| |
Comment on this article
Freshman Address
Undergraduate education and the research university.
November/December 2012
by Richard Levin ’74PhD
Richard Levin ’74PhD is president of Yale University. This speech was delivered in Woolsey Hall on August 25, 2012, to the Yale College Class of 2016.
I am delighted to join Dean [Mary] Miller [’81PhD] in welcoming you, the Class of 2016, to Yale
College. I want to welcome also the relatives and friends who have accompanied
you here, and especially your parents. As a father of four college graduates, I
know how proud you parents are of your children’s achievement, how hopeful you
are for their future, and how many concerns—large and small—you have at this
moment.
Let me try to reassure you. Your children are going to
love it here! And I expect that you are going to enjoy your association with
Yale, whether you are a returning graduate or one of the vast majority of
parents who never set foot in New Haven until your children started to think
about where to go to college. You may take comfort in learning that surveys
have shown that Yale parents are the most satisfied in the Ivy League. So,
welcome to the Yale family! We are so pleased to have your children with us,
and we will do our best to provide them with abundant opportunities to learn
and thrive in the four years ahead.
And to you, Class of 2016, welcome. I suspect that you
have many reasons for being here. You may have chosen to attend Yale College
because you heard that it was a place that attracted unusually talented and
interesting students. Perhaps you were impressed by the depth and breadth of
our 2,000 course offerings. You may have been drawn to the idea of residential
colleges, communities that are microcosms of the student body and inspire
lifelong loyalty. You may have learned about the diverse array of undergraduate
organizations devoted to politics, debate, journalism, and community
service—organizations that will give you a chance to develop your skills as
leaders and as collaborators. You may have been drawn by Yale’s superlative
undergraduate arts organizations: from chamber orchestras to dramatic
societies, from dance ensembles to a cappella singing groups. You may have been
recruited to one of our 35 varsity athletic teams, with their outstanding coaches
and facilities. You may have learned about our commitment to sustainability and
been interested in joining one of our environmental groups or working on the
Yale Farm. Or you may have been excited by the extensive array of international
experiences open to you as students in Yale College.
All of these are good reasons to find Yale a school
worthy of four years of your time. But I thought that I might focus this
morning on an aspect of Yale that you might not have considered: the special advantages
of your having chosen to attend a college situated within one of the world’s
great research universities. This distinction means, first, that the faculty
who will teach you are leading scholars in their respective fields, and,
second, that you will have access to virtually unmatched library and museum
resources.
Consider the extraordinary collections that are
available to you in the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for
British Art, and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Dozens of your professors
in literature, history, the history of art, anthropology, geology, ecology, and
evolutionary biology will make use of these museum resources in your courses,
and perhaps some of you will join with other students in curating your own
museum exhibit. Last spring, four undergraduates collaborated with curators and
conservators at the Yale Center for British Art to study the materials and
techniques used in the creation of early English wood panel paintings. They
created an exhibit that was on display at the center from April through July. A
year earlier, Yale students collaborated with others at the University of
Maryland to create an exhibit on African American art drawn from Yale’s
collections that was shown both at our art gallery and on the Maryland campus.
Even if you do not engage quite so deeply as to curate an exhibit, I would urge
you to visit our museums. You may discover a love of art or a love of nature
that enriches your life.
Our libraries are an endless source of discovery for
students who wish to engage in archival research. You will find materials there
that allow you to undertake projects that go far beyond what might be possible
elsewhere. Some years ago, one undergraduate discovered in the uncataloged papers of a deceased professor that a faculty
organization called the Yale Library Project had provided cover for an
important World War II intelligence mission. Just this week, I learned from a
high school student working in the archives of the Beinecke Library about his discovery of the methods used by late-nineteenth-century
railroads to finance their sale of farmland to settlers in the northern plains
of the United States. It turns out that the railroads’ strategies for helping
landowners remain on their farms during periods of financial hardship were much
more effective than our efforts to protect homeowners from foreclosure during
the current recession.
Consider next some examples
of the astonishingly creative and original work of the faculty who will be
teaching you:
- Earlier this year, John Lewis
Gaddis, a professor of history, won the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant
biography of George Kennan, the diplomat and architect of US strategy in the
Cold War.
- A group of scientists led by Rick Prum, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, was
able to deduce from fossils the colors of feathers on a dinosaur.
- Geologist Zhengrong Wang has demonstrated that carbon can be captured from the atmosphere and
sequestered, not in gaseous or liquid form beneath the earth’s surface, but in
solid form, by catalyzing a reaction to transform subsurface rocks into calcium
and magnesium carbonate. This is one of several technologies that Yale
scientists are pursuing in the hope of finding solutions to the problem of
global warming.
- Historian Timothy Snyder has shown
in his recent book Bloodlands the
ideological and practical connections between the Nazi extermination of Jews
and other east Europeans and the Soviet extermination of the same populations.
