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謝謝Torres校長,歡迎派屈克州長,感謝大家來到這裡。今天是哈佛校友會第146屆年會,也是哈佛大學第364屆畢業典禮,很榮幸邀請到前州長德瓦爾.派屈克。他是哈佛大學1978年畢業生,以及1982年哈佛法學院畢業生。在表現傑出的公職生涯期間,他極力主張藉由教育的力量改變生活,他非凡的經歷就是最有說服力的證明。從芝加哥南區到麻瑟諸塞州議會大廈,州長就職宣誓典禮上他以門迪聖經宣誓,這本聖經是1841年的一份獻禮,由奴隸船Amistad號上的非洲俘虜獻給為他們贏得自由權的人-約翰.昆西.亞當斯。派屈克州長繼承了Amistad號非洲奴隸的反叛精神,也繼承了他們的辯護律師亞當斯的執法精神。亞當斯,如Torres校長介紹過的,是哈佛大學1787年畢業生,也是哈佛校友會第一任主席。他的父親約翰.亞當斯也是哈佛校友,畢業於1755年,這種跨世紀的傳承正是我們每年春天在這裡團聚的原因,重新凝聚與加強我們與這所傑出學校的聯繫。
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Thank you, President Torres. Welcome, Governor Patrick. Thank you, everyone, for being here.
The 146th annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association at the 364th Commencement of Harvard University. It’s a particular pleasure to welcome former Governor Deval Patrick of the College Class of 1978 and the Harvard Law School Class of 1982. Throughout his distinguished career in government, he forcefully argued for the power of education to transform lives. Nothing made that case more persuasively than his own remarkable life — from Chicago’s South Side to the Massachusetts State House. When he was sworn in as governor, he took the oath of office with the Mendi Bible, presented in 1841 by the African captives who had seized the slave ship Amistad to the man who had won their legal right to freedom, John Quincy Adams. Governor Patrick can claim connection with both the African heritage of the Amistad rebels and the institutional roots of their defender. Adams, as you heard before from President Torres, was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1787, and was both the first president of this alumni association, and himself the son of an earlier alumnus, John Adams, of the Class of 1755. That kind of continuity across the centuries is not the least of the reasons that we congregate here every spring to renew and reinforce our ties to this extraordinary place.
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我想先提一些顯而易見且令人好奇的事。我們今天齊聚一堂,我們因某種聯繫來到這裡,這是許多人、許多世代的聯繫,我們藉由儀式慶祝這種跨越時間的聯繫,穿著中世紀長袍、歌頌母校、彰顯哈佛根深蒂固的傳統,以及普遍存在於所有大學的傳統。即使在網路和虛擬化時代,學校這個機構仍讓我們齊聚一堂、回到這裡。我們還唱了-或更確切地說,傑出的Renée Fleming曾演唱《美哉美國》,讚頌另一個機構-我們的民主國家。我身後的紀念教堂石碑上刻了許多人的名字,還有它後方的紀念館,這就是這些人獻出生命來保護和維護的國家。當麻瑟諸塞灣殖民地開拓者於1630年抵達這片海岸時,他們以異教徒的身分而來,摒棄了故鄉英國的體制。但一直令我驚訝的是,在這片荒地裡,光是生存下來就是最大的挑戰,他們竟如此迅速地意識到建立學習機構的重要性。因此新英格蘭地區-如1642年畢業生William Hubbard所言:「新英格蘭地區或許能藉此獲得適合管理教會和國家事務的人才。」
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Let me start by noticing what is both obvious, and curious: We are here today together. We are here in association. It is an association of many people, and many generations. We celebrate a connection across time in these festival rites, singing our alma mater, adorning ourselves in medieval robes to mark the deep-rooted traditions of Harvard, and of universities more generally. Even in the age of the online and the virtual, an institution has brought us together, and brings us back. We have also sung — or rather the magnificent Renée Fleming has sung — “America the Beautiful,” to honor another institution, our democratic republic, which the men and women whose names are carved in stone in Memorial Church right behind me — and Memorial Hall just behind that — gave their lives to protect and uphold. When the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived on these shores in 1630, they came as dissenters — rejecting institutions of their English homeland. But I have always found it striking that here in the wilderness, where mere survival was the foremost challenge, they so rapidly felt compelled to found this seat of learning so that New England, in the words of William Hubbard of the Class of 1642, “might be supplied with persons fit to manage the affairs of both church and state.”
