then, you add to that: We're doctors and we're trapped in an ice cave. That's the "-and." And then hopefully they "yesand" you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other's lead, neither of you are really in control. It's more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience. Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what's going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say "yes." And if you're lucky, you'll find people who will say "yes" back. Now will saying "yes" get you in trouble at times? Will saying "yes" lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don't be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say "yes." And that's The Word. I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat. "Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie" Michael Lewis June 3, 2012 Princeton Commencement (NOTE: The video of Lewis' speech as delivered is available on the Princeton YouTube channel.) Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black it'll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment. Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I don't remember a word of it. I can't even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasn't. I was totally outraged. Here Id gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out. At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost

certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself. I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books. Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say how well written my thesis was. He didn't. And so after about 45 minutes I finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?" "Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make a living at it." And I didn't not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinventedinto the place we have all come to know and love. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors. Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis. I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "You might just want to think about that," he said. "Why?" "Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books," he said. I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like because I'd felt it here, at Princeton and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling. The book I wrote was called "Liars Poker." It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place? This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really dont like to hear success explained away as luck especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

I wrote a book about this, called "Moneyball." It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A's, was spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the Yankees and more than all the other richer teams. This isn't supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out: the rich teams didn't really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players got blamed and credited for events beyond their control. Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example. Forget baseball, forget sports. Here you had these corporate employees, paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had been doing forever. In front of millions of people, who evaluate their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet they were misvalued because the wider world was blind to their luck. This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our noses. And no one noticed until it paid a poor team so well to notice that they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can't be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can't distinguish between lucky and good, who can? The "Moneyball" story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. I make this point because along with this speech it is something that will be easy for you to forget. I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus. Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader's shirt. This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his. This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country,

lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything. All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't. Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations.

"We are What We Choose" Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Princeton Class of 2010 Baccalaureate May 30, 2010

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell. At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!" I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever." What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices. This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in. Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me. How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices? I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that

didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion. I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind? I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke Remarks on Class Day 2008 At Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts June 4, 2008 It seems to me, paradoxically, that both long ago and only yesterday I attended my own Class Day in 1975. I am pleased and honored to be invited back by the students of Harvard. Our speaker in 1975 was Dick Gregory, the social critic and comedian, who was inclined toward the sharp-edged and satiric. Central bankers don't do satire as a rule, so I am going to have to strive for "kind of interesting." When I attended Class Day as a graduating senior, Gerald Ford was President, and an up-andcoming fellow named Alan Greenspan was his chief economic adviser. Just weeks earlier, the last Americans remaining in Saigon had been evacuated by helicopters. On a happier note, the Red Sox were on their way to winning the American League pennant. I skipped classes to attend a World Series game against the Cincinnati Reds. As was their wont in those days, the Sox came agonizingly close to a championship but ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. On that score, as on others--disco music and Pet Rocks come to mind--many things are better today than they were then. In fact, that will be a theme of my remarks today. Although 1975 was a pretty good year for the Red Sox, it was not a good one for the U.S. economy. Then as now, we were experiencing a serious oil price shock, sharply rising prices for food and other commodities, and subpar economic growth. But I see the differences between the economy of 1975 and the economy of 2008 as more telling than the similarities. Today's situation differs from that of 33 years ago in large part because our economy and society have become much more flexible and able to adapt to difficult situations and new challenges. Economic policymaking has improved as well, I believe, partly because we have learned well some of the hard lessons of the past. Of course, I do not want to minimize the challenges we currently face, and I will come back to a few of these. But I do think that our demonstrated ability to respond constructively and effectively to past economic problems provides a basis for optimism about the future. I will focus my remarks today on two economic issues that challenged us in the 1970s and that still do so today--energy and productivity. These, obviously, are not the kind of topics chosen by many recent Class Day speakers--Will Farrell, Ali G, or Seth MacFarlane, to name a few. But, then, the Class Marshals presumably knew what they were getting when they invited an economist. Because the members of today's graduating class--and some of your professors--were not yet born in 1975, let me begin by briefly surveying the economic landscape in the mid-1970s. The economy had just gone through a severe recession, during which output, income, and employment fell sharply and the unemployment rate rose to 9 percent. Meanwhile, consumer price inflation, which had been around 3 percent to 4 percent earlier in the decade, soared to more than 10 percent during my senior 1 year. The oil price shock of the 1970s began in October 1973 when, in response to the Yom Kippur War, Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on exports. Before the embargo, in 1972, the price of imported oil was about $3.20 per barrel; by 1975, the average price was nearly $14 per barrel, more than four times greater. President Nixon had imposed economy-wide controls on wages and prices in 1971, including prices of petroleum products; in November 1973, in the wake of the embargo, the 2 President placed additional controls on petroleum prices. As basic economics predicts, when a scarce resource cannot be allocated by market-determined prices, it will be allocated some other way--in this case, in what was to become an iconic symbol of the times, by long lines at gasoline stations. In 1974, in an attempt to overcome the unintended consequences of price controls, drivers in many places were permitted to buy gasoline only on odd or even days of the month, depending on the last digit of their license plate number. Moreover, with the controlled price of U.S. crude oil well below world prices, growth in domestic exploration slowed and production was curtailed--which, of course, only made things worse.

