August 21, 2023
Class of 2027, transfer students, Eli Whitney students, visiting international students, welcome to Yale! President Salovey, Chaplain Saltiel, other university leaders, good morning! And parents, guardians, families, and friends gathered here, welcome and good morning to you, and thank you for everything you have done in guiding and supporting these young adults. I am delighted that you and your students are joining the Yale community.
This opening assembly is one of my favorite formal events of the academic year, because it’s one of the times when we all come together in fellowship. It’s also your first day as new members of this community. Students, you come here today as strangers, but in the days and years ahead you will become colleagues and friends, many for life, learning from and teaching one another.
Together with the faculty and staff, you have joined a community that shares a love of learning. Yale is a special kind of community, and in this regard I like to recall the words of civil rights activist and Yale alumna Pauli Murray, who said that “True community is based upon equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. It affirms the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together.” As a college, we are also bound together by the search for knowledge and the task of helping young people reach their full potential.
You join a great tradition shaped by the many generations of students who have come before you, from every imaginable background and walk of life. This week, more than 1,600 of you have come to New Haven from all over the world. No single racial or ethnic group is a majority among the student body. More than a fifth of you will be in the first generation of your families to graduate from a four-year college, and more than a fifth of you have received Pell Grants for lower-income students.
130 of you applied through the QuestBridge program, and 38 were admitted through the transfer and Eli Whitney Students programs. 10 of you are US military veterans, and 22 of you began your college education at a community college. Together, you represent 53 US states and territories and more than 60 countries. You come to Yale from a range of religious backgrounds, cultural traditions, and political beliefs. Amidst this great diversity, you also share much in common: you are promising students with wide horizons and an excitement about learning. And together, you have come to Yale to pursue a broad, liberal education.
As you look around today, you can see the physical embodiment of our community of learning. Here we stand in front of Sterling Memorial Library, the heart of campus, which holds over three million books on all fields of knowledge. Around us are some of Yale’s residential colleges, where you will live, eat, and learn together.
The first residential colleges in the west were constructed at Oxford in the 13th century for students at the university there, and a lot of our campus architecture echoes Oxford’s Gothic style. Colleges today maintain some of the air of the medieval cloister. They offer young people an opportunity to develop away from the pressures of the broader society, so that they can later make important contributions beyond the college gates.
The father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, paints a famous picture of a student at Oxford, who wears a threadbare cloak, rides an emaciated horse, and is rather underfed himself. So dedicated is the student to learning that when he gets some money from his friends, he spends it not on fine clothes, or a new horse, or even food for himself, but on books about philosophy. And Chaucer concludes this unforgettable portrait of the Oxford student by saying “gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”
As Chaucer knew more than 700 years ago, the essential character of college life is not just the attention that colleges pay to the needs of the body (although we do intend to keep you well-fed), but the sense of a group of friends and classmates who learn together and who teach one another. This is what social scientists call the “peer effect,” and it is something we academics are at risk of neglecting, namely that students can—in the right environment—learn as much from their interactions with each other in student societies and team sports, at improv nights and orchestra rehearsals, and in study groups and intense late-night conversations, as they do from their formal coursework.
So why do we educate students in a communal setting? Let’s go back even further to Plato’s Academy, one of the first institutions of higher learning. In his book The Republic, Plato envisions a communal education for the leaders of his ideal city. The leaders will be chosen by meritocratic state examinations. They will live and eat together, will have no private property of their own, and will study philosophy—the Greek word for the love of wisdom.
Plato also proposes, very unusually for his time, that women and men should have exactly the same education. Plato believed that such an education would develop leaders who are dedicated to the city and justice above all else, who do not consider their own private gain in making decisions, and who have the moral character to avoid corruption. Although few of us today would subscribe to Plato’s anti-democratic views or his insistence on the abolition of private property and the nuclear family, the education you receive at Yale does have something in common with Plato’s ideals. Of course, we don’t require that you major in philosophy—but we do hope that you will love wisdom for its own sake. We also hope that you will follow the longstanding Yale tradition of developing your character and pursuing a life of service. This education will prepare you for leadership in all walks of society.
Yale is not just one community, but many, and depending on your interests, you might join several of them, including student clubs, arts organizations, sports teams, cultural centers and identity groups, faith groups, and political parties. The sense of belonging in multiple overlapping communities is one of the most positive effects of college life, what I think of as collisional frequency. In physics and chemistry, collision frequency refers to the rate at which two atoms or molecules bump into each other in a particular volume. Metaphorically, I think of collisional frequency as the frequency with which we bump into each other on campus, sparking new ideas and conversations. Yale is brilliantly designed to increase the frequency of encounters like these.
The word community derives from the notion of the common or shared; it often has a religious overtone of people who share a spiritual bond. University leaders—and religious, political, and corporate leaders too—tend to speak of community in unreservedly positive tones, but anyone who has belonged to a community knows that it is impossible to avoid tensions when living with other people. And communities can sometimes ask too much of us; across cultures, how individuals should relate to their communities remains a live debate. Here I come back to the notion of a community of learning. Our shared purpose here is to learn from one another and to teach each other. That means respecting and encouraging each other’s freedom and autonomy. It’s what Pauli Murray meant when she spoke of equality, mutuality, and reciprocity.
College is a particular kind of community, where people come from a range of backgrounds and are united, not around a single religious tradition, or a single cultural background, or even a single nationality, but around the desire to learn. It welcomes the full range of perspectives; it depends on mutual respect; and it invites every kind of debate, judging each argument by the standards of reason and evidence. It embraces the learning of many times and places. It develops citizens of the world.
Asked about the study of English literature, the literature of India’s colonial government, Mahatma Gandhi encouraged his people to study both English and their native languages. He offers an image of the collision of cultures that I love: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” Yale is the kind of cosmopolitan community of learning where you will encounter cultures of all lands, and where you can learn together.
I trust that, like Chaucer’s clerk, you will be glad to learn and teach; I hope that, like Plato’s students, you will pursue lives of service; I expect that, like Gandhi, you will open yourselves to the cultures of the world; and I pray, with Pauli Murray, that you will treat each other with equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. You will find Yale a welcoming place to learn, and you will remain a part of this community for the rest of your lives.
Thank you, and welcome to Yale.
Pericles Lewis
Dean of Yale College