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教會、國家、大學,他們認為這三個機構是麻瑟諸塞州發展的要素,John Winthrop州長認為,這三個機構可確保殖民者在一個美麗新世界的新社會「團結一致」。從那時起,許多世代更迭,哈佛的足跡從幾棟木製建築不斷擴展,但我們不曾對每一代學生的能力失去信心,期待他們建立一個比原來更好的社會。我們不曾對哈佛擁有使這個目標成為可能的能力失去信心,正如一位早期創始人Thomas Shepard所言,我們希望踏入社會的畢業生能「拓展目光,有益國家」。如今,將近四個世紀後,我們發現我們處於充滿挑戰的歷史時刻,我們如何讓畢業生「拓展目光」,財務的新工作。我們如何讓畢業生「拓展目光」,走上有益他人的道路?Shepard提到「拓展」,他所說的對象是「國家和國家利益」。我們是否成功培養出以造福他人為目標的學生?還是我們都沉溺於追求個人成就、機會和表現,以至於忘了我們相互依存的關係,忘了我們對彼此及對這所旨在促進公共利益之大學的責任?
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Church, state, and College. Three institutions they deemed essential to this Massachusetts experiment. Three institutions to ensure that the colonists, as Governor John Winthrop urged, could be “knit together as one” in a new society in a brave new world. Dozens of generations have come and gone since then, and the University’s footprint has expanded considerably beyond a small cluster of wooden buildings. But we have never lost faith in the capacity of each generation to build a better society than the one it was born into. We have never lost faith in the capacity of this College to help make that possible. As an early founder, Thomas Shepard put it, we hope to graduate into the world people who are, in his words, “enlarged toward the country and the good of it.” Yet now, nearly four centuries later, we find ourselves in a challenging historical moment. How do we “enlarge” our graduates in a way that benefits others as well? Shepard spoke of enlarging “toward” — toward, as he put it, “the country and the good of it.” Are we succeeding in educating students oriented toward the betterment of others? Or have we all become so caught up in individual and personal achievements, opportunities, and appearances that we risk forgetting our interdependence, our responsibilities to one another and to the institutions meant to promote the common good?
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這是個盛行自拍的時代,自拍棒隨處可見。別誤會我的意思,自拍讓人欲罷不能。兩年前的大學部畢業演講中,我鼓勵畢業生寄自拍照給我們,讓我們與他們保持聯繫,瞭解他們畢業後的生活。但試想一下,一個構築於自拍的社會意味著什麼?在我看來這是「利己主義」的真實體現,這通常不是用於讚美的詞彙,事實上韋氏詞典列舉的同義詞包括「以自我為中心」、「自戀」和「自私」。我們無止盡地關注自己、關注我們的形象、關注我們得到的「讚」,就像我們的鼓勵。事實上正如我們對學生的鼓勵,不斷用一連串成就美化我們的履歷填寫大學、工作或研究所申請書。借用Shepard的說法,我們不斷「放大自我」。正如一位社會評論家所觀察到的,我們不斷打造自我品牌,我們花時間盯著螢幕,而不是彼此。我們大部分的生活不是用來體驗,而是用來展示、分享、上傳Snapchat和Instagram,最後以自拍合集呈現。
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This is the era of the selfie — and the selfie stick. Don’t get me wrong: There is much to love about selfies, and two years ago in my Baccalaureate address I concluded by urging the graduates to send such pictures along so we could keep up with them and their post-Harvard lives. But think for a moment about the implications of a society that goes through life taking its own picture. That seems to me a quite literal embodiment of “self-regarding” — a term not often used as a compliment. In fact, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers “egocentric,” “narcissistic,” and “selfish” as synonyms. We direct endless attention to ourselves, our image, our “Likes,” just as we are encouraged — and in fact encourage our students — to burnish resumes and fill first college and then job or graduate school applications with endless lists of achievements — with examples, to borrow Shepard’s language, of constant enlargements of self. As one social commentator has observed, we are ceaselessly at work building our own brands. We spend time looking at screens instead of one another. Large portions of our lives are hardly experienced: They are curated, shared, Snapchatted and Instagrammed — rendered as a kind of composite selfie.