In addition to creating long lines at gasoline stations, the oil price shock exacerbated what was already an intensifying buildup of inflation and inflation expectations. In another echo of today, the inflationary situation was further worsened by rapidly rising prices of agricultural products and other commodities. Economists generally agree that monetary policy performed poorly during this period. In part, this was because policymakers, in choosing what they believed to be the appropriate setting for monetary policy, overestimated the productive capacity of the economy. I'll have more to say about this shortly. Federal Reserve policymakers also underestimated both their own contributions to the inflationary problems of the time and their ability to curb that inflation. For example, on occasion they blamed inflation on so-called cost-push factors such as union wage pressures and price increases by large, market-dominating firms; however, the abilities of unions and firms to push through inflationary wage and price increases were symptoms of the problem, not the underlying cause. Several years passed before the Federal Reserve gained a new leadership that better understood the central bank's role in the inflation process and that sustained anti-inflationary monetary policies would actually work. Beginning in 1979, such policies were implemented successfully--although not without significant cost in terms of lost output and employment--under Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. For the Federal Reserve, two crucial lessons from this experience were, first, that high inflation can seriously destabilize the economy and, second, that the central bank must take responsibility for achieving price stability over the medium term. Fast-forward now to 2003. In that year, crude oil cost a little more than $30 per barrel. Since then, crude oil prices have increased more than fourfold, proportionally about as much as in the 1970s. Now, as in 1975, adjusting to such high prices for crude oil has been painful. Gas prices around $4 a gallon are a huge burden for many households, as well as for truckers, manufacturers, farmers, and others. But, in many other ways, the economic consequences have been quite different from those of the 1970s. One obvious difference is what you don't see: drivers lining up on odd or even days to buy gasoline because of price controls or signs at gas stations that say "No gas." And until the recent slowdown--which is more the result of conditions in the residential housing market and in financial markets than of higher oil prices--economic growth was solid and unemployment remained low, unlike what we saw following oil price increases in the '70s. For a central banker, a particularly critical difference between then and now is what has happened to inflation and inflation expectations. The overall inflation rate has averaged about 3-1/2 percent over the past four quarters, significantly higher than we would like but much less than the double-digit rates that inflation reached in the mid-1970s and then again in 1980. Moreover, the increase in inflation has been milder this time--on the order of 1 percentage point over the past year as compared with the 4 6 percentage point jump that followed the 1973 oil price shock. From the perspective of monetary policy, just as important as the behavior of actual inflation is what households and businessesexpect to happen to inflation in the future, particularly over the longer term. If people expect an increase in inflation to be temporary and do not build it into their longer-term plans for setting wages and prices, then the inflation created by a shock to oil prices will tend to fade relatively quickly. Some indicators of longer-term inflation expectations have risen in recent months, which is a significant concern for the Federal Reserve. We will need to monitor that situation closely. However, changes in long-term inflation expectations have been measured in tenths of a percentage point this time around rather than in whole percentage points, as appeared to be the case in the mid-1970s. Importantly, we see little indication today of the beginnings of a 1970s-style wage-price spiral, in which wages and prices chased each other ever upward. A good deal of economic research has looked at the question of why the inflation response to the oil 5 shock has been relatively muted in the current instance. One factor, which illustrates my point about the adaptability and flexibility of the U.S. economy, is the pronounced decline in the energy intensity of the economy since the 1970s. Since 1975, the energy required to produce a given amount of 6 output in the United States has fallen by about half. This great improvement in energy efficiency was less the result of government programs than of steps taken by households and businesses in response to higher energy prices, including substantial investments in more energy-efficient equipment and means of transportation. This improvement in energy efficiency is one of the reasons why a given increase in crude oil prices does less damage to the U.S. economy today than it did in the 1970s.
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Another reason is the performance of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve and other central banks have learned the lessons of the 1970s. Because monetary policy works with a lag, the short-term inflationary effects of a sharp increase in oil prices can generally not be fully offset. However, since Paul Volcker's time, the Federal Reserve has been firmly committed to maintaining a low and stable rate of inflation over the longer term. And we recognize that keeping longer-term inflation expectations well anchored is essential to achieving the goal of low and stable inflation. Maintaining confidence in the Fed's commitment to price stability remains a top priority as the central bank navigates the current complex situation. Although our economy has thus far dealt with the current oil price shock comparatively well, the United States and the rest of the world still face significant challenges in dealing with the rising global demand for energy, especially if continued demand growth and constrained supplies maintain intense pressure on prices. The silver lining of high energy prices is that they provide a powerful incentive for action--for conservation, including investment in energy-saving technologies; for the investment needed to bring new oil supplies to market; and for the development of alternative conventional and nonconventional energy sources. The government, in addition to the market, can usefully address energy concerns, for example, by supporting basic research and adopting well-designed regulatory policies to promote important social objectives such as protecting the environment. As we saw after the oil price shock of the 1970s, given some time, the economy can become much more energyefficient even as it continues to grow and living standards improve. Let me turn now to the other economic challenge that I want to highlight today--the productivity performance of our economy. At this point you may be saying to yourself, "Is it too late to book Ali G?" 7 However, anyone who stayed awake through EC 10 understands why this issue is so important. As Adam Smith pointed out in 1776, in the long run, more than any other factor, the productivity of the workforce determines a nation's standard of living. The decades following the end of World War II were remarkable for their industrial innovation and creativity. From 1948 to 1973, output per hour of work grew by nearly 3 percent per year, on 8 average. But then, for the next 20 years or so, productivity growth averaged only about 1-1/2 percent per year, barely half its previous rate. Predictably, the rate of increase in the standard of living slowed as well, and to about the same extent. The difference between 3 percent and 1-1/2 percent may sound small. But at 3 percent per year, the standard of living would double about every 23 years, or once every generation; by contrast, at 1-1/2 percent, a doubling would occur only roughly every 47 years, or once every other generation. Among the many consequences of the productivity slowdown was a further complication for the monetary policy makers of the 1970s. Detecting shifts in economic trends is difficult in real time, and most economists and policymakers did not fully appreciate the extent of the productivity slowdown until the late 1970s. This further influenced the policymakers of the time toward running a monetary policy that was too accommodative. The resulting overheating of the economy probably exacerbated 9 the inflation problem of that decade. Productivity growth revived in the mid-1990s, as I mentioned, illustrating once again the resilience of 10 the American economy. Since 1995, productivity has increased at about a 2-1/2 percent annual rate. A great deal of intellectual effort has been expended in trying to explain the recent performance and to forecast the future evolution of productivity. Much very good work has been conducted here at Harvard by Dale Jorgenson (my senior thesis adviser in 1975, by the way) and his colleagues, and 11 other important research in the area has been done at the Federal Reserve Board. One key finding of that research is that, to have an economic impact, technological innovations must be translated into successful commercial applications. This country's competitive, market-based system, its flexible capital and labor markets, its tradition of entrepreneurship, and its technological strengths--to which Harvard and other universities make a critical contribution--help ensure that that happens on an ongoing basis. While private-sector initiative was the key ingredient in generating the pickup in productivity growth, government policy was constructive, in part through support of basic research but also to a substantial degree by promoting economic competition. Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government deregulated a number of key industries, including air travel, trucking, telecommunications, and energy. The resulting increase in competition promoted cost reductions and innovation, leading in turn to new

products and industries. It is difficult to imagine that we would have online retailing today if the transportation and telecommunications industries had not been deregulated. In addition, the lowering of trade barriers promoted productivity gains by increasing competition, expanding markets, and 12 increasing the pace of technology transfer. Finally, as a central banker, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the contribution of monetary policy to the improved productivity performance. By damping business cycles and by keeping inflation under control, a sound monetary policy improves the ability of households and firms to plan and increases their willingness to undertake the investments in skills, research, and physical capital needed to support continuing gains in productivity. Just as the productivity slowdown was associated with a slower growth of real per capita income, the productivity resurgence since the mid-1990s has been accompanied by a pickup in real income growth. One measure of average living standards, real consumption per capita, is nearly 35 percent higher today than in 1995. In addition, the flood of innovation that helped spur the productivity resurgence has created many new job opportunities, and more than a few fortunes. But changing technology has also reduced job opportunities for some others--bank tellers and assembly-line workers, for example. And that is the crux of a whole new set of challenges. Even though average economic well-being has increased considerably over time, the degree of inequality in economic outcomes over the past three decades has increased as well. Economists continue to grapple with the reasons for this trend. But as best we can tell, the increase in inequality probably is due to a number of factors, notably including technological change that seems to have favored higher-skilled workers more than lower-skilled ones. In addition, some economists point to increased international trade and the declining role of labor unions as other, probably lesser contributing factors. What should we do about rising economic inequality? Answering this question inevitably involves difficult value judgments and tradeoffs. But approaches that inhibit the dynamism of our economy would clearly be a step in the wrong direction. To be sure, new technologies and increased international trade can lead to painful dislocations as some workers lose their jobs or see the demand for their particular skills decline. However, hindering the adoption of new technologies or inhibiting trade flows would do far more harm than good over the longer haul. In the short term, the better approach is to adopt policies that help those who are displaced by economic change. By doing so, we not only provide assistance to those who need it but help to secure public support for the economic flexibility that is essential for prosperity. In the long term, however, the best way by far to improve economic opportunity and to reduce inequality is to increase the educational attainment and skills of American workers. The productivity surge in the decades after World War II corresponded to a period in which educational attainment was increasing rapidly; in recent decades, progress on that front has been far slower. Moreover, inequalities in education and in access to education remain high. As we think about improving education and skills, we should also look beyond the traditional K-12 and 4-year-college system--as important as it is--to recognize that education should be lifelong and can come in many forms. Early childhood education, community colleges, vocational schools, on-the-job training, online courses, adult education--all of these are vehicles of demonstrated value in increasing skills and lifetime earning power. The use of a wide range of methods to address the pressing problems of inadequate skills and economic inequality would be entirely consistent with the themes of economic adaptability and flexibility that I have emphasized in my remarks. I will close by shifting from the topic of education in general to your education specifically. Through effort, talent, and doubtless some luck, you have succeeded in acquiring an excellent education. Your education--more precisely, your ability to think critically and creatively--is your greatest asset. And unlike many assets, the more you draw on it, the faster it grows. Put it to good use. The poor forecasting record of economists is legendary, but I will make a forecast in which I am very confident: Whatever you expect your life and work to be like 10, 20, or 30 years from now, the reality will be quite different. In looking over the 30th anniversary report on my own class, I was struck by the great diversity of vocations and avocations that have engaged my classmates. To be sure, the volume was full of attorneys and physicians and professors as well as architects, engineers, editors, bankers,

and even a few economists. Many listed the title "vice president," and, not a few, "president." But the class of 1975 also includes those who listed their occupations as composer, environmental advocate, musician, playwright, rabbi, conflict resolution coach, painter, community organizer, and essayist. And even for those of us with the more conventional job descriptions, the nature of our daily work and its relationship to the economy and society is, I am sure, very different from what we might have guessed in 1975. My point is only that you cannot predict your path. You can only try to be as prepared as possible for the opportunities, as well as the disappointments, that will come your way. For people, as for economies, adaptability and flexibility count for a great deal. Wherever your path leads, I hope you use your considerable talents and energy in endeavors that engage and excite you and benefit not only yourselves, but also in some measure your country and your world. Today, I wish you and your families a day of joyous celebration. Congratulations.

