大學畢業典禮名校校長英語演講稿
對于一些名校的校長在畢業典禮上是如何發言演講的呢?下面是小編搜集的大學畢業典禮名校校長英語演講稿，歡迎大家閱讀，希望對大家有所幫助。
篇一：哈佛校長福斯特2017年哈佛大學畢業典禮演講
Good afternoon. My remarks at this moment in our Commencement rituals are officially titled a “Report to the Alumni.” The first time I delivered them, in 2008, I was the only obstacle between all of you and J.K. Rowling. I looked out on a sea of eager children, costumed Dumbledores, and Quidditch brooms waving impatiently in the air. Today, you await Mark Zuckerberg, whose wizardry takes a different form, one that has changed the world, and although he doesn’t seem to have inspired an outbreak of hoodies, we certainly do have some costumes in this audience today. I see we are now handing out blankets.
This is a day of joy and celebration, of happy endings and new beginnings, of families and friends, of achievements and hopes. It is also a day when we as a university perform our most important annual ritual, affirming once again the purposes that animate us and the values that direct and inspire us.
I want to speak today about one of the most important – and in recent months, most contested – of these values. It is one that has provoked debate, dissent, confrontation, and even violence on campuses across the country, and one that has attracted widespread public attention and criticism.
I am, of course, talking about issues of free speech on university campuses. The meaning and limits of free speech are questions deeply embedded in our legal system, in interpretations of the First Amendment and its applications. I am no constitutional lawyer, indeed no lawyer at all, and I do not intend in my brief remarks today to address complex legal doctrines. Nor, clearly, can I in a few brief minutes take on even a fraction of the arguments that have been advanced on this issue. Instead, I speak as one who has been a university president for a decade in order to raise three questions:
First: Why is free speech so important to and at universities?
Second: Why does it seem under special challenge right now?
And, third: How might we better address these challenges by moving beyond just defensively protecting free speech – which, of course, we must do – to actively and affirmatively enabling it and nurturing environments in which it can thrive?
So first: Why is free speech so important to and at universities? This is a question I took up with the newly arrived first-year students in the College when I welcomed them at Convocation last fall. For centuries, I told them, universities have been environments in which knowledge has been discovered, collected, studied, debated, expanded, changed, and advanced through the power of rational argument and exchange. We pursue truth unrelentingly, but we must never be so complacent as to believe we have unerringly attained it. Veritas is inspiration and aspiration. We assume there is always more to know and discover so we open ourselves to challenge and change. We must always be ready to be wrong, so being part of a university community requires courage and humility. Universities must be places open to the kind of debate that can change ideas and committed to standards of reason and evidence that form the bases for evaluating them.
Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones. From at least the time of Galileo, we can see how repressing seemingly heretical ideas has blinded societies and nations to the enhanced knowledge and understanding on which progress depend. Far more recently, we can see here at Harvard how our inattentiveness to the power and appeal of conservative voices left much of our community astonished – blindsided by the outcome of last fall’s election. We must work to ensure that universities do not become bubbles isolated from the concerns and discourse of the society that surrounds them.
Universities must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, but must be established – established through reasoned argument, assessment, and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth. The legitimacy of universities’ claim to be sources and validators of fact depends on our willingness to actively and vigorously defend those facts. And we must remember that limiting some speech opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own. If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words? Freedom of expression, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said long ago, protects not only free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate. We need to hear those hateful ideas so our society is fully equipped to oppose and defeat them.
Over the years, differences about the implementation of the University’s free speech principles have often provoked controversy. And we haven’t always gotten it right. As long ago as 1939, an invitation from a student group to the head of the American Communist Party generated protest and the invitation was ultimately canceled by the Corporation. Bertrand Russell’s appointment as William James Lecturer just a year later divided the Corporation, but President Conant broke the tie and Russell came. Campus conflicts over invited speakers are hardly new.
Yet the vehemence with which these issues have been debated in recent months, not just on campuses but in the broader public sphere, suggests there is something distinctive about this moment. Certainly, these controversies reflect a highly polarized political and social environment – perhaps the most divisive since the era of the Civil War. And in these already fractious circumstances, free speech debates have provided a fertile substrate into which anger and disagreement could be planted to nourish partisan outrage and generate media clickbait. But that is only a partial explanation.
Universities themselves have changed dramatically in recent years, reaching beyond their traditional, largely homogeneous populations to become more diverse than perhaps any other institution in which Americans find themselves living together. Once overwhelmingly white, male, Protestant, and upper class, Harvard College is now half female, majority minority, religiously pluralistic, with nearly 60 percent of students able to attend because of financial aid. Fifteen percent are the first in their families to go to college. Many of our students struggle to feel full members of this community – a community in which people like them have so recently arrived. They seek evidence and assurance that – to borrow the title of a powerful theatrical piece created by a group of our African-American students – evidence and assurance that they, too, are Harvard.