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某種程度的自戀是我們的天性,如哈佛校友E.O. Wilson最近所寫的:「我們是擁有無止盡好奇心的物種,只要對象是我們自己和我們知道或想知道的人。」但我想強調這種自戀所帶來的兩個令人不安的後果:首先這將削弱我們對他人的責任感,服務精神正是Thomas Shepard所言的核心理念,說明哈佛對畢業生的期許:不斷「放大」、超越自我,不僅是為了自己的利益,也是為了他人和世界,這是哈佛一直努力的目標之一。我們的學生和教職員藉由服務社區和全世界體現這種精神,從在Allston開辦哈佛Ed Portal網路課程,到前往賴比瑞亞參與緩解伊波拉病毒危機的工作,他們改變了無數人的生命。哈佛園的Dexter紀念門邀請學生「為增長智慧而來,為更妥善服務國家和人類而離開。」今天約6500名畢業生即將走出校門,希望每個人都記得服務的使命。
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Now, a certain amount of self-absorption is in our nature. As Harvard’s own E.O. Wilson has recently written, and I quote him, “We are an insatiably curious species — provided the subjects are our personal selves and people we know or would like to know.” But I want to underscore two troubling aspects of this obsession with ourselves. The first is it undermines our sense of responsibility to others — the ethos of service at the heart of Thomas Shepard’s phrase describing Harvard’s enduring commitment to graduate students who are “enlarged” to be about more than themselves. Not just enlarged for their own sake and betterment — but enlarged toward others and toward the world. This is part of the essence of what this university has always strived to be. Our students and faculty have embodied that spirit through their work to serve in our neighborhood and around the world. From tutoring at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston to working in Liberia to mitigate the Ebola crisis, they make a difference in the lives of countless individuals. The Dexter Gate across the Yard invites students to “Enter to grow in wisdom. Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” Today some 6,500 graduates go forth. May each of them remember that it is in some way to serve.
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還有一種我們應注意的危險:自戀不僅削弱我們對他人的責任感,也會削弱我們對他人的依賴,這對哈佛、對高等教育、對基礎社會機構來說都是一種困擾,使我們咎由自取地忘了這些機構存在的目的和必要性。批評家質疑:為何我們需要大學?難道我們不能全靠自學?矽谷創業家Peter Thiel鼓勵學生輟學,甚至資助他們,其中包括幾個本校生離開大學、追求自己的創業夢想。畢竟邏輯上來說,馬克.祖克柏和比爾.蓋茲都輟學了,他們似乎幹的不錯。是的,沒錯,但我們應該記住,比爾.蓋茲和馬克.祖克柏都是哈佛輟學生。哈佛,他們改變世界的夢想誕生於哈佛。哈佛和其他類似機構培養了物理學家、數學家、電腦科學家、商業分析師、律師和成千上萬Facebook及微軟賴以生存的專業人士;哈佛培養了領導國家的人民公僕,使Facebook、微軟和類似公司得以在這個良好環境中成長茁壯;哈佛培養了作家、製片人和記者,他們創造了廣為流傳的「內容」,提供互聯網所需的題材。
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There is yet another danger we should note as well. Self-absorption may obscure not only our responsibilities to others but our dependence upon them. And this is troubling for Harvard, for higher education and for fundamental social institutions whose purposes and necessity we forget at our peril. Why do we even need college, critics demand? Can’t we do it all on our own? Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has urged students to drop out and has even subsidized them — including several of our undergraduates — to leave college and pursue their individual entrepreneurial dreams. After all, the logic goes, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out and they seem to have done OK. Well, yes. But we should remember: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had Harvard to drop out of. Harvard to serve as the place where their world-changing discoveries were born. Harvard and institutions like it to train the physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, business analysts, lawyers, and thousands of other skilled individuals upon whom Facebook and Microsoft depend. Harvard to enlighten public servants to lead a country in which Facebook, Microsoft, and companies like them can thrive. Harvard to nurture the writers and filmmakers and journalists who create the storied “content” that gives the Internet its substance.