Multi-academy award winning actress Meryl Streep spoke to Barnard's graduating class Monday, humbly relaying to grads her own success story and thoughts on the other gender. "Men are adapting," she said. "About time...they are adapting consciously and also without consciously and without realizing it for the better of the whole group. They are changing their deepest prejudices to regard as normal the things that their fathers would have found very very difficult and their grandfathers would have abhorred and the door to this emotional shift is empathy. As Jung said, emotion is the chief source of becoming conscious." Thank you, all. Thank you, President Spar, Ms. Golden, President Tilghman, Members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, proud swelling parents and family, and gorgeous class of 2010. If you are all really, really lucky, and if you continue to work super hard, and you remember your thank you notes and everybody's name; and you follow through on every task that's asked of you and also somehow anticipate problems before they even arise and you somehow sidestep disaster and score big. If you get great scores on your LSATS, or MSATS, or ERSATS or whatever. And you get into your dream grad school or internship which leads to a super job with a paycheck commensurate with responsibilities of leadership or if you somehow get that documentary on a shoe-string budget and it gets accepted at Sundance and maybe it wins Sundance and then you go on to be nominated for an Oscar and then you win the Oscar. Or if that money-making website that you designed with your friends somehow suddenly attracts investors and advertisers and becomes the go-to site for whatever it is you're selling, blogging, sharing, or net-casting and success shinning, hoped-for but never really anticipated success comes your way I guarantee you someone you know or love come to you and say, "Will you address the graduates at my college?" And you'll say "Yeah sure, when is it? May 2010? 2010? Yeah sure, that's months away and then the nightmare begins. The nightmare we've all had and I assure you, you'll continue to have even after graduation, 40 years after graduation. About a week before the due date, you wake up in the middle of the night, "Huh, I have a paper due and I haven't done the reading, Oh my god!" If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty bound to spread it around like manure, fertilize those young minds, let them in on the secret, what is it that you know that no one else knows, the self examination begins, one looks inward, one opens an interior door. Cobwebs, black, the lights bulbs burned out, the

airless dank refrigerator of an insanely over-scheduled, unexamined life that usually just gets take-out. Where is my writer friend, Anna Quindlen when I need her? On another book tour. Hello I'm Meryl Streep, and today, Class of 2010 and I am really, I am very honored, and humbled to be asked to pass on tips and inspiration to you for achieving success in this next part of your lives. President Spar, when I consider the other distinguished medal recipients and venerable Board of Trustees, the many accomplished faculty and family members, people who've actually done things, produced things, while I have pretended to do things, I can think about 3,800 people who should have been on this list before me and you know since my success has depended wholly on putting things over on people. So I'm not sure parents think I'm that great a role model anyway. I am however an expert in pretending to be an expert in various areas, so just randomly like everything else in this speech, I am or I was an expert in kissing on stage and on screen. How did I prepare for this? Well most of my preparation took place in my suburban high school or rather behind my suburban high school in New Jersey. One is obliged to do great deal of kissing in my line of work. Air kissing, ass-kissing, kissing up and of course actual kissing, much like hookers, actors have to do it with people we may not like or even know. We may have to do it with friends, which, believe it or not is particularly awkward, for people of my generation, it's awkward. My other areas of faux expertise, river rafting, miming the effects of radiation poisoning, knowing which shoes go with which bag, coffee plantation, Turkish, Polish, German, French, Italian, that's Iowa-Italian from the bridges of Madison county, bit of the Bronx, Aramaic, Yiddish, Irish clog dancing, cooking, singing, riding horses, knitting, playing the violin, and simulating steamy sexual encounters, these are some of the areas in which, I have pretended quite proficiently to be successful, or the other way around. As have many women here, I'm sure. Women, I feel I can say this authoritatively, especially at Barnard where they can't hear us, what am I talking about? They professionally can't hear us. Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be, if successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill and we all do it. All the time, we don't want to be caught doing it but nevertheless it's part of the adaptations of our species, we change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time, and not just strategically, or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically, without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group. I remember very clearly my own first conscious attempt at acting. I was six placing my mother's half slip over my head in preparation to play the Virgin Mary in our living room. As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll I felt quieted, holy, actually, and my transfigured face and very changed demeanor captured on super-8 by my dad pulled my little brother Harry to play Joseph and Dana too, a barnyard animal, into the trance. They were actually pulled into this nativity scene by the intensity of my focus. In my usual technique for getting them to do what I want, yelling at them would never ever have achieved and I learned something on that day. Later when I was nine, I remember taking my mother's eyebrow pencil and carefully drawing lines all over my face, replicating the wrinkles that I had memorized on the face of my grandmother whom I adored and made my mother take my picture and I look at it now and of course, I look like myself now and my grandmother then. But I do really remember in my bones, how it was possible on that day to feel her age. I stooped, I felt weighted down but cheerful, you know I felt like her. Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art. And in high school, another form of acting took hold of me. I wanted to learn how to be appealing. So I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be that of the generically pretty high school girl. I researched her deeply, that is to say shallowly, in Vogue, in Seventeen, and in Mademoiselle Magazines. I tried to imitate her hair, her lipstick, her lashes, the clothes of the lithesome, beautiful and generically appealing high school girls that I saw in those pages. I ate an apple a day, period. I peroxided my hair, ironed it straight. I demanded brand name clothes, my mother shut me down on that one. But I did, I worked harder on this characterization really than anyone I think I've ever done since. I worked on my giggle, I lightened it. Because I like it when it went, kind of "ehuh" and the end, "eheeh" "ehaeaahaha" because I thought it sounded child

like, and cute. This was all about appealing to boys and at the same time being accepted by the girls, a very tricky negotiation. Often success in one area precludes succeeding in the other. And along with all my other exterior choices, I worked on my, what actors call, my interior adjustment. I adjusted my natural temperament which tends to be slightly bossy, a little opinionated, loud, a little loud, full of pronouncements and high spirits, and I willfully cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy, natural sort of sweetness, even shyness if you will, which was very, very, very effective on the boys. But the girls didn't buy it. They didn't like me; they sniffed it out, the acting. And they were probably right, but I was committed, this was absolutely not a cynical exercise, this was a vestigial survival courtship skill I was developing. And I reached a point senior year, when my adjustment felt like me, I had actually convinced myself that I was this person and she, me, pretty, talented, but not stuck-up. You know, a girl who laughed a lot at every stupid thing every boy said and who lowered her eyes at the right moment and deferred, who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation, I really remember this so clearly and I could tell it was working, I was much less annoying to the guys than I had been, they liked me better and I like that, this was conscious but it was at the same time motivated and fully-felt this was real, real acting. I got to Vassar which 43 years ago was a single-sex institution, like all the colleges in what they call the Seven Sisters, the female Ivy League and I made some quick but lifelong and challenging friends. And with their help outside of any competition for boys my brain woke up. I got up and I got outside myself and I found myself again. I didn't have to pretend, I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and slovenly and open and funny and tough and my friends let me. I didn't wash my hair for three weeks once. They accepted me like the Velveteen Rabbit. I became real instead of an imagined stuffed bunny but I stockpiled that character from high school and I breathed life into her again some years later as Linda in the "Deer Hunter." There is probably not one of you graduates who has ever seen this film but the "Deer Hunter" it won best picture in 1978 Robert De Niro, Chris Walken, not funny at all. And I played Linda, a small town girl in a working class background, a lovely, quiet, hapless girl, who waited for the boy she loved to come back from the war in Vietnam. Often men my age, President Clinton, by the way, when I met him said, "Men my age, mention that character as their favorite of all the women I've played." And I have my own secret understanding of why that is and it confirms every decision I made in high school. This is not to denigrate that girl by the way or the men who are drawn to her in anyway because she's still part of me and I'm part of her. She wasn't acting but she was just behaving in a way that cowed girls, submissive girls, beaten up girls with very few ways out have behaved forever and still do in many worlds. Now, in a measure of how much the world has changed the character most men mention as their favorite is, Miranda Priestly. Now as a measure of how the world has changed. The character most men mention as their favorite. Miranda Priestly. The beleaguered totalitarian at the head of Runway magazine in Devil Wears Prada. To my mind this represents such an optimistic shift. They relate to Miranda. They wanted to date Linda. They felt sorry for Linda but they feel like Miranda. They can relate to her issues, the high standards she sets for herself and others. The thanklessness of the leadership position. The "Nobody understands me" thing. The loneliness. They stand outside one character and they pity her and they kind of fall in love with her but they look through the eyes of this other character. This is a huge deal because as people in the movie business know the absolute hardest thing in the whole world is to persuade a straight male audience to identify with a woman protagonist to feel themselves embodied by her. This more than any other factor explains why we get the movies we get and the paucity of the roles where women drive the film. It's much easier for the female audience because we were all grown up brought up identifying with male characters from Shakespeare to Salinger. We have less trouble following Hamlet's dilemma viscerally or Romeo's or Tybalt or Huck Finn or Peter Pan -- I remember holding that sword up to Hook -- I felt like him. But it is much much much harder for heterosexual boys to identify with Juliet or Desdemona, Wendy in Peter Pan or Joe in Little Women or the Little Mermaid or Pocohontas. why I don't know, but it just is. There has always been a resistance to imaginatively assume a persona, if that persona is a she. But things are changing now and it's in your generation we're seeing this. Men are adapting... about time...they are adapting consciously and also without consciously and without realizing it for the better of the whole group. They are changing their deepest prejudices to regard as normal the things that their fathers would have found very very difficult and their grandfathers would have abhorred and the door to this emotional shift is empathy. As Jung said, emotion is the chief source of becoming conscious. There can be no transforming of lightness into dark of apathy into movement without emotion. Or as Leonard Cohen says pay attention