The price of our commitment to freedom of speech is paid disproportionately by these students. For them, free speech has not infrequently included enduring a questioning of their abilities, their humanity, their morality – their very legitimacy here. Our values and our theory of education rest on the assumption that members of our community will take the risk of speaking and will actively compete in our wild rumpus of argument and ideas. It requires them as well to be fearless in face of argument or challenge or even verbal insult. And it expects that fearlessness even when the challenge is directed to the very identity – race, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality – that may have made them uncertain about their right to be here in the first place. Demonstrating such fearlessness is hard; no one should be mocked as a snowflake for finding it so.
Hard, but important and attainable. Attainable, we believe, for every member of our community. But the price of free speech cannot be charged just to those most likely to become its target. We must support and empower the voices of all the members of our community and nurture the courage and humility that our commitment to unfettered debate demands from all of us. And that courage means not only resilience in face of challenge or attack, but strength to speak out against injustices directed at others as well.
Free speech doesn’t just happen and require intervention when it is impeded. It is not about the freedom to out-shout others while everyone has their fingers in their ears. For free speech to flourish, we must build an environment where everyone takes responsibility for the right not just to speak, but to hear and be heard, where everyone assumes the responsibility to treat others with dignity and respect. It requires not just speakers, but, in the words of James Ryan, dean of our Graduate School of Education, generous listeners. Amidst the current soul-searching about free speech, we need to devote more attention to establishing the conditions in which everyone’s speech is encouraged and taken seriously.
Ensuring freedom of speech is not just about allowing speech. It is about actively creating a community where everyone can contribute and flourish, a community where argument is relished, not feared. Freedom of speech is not just freedom from censorship; it is freedom to actively join the debate as a full participant. It is about creating a context in which genuine debate can happen.
Talk a lot, I urged the Class of 2020 last fall; listen more. Don’t stand safely on the sidelines; take the risk of being wrong. It is the best way to learn and grow. And build a culture of generous listening so that others may be emboldened to take risks, too. A community in a shared search for Veritas – that is the ideal for which Harvard must strive. We need it now more than ever.
Thank you.
篇二：麻省理工校長在麻省理工學院2017畢業典禮上的`演講
Thank you, Liana! I want to deeply thank the Senior Gift Committee and everyone who contributed to this wonderful gift, to support student activities at MIT.
I also want to recognize the alumni volunteers from the New York metro area, who provided the challenge grant to increase the impact of gifts from this year’s senior class.
Many of those “challengers” are in the audience today so, thank you, thank you, for your leadership and generosity!
To the graduates of 2017: Congratulations! My job today is to deliver a “charge” to you and I will get to that in a minute. But first, I want to recognize the people who
helped-you-charge this far!
To everyone who came here this morning to celebrate our graduates — welcome to MIT!
OK, for this next acknowledgment, I need your help. Right behind me, over my left shoulder, there’s a camera. In a moment, I’m going to ask all of you to wave to it, all right?
Now I would like to offer a special greeting to all those who were not able to come to campus, but who are watching and cheering-on today’s graduates, online, from locations all over the globe. We are very glad to have you with us, too!
Now, all of you graduates, please cheer and wave!
I think you can do better than that! And remember I still have your diplomas!
One more time – cheer and wave!
And to the parents and families of today’s graduates, a huge “Congratulations” to you, as well! For you, this day is the joyful result of years of loving support and sacrifice. Please accept our deep gratitude and admiration.
It is great to have all of you here on Killian Court, on this wonderful day, for this tremendously important occasion.
In fact, this is such a solemn and serious ceremony that I thought you would not mind if we played a little game.
With a big shout-out to graduating senior Lilly Chin, I call this game “MIT Jeopardy 2017!”
So you all know how Jeopardy works. I give the clues, and then you give the answers but in the form of questions. Let me give you a couple of examples, just to practice:
If the clue is, “This revolutionary gene-editing system shares its name with a drawer in your refrigerator,” you would say, “What is CRISPR?”
Next clue: “The vibrations from this phenomenon were so gigantic that they could be detected 3 billion light years away,” you would say, “What are the campus-wide dance parties?”
OK, you got it? Ready to play?
I expect you to answer the next one, loudly! So, listen closely! Here’s your clue:
“This school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, may in fact be the world’s greatest university.”
Answer: “What is MIT!”
OK, one more: If the clue is, “This field of study is known for enrolling all of the smartest students at MIT,” obviously the answer would be, “Course_____”
No, no, no! I’m not going there! Big mistake! Wrong clue!