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我們必須瞭解,大學是許多重大發明的溫床,對於推進技術革命的公司相當重要,藉此改變我們的生活。從早期發明電腦和編寫程式的成功,到為如今無所不在的觸控螢幕奠定發展基礎。我們也被告知,大學即將分崩離析,藉由創新技術使人們得以自學,在大規模網路開放式課程中選課,設立自學學位。但網路學習與在校學習並不相悖,前者可以錦上添花,但無法取代後者。藉由類似edX和HarvardX的網路課程,我們與全球數百萬人分享由高等院校創造的智慧財產。有趣的是,我們發現全球網路學習者中有個人數眾多的群體,那就是老師,他們用這些知識充實課堂上的教學內容。主張大學已不符合潮流的斷言源於人們對機構的信任度日漸減少,部分原因在於我們對個人力量和魅力的陶醉及對名人的崇拜。政府、企業和非營利組織跟大學一樣,成了被質疑和批評的目標,很少有與之抗衡的聲音提醒我們這些機構如何提供我們服務和支持,我們往往將它們的所作所為視為理所當然。
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And we must recognize as well that universities have served as sources of discoveries essential to the work of the companies advancing the revolutions in technology that have changed our lives — from early successes in creating and programming computers to development of prototypes that laid the groundwork for the now-ubiquitous touchscreen. We are told, too, that universities are about to be unbundled, disrupted by innovations that enable individuals to teach themselves, selecting from a buffet of massive open online courses and building do-it-yourself degrees. But online opportunities and residential learning are not at odds; the former can strengthen — but does not supplant — the latter. And through initiatives like edX and HarvardX, we are sharing intellectual riches that are the creations of institutions of higher learning with millions of people around the globe. Intriguingly, we have found that a highly represented group among these online learners around the world is teachers — who will use this knowledge to enrich their own schools and face-to-face classrooms. Assertions about the irrelevance of universities are part of a broader and growing mistrust of institutions more generally, one fuelled by our intoxication with the power and charisma of the individual and the cult of celebrity. Government, business, non-profits are joined with universities as targets of suspicion and criticism. There are few countervailing voices to remind us how institutions serve and support us. We tend to take what they do for granted.