to the cracks because that's where the light gets in. You, young women of Barnard have not had to squeeze yourself into the corset of being cute or to muffle your opinions but you haven't left campus yet. I'm just kidding. What you have had is the privilege of a very specific education. You are people who may able to draw on a completely different perspective to imagine a different possibility than women and men who went to coed schools. How this difference is going to serve you it's hard to quantify now, it may take you forty years like it did me to analyze your advantage. But today is about looking forward into a world where so-called women's issues, human issues of gender inequality lie at the crux of global problems from poverty to the AIDS crisis to the rise in violent fundamentalist juntas, human trafficking and human rights abuses and you're going to have the opportunity and the obligation, by virtue of your providence, to speed progress in all those areas. And this is a place where the need is very great, the news is too. This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There's only change, and resistance to it and then more change. Never before in the history or country have most of the advanced degrees been awarded to women but now they are. Since the dawn of man, it's hardly more than 100 years since we were even allowed into these buildings except to clean them but soon most of law and medical degrees will probably also go to women. Around the world, poor women now own property who used to be property and according to Economist magazine, for the last two decades, the increase of female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants India or china. Cracks in the ceiling, cracks in the door, cracks in the Court and on the Senate floor. You know, I gave a speech at Vassar 27 years ago. It was a really big hit. Everyone loved it, really. Tom Brokaw said it was the very best commencement speech he had ever heard and of course I believed this. And it was much easier to construct than this one. It came out pretty easily because back then I knew so much. I was a new mother, I had two academy awards and it was all coming together so nicely. I was smart and I understood boiler plate and what sounded good and because I had been on the squad in high school, earnest full-throated cheerleading was my specialty so that's what I did but now, I feel like I know about 1/16th of what that young woman knew. Things don't seem as certain today. Now I'm 60, I have four adult children who are all facing the same challenges you are. I'm more sanguine about all the things that I still don't know and I'm still curious about. What I do know about success, fame, celebrity that would fill another speech. How it separates you from your friends, from reality, from proportion. Your own sweet anonymity, a treasure you don't even know you have until it's gone. How it makes things tough for your family and whether being famous matters one bit, in the end, in the whole flux of time. I know I was invited here because of that. How famous I am. I how many awards I've won and while I am I am overweeningly proud of the work that, believe me, I did not do on my own. I can assure that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness. My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help. No matter what you see me or hear me saying when I'm on your TV holding a statuette spewing, that's acting. Being a celebrity has taught me to hide but being an actor has opened my soul. Being here today has forced me to look around inside there for something useful that I can share with you and I'm really grateful you gave me the chance. You know you don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you and you already have. Bravo to you. Congratulations. What Are You Going to Do With That? Katherine Streeter for The Chronicle Review. The essay below is adapted from a talk delivered to a freshman class at Stanford University in May. The question my title poses, of course, is the one that is classically aimed at humanities majors. What practical value could there possibly be in studying literature or art or philosophy? So you must be wondering why I'm bothering to raise it here, at Stanford, this renowned citadel of science and technology. What doubt can there be that the world will offer you many opportunities to use your degree?

But that's not the question I'm asking. By "do" I don't mean a job, and by "that" I don't mean your major. We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By "What are you going to do," I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by "that," I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be sitting here today, and everything you're going to be doing for the rest of the time that you're in school. We should start by talking about how you did, in fact, get here. You got here by getting very good at a certain set of skills. Your parents pushed you to excel from the time you were very young. They sent you to good schools, where the encouragement of your teachers and the example of your peers helped push you even harder. Your natural aptitudes were nurtured so that, in addition to excelling in all your subjects, you developed a number of specific interests that you cultivated with particular vigor. You did extracurricular activities, went to afterschool programs, took private lessons. You spent summers doing advanced courses at a local college or attending skill-specific camps and workshops. You worked hard, you paid attention, and you tried your very best. And so you got very good at math, or piano, or lacrosse, or, indeed, several things at once. Now there's nothing wrong with mastering skills, with wanting to do your best and to be the best. What's wrong is what the system leaves out: which is to say, everything else. I don't mean that by choosing to excel in math, say, you are failing to develop your verbal abilities to their fullest extent, or that in addition to focusing on geology, you should also focus on political science, or that while you're learning the piano, you should also be working on the flute. It is the nature of specialization, after all, to be specialized. No, the problem with specialization is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your specialty. The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. It cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself. And of course, as college freshmen, your specialization is only just beginning. In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements. Again, there's nothing wrong with being those things. It's just that, as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember who you once were. You start to wonder what happened to that person who played piano and lacrosse and sat around with her friends having intense conversations about life and politics and all the things she was learning in her classes. The 19-year-old who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has become a 40-year-old who thinks about only one thing. That's why older people are so boring. "Hey, my dad's a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers." And there's another problem. Maybe you never really wanted to be a cardiac surgeon in the first place. It just kind of happened. It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves. You go to a place like Stanford because that's what smart kids do. You go to medical school because it's prestigious. You specialize in cardiology because it's lucrative. You do the things that reap the rewards, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends impressed. From the time you started high school and maybe even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, and so now you naturally think about your life in terms of "getting into" whatever's next. "Getting into" is validation; "getting into" is victory. Stanford, then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so forth. Or Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or whatever. You take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be inevitable. Or maybe you did always want to be a cardiac surgeon. You dreamed about it from the time you were 10 years old, even though you had no idea what it really meant, and you stayed on course for the entire time you were in school. You refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you

had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical school. But either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all means. Not what it means in the "big picture," whatever that is, but what it means to you. Why you're doing it, what it's all for. It sounds like a clich, this "waking up one day," but it's called having a midlife crisis, and it happens to people all the time. There is an alternative, however, and it may be one that hasn't occurred to you. Let me try to explain it by telling you a story about one of your peers, and the alternative that hadn't occurred to her. A couple of years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard that dealt with some of these same matters, and afterward I was contacted by one of the students who had come to the event, a young woman who was writing her senior thesis about Harvard itself, how it instills in its students what she called self-efficacy, the sense that you can do anything you want. Self-efficacy, or, in more familiar terms, self-esteem. There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy." And there are other kids, the kind with self-efficacy or self-esteem, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because I'm smart." Again, there's nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you're smart. But what that Harvard student didn't realizeand it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested itis that there is a third alternative. True self-esteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. True self-esteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you getand the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance lettersare not what defines who you are. She also claimed, this young woman, that Harvard students take their sense of self-efficacy out into the world and become, as she put it, "innovative." But when I asked her what she meant by innovative, the only example she could come up with was "being CEO of a Fortune 500." That's not innovative, I told her, that's just successful, and successful according to a very narrow definition of success. True innovation means using your imagination, exercising the capacity to envision new possibilities. But I'm not here to talk about technological innovation, I'm here to talk about a different kind. It's not about inventing a new machine or a new drug. It's about inventing your own life. Not following a path, but making your own path. The kind of imagination I'm talking about is moral imagination. "Moral" meaning not right or wrong, but having to do with making choices. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life. It means not just going with the flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success. Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed. When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out. When you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of before. Let me give you another counterexample. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same points. I said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional rewards. And one of the most common criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was wrong. TFA, TFAI heard that over and over again. And Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good thing. But to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I'm saying. The problem with TFA or rather, the problem with the way that TFA has become incorporated into the systemis that it's just become another thing to get into.

