On Conversation 

First-year address by Pericles Lewis, August 22, 2022

President Salovey, Chaplain Kugler, Colleagues, Students, Families, and Friends, Good morning! Students from the Class of 2026, transfer students, Eli Whitney students, and Visiting International Students, welcome to Yale! Family members and friends, in my role as the dean of Yale College, I extend my warm welcome to you as well, along with gratitude for everything you have done in supporting and guiding these young adults.

This opening assembly is one of my favorite formal events of the academic year because it introduces us to each other, just as you, our new students, have begun introducing yourselves to your fellow classmates. I also think of it as the beginning, less formally, of a conversation with your peers and instructors that will go on for many years to come.

You will find great fellowship here, and you also will find the great pleasure of learning. At the beginning of his Analects, the Chinese philosopher Confucius provides words that are as relevant today as they were 2500 years ago. Here he is, as though addressing you now: “Is it not a pleasure to learn and—when it is timely—to practice what you have learned? Is it not a joy to have friends coming from afar” And I am delighted to welcome all of you, our new students, who come from near or far to experience the pleasure of learning together. Yale Professor Annping Chin emphasizes that the purpose of learning, for Confucius, consisted in the opportunity to develop our moral and aesthetic sensibilities, to fulfill our humanity, and to do so with humility. In a parallel with Socrates, who lived about a century later, we know most of what Confucius taught through the accounts of his disciples, who always represent the great philosopher in conversation. In fact, the meaning of the Chinese title of the Analects, “Lunyu,” is “conversations” or “dialogues.” Like these ancient thinkers, the community you are now joining learns through dialogue. Thoughtful conversation can allow each of us to develop our own sensibilities and fulfill our humanity. 

The Yale College community has a long history, shaped by the many generations of students who have come before you. And this week, more than 1,500 of you have come to New Haven from all over the world. No single racial or ethnic group is a majority in this very diverse student body. Almost a fifth of you will be in the first generation in your families to graduate from a 4-year college, about a fifth of you have received Pell Grants for lower-income students. 128 of you applied through the QuestBridge program, and 47 were admitted through the transfer and Eli Whitney Students programs. 13 of you are US military veterans, and 21 of you began your college education at a community college. Together, you represent 51 US states and territories and more than 50 countries. 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.

You will find one here, in both formal and informal settings. Here we stand in front of Sterling Memorial Library, the heart of campus, which holds over 2 million books on all fields of knowledge. You will learn in the classrooms and discussion sections that start next week; the libraries, galleries, and laboratories where you will broaden and test what you have learned; even the desk or carrel you will claim for solitary study. You will experience the less formal part of your education when you talk with the people around you, in the student groups you join, with your instructors during their office hours, or with the stranger sitting beside you at the long table in your residential college dining hall. Yale’s traditions and communities form their own civil society that runs parallel to the official curriculum. Of course, you are here to pursue formal study. But I also encourage you to explore various ways to learn outside the classroom or the library. This is a campus designed, often intentionally but sometimes by happy accident, for conversation. Together, the books and classrooms, and the more informal lessons you will learn from each other — all of these form part of a single, broader conversation.

It is the conversation of a scholarly community that defines the pursuit of knowledge in a great university. You come here knowing the state of public dialogue in our polarized society. You know already how at times it simply reaffirms our existing beliefs and at other times devolves into partisanship or even violence. Universities are not immune to dogma, but they do aspire to a higher type of conversation. As you join or start your own conversations in the semesters ahead, think about how they can expand your horizons. One of the distinctive things about human experience is that we are born in particular bodies, at particular times and places. We see the world from a given perspective. But we also have the chance to expand our worldview as we grow and learn and travel. The poet Tennyson has a beautiful image of this kind of learning in his poem “Ulysses.” He writes: “I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.” There is always something to learn just over the horizon.

Whether you have traveled a long way to get here or whether you have lived all your life in New Haven, you may feel that sense of an expanding horizon as you meet new friends and explore new intellectual territory. I have spent almost half my life at Yale, so I see the world from a very particular vantage point. But I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how education enables us to transcend the limits of our horizons. In Truth and Method, an important book about historical interpretation, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that “The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point,” and he argued that understanding involves what he called a “fusion of horizons” in which we become more thoughtful about how our own assumptions relate to someone else’s vantage point. For Gadamer, interpreting an ancient text or a conversation or dialogue with another person involves opening ourselves to reassessing our own assumptions.

He focuses on interpersonal and humanistic knowledge, but a similar process is at work in testing scientific hypotheses. In fact, the work of understanding, and even just the work of living in this world, involves a constant mental journey through time and space that develops our views and changes our horizons—a journey like the one Ulysses made, what the Greeks called an Odyssey. It involves an ongoing metaphorical conversation where we question our own assumptions and prejudices through our encounters with other people. Ideally, if we are open to growing, we can talk to people whose standpoints differ from ours, and we can learn from these conversations. A crucial, even defining prerequisite of learning is the willingness to open ourselves to views and ideas — and even ways of life — that challenge our assumptions, either so we can learn to understand and defend them, or in some cases to change or reassess them. This does not mean that you need to accept every idea that your professors or fellow students propose to you.

But in the years ahead, your job will be to consider the new ideas you encounter with an open mind, weigh new perspectives and arguments, and arrive at your own views about matters of great importance for yourselves and for your futures—matters such as the nature of justice, the understanding of the natural world, the meaning of art, the purposes of life.

You will explore these questions not only in your classes but also over meals in your dining halls, on the athletic fields, in your campus jobs, in your student organizations, as volunteers serving the community, or in any of the many pursuits open to you as a student. One of the greatest opportunities learn at Yale comes from the “peer effect,” the chance to interact with other talented people your own age. The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, who happens to have received her master’s degree at Yale, offers a similar vision to Gadamer’s when discussing learning about other people’s experiences, especially in the context of living in a college community.

Whereas Gadamer focuses on understanding different horizons through time and history, Adichie emphasizes listening to different stories through space and geography. In her speech on “The Danger of a Single Story,” she tells of arriving at the age of 19 at another fine American university where her roommate knew nothing about Nigeria and made stereotypical assumptions about Adichie’s homeland and way of life. At first, Adichie was annoyed at her roommate’s lack of understanding. After spending some time in the United States, however, and thinking about her own limited experience of rural parts of Nigeria, Adichie came to realize that her roommate’s assumptions about Africa were due to her limited exposure to more accurate stories about Africa. Adichie goes on to tell both positive and negative stories of her childhood and then says: “All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

She concludes that “it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.” It is all too easy to make assumptions about others we meet, or to take offense at assumptions others make about us, but our goal is to engage in dialogue so that we can overcome initial misunderstandings and learn from one another.

As you settle into your residential colleges and begin your classes, I invite you to participate in a dialogue. Like Confucius, enjoy the pleasure of learning. Like Ulysses, seek out new worlds. Like Gadamer, strive to expand your horizon of expectations. Like Adichie, explore the complexity of other people’s stories, share your own, and create new stories together. You may find the most interesting conversations in seminars or lab meetings, or you may find them in your extracurricular activities, or late at night in the college buttery.

You will find those conversations where you seek them. In order for them to succeed, I ask you to open yourselves to learning from each other. Enter into conversation in a spirit of generosity. Assume good intentions. And value complexity and nuance over self-assurance and stereotype. These conversations are an integral part of your Yale education. The lessons they teach you will show you how to develop as human beings. And they will show you how to shape the conversations that shape our society. Thank you, and welcome to Yale.