Each painted a picture of the challenges and joys the next several years will bring. Each also spoke of Harvard’s confidence in the impact these new scholars will have — not just on this community, but on the world’s body of knowledge.
Faust kicked off the Orientation proceedings with an evocative description of another Harvard ritual, Commencement Day. She recalled that amid the pomp and circumstance surrounding her on stage on that day, she always finds her mind engaged by the trajectories of the PhD candidates assembled before her in Tercentenary Theatre. Looking at individual faces in the crowd, “I think about “What did that one work on?”” she said. “What kind of discoveries did that individual make that brought her or him to this moment of receiving a Ph.D. in recognition of that work?” Reading the titles of their dissertations, printed in the Commencement program, she lets her mind wonder at the topics and the breadth of knowledge they represent.
“And as I look at you, I think, what are your titles going to be? What are you going to write about? What will be your stimulating, unique, and significant contributions to the world of knowledge that awaits your entry into it? I think the possibilities are ones you will have a marvelous time exploring.
“You have chosen to be part of this community of learning at Harvard,” Faust continued, “and part of a larger community of learning and of advanced scholarship across the world. You’ve chosen to dedicate yourselves to the life of the mind, and I hope you are imagining yourselves as I’m imagining you today, ready to receive your degrees in some spring not too far distant from now.”
Prized Convictions
Brandt helped illuminate the nature of the community students were now joining. “If there is any single conviction that we prize here at Harvard,” he told students, “it is the commitment to new knowledge and its expansion, and the clear and open exchange of ideas. Knowledge, we know, is provisional and elastic; it is never a zero sum game. And during your time here, we are confident that you will be making your own unique and important contributions to what we know.”
He also touched on the larger uncertainties affecting the climate for research education in the U.S. “As you already know, you begin your graduate studies at a moment of great complexity and considerable uncertainty for our world and for higher education, research, and teaching,” he said. “In the last years we have had confirmed what we surely must have already known: that the university is no ivory tower. Higher education is deeply embedded in the broad forces and contours of our world.
“But we have also affirmed, during this time, that the goals and values of the University, and your aspirations to contribute to the world of learning and knowledge have never – yes, never – been more important,” Brandt continued. “We intend to foster your work and these critical values of inquiry moving forward. “
Learn, and Teach
Dean Michael Smith conjured the open-ended inquiry that is at the heart of graduate education when he asked his audience, “What do you like to think about? What problem in the world would you like to see solved? Where does your mind go when you sit in Widener?” For the next several years, he said, answering those questions will be “your job. And it’s a great job. And there’s no better place to do it than at Harvard.
“Think hard, think expansively,” he continued. “Use your days, use Harvard. Learn from each other, and teach the world.”
And — as the latter part of the Orientation program highlighted — have some fun, too. Professor James Hogle, the master of Dudley House, took to the microphone to underscore the importance of cultivating one’s interests outside the lab or library. He said that students are more productive in their scholarship when they are happy in their lives, and that Dudley House, offering a broad range of activities planned by students for students, “is your house.” It is there for the moments when free time presents, or — perhaps more likely — when sanity demands a break from “the bench, the carrel, the office, or wherever it is you’re chained to at the moment,” Hogle said.
Also taking the podium were Garth McCavana, Dean for Students at GSAS, Katie Rose, the coordinating fellow at Dudley House and a PhD student in Slavic languages and literatures, and Benjamin Woodring, the president of the Graduate Student Council, a PhD student in English. They described the many activities and sources of support and advocacy that new students can seek at GSAS. And Rose and Woodring did something more than invite their audience to engage fully in the life of the Graduate School; they showed them a model of two who have done it, and who lived to tell.