In terms of its content, Teach for America is completely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the same. It's prestigious, it's hard to get into, it's something that you and your parents can brag about, it looks good on your rsum, and most important, it represents a clearly marked path. You don't have to make it up yourself, you don't have to do anything but apply and do the workjust like college or law school or McKinsey or whatever. It's the Stanford or Harvard of social engagement. It's another hurdle, another badge. It requires aptitude and diligence, but it does not require a single ounce of moral imagination. Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have madeor failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets." Today there are other nets. One of those nets is a term that I've heard again and again as I've talked with students about these things. That term is "self-indulgent." "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "Wouldn't it be self-indulgent to pursue painting after I graduate instead of getting a real job?" These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little bit different. Even worse, the kinds of questions they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Many students have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peersfrom their peersto justify a creative or intellectual life. You're made to feel like you're crazy: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try. Think of what we've come to. It is one of the great testaments to the intellectualand moral, and spiritualpoverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You are all told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you're being "self-indulgent" if you actually want to get an education. Or even worse, give yourself one. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not OK to play music, or write essays, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is OK to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it's not selfish at all. Do you see how absurd this is? But these are the nets that are flung at you, and this is what I mean by the need for courage. And it's a never-ending process. At that Harvard event two years ago, one person said, about my assertion that college students needed to keep rethinking the decisions they've made about their lives, "We already made our decisions, back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." And I thought, who wants to live with the decisions that they made when they were 12? Let me put that another way. Who wants to let a 12year-old decide what they're going to do for the rest of their lives? Or a 19-year-old, for that matter? All you can decide is what you think now, and you need to be prepared to keep making revisions. Because let me be clear. I'm not trying to persuade you all to become writers or musicians. Being a doctor or a lawyer, a scientist or an engineer or an economistthese are all valid and admirable choices. All I'm saying is that you need to think about it, and think about it hard. All I'm asking is that you make your choices for the right reasons. All I'm urging is that you recognize and embrace your moral freedom.

And most of all, don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person. It's been saidand I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an idea that's worth taking seriouslythat you guys belong to a "postemotional" generation. That you prefer to avoid messy and turbulent and powerful feelings. But I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself. College is just beginning for you, adulthood is just beginning. Open yourself to the possibilities they represent. The world is much larger than you can imagine right now. Which means, you are much larger than you can imagine.

Steve Jobs at Stanford University Commencement on June 12, 2005 I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest Ive ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Thats it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him? They said: Of course. My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldnt see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasnt all romantic. I didnt have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didnt have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif

typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cant capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you cant connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz (Ed. Note-Apple Computer CoFounder, Steve Wozniak) and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didnt know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didnt see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apples current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. Im pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadnt been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Dont lose faith. Im convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I

loved what I did. Youve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you havent found it yet, keep looking. Dont settle. As with all matters of the heart, youll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Dont settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: If you live each day as if it was your last, someday youll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been No for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that Ill be dead soon is the most important tool Ive ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didnt even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought youd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and Im fine now. This was the closest Ive been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven dont want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Lifes change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so dont waste it living someone elses life. Dont be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Dont let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.
Mike Bloomberg Speaks at the Princeton University 2011 Baccalaureate I really welcomed this opportunity. I wasnt going to give it up for anything. Ive been working on my remarks all year. I met with my thesis advisor last September. Ive been churning out 80-100 pages, and I turned it in right before the deadline during the second week of April. I even got the thing bound over at Triangle Printers. So Ive been raring to go. I showed up last night hoping to settle in and get a good nights sleep. Only when I arrived, you were apparently having some type of pagan beer-drinking festival with lots of people wearing orange and black tank tops and jockey shorts. And, after all that, there was no place for me to sleep. I couldnt even get into Bloomberg Hall. But I found something to pass the time. It was Karaoke Night at the Ivy Inn. And here I am today still in good voice and ready to offer some thoughts that you graduates will undoubtedly cherish word-for-word decades from now. First, however, let me recognize another very important group here this afternoon: Im talking about your proud parents, friends, and relatives, who are here to support you on this great day. I think they deserve a big hand. And lets not forget: They have travelled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to be here today and paid more money than they want to remember only to be told to go sit outside. Parents: Ive been there. When my daughter, Emma, graduated, I was dying to know what the inside of this chapel looked like. Graduates: Youre happy to be moving on, but this final weekend inspires more than a few bittersweet emotions. No more lawn parties after you leave here. Youll have to start paying to do your laundry. Thats right: There is no free lunch in the real world or, in your case: no free brunch with a lavish omelet bar. Life can be cruel, graduates. Even worse: Youre leaving now and next years seniors are slated to get the highest grades in Princeton history since Dean Malkiel is also leaving. Bad timing, folks what can I say? Still, lets focus on the bright side of your departures. This is a moment when you inevitably look back at the past four years and remember all the good times youve had and all the challenges youve overcome. And it takes place, appropriately enough, on Memorial Day weekend when we, as a nation, also remember. We remember the men and women who served our nation in uniform and gave their lives to defend our country and guarantee our freedom. They died so that you could say what you wish, worship as you wish, live as you wish. So, before you embark on your new adventures beyond Fitz Randolph

Gates, lets take a moment to remember what obligations we owe to them and what responsibilities we carry with us. First, we must remember that its up to us not just our military but all of us to stand up and defend it when we see freedom threatened or denied. Thats why, for instance, Ive spoken out in support of Ai Weiwei, an artist who was scheduled to open an exhibit in New York City, but who has been detained indefinitely by Chinese authorities. Its why Ive strongly defended the rights of New York Citys Muslim community to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. And its why Im urging the New York State Legislature to support a bill that would grant marriage equality to all men and all women. For me, this is an issue of fundamental freedom and fairness and the fact that your generation overwhelmingly supports marriage equality is one of the reasons I am so hopeful for the future. Your generation is tearing down walls here at home and across the world. The revolutions for freedom that now spread like wildfire in the Arab world burn with the anger from decades of suffering and repression. But they were lit, in part, by technology that was developed by your generation. No other generation has started revolutions from half-way around the world. Yours has. And youre only just beginning. There may be no greater way to repay those American soldiers who died for our country than to spread the freedoms Americans enjoy around the world. So keep it up. The more we give people the opportunity to express themselves, the more we tear down the barriers to full equality, the brighter our future will be. As we stand up for the freedoms our soldiers have died protecting, we also owe it to them to do whats best for our nation not whats easiest or most popular. In 1917, in his address to Congress asking for a declaration of war, your fellow Princetonian, President Woodrow Wilson, said, Whats right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts. This is the kind of courage and determination that built our nation that made America a beacon of liberty and a laboratory for progress. And yet, in government, too often whats right is less precious than winning re-election. Coming from the private sector, I never cease to be amazed by how many highly intelligent people follow the party line instead of doing what they know in their hearts to be right. Dont fall into that trap. Dont play by their rules. Dont follow the crowd. Dont fool yourself into thinking that one party is 100% right 100% of the time and the other party is always dead wrong. History shows that no party has a monopoly on good ideas, or God on its side. Dont forget what youve been taught here at Princeton. You have all been fortunate to be part of an institution thats always put an emphasis on practical thinking, real-world solutions and sticking to the facts. Dont forget that because theres no better way to understand extreme partisanship in Washington is hurting the country on issue with partisanship isnt that the two sides disagree on everything and actually agree on about 75% of the issues, but theyd rather fight to peace to forge progress. problems and solve them. The after issue. And the big problem nothing gets done. Its that they score political points than make

Nevertheless, its very encouraging to me that independents are the fastest-growing bloc of voters in the country and Im especially encouraged that young people like you are leading the way. Its another sign that your generation is ready to create a brighter future for our country and our world. Id like to ask you to remember one more obligation we owe those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for us. Its something that all of you are familiar with. Its part of Princetons informal motto: In the nations service and in the service of all nations. Im talking about service and volunteering. I think one of the encouraging things to come out of the aftermath of 9/11 is a renewed spirit of service. Americans of all backgrounds but especially your generation want to do more to help the world. And they have.

Lide Paterno, for instance, graduated from Princeton five years ago and, with the help of his classmates, has worked to improve educational opportunities in a small village in northern Tanzania. Rishi Jaitly, from the Class of 04, has founded a national nonprofit with the goal of boosting the economy and fortunes of one of Americas hardest-hit states: Michigan. And I have no doubt that your class will produce its own social entrepreneurs who will strive to change the world. In my life, Ive found that service is one of the most rewarding things you can do. Its what led me to take on the biggest challenge and the biggest risk of my life: running for mayor. And today, as someone whos in the position to see up-close the real impact of public service by millions of New Yorkers, I can tell you: Every minute of service helps in more ways than you can count. As busy as you will be in your careers, and as you start families, always find time to give back to others. We are a nation of volunteers. It is the glue that binds us together as Americans and the fact that your generation is more active in service than any before it is an incredibly hopeful and encouraging sign for the future. So on this Memorial Day weekend on a weekend youll never forget for the rest of your lives remember not just the soldiers we have lost in battle, but what we owe them. Make the most of your freedom and defend everyones right to it. Seek the truth by asking your own questions and coming to your own conclusions. Give back and you will be repaid many times over. And in everything you do, work hard. Take risks. Do what you love and figure out a way to get paid for it. Never stop learning. Never compromise your integrity. Never, never give up. And most importantly always call your parents. Remember how they were forced to sit outside one day in May. And all of this applies whatever your next step after graduation may be. Whether you are about to enter the world of banking and finance, or well, I guess that pretty much covers everybody. No doubt, its going to be challenging at times. But I know that your talent, your energy, and your vigorous commitment to the truth will shine through. Congratulations and good luck.

