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发信人: freefighter (为权利而斗争), 信区: CL
标 题: 献给我04的深大法学院校友（后附哈佛校长给2008届本科毕业生的毕业演讲）
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Mon Jul 7 10:30:50 2008), 站内
真的很遗憾，由于工作原因没能赶回学校参加这届法学院校友的毕业典礼，想起两年前
的那个毕业周自己依然心潮澎湃，心中为今年毕业的法学校友祝福骄傲！
真的很振奋，能够在毕业周期间匆匆回趟母校，在校园网看到敬爱的章校长的毕业致辞
“天行健”，那一刻情绪再次高涨，为母校感到无限的荣光。
毕业两年了，在bbs上发贴的数量和质量都是走下降曲线，其实心中还依然有万千言语，
只不过，这参加工作的两年后，让我这个热血青年能够找个机会冷静平静一下，也让我慢慢
咀嚼下大学四年母校传给我的宝贵知识和智慧。
今年毕业的本科生师弟师妹是04的了，一转眼，大家都已经毕业了！我特别的感恩母校，
特别的感恩法学院也特别的感恩所有的校友，尤其要特别的感恩04的法学院校友。
如果我没有记错的话，是你们在入学见面会上宽容的给了我机会让我说几句心里话，我还
记得当时我还篡改了了肯尼迪总统的感言，说出了“Ask not what your law school can
do for you, ask what you can do for the school”。其实，我相信，这是我们共同的感
悟，或许！
记得在你们二年级的时候，我这个个性有些张狂的师兄曾经冲动的将我的实习报告篡改成
了一份“给法学院二年级师弟师妹的一封信”，希望你们看了我这个冲动师兄的那封信后不
会太介意，现在想来，自己上学的时候确实是胆汁质的一个甲亢型青年了。
两年了，母校已经越来越好，法学院也是越来越好，我也祝福所有的法学院校友越来越
好。
繁忙的工作让我无法将自己的感悟全部写下来，我思前想后还是写出来上面这段真心话！
我真的很羡慕大家，我们有个好学院，我们有个好大学，这是我们一生的荣耀。
毕业后，我常常回来荔园晨风和大家一起潜水，也常常去逛逛Harvard、Yale这类学校的
网站，我坚定地告诉自己，有一天，我肯定要去那里读个Juris Doctor.
我把Harvard网站瞎慕衲甑呐３rew Gilpin Faust的毕业致辞转贴过来，和大家
一起共勉吧。
以下内容转载地址：
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/faust/080603_bacc.html
访问时间：2008年7月7日
Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
The Memorial Church
Cambridge, Mass.
June 3, 2008
As prepared for delivery
In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing
before you expected to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit,
dressed like a Puritan minister — an apparition that would have horrified many
of my distinguished forebears and perhaps rededicated some of them to the
extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled Increase and Cotton
into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the
moment of and for Veritas.
You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not
quite one. You have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies
the voice of experience? Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our
roles could be reversed and I could, in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls
for the next hour or so.
We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece.
Though I recently learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May
22. I know we need to wean you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew
we took it quite so literally.
But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine
this were a baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the
questions. “What is the meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four
years at Harvard for? President Faust, you must have learned something since
you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?” (Forty years. I’ll say it
out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my Bryn
Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was
young for my class.)
In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just
these questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have
been trying to figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly,
why you were asking.
Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my
appointment was announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued
when I had lunch at Kirkland House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with
students in my office hours, even with some recent graduates I encountered
abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the curriculum or advising
or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol
policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall
Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting,
i-banking?
There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it.
There is the Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he
robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors
Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, whom many of you have encountered in your
economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar answer based on their study of
student career choices since the seventies. They find it notable that, given
the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless still
choose to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for
America; one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina;
another will be engaged in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an
honors degree in math, will study poetry; another will train as a pilot with
the USAF; another will work to combat breast cancer. Numbers of you will go to
law school, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent with the
pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are
selecting finance and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class
reported that 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce
made this choice. This year, even in challenging economic times, the figure is
39 percent.
High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance
for many of you that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying
life alongside your friends, the promise of interesting work — there are lots
of ways to explain these choices. For some of you, it is a commitment for only
a year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be able to do good by
first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.
I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in
figuring out why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right;
if finance is indeed the “rational choice,” why do you keep raising this
issue with me? Why does this seemingly rational choice strike a number of you
as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in some sense less a free
choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be troubling so
many of you?
You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed
your question in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon
of senior career choice rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost
embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L
— is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of a Monty Python
movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which one
would dare admit to harboring serious concern.
But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability,
our pretense of invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers
to your question.
I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be
conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those
two goals fit together. You are not sure if a generous starting salary at a
prestigious brand name organization together with the promise of future wealth
will feed your soul.
Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment
you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that
you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will
change the world. We have burdened you with no small expectations. And you have
already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your dedication to service
demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about the future
of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your
reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s
presidential contests.
But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career
choice. Is it necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful
work? If it were to be either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to
have both?
You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about
trying to reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may
not be possible to have it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires
making choices. And selecting one option — a job, a career, a graduate
program — means not selecting others. Every decision means loss as well as
gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your question
to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.
Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma,
representing a set of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one
career path. These are issues that in one way or another will at some point
face you all — as you graduate from medical school and choose a specialty —
family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your law degree to
work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to
stay in teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you
want to have both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were
educated to make a difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and
satisfaction, but for the world around you. And now you have to figure out the
way to make that possible.
I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely
distinct from the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses
like “Positive Psychology” — Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness”
in search of tips. But how do we find happiness? I can offer one encouraging
answer: get older. Turns out that survey data show older people — that is, my
age — report themselves happier than do younger ones. But perhaps you don’t
want to wait.
As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you
articulate your worries about the relationship of success and happiness —
perhaps, more accurately, how to define success so that it yields and
encompasses real happiness, not just money and prestige. The most remunerative
choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying. But
you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a public
servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which
to make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English
professor after you finished who knows how many years of graduate school and
dissertation writing?
The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what
you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue
what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There
is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.
I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been
sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your
destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to
be and then circle back to where you have to be.
You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just
right for you. Or, you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who
had just returned from an interview on the West Coast with a prestigious
consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “I hate flying, I hate
hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be happy if
you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.
But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question
— not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same
time challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life
to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there.
This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault.
Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well,
wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that
a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands
that you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning
inherent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a
person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it
unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in
liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency,
of discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful,
happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be
prepared to change routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you,
and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are
as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the
world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.
I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and
let us know.
--
毫无疑问，如果思考并去理解事物之间的相互联系，任何事物都饶有趣味。当你不懈地
追求，每一种职业都很了不起。但任何职业都不能像法律那样给予如此开阔的眼界，去感受
人类灵魂内在的能量，去深刻体验生命的激流。它能够让它的从业者以目击者和参与者的身
份，去分享生命的情感、奋斗、失望和凯旋。法律就像魔镜，反映的不仅仅是我们的生活，
而且是曾经存在过的所有人的生活！每当我想到这一宏伟的主题时，我都难以自制。
——【霍姆斯（Oliver Wendell Holmes）】，曾任律师，哈佛大学法学院法律史讲
座教授，1882年出任美国马萨诸塞州最高法院法官并在1899年升任首席法官，1902年任美国
联邦最高法院大法官。
※ 修改:·freefighter 于 Jul 7 11:42:00 修改本文·[FROM: 222.66.57.232]
※ 来源:·荔园晨风BBS站 http://bbs.szu.edu.cn·[FROM: 222.66.57.232]
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