Freshman Address: Opportunity and ResponsibilityPresident Richard C. LevinAugust 28, 2010Yale UniversityI am delighted to join Dean Miller in welcoming you, the Class of 2014, to Yale College. I want to welcome also the relatives and friends who have accompanied you here, and especially your parents. As a father of four college graduates, I know how proud you parents are of your children’s achievement, how hopeful you are for their future, and how many concerns – large and small – you have at this moment.Let me try to reassure you. Your children are going to love it here! And you are going to enjoy your association with Yale, too, whether you are a returning graduate or one of the vast majority of parents who never set foot in New Haven until your children started to think about where to go to college. You may take comfort in learning that surveys have shown that Yale parents are the most satisfied in the Ivy League. So, welcome to the Yale family! We are so pleased to have your children with us, and we will do our best to provide them with abundant opportunities to learn and thrive in the four years ahead.And to you, the Class of 2014, I make the same pledge. For you, these next four years will be a time of opportunity unlike any other. Here you are surrounded by astonishing resources: fascinating fellow students from all over the world, a learned and caring faculty, intimate residential college communities, a magnificent library, two extraordinary art museums, an outstanding museum of natural history, superb athletic facilities, and student organizations covering every conceivable interest — the performing arts, politics, and community service among them. You will have complete freedom to explore, learn about new subjects, meet new people, and pursue new passions. I want to encourage you, in every way that I can, to make the most of this rare and unique opportunity.Let’s start with your academic program.Most likely, you will be overwhelmed by the more than 2000 courses available to you. You will inevitably miss out on 98% of them. But let me urge you nonetheless to sample widely. Each of the scholarly disciplines provides a different perspective on human experience; each allows you a different window on our accumulated knowledge of nature and culture, and each, quite literally, allows you to see the world differently. If I could offer only one piece of advice about selecting courses, it would be this: stretch yourself. Don’t assume that you know in advance what field s will interest you the most. Take some courses in fields that are entirely outside the range of your pastexperience. You will not only emerge as a more broadly educated person, but you will also stand a better chance of discovering an unsuspected passion that helps to shape the future course of your life.By studying philosophy, for example, you will learn to reason more rigorously and to discern more readily what constitutes a logically consistent argument and what does not. And you will study texts that wrestle directly with the deepest questions of how one shouldlive.Your professors of literature, music, and art history will teach you to read, listen, and see closely, and help you to develop a keener appreciation for the artistry that makes literature, music, and visual art sublime representations of human emotions, values, andideas. Whether you major in these subjects or not, your appreciation of what is true and beautiful may be forever enriched.Your professors of history will teach you to appreciate the challenging art of reconstructing the past, and to understand how meaning is extracted from experience. This may help you to gain perspective on your own experience.Years ago, when I taught introductory economics in Yale College, I always began by telling the students that the course would change their lives. Why? Because economics will open you to an entirely new and different way of understanding how the world works. Economics will not prescribe for you how society should be organized, or the extent to which individual freedom should be subordinated to collective ends, or how the fruits of human labor should be distributed. But understanding the logic of markets will give you a new way to think about these perpetually important questions. In similar fashion, each of the other social sciences — psychology, political science, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics — will give you a different perspective on human experience in society.Some of you may already have a passion for science or mathematics, and you may have set your sights on a major in science, math, or engineering. There is so much in these pursuits to excite the imagination that I hardly need elaborate. In science, we are in the midst of discovering the causes of human disease, the mechanisms of evolution, and the origins of the universe. In engineering, we have unprecedented opportunities to develop new materials, new medical devices, and new sources of energy. One of the virtues of studying science and engineering at a place like Yale is that you can practice science and engineering while you study it; you can work in research laboratories along side your professors on problems at the very frontier of knowledge.With respect to science, I have two messages for you that are mirror images. First, if you are someone with an early or emerging passion for science, take the time to sample othersubjects as well. Even if you pursue science or engineering as a career, broadening your education in the other liberal arts will both enrich your lives and improve yourscience. Second, if you do not think yourself a ―science type,‖ don’t just fulfill the science requirement; give science a serious try. During the past decade, we have developed a number of problem-oriented science courses without prerequisites; they are meant to give you a rigorous exposure to science without the comprehensiveness of a survey course designed for those already committed to a major or to a pre-medical curriculum. Try one or two of these courses, early on; you may be surprised by your newfound enthusiasm.And, to complete this mini-tour of the curriculum, we will not let you forget about writing, math, and languages. Some attention to these skills is required, but there are many ways to satisfy the requirements. Again, I would urge you to stretch yourselves; try something different — an expository or creative