Baccalaureate Address 2006 Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers We will leave with recognitions of various kinds, some marked on parchment, some engraved on pins or plaques - some not. It is really too soon, really too soon for any of us, to know how much, or just what, we have accomplished at Harvard. But one thing is for sure: the world has high expectations of anyone who spends time here. Of course, whatever we do, we will take Harvard with us. We have formed relationships here that will last the rest of our lives. In December, I married the woman I met in my first year at Harvard. Some of you may do similarly. We have all stored up so many memories. Some are wonderful. Some are painful. Some memories are the kind the passage of time turns to sober wisdom; some, the kind the passage of time makes funnier and funnier. All of these memories will shape our complex feelings about and for this special place. But I claim membership in your class for another, deeper, reasons. For me, the greatest joy of being the president of Harvard has been the opportunity to represent, to teach, to converse with, to work with, and to celebrate the students of Harvard College. Of Harvard students, my memory brims : I think of telling your tearful parents that everything was going to work out for the best as I welcomed you to Harvard just 45 months ago. I think of learning from you about everything from two-photon microscopy to the Ching dynasty as you told me about your senior theses. I think of being there when the women's ice hockey team won in triple overtime. And of listening to two of you play Mozart - and three more play jazz - at my wedding.

 I think of dancing with a few of you and talking with so many more of you in study breaks in Annenberg or your houses. I think of being reminded very forcefully of what I always like to say about Harvard, that is a place based on the authority of ideas rather than the idea of authority, when a student four weeks into my freshman seminar told me that the paper I had written as secretary of the Treasury was, as I quote, "kind of interesting," but as he told the students in the seminar, "President Summers' data did not even come close to proving his conclusion." I think of some of the best discussions I have ever had of globalization issues. And yes, I did get a kick out of signing for you the ever dwindling supply of dollar bills with my name on them. This is because I thought then, and I think now, that there is not much anyone can do that is more important than to provide students with minds like yours with an educational experience commensurate with your excellence. For you are remarkably gifted, deeply committed, gifted, and - as history suggests - more likely than any other group of 1,650 22-year-olds to change the world. But now, talk about what Harvard will do about grade inflation, Allston, or Springfest - or even the Core - is fading in importance for you and for me. You will leave here with your transcripts and honors, with your friends, and with your memories. I want to share with you additional hopes for what you leave here with - a hope for what we on the faculty helped you to develop during your years here. It is something different and broader than knowledge of a field or of a disciplinary approach - something that transcends even the Core's 11 categories. It is an attitude towards your own minds, and the difference that thought can make. At one level, what I am about to express are personal convictions of mine - you will sense this, I suspect, in what I say. But I believe what I am going to say expresses the obligation that all of us who have been privileged to study in this Yard should feel. I hope that more than anything else you leave here with a reverence for, and a personal commitment to, the power of human thought and the positive contribution reason can make. I speak of a reverence for the power of human thought because our existence is shaped by those ideas that come sometimes as a spark of genius, sometimes as a product of a great debate, sometimes in a moment of serendipity. One of my heroes, John Maynard Keynes, famously wrote of the sphere in which I have lived "The ideas of economists and political philosophers - both when they are right and when they are wrong - are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else." Keynes went on to warn that persons "who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Ideas and their power allow even the poor in our country today to take for granted things that John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan could not have dreamed of - the ability to cross the country in 5 hours, to talk with anyone ... anywhere, to enjoy the recreation of watching movies in one's home in a room with a controlled temperature, the confident expectation that most children will live to be an adult. The idea of freedom and the genius of the Constitution enable us to take for granted all that we take for granted, that we may say what we think, read what we choose, and sleep secure in the knowledge that agents of our government will not be pounding our doors in the middle of the night. It is the power of human thought that has given us some of life's most sublime moments - hearing the music of Beethoven, seeing the paintings of Picasso, pondering the philosophies of Plato, or viewing the dramas of Shakespeare. To be sure, reverence for human thought no more than reverence for anything else does not mean uncritical appreciation of all its products. Countless millions of people have been sent to their deaths in the name of misguided ideas. History's tragedies must inspire awe, and sometimes dread, at the power of human thought to wreak misery as well as good. So yes, a few moments ago I expressed the hope that you would leave here with not just reverence for the power of human thought but I also express the hope that you would leave here with a personal commitment to the idea of reason. For, as a graduate of Harvard, this iconic institution, you represent and stand for the idea of the mind. And you can show that analysis and logic - though fallible, though susceptible to abuse - can, and must, carry the day. It is an irony of our time that at a moment when the power of reason to cure diseases, link nations, emancipate the enslaved, and improve living standards has never been greater, the idea of reason is increasingly in question. Perhaps the greatest large-scale threat to the lives we all plan to lead over the next decades comes from the threat of faith-based terror - from the threat of destruction carried out

with the objective of destroying the commitment to open-minded inquiry, of casting doubt on the idea of society organized on the basis of what its citizens choose. The deliberateness of what we call "deliberative" democracy vests power in all of us to think, to reason, and to choose. When this deliberateness is threatened anywhere, the world grows more dangerous everywhere And the threats to reason can be close to home. Think about this, at a time when biological science has done more to reduce human suffering and has more potential to reduce human suffering than ever before in all of history. There is today, in American public schools, more doubt cast on the theory of evolution than at any time in the last century. American public policy remains in thrall to those who doubt the reality of man-made global warming this while global warming is about as debatable as the idea that smoking is bad for your health. How do we respond to such threats? We respond by insisting that our public choices be reasoned ones, ones informed by the power of data and experience, analysis and logic. We cannot confront enemies - but nor can we effectively heal, or feed, or build, or trade - without penetrating understanding and comprehensive analysis of realms we still find mysterious. This applies to all of us. For assumptions - even the most well-meaning assumptions - are often inadequate and frequently harmful: the world does not always match what we would like to think, or what current conventional wisdom tells us is true. How, without the deep, counterintuitive, cultural understanding of the kind our country invested in gaining of Japan after the Second World War can we have any hope of making progress in today's Middle East? How, without a commitment to understanding in the most rigorous and careful way, not only the mechanics of biological transmission and the ethical imperatives of treatment, but also the logistics of local distribution and so much else, will we head off pandemics? Analysis - focused, tough-minded, and searching - will be essential to all our future. I ask you - if we do not uphold the ideal of reason, who will? And there are other threats, less urgent, less obvious to the power of reason you will encounter threats that come from elevating the values of consensus, conformity, and comfort above the value of truth. Someone I greatly admired, a colleague of mine in the Economics Department, John Kenneth Galbraith, who died a few weeks ago, was the tallest - in many senses - professor Harvard ever had. Galbraith once warned that "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking," and he commented wryly on another occasion: "In any organization it is far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone." Galbraith thus urged: "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also one should afflict the comfortable especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." I agree with Galbraith that the power of thought to do good is in peril when we imagine that just because people may construe truth differently that truth itself is inaccessible, or that every argument is as good as every other. Indeed when consensus or comity overshadows clarity, when the airing and incorporation of diverse views becomes the end rather than the means, then we set the bar too low. It is not enough, if we are to make the world better, to sign on to processes that explore all positions but cede the hope of changing anyone's mind. Ultimately, for effective action, people do have to agree on some things and reject others to find dynamic ways forward. When Galbraith said, "there is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth" the wonder he meant to celebrate was that of progress. And so I urge you, you bearers of the power of thought: think, and broadcast your thoughts bravely and listen attentively for the advent of new truths. Stand up for what makes sense, and risk seeming unreasonable now and then. George Bernard Shaw once observed "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Live with the discomfort, sometimes, of having made others squirm, and respect and listen, too, to those who leave you ill at ease. Hawthorne thought this way, too. He said, "the world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease."

