|
November-December 2007
|
< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 It is not easy to convince a nation or a world to respect, much less support, institutions committed to challenging society’s fundamental assumptions. But it is our obligation to make that case: both to explain our purposes and to achieve them so well that these precious institutions survive and prosper in this new century. Harvard cannot do this alone. But all of us know that Harvard has a special role. That’s why we’re here; that’s why it means so much to us. Last week I was given a brown manila envelope that had been entrusted to the University Archives in 1951 by James B. Conant, Harvard’s twenty-third president. He left instructions that it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of the next century “and not before.” I broke the seal on the mysterious package to find a remarkable letter from my predecessor. It was addressed to “My dear Sir.” Conant wrote with a sense of imminent danger. He feared an impending World War III that would make, as he put it, “the destruction of our cities including Cambridge quite possible.” “We all wonder,” he continued, “how the free world is going to get through the next fifty years.” But as he imagined Harvard’s future, Conant shifted from foreboding to faith. If the “prophets of doom” proved wrong, if there was a Harvard president alive to read his letter, Conant was confident about what the University would be. He wrote, “You will receive this note and be in charge of a more prosperous and significant institution than the one over which I have the honor to preside.… That…[Harvard] will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of tolerance for heresy, I feel sure.” We must dedicate ourselves to making certain he continues to be right; we must share and sustain his faith. Conant’s letter, like our gathering here, marks a dramatic intersection of the past with the future. This is a ceremony in which I pledge—with keys and seal and charter—my accountability to the traditions that his voice from the past invokes. At the same time, I affirm, in compact with all of you, my accountability to and for Harvard’s future. As in Conant’s day, we face uncertainties in a world that gives us sound reason for disquiet. But we, too, maintain an unwavering belief in the purposes and potential of this university and in all it can do to shape how the world will look another half-century from now. Let us embrace those responsibilities and possibilities; let us share them “knitt together…as one”; let us take up the work joyfully, for such an assignment is a privilege beyond measure.  
 
 
|