Now, if the clue is, “This brave and brilliant man is the current CEO of Apple” you might be tempted to say, “Who is Tim Cook?”
But without question, the best answer would be “Who is the spiciest memelord?”
I was very impressed by Tim’s remarks this morning. I expect you were, too. Over the last few years, he has taken bold public positions on key issues on free speech, gay rights, the right to privacy, the need for action on climate change and more.
In doing so, I believe he is setting a tremendous example of what it means to be a citizen and a leader. And I’m deeply grateful to have Tim with us today.
But, when we first invited Tim to speak at Commencement, I tried to talk him into doing something a little different.
I said, ‘Tim, it’s perfect! MIT Commencement is on a Friday! You always release your new phones on a Friday!”
“So how about releasing the iPhone 8?”
Tim did not bite.
But the truth is today; I am the one presiding over the release of a mind-blowing new product.
This product is a limited edition — and it’s extremely personalized. In fact, it comes in more than 2,800 varieties.
And let me tell you, when you line them up together they make an impressive and beautiful display. You do make an impressive and beautiful display!
The operating system for our latest product is amazing! It has unmatched processing ability and built-in memory. I know because we have tested it — over and over and over!
And Tim, I have to point out that our product already has 3-D-sensing facial recognition!
At MIT, we know that our product “can do extraordinary things” that “we never thought possible before today.”
From experience, we know that people are willing to pay a tremendous amount for this product.
And that is really no surprise because I am very proud to tell you that the product we launch today has an unlimited capacity to augment reality to make a better world.
There are rumors that the iPhone 8 may no longer have a “home” button. But those of you who receive your degrees today certainly do right here [pats heart] — and I hope that it always brings you back, right here to your home at MIT.
Now before you get those diplomas allow me to demonstrate your capacity for wireless charging.
I have no doubt that the creativity of this group-of-graduates will be the source of new products, new capabilities, new discoveries, new designs, new organizations — and whole new industries.
We should not be surprised if some of those new concepts are deeply disruptive.
Disrupting old systems and assumptions can be a very good idea. But it can also have a great human cost.
And I believe that, as members of this “institute of technology,” thinking about this human question is very much our business.
It is not something we can leave for “other people” to figure out. And it’s a question where we may need to do more listening than talking for quite a while.
So, I want to leave you with this thought:
At MIT, our mission guides us to advance knowledge to educate students and to bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.
As a result, we are driven and motivated to working on big problems. And we like to solve them, in part, by developing new technologies.
But the truth is that one of today’s great challenges is how to help society navigate the unintended impact of technology itself.
So, as you work together to conjure new ideas to invent new products, to design new ways to manufacture them and devise new ways to use them in the world; I hope you will consider their impact on ALL of society right from the start.
If you can make this assessment not an afterthought but a first concern you will contribute to solving one of the deepest and most difficult challenges of our time.
During the time you have spent on our campus, the fabric of our society has experienced many serious strains.
So I am very grateful that on this campus, the last few years have also seen a new blossoming of community, and of deliberate efforts to cultivate connection and compassion, and shared progress, with shared joy.
That feeling of connection and unity has a great deal to do with the example and ideas and leadership of those of you who graduate today. And that is what gives me the confidence to deliver my charge to you.
Now, I’m going to use a word that feels very comfortable at MIT although it has taken-on a troubling new meaning elsewhere in the world.
But I know that our graduates will know what I mean.
After you depart for your new destinations, I want to ask you to hack the world — until you make the world a little more like MIT:
More daring and more passionate. More rigorous, inventive and ambitious. More humble, more respectful, more generous, more kind.
This morning, I see more than 2,800 new graduates who are ready for that lifelong problem-set. You made MIT better. And you will make a better world.
You came to MIT with exceptional qualities of your own. And now you leave us, equipped with a rare set of skills, and steeped in this community’s deepest values:
A commitment to excellence. Integrity. Meritocracy. Boldness. Humility. An open spirit of collaboration. A strong desire to make a positive impact. And a sense of responsibility to make the world a better place.
I hope you will take your MIT values with you and I hope you will always take time to listen to the world because that is the secret of making yourselves the finest human beings and the most magnificent “MIT products” that you can be.
Because I also see a planet that urgently needs everything you have to offer.
So now, go out there. Join the world. Find your calling. Solve the unsolvable. Invent the future. Take the high road. And you will continue to make your family, including your MIT family, proud.
On this wonderful day, I am proud of all of you. To every one of the members of the graduating Class of 2017:
Please accept my best wishes for a happy and successful life and career. Congratulations!
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