writing class, statistics instead of more calculus, or a new language, even as you pursue further study of one you already know.My suggestion that you stretch yourselves is not limited to the classroom. It applies to both the friends and extracurricular activities you choose as well. If the friends you make here are exclusively those who come from backgrounds just like your own and went to high schools just like your own, you will have forfeited half the value of a Yale education. You come from all 50 states and 58 nations, from a wide range of racial, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds. Each of your residential colleges reflects within itself that rich diversity. Seek out friends with different histories and different interests; you will find that you learn the most from the people least like you.No doubt you will participate in one or more of the 300 student organizations on campus, as well as varsity, club, and intramural athletic teams. You may find your consuming passion, the passion that shapes your life after Yale, in one of these pursuits. I can think of scores of journalists, public servants, teachers, start-up entrepreneurs, performers, and filmmakers whose career choices were shaped by their extracurricular activities here at Yale. Again, my advice is to move beyond the familiar; try at least one extracurricular activity that is brand new to you. And, by all means, do not spend all your time with your varsity teammates, or your fellow singing group members, or the others who write for the Yale Daily News. Make the most of the extraordinary variety of opportunities available to you.So far, my advice to you is focused entirely on how you might get the most out of your Yale education. You might be wondering: am I here just to exploit all of Yale’s treasures for myself alone? The answer is ―no.‖We have confidence, based on the evidence of history and knowledge of the culture of this place, that your journey toward self-discovery, your progress toward finding your passion, will yield more than self-gratification and personal advancement. We believe that because you are intelligent and reflective members of acommunity of scholars, you will come to recognize that with the abundant opportunities for self-enrichment that Yale provides, there also come responsibilities.And what are these responsibilities? They begin with responsibility for the wellbeing of the institution you are joining today. Let me remind you that even for those of you whose parents are paying the full tuition, room and board charges, more than half of the total cost of your Yale education is supported by the gifts of those who came before you. More than half of you hold scholarships. And most of our buildings, athletic facilities, and museum and library collections trace to gifts from graduates of Yale College.Your responsibilities also include good citizenship in its many varieties. At Yale’s f ounding this took the form of supporting New Haven colony and the Congregational Church. Today, while volunteer service to local community organizations, secular and religious, remains a distinguishing characteristic of Yale graduates, our horizons have broadened. Some of you will undoubtedly carry on Yale’s great tradition of producing national leaders, and for all of you who spend most of your adult lives in the United States, there is an emerging burden of citizenship that will be yours to bear. And that is the powerfully important burden of helping to raise the level of public discourse. One has only to compare the rhetoric of today’s leaders with the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, given 150 years ago, or the transcripts of the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 50 years ago, to see how oversimplified ideology and appeal to narrow interest groups have triumphed over intelligence and moderation in civic discussion. By insisting, as citizens, on serious discussion instead of slogans that mask narrow partisan interests, you can help to make our democracy more effective.Today, because the world is so highly interconnected and interdependent, you will have the added responsibility of acting as global citizens. Your generation, more than any that has gone before, will need deep knowledge of and intimate engagement with cultures and societies very different from your own. Those of you who come from abroad will of course experience immersion in another culture right here in New Haven. The rest of you may do so by taking advantage of one of our many programs of work or study abroad. Such an experience will stretch you in just the way that I am recommending more generally; it will force you to see yourself from a different perspective, and to see others free from preconceptions. Since so many of the issues confronting us — from poverty and disease to the proliferation of nuclear weapons — require cooperative solutions, a cross-cultural perspective is invaluable. Even before you travel overseas, you might start preparing yourselves for global citizenship by sampling some of the courses in international studies offered by the recently established Jackson Institute, such as the new multidisciplinary gateway course on global affairs.In addition to the burdens of local, national, and international citizenship, your generation will need to rise as well to the challenge of planetary stewardship. Without a radical reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases during your lifetimes, much of humanity will suffer dislocation and famine on an unprecedented scale. We have both the current means to slow down the accumulation of atmospheric carbon and the imagination to develop the technologies needed to prevent catastrophe. We seem to lack only conviction and collective will. You will need to scrutinize the evidence for yourselves, with all the critical intelligence that you can muster. But, if you do, I am confident that you will assume this last responsibility as well. And you will have the opportunity to practice planetary stewardship right here at Yale, as we try to model what it means to become a sustainable campus.Women and men of the Class of 2014, we take great pleasure in welcoming you to Yale College, and we delight in the anticipation of opportunities that you will seize and the responsibilities that you will come to bear as citizens of your communities, the nation, the world, and the planet.。