哈佛校长演讲.docx

Installation address: Unleashing our most ambitious imaginingsCambridge, Mass.Oct. 12, 2007I stand honored by your trust, inspired by your charge. I am grateful to the Governing Boards for their confidence, and I thank all of you for gathering in these festival rites. I am indebted to my three predecessors, sitting behind me, for joining me today. But I am grateful to them for much more – for all that they have given to Harvard and for what each of them has generously given to me – advice, wisdom, support. I am touched by the greetings from staff, faculty, students, alumni, universities, from our honorable Governor, and from the remarkable John Hope Franklin, who has both lived and written history. I am grateful to the community leaders from Boston and Cambridge who have come to welcome their new neighbor. I am a little stunned to see almost every person I am related to on earth sitting in the front rows. And I would like to offer a special greeting of my own to my teachers who are here – teachers from grade school, high school, college and graduate school – who taught me to love learning and the institutions that nurture it. We gather for a celebration a bit different from our June traditions. Commencement is an annual rite of passage for thousands of graduates; today marks a rite of passage for the University. As at Commencement, we don robes that mark our ties to the most ancient traditions of scholarship. On this occasion, however, our procession includes not just our Harvard community, but scholars – 220 of them – representing universities and colleges from across the country and around the world. I welcome and thank our visitors, for their presence reminds us that what we do here today, and what we do at Harvard every day, links us to universities and societies around the globe. Today we mark new beginnings by gathering in solidarity; we celebrate our community and its creativity; we commit ourselves to Harvard and all it represents in a new chapter of its dis