- In her pathbreaking work The
Ornament of the World, María Rosa Menocal demonstrated that the Middle Ages in Spain were not
a time of darkness and superstition, but a period in which Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish literature, philosophy, and architecture flourished and profoundly
influenced one another.
- In the Western Desert of Egypt,
archaeologist John Darnell has unearthed a lost city—the site of a massive
bread-making industry more than 3,500 years ago.
- And finally, your dean, Mary
Miller, has just given you [in her address] a glimpse of her immense knowledge
of Mesoamerican history, art, and culture. In her own work of rediscovery, she
has employed infrared photography to produce enhanced, high-definition images
of the Mayan murals at Bonampak and used these images as a platform for her
seminal reinterpretations of Mayan art, architecture, and civilization.
What is remarkable about studying in Yale College is
that you will have direct access to the scholars I have mentioned, among many
others. Distinguished as they are in research, they are also committed to teaching.
You will take their courses, participate in their seminars, and have the opportunity
to work as their research assistants or do independent research under their
supervision. Most of the projects I just described involved students in some
capacity, but here are a few more in which the role of undergraduates is
central:
Consider, for example, Professor Scott Strobel’s course in which undergraduates travel over spring
break to a tropical rain forest to gather endophytes,
microorganisms that are found in abundance on plants. The students then return
to Yale, where they work for the balance of the spring semester and throughout
the summer to characterize the organisms that they have found and discover
their properties. On recent rain forest expeditions, students have found
several organisms that effectively degrade plastic. One in particular is
capable of breaking down polyurethane in the absence of oxygen, holding promise
for practical use in the biodegradation of buried trash.
Or perhaps you will be intrigued by the opportunity to
hunt for exoplanets—bodies that orbit around stars
other than our own sun—under the supervision of Professor Debra Fischer and her
colleagues in astronomy. Professor Fischer helped to launch the online citizen
science project called Planet Hunters, which engages 40,000 web users in the
search for exoplanets using data gathered from a NASA
space mission. Three Yale College students collaborated on the first published
paper from the Planet Hunters project, announcing the discovery of two
previously unidentified exoplanets. Two other
undergraduates are coauthors on a paper describing another discovery that is
soon to be published. One of the students involved in the first paper is now
working on a team that has developed a new device capable of doubling the
precision of the Keck Observatory telescope, making the world’s largest
telescope even more powerful.
Finally, if you would like to combine an interest in
the performing arts with serious study, you might consider participation in the
Yale Baroque Opera Project. Conceived by the eminent musicologist Ellen Rosand, who has made major contributions to our
understanding of early music, the Baroque Opera Project introduces students to
the historical, aesthetic, and performance issues related to Italian opera of
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in their coursework, and mounts
two full-scale productions each year.
These examples illustrate how you might benefit from
participating in the work of a university committed to pathbreaking research. I encourage you in the strongest terms to take full advantage of the
people and resources available here. Don’t be shy! Yale’s faculty, libraries,
and museums are here for you. If you want to get engaged with the amazing
research activities that go on here, do not hesitate to ask a professor, a
librarian, or a museum curator. They will welcome your interest.
Let me go one step further. If you want to get the most
from your Yale education, be adventurous. Do not content yourself with a familiar
path. As you choose your courses, try something different—an expository or
creative writing class, statistics instead of more calculus, or a new language,
even as you pursue further study of one you already know. Sign up for courses
and projects that will challenge you. You may never again have so much
opportunity to explore new ideas, to test out new directions, to pursue
different routes to discovering your true passion. Stretch yourself.
I offer the same advice in connection with your
activities outside the classroom, libraries, and museums. Seek out the
unfamiliar. If the friends you make here are exclusively those who come from
backgrounds just like your own and who went to high schools just like your own,
you will have forfeited half the value of a Yale education. You come from 54
nations, from a wide range of racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Each of your residential colleges contains within itself that rich diversity.
Seek out friends with different histories and different interests; you will
find that you learn the most from the people least like you.
In the same way, as you choose extracurricular
activities, try to move beyond the familiar; try at least one extracurricular
activity that is brand new to you. Volunteer for community service and begin to
understand how what you have learned here might be of value to others. Work or
study abroad on one of our many summer programs, and see the world from a
different perspective.
Women and men of the Yale College class of 2016: you
may have come here for many different reasons. But now that you are about to
begin your four-year journey of discovery, take note that you have come to one
of the world’s great centers of learning. This presents you with very special
opportunities. Learn from your teachers the joy of participating in the
advancement of human understanding of nature and culture. Draw upon the
abundant resources of our libraries, museums, and laboratories. Stretch to your
limits intellectually and interpersonally. Your effort will be richly rewarded.  |
|
