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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 We live in the midst of scientific developments as dramatic as those of any era since the seventeenth century. Our obligation to the future demands that we take our place at the forefront of those transformations. We must organize ourselves in ways that enable us fully to engage in such exploration, as we have begun to do by creating the Broad Institute, by founding cross-school departments, by launching a School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. We must overcome barriers both within and beyond Harvard that could slow or constrain such work, and we must provide the resources and the facilities—like the new science buildings in both Cambridge and Allston—to support it. Our obligation to the future makes additional demands. Universities are, uniquely, a place of philosophers as well as scientists. It is urgent that we pose the questions of ethics and meaning that will enable us to confront the human, the social, and the moral significance of our changing relationship with the natural world. Accountability to the future requires that we leap geographic as well as intellectual boundaries. Just as we live in a time of narrowing distances between fields and disciplines, so we inhabit an increasingly transnational world, in which knowledge itself is the most powerful connector. Our lives here in Cambridge and Boston cannot be separated from the future of the rest of the earth: we share the same changing climate; we contract and spread the same diseases; we participate in the same economy. We must recognize our accountability to the wider world, for, as John Winthrop warned in 1630, “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Harvard is both a source and a symbol of the ever-expanding knowledge upon which the future of the earth depends, and we must take an active and reflective role in this new geography of learning. Higher education is burgeoning around the globe in forms that are at once like and unlike our own. American universities are widely emulated, but our imitators often display limited appreciation for the principles of free inquiry and the culture of creative unruliness that defines us. The “Veritas” in Harvard’s shield was originally intended to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the unassailable verities of Puritan religion. We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a possession. Yet in this we—and all universities defined by the spirit of debate and free inquiry—challenge, and even threaten, those who would embrace unquestioned certainties. We must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand. The kinds of accountability I have described represent at once a privilege and a responsibility. We are able to live at Harvard in a world of intellectual freedom, of inspiring tradition, of extraordinary resources, because we are part of that curious and venerable organization known as a university. We need better to comprehend and advance its purposes—not simply to explain ourselves to an often critical public, but to hold ourselves to our own account. We must act not just as students and staff, historians and computer scientists, lawyers and physicians, linguists and sociologists, but as citizens of a university, with obligations to this commonwealth of the mind. We must regard ourselves as accountable to one another, for we constitute the institution that in turn defines our possibilities. Accountability to the future encompasses special accountability to our students, for they are our most important purpose and legacy. And we are responsible not just to and for this university, Harvard, at this moment, 2007, but to the very concept of the university as it has evolved over nearly a millennium. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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