Certainly, the awkward have no monopoly on truth, but truth itself - as Galileo, as Plato, as James Joyce, as Philip Roth, all learned - sometimes has an awkward and unpopular way of announcing itself. Its inconvenience should be no bar to entertaining it on the merits. I hope and trust that you have been trained, even driven, here to think outside your comfort zone. Use this experience. Be among the first to recognize the wild originality of the next Joyce, the transformative synthesis of the next Weber, the elegant wonder of the iPod, or, indeed, the power and originality of your own wild surmises. As individuals, we might not achieve what Newton, or Jefferson, or Beethoven did. But you can, we can, each in our own way, seek to bring the power of our minds to bear to do something, to create something, to influence someone in a way that has never happened before. As creators and implementers of thought, we can make a difference in the world. I have loved my years as president of Harvard. I hope you have loved your student years here. Now we go forth shaken in some of our convictions, fortified in others, older for sure, wiser we trust. Never before has there been so much ability through new ideas to contribute to the lives of our fellow citizens. Let us strive to be beacons of reason in our lives and in the lives of those we touch. My classmates Godspeed to us all.

Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement 2007 President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates: Ive been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you Id come back and get my degree. I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. Ill be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, Im just happy that the Crimson has called me Harvards most successful dropout. I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class I did the best of everyone who failed. But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. Im a bad influence. Thats why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today. Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadnt even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didnt worry about getting up in the morning. Thats how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people. Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesnt guarantee success. One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the worlds first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: Were not quite ready, come see us in a month, which was a good thing, because we hadnt written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft. What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on. But taking a serious look back I do have one big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanitys greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. It took me decades to find out. You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the worlds inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope youve had a chance to think about how in this age of accelerating technology we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them. Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it? For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year none of them in the United States. We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just werent being delivered. If you believe that every life has equal value, its revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: This cant be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving. So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: How could the world let these children die? The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system. But you and I have both. We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world. I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end because people just dont care. I completely disagree. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing not because we didnt care, but because we didnt know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted. The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps. Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future. But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. Were determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent. The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths. We dont read much about these deaths. The media covers whats new and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where its easier to ignore. But even when we do see it

or read about it, its difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. Its hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we dont know how to help. And so we look away. If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution. Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks How can I help?, then we can get action and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares and that makes it hard for their caring to matter. Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have whether its something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet. The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highestleverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior. Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century which is to surrender to complexity and quit. The final step after seeing the problem and finding an approach is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts. You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government. But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected. I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one persons life then multiply that by millions. Yet this was the most boring panel Ive ever been on ever. So boring even I couldnt bear it. What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software but why cant we generate even more excitement for saving lives? You cant get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that is a complex question. Still, Im optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new they can help us make the most of our caring and thats why the future can be different from the past. The defining and ongoing innovations of this age biotechnology, the computer, the Internet give us a chance weve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease. Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous

complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant. The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating. The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree. At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people dont. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who dont have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world. We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago. Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. What for? There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name? Let me make a request of the deans and the professors the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves: Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems? Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the worlds worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty the prevalence of world hunger the scarcity of clean water the girls kept out of school the children who die from diseases we can cure? Should the worlds most privileged people learn about the lives of the worlds least privileged? These are not rhetorical questions you will answer with your policies. My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: From those to whom much is given, much is expected. When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given in talent, privilege, and opportunity there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us. In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you dont have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Dont let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer. Knowing what you know, how could you not? And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the worlds deepest inequities on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity. Good luck.

Text of Justice David Souters speech Harvard Commencement remarks (as delivered)

When I was younger, I used to hear Harvard stories from a member of the class of 1885. Back then, old graduates of the College who could get to Cambridge on Commencement Day didnt wait for reunion years to come back to the Yard. Theyd just turn up, see old friends, look over the new crop, and have a cup of Commencement punch under the elms. The old man remembered one of those summer days when he was heading for the Square after lunch and crossed paths with a newly graduated senior, who had enjoyed quite a few cups of that punch. As the two men approached each other the younger one thrust out his new diploma and shouted, Educated, by God. Even with an honorary Harvard doctorate in my hands, I know enough not to shout that across the Yard, but the Universitys generosity does make me bold enough to say that over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States, and about what judges do when they apply it in deciding cases with constitutional issues. Im going to draw on that experience in the course of the next few minutes, for it is as a judge that I have been given the honor to speak before you. The occasion for our coming together like this aligns with the approach of two separate events on the judicial side of the national public life: the end of the Supreme Courts term, with its quickened pace of decisions, and a confirmation proceeding for the latest nominee to fill a seat on the court. We will as a consequence be hearing and discussing a particular sort of criticism that is frequently aimed at the more controversial Supreme Court decisions: criticism that the court is making up the law, that the court is announcing constitutional rules that cannot be found in the Constitution, and that the court is engaging in activism to extend civil liberties. A good many of us, Im sure a good many of us here, intuitively react that this sort of commentary tends to miss the mark. But we dont often pause to consider in any detail the conceptions of the Constitution and of constitutional judging that underlie the critical rhetoric, or to compare them with the notions that lie behind our own intuitive responses. Im going to try to make some of those comparisons this afternoon. The charges of lawmaking and constitutional novelty seem to be based on an impression of the Constitution, and on a template for deciding constitutional claims, that go together something like this. A claim is made in court that the government is entitled to exercise a power, or an individual is entitled to claim the benefit of a right, that is set out in the terms of some particular provision of the Constitution. The claimant quotes the provision and provides evidence of facts that are said to prove the entitlement that is claimed. Once they have been determined, the facts on their face either do or do not support the claim. If they do, the court gives judgment for the claimant; if they dont, judgment goes to the party contesting the claim. On this view, deciding constitutional cases should be a straightforward exercise of reading fairly and viewing facts objectively. There are, of course, constitutional claims that would be decided just about the way this fair reading model would have it. If one of todays 21-year-old college graduates claimed a place on the ballot for one of the United States Senate seats open this year, the claim could be disposed of simply by showing the persons age, quoting the constitutional provision that a senator must be at least 30 years old, and interpreting that requirement to forbid access to the ballot to someone who could not qualify to serve if elected. No one would be apt to respond that lawmaking was going on, or object that the age requirement did not say anything about ballot access. The fair reading model would describe pretty much what would happen. But cases like this do not usually come to court, or at least the Supreme Court. And for the ones that do get there, for the cases that tend to raise the national blood pressure, the fair reading model has only a tenuous connection to reality. Even a moments thought is enough to show why it is so unrealistic. The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches. These provisions cannot be applied like the requirement for 30-year-old senators; they call for more elaborate reasoning to show why very general language applies in some specific cases but not in others, and over time the various examples turn into rules that the Constitution does not mention. But this explanation hardly scratches the surface. The reasons that constitutional judging is not a mere combination of fair reading and simple facts extend way beyond the recognition that constitutions have to have a lot of general language in order to be useful over long stretches of time. Another reason is that the Constitution contains values that may well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony. Yet another reason is that the facts that determine whether a constitutional provision

applies may be very different from facts like a persons age or the amount of the grocery bill; constitutional facts may require judges to understand the meaning that the facts may bear before the judges can figure out what to make of them. And this can be tricky. To show you what Im getting at, Ive picked two examples of what can really happen, two stories of two great cases. The two stories wont, of course, give anything like a complete description either of the Constitution or of judging, but I think they will show how unrealistic the fair reading model can be. The first story is about what the Constitution is like. Its going to show that the Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language that a contract draftsman would try to avoid, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, all together, all at once. The story is about a case that many of us here remember. It was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on June 26, 1971, and is known as the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times and the Washington Post had each obtained copies of classified documents prepared and compiled by government officials responsible for conducting the Vietnam War. The newspapers intended to publish some of those documents, and the government sought a court order forbidding the publication. The issue had arisen in great haste, and had traveled from trial courts to the Supreme Court, not over the course of months, but in a matter of days. The time was one of high passion, and the claim made by the United States was the most extreme claim known to the constitutional doctrines of freedom to speak and publish. The government said it was entitled to a prior restraint, an order forbidding publication in the first place, not merely one imposing a penalty for unlawful publication after the words are out. The argument included an exchange between a great lawyer appearing for the government and a great judge, and the colloquy between them was one of those instances of a grain of sand that reveals a universe. The great lawyer for the United States was a man who had spent many Commencement mornings in this Yard. He was Erwin Griswold, dean of the Law School for 21 years, who was serving a stint as solicitor general of the United States. The great judge who questioned the dean that day was Mr. Justice Black, the first of the New Deal justices, whom Justice Cardozo described as having one of the most brilliant legal minds he had ever met with. The constitutional provision on which their exchange centered was the First Amendment, which includes the familiar words that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Although that language by its literal terms forbade Congress from legislating to abridge free expression, the guarantees were understood to bind the whole government, and to limit what the president could ask a court to do. As for the remainder of the provision, though, Justice Black professed to read it literally. When it said there shall be no law allowed, it left no room for any exception; the prohibition against abridging freedom of speech and press was absolute. And in fairness to him, one must say that on their face the First Amendment clauses seem as clear as the requirement for 30-year-old senators, and that no guarantee of the Bill of Rights is more absolute in form. But that was not the end of the matter for Dean Griswold. Notwithstanding the language, he urged the court to say that a restraint would be constitutional when publication threatened irreparable harm to the security of the United States, and he contended there was enough in the record to show just that; he argued that the intended publications would threaten lives, and jeopardize the process of trying to end the war and recover prisoners, and erode the governments capacity to negotiate with foreign governments and through foreign governments in the future. Justice Black responded that if a court could suppress publication when the risk to the national interest was great enough, the judges would be turned into censors. Dean Griswold said he did not know of any alternative. Justice Black shot back that respecting the First Amendment might be the alternative, and to that, Dean Griswold replied in words I cannot resist quoting: The problem in this case, he said, is the construction of the First Amendment. Now Mr. Justice, your construction of that is well-known, and I certainly respect it. You say that no law means no law, and that should be obvious. I can only say, Mr. Justice, that to me it is equally obvious that no law does not mean no law, and I would seek to persuade the Court that that is true.

