哈佛女校长的讲演（转贴）

qlpy

《完》

http://dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-Download.htm

qlpy

http://www.youtube.com/v/5gBeI0Fe170?version=3&hl=en_US


http://www.youtube.com/v/B0zFiliqR4E?version=3&hl=en_US

齐力

回复 20# 俺爱俺家

Good job! Well done!:clap:

qlpy

Unleashing our most ambitious imaginings
《放飞我们最富挑战性的想象力》


I stand honored by your trust, inspired by your charge.

I am grateful to the Governing Boards  监理董事会 for their confidence, and I thank all of you for gathering in these festival rites.

qlpy

I am indebted 蒙受恩泽 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.

qlpy

I am touched by the greetings from staff, faculty, students, alumni 校友, universities, from our honorable Governor,

and from the remarkable John Hope Franklin, who has both lived and written history.


http://www.youtube.com/v/qPPNEpmcvIE?version=3&hl=en_US

qlpy

I am grateful to the community leaders from Boston and Cambridge who have come to welcome their new neighbor.

I am a little stunned 有点儿目瞪口呆地 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 小学, high school, college and graduate school –
who taught me to love learning and the institutions that nurture it.

qlpy

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.

（西方也同样是礼多人不怪）

qlpy

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 distinguished history.

Like a congregation at a wedding 就像是聚集在婚礼上, you signify by your presence a pledge of support for this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution.

As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals have meanings and purposes;

they are intended to arouse emotions and channel intentions.

qlpy

In ritual, as the poet Thomas Lynch has written, “We act out things we cannot put into words.” 我们付诸行动于我们不能用言语表达的事

But now my task is in fact to put some of this ceremony into words, to capture our meanings and purposes.

Inaugural speeches are a peculiar genre. 就职演讲是一种特殊的体裁。

They are by definition pronouncements by individuals who don’t yet know what they are talking about.

Or, we might more charitably dub them expressions of hope unchastened by the rod of experience.

qlpy

A number of inaugural veterans – both orators and auditors – have proffered advice,

including unanimous agreement that my talk must be shorter than Charles William Eliot’s – which ran to about an hour and a half.

Often inaugural addresses contain lists – of a new president’s specific goals or programs.
就职演讲常常会罗列一些新校长的具体构想或是计划。

But lists seem too constraining when I think of what today should mean;
但是，当我在考虑今天意味着什么的时候，这样的罗列似乎过于束缚人，

they seem a way of limiting rather than unleashing our most ambitious imaginings, our profoundest commitments.
它们限制了而不是去放飞我们最富挑战性的想象力，限制了我们去思考我们最深远的责任和义务。

qlpy

If this is a day to transcend the ordinary, if it is a rare moment when we gather not just as Harvard,
如果今天是超越普通日子的一天，如果今天是我们为数不多的、不仅是作为哈佛人聚集在一起、

but with a wider world of scholarship, teaching and learning,
而是与一个更为广阔的学术、教学与学问的世界站在一起的一天，

it is a time to reflect on what Harvard and institutions like it mean in this first decade of the 21st century.
那么，现在就是哈佛以及像哈佛这类大学去思考的时候了：在这21世纪的第一个十年中，我们应该扮演什么样的角色。

Yet as I considered how to talk about higher education and the future, I found myself – historian that I am –

returning to the past and, in particular, to a document I encountered in my first year of graduate school.

qlpy

My cousin Jack Gilpin, Class of ’73, read a section of it at Memorial Church this morning.

As John Winthrop sat on board the ship Arbella in 1630, sailing across the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

he wrote a charge to his band of settlers, a charter for their new beginnings.

He offered what he considered “a compass to steer by” – a “model,” but not a set of explicit orders.

Winthrop instead sought to focus his followers on the broader significance of their project, on the spirit in which they should undertake their shared work.

qlpy

I aim to offer such a “compass” today, one for us at Harvard, and one that I hope will have meaning for all of us who care about higher education,

for we are inevitably, as Winthrop urged his settlers to be, “knitt together in this work as one.”

American higher education in 2007 is in a state of paradox – at once celebrated and assailed.

qlpy

A host of popular writings from the 1980s on have charged universities with teaching too little, costing too much,

coddling professors and neglecting students, embracing an “illiberalism” that has silenced open debate.

A PBS special in 2005 described a “sea of mediocrity” that “places this nation at risk.”