Commencement 2024

×

Earth Scientist Naomi Oreskes Delivers 2024 Commencement Address

Text (unedited) of commencement address by earth scientist Naomi Oreskes

President Botstein, academic colleagues, parents, friends, and most of all students, thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you on this important day.

I’d like to start by extending my heartfelt congratulations to everyone here. And I mean everyone. To the graduates of the Bard class of 2024, of course. This is your day.  But also to everyone here—parents, friends, professors, staff—who worked to make the promise of your college education into a reality. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a college or university to raise a graduate. Congratulations to all of you for a job well done. 

And, to my fellow honorary degree awardees, this is your day, too.

This is what in my tradition we call a “shehecheyanu moment:” a moment when we pause to appreciate the fact that we have come to a point in time, this place in the world, this moment of success and happiness.  Shehecheyanu literally means “we are alive,” and moments like these are worth savoring and remembering. So, while I am not a comedian, I will try not to be boring, in the hope that you may remember some part of my comments. 

In this moment of joy, I’d like to talk today about something slightly difficult: the problem of conflict and contradiction.  

We all know—and to some degree understand in our hearts—that joy and sadness can reside in the same place, even at the same time.  Today, you graduates are happy to be graduating, but probably sad to be leaving