As Chief Justice Marshall said, so long ago, it is a Constitution we are interpreting. The government lost the case and the newspapers published, but Dean Griswold won his argument with Justice Black. To show, as he put it, that no law did not mean no law, Dean Griswold had pointed out that the First Amendment was not the whole Constitution. The Constitution also granted authority to the government to provide for the security of the nation, and authority to the president to manage foreign policy and command the military. And although he failed to convince the court that the capacity to exercise these powers would be seriously affected by publication of the papers, the court did recognize that at some point the authority to govern that Dean Griswold invoked could limit the right to publish. The court did not decide the case on the ground that the words no law allowed of no exception and meant that the rights of expression were absolute. The courts majority decided only that the government had not met a high burden of showing facts that could justify a prior restraint, and particular members of the court spoke of examples that might have turned the case around, to go the other way. Threatened publication of something like the D-Day invasion plans could have been enjoined; Justice Brennan mentioned a publication that would risk a nuclear holocaust in peacetime. Even the First Amendment, then, expressing the value of speech and publication in the terms of a right as paramount as any fundamental right can be, does not quite get to the point of an absolute guarantee. It fails because the Constitution has to be read as a whole, and when it is, other values crop up in potential conflict with an unfettered right to publish, the value of security for the nation and the value of the presidents authority in matters foreign and military. The explicit terms of the Constitution, in other words, can create a conflict of approved values, and the explicit terms of the Constitution do not resolve that conflict when it arises. The guarantee of the right to publish is unconditional in its terms, and in its terms the power of the government to govern is plenary. A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well. These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good and another one. The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice. And choices like the ones that the justices envisioned in the Papers case make up much of what we call law. Let me ask a rhetorical question. Should the choice and its explanation be called illegitimate law making? Can it be an act beyond the judicial power when a choice must be made and the Constitution has not made it in advance in so many words? You know my answer. So much for the notion that all of constitutional law lies there in the Constitution waiting for a judge to read it fairly. Now let me tell a second story, not one illustrating the tensions within constitutional law, but one showing the subtlety of constitutional facts. Again the story is about a famous case, and a good many of us here remember this one, too: Brown v. Board of Education from 1954, in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that racial segregation in public schools imposed by law was unconstitutional, as violating the guarantee of equal protection of the law. Brown ended the era of separate-but-equal, whose paradigm was the decision in 1896 of the case called Plessy v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court had held it was no violation of the equal protection guarantee to require black people to ride in a separate railroad car that was physically equal to the car for whites. One argument offered in Plessy was that the separate black car was a badge of inferiority, to which the court majority responded that if black people viewed it that way, the implication was merely a product of their own minds. Sixty years later, Brown held that a segregated school required for black children was inherently unequal. For those whose exclusive norm for constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision. Those who look to that model are not likely to think that a federal court back in 1896 should have declared legally mandated racial segregation unconstitutional. But if Plessy was not wrong, how is it that Brown came out so differently? The language of the Constitutions guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be hard to say that the obvious facts on which

Plessy was based had changed, either. While Plessy was about railroad cars and Brown was about schools, that distinction was no great difference. Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results. As Ive said elsewhere, the members of the Court in Plessy remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery to make it look unexceptional by contrast. As a consequence, the judges of 1954 found a meaning in segregating the races by law that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see. That meaning is not captured by descriptions of physically identical schools or physically identical railroad cars. The meaning of facts arises elsewhere, and its judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own. Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race. The judges who understood the meaning that was apparent in 1954 would have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution if they had not held the segregation mandate unconstitutional. Again, a rhetorical question. Did the judges of 1954 cross some limit of legitimacy into law making by stating a conclusion that you will not find written in the Constitution? Was it activism to act based on the current meaning of facts that at a purely objective level were about the same as Plessys facts 60 years before? Again, you know my answer. So much for the assumption that facts just lie there waiting for an objective judge to view them. Let me, like the lawyer that I am, sum up the case Ive tried to present this afternoon. The fair reading model fails to account for what the Constitution actually says, and it fails just as badly to understand what judges have no choice but to do. The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another. Not even its most uncompromising and unconditional language can resolve every potential tension of one provision with another, tension the Constitutions Framers left to be resolved another day; and another day after that, for our cases can give no answers that fit all conflicts, and no resolutions immune to rethinking when the significance of old facts may have changed in the changing world. These are reasons enough to show how egregiously it misses the point to think of judges in constitutional cases as just sitting there reading constitutional phrases fairly and looking at reported facts objectively to produce their judgments. Judges have to choose between the good things that the Constitution approves, and when they do, they have to choose, not on the basis of measurement, but of meaning. The fair reading model misses that, but it has even more to answer for. Remember that the tensions that are the stuff of judging in so many hard constitutional cases are, after all, the creatures of our aspirations: to value liberty, as well as order, and fairness and equality, as well as liberty. And the very opportunity for conflict between one high value and another reflects our confidence that a way may be found to resolve it when a conflict arises. That is why the simplistic view of the Constitution devalues our aspirations, and attacks that our confidence, and diminishes us. It is a view of judging that means to discourage our tenacity (our sometimes reluctant tenacity) to keep the constitutional promises the nation has made. So, it is tempting to dismiss the critical rhetoric of lawmaking and activism as simply a rejection of too many of the hopes we profess to share as the American people. But there is one thing more. I have to believe that something deeper is involved, and that behind most dreams of a simpler Constitution there lies a basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair reading model seems to promise. And who has not felt that same hunger? Is there any one of us who has not lived through moments, or years, of longing for a world without ambiguity, and for the stability of something unchangeable in human institutions? I dont forget my own longings for certainty, which heartily resisted the pronouncement of Justice Holmes, that certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny. But I have come to understand that he was right, and by the same token I understand that I differ from the critics Ive described not merely in seeing the patent wisdom of the Brown decision, or in

espousing the rule excluding unlawfully seized evidence, or in understanding the scope of habeas corpus. Where I suspect we differ most fundamentally is in my belief that in an indeterminate world I cannot control, it is still possible to live fully in the trust that a way will be found leading through the uncertain future. And to me, the future of the Constitution as the Framers wrote it can be staked only upon that same trust. If we cannot share every intellectual assumption that formed the minds of those who framed the charter, we can still address the constitutional uncertainties the way they must have envisioned, by relying on reason, by respecting all the words the Framers wrote, by facing facts, and by seeking to understand their meaning for living people. That is how a judge lives in a state of trust, and I know of no other way to make good on the aspirations that tell us who we are, and who we mean to be, as the people of the United States.

JK Rowling Harvard Commencement 2008 President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates. The first thing I would like to say is thank you. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the worlds largest Gryffindor reunion. Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I cant remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the gay wizard joke, Ive come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement. Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this. I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called real life, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me. I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now. So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom. I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers. I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very wellacquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average persons idea of success, so high have you already flown. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as

a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case, you fail by default. Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned. So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyones total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty Internationals headquarters in London. There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes. Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness. And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his countrys regime, his mother had been seized and executed. Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other peoples lives simply by existing. But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other peoples lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the worlds only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my childrens godparents, the people to whom Ive been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.