Pericles Lewis
August 18, 2025
First Year Address 2025: On Flourishing
Welcome.
President McInnis, Chaplain Saltiel, Colleagues – good morning!
And good morning to the parents, guardians, and friends of the incoming class. In my role as dean of Yale College, I thank you for everything you have done in guiding and supporting these young adults. I am delighted that they, and you, are joining the Yale community.
Students from the Class of 2029, transfer students, and Eli Whitney students, welcome to Yale! You are a remarkable group with wide-ranging interests. About a third of you conducted research in high school. Almost half were varsity or JV athletes. A quarter of you play a musical instrument at a high level. Many of you have held summer jobs or participated in student government, robotics, community service, or speech and debate. 14 of you are U.S. military veterans.
You come from over 1200 different high schools, in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, 3 US territories, and 48 countries around the world. Amidst these varied interests and backgrounds, 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.
You come here for many reasons—to gain knowledge, to prepare for a life and a career, to participate in a community. But another important element of your college education is your personal ethical development, what I like to think of as flourishing, borrowing a phrase from the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Flourishing as a student—and, later, in adult life—is connected to taking responsibility for your decisions and learning how to lead a responsible life.
What do I mean when I say “responsible”? Before Nelson Mandela became the first Black president of South Africa, he was imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island, where he often recited an old Victorian poem, “Invictus,” meaning “Undefeated.” William Ernest Henley wrote it, and a copy of it was placed on your seat. The poem gets at what I mean by responsible. It describes the horrors that can happen to you but insists that your “unconquerable soul” can survive.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Beautiful, but grim. The poet lives in a dark, possibly godless world, alone. But the poem comforted Mandela. Most of us won’t be imprisoned for our beliefs, and few if any of us will lead our nations out of a system of oppression. Mandela was one of the most admirable people of the 20th century. He aspired to be master of his fate and captain of his soul, and so can we — so can you.
One of the things you can learn in college is how to lead a responsible life, how to answer for your own choices: who you want to be with, how you want to spend your time, what job you want to have, what kind of person you are, and what kind of person you want to become. The Yale theologian Miroslav Volf calls this “a life worth living.”
Of course, most of us can’t answer all of these questions, or even say exactly why we behave the way we do. But the effort is essential. The effort is everything. Henley tells us in his poem that circumstances will always limit us, and that so much of life depends on accident or luck. But, in the end, we have to make moral choices with the hand that life deals us.
Character. That is what the Greeks and the Victorians called this moral process. The Greek word for character was ethos, and ethics, especially for a philosopher like Aristotle, explores the kind of character you hope to develop, the kind of person you want to be. We each arrive at adulthood with certain habits, inclinations, and predispositions. We can’t entirely control these, but we can shape them.
Character is a universal question—it is less about where you come from and more about where you choose to go next. If you are coming to Yale as a young adult, you can ask — and I hope you will ask — who you will be for the rest of your life—including not just what career you will choose but what kind of life you might live and what moral values you want to live by.
Character education today is controversial. Conservatives sometimes blame schools, colleges, and universities for being too permissive and not guiding students on proper mores or instilling patriotism. Progressives promote a different set of mores and sometimes blame these same institutions for transmitting the values of a capitalist society that they view as inegalitarian or even oppressive.
Critics on the right would have educators speak more directly about moral values. Critics on the left would have us more explicitly question the social and political values of the dominant culture. In this context, even talking about character can seem prudish or quaint. But American liberal education has long emphasized the development of character, and I think it remains relevant to college today.
The noted psychologist Angela Duckworth emphasizes one dimension of character in her work on “grit.” Duckworth grew up in New Jersey and went to some of the top educational institutions in the world. She also taught in public schools, where she first developed her theory that certain character traits associated with perseverance, effort, and hard work—what she calls “grit”—are more important for success than innate talent.
She founded the Character Lab at the University of Pennsylvania to put her theories about grit into practice in improving character education especially for elementary and secondary school students. Duckworth has published several studies showing how grit contributes to success in everything from military education to spelling bees to sports.
Grit is, very likely, what got you here. But there are other dimensions of character that are even more important for living a good life, and these are associated with the more ancient notion of virtue. The ethical dimension of the education you are about to pursue starts with asking what kind of character you want to have, and that means asking what virtues you want to cultivate—a theme that Aristotle and Confucius explored around twenty-five hundred years ago.
Aristotle thought that cultivating virtue was the key to flourishing, to the best life for human beings. Among philosophers today, this approach is known as “virtue ethics.” He emphasized such virtues as generosity, friendliness, and truthfulness. Importantly, for Aristotle, all the virtues involve a balancing act, what he calls a “mean,” between having an excess of a certain quality and having a lack or defect.
One virtue recognized in many cultures is courage. For Aristotle, the defect or absence of courage is cowardice, but there is also such a thing as excessive courage, which Aristotle calls rashness. Today we might think that every virtue has one opposite, which is a vice, but Aristotle thought of every virtue as being in the middle of a spectrum, having just the right amount of some quality and neither too much nor too little. Thinking about virtue this way seems particularly important today when we are so prone to cast social and political struggles in polarized terms. It is a profound mistake to believe that you and your allies are uniquely virtuous and your opponents are vicious or evil.
The great Chinese philosopher Confucius lived a little earlier than Aristotle. He too counseled the cultivation of virtue, and many of the virtues he describes resemble Aristotle’s. The most important of these, humaneness, combines the idea of fairness and charity towards others with an awareness of your own human limits.
Like the Greek philosophers, Confucius also emphasizes wisdom. He is reported to have said: “To say that you know something when you know it and to say that you do not know something when you do not know it—this is true wisdom.” Here we see the idea that wisdom consists in knowing the limits of your own understanding. In these ancient philosophers, we glimpse certain timeless virtues and also perceive the fact that no single list of virtues can be entirely comprehensive.
Yale and many other universities were founded by churches, and the gowns we put on for ceremonies like this one have their origins in priestly robes. But professors today are not here to preach to students or to impart their own moral or political values.
We do, however, have a responsibility to ask you, our students, to confront moral questions. Our job is not just to be role models in the sense of morally respectable people of good character but to model moral inquiry for our students, which means encouraging you to ask questions, including questions about the kind of life you want to live.
We cannot just assign readings or even exercises or problem sets that will teach you how to be friendly or courageous. Rather, the hope of a liberal education is that by living and working together with others, you as a student will make the connections between your studies and the kind of person you want to become. Thus the ethical dimension of a liberal education is closely connected to the social dimension.
Character is not a list of rules or attributes from antiquity or holy texts. At the heart of character is a question, not a rule. Character asks you — even challenges you —to discover your values, articulate them, defend them, even change them in the face of new knowledge, and above all to learn how to live by them.
That is what I mean by living a responsible life. It is the kind of life in which you take responsibility for your own actions and you can answer for your decisions. By this, I don’t just mean being responsible to your parents or your society or some abstract sense of duty, but also being responsible to yourself. If someone asks you, “why are you living that way?,” you should be able to give some kind of response and you should be able to live with that response.
To me, that is the essence of living an excellent life as a human being. Ideally, during your time at Yale, we can help you learn to shape your own characters to the point where, at least within the limits of circumstance, you are masters of your fates and captains of your souls.
Thank you, and again, welcome to Yale!
Pericles Lewis
Dean of Yale College