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你的食物是安全的、你的血液檢查是可信賴的、你的投票所是開放的,只要打開開關就會有電。你前往波士頓的班機根據負責航空安全的機構制定的規則和制度起降,想像一下一星期或一個月沒有這些「民用基礎設施」的情形。沒有鞏固我們社會的機構、沒有提供我們相互依存性之公共機構的承諾。想想西非國家缺乏控制伊波拉病毒及因此產生之破壞的公共醫療系統,相較於眾多機構彼此合作、迅速拯救生命、控制疫情。當伊波拉病毒出現在美國時,想想我們民用基礎設施的其他組成:圖書館、博物館、校委會、宗教組織,這些都是推動我們前進的要素,如同道路、鐵路和橋樑機構體現了我們彼此之間現有及長久的聯繫,它們凝聚了我們不同的天賦和能力,藉此追求共同的目標,同時,它們使我們與過去和未來連結在一起。它們是價值的儲藏所,超越自我的恆久價值,它們挑戰我們跳脫當下短暫的滿足感,思考更遠大的願景、更長遠的目標、更全面的藍圖;它們提醒我們世界只是暫時屬於我們,我們肩負過去與未來的責任,我們不僅是我們自己和我們的自拍照。
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Your food was safe; your blood test was reliable; your polling place was open; electricity was available when you flipped the switch. Your flight to Boston took off and landed according to rules and systems and organizations responsible for safe air travel. Just imagine a week or a month without this “civic infrastructure” — without the institutions that undergird our society and without the commitment to our interdependence that created these structures of commonality in the first place. Think of the countries in West Africa that lacked the public health systems to contain Ebola and the devastation that resulted. Contrast that with the network of institutions that so rapidly saved lives and contained spread of the disease when it appeared in the United States. Think about other elements of our civic infrastructure — the libraries, the museums, the school committees, the religious organizations that are as vital to moving us forward as are our roads and railways and bridges. Institutions embody our present and enduring connections to one other. They bring our disparate talents and capacities to the pursuit of common purpose. At the same time, they link us to both what has come before and what will follow. They are repositories of values — values that precede, transcend, and outlast the self. They challenge us to look beyond the immediate, the instantly gratifying, to think about the bigger picture, the longer run, the larger whole. They remind us that the world is only temporarily ours, that we are stewards entrusted with the past and responsible to the future. We are larger than ourselves and our selfies.
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這正是大學教育的責任,藉由人類共同的遺產創造新的未來,由今天數千名畢業生創造的未來。我們的任務是一個持續的承諾,不是針對單一個體、甚至一個世代或一個時代,而是針對一個更大的世界,以及正等待它服務的時代。1884年,我的前輩Charles William Eliot為約翰.哈佛的雕像揭幕。談到這個,可說是擁有「波瀾壯闊」一生的人對善行的看法,他也是讓這所大學冠名的人。Eliot說:「他會教導人們,善行將流芳百世、開花結果、以無法度量的方式繁衍;他會教導人們,他種下的種子將萌發出喜悅力量及永不枯竭的能量,在這座知識花園中年年綻放,隨著時間推移,在所有人類活動領域欣欣向榮。」換句話說,今天下午我們經過的那座雕像,不僅是獻給個人的紀念碑,也是獻給一個不斷自我革新之團體與機構的紀念碑。你們今天的出席代表對這個團體和機構的聯繫和認可,這是對哈佛能力的認可,驅使你邁向超越自我的生命和世界。感謝你們為了這份承諾來到這裡,感謝這一切和你們的堅持,祝你們擁有喜悅、力量和永不枯竭的活力,十分感謝。
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That responsibility is quintessentially the work of universities — calling upon our shared human heritage to invent a new future — the future that will be created by the thousands of graduates who leave here today. Our work is about that ongoing commitment — not to a single individual or even one generation or one era — but to a larger world and to the service of the age that is waiting before it. In 1884, my predecessor Charles William Eliot unveiled a statue of John Harvard and spoke of the good that can come from the study of what we might call the “enlarged” life of the man whose name this university bears. Eliot said: “He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fructified and multiplied beyond all power of measurement or computation. He will teach that from the seed which he planted … have sprung joy, strength, and energy ever fresh, blooming year after year in this garden of learning, and flourishing … as time goes on, in all fields of human activity.” In other words, that statue we paraded past this afternoon is not simply a monument to an individual, but to a community and an institution constantly renewing itself. Your presence here today represents an act of connection and of affirmation of that community and of this institution. It is a recognition of Harvard’s capacity to propel you toward lives and worlds beyond your own. I thank you for the commitment that brought you here today and for all it means and sustains. I wish you joy, strength, and energy ever fresh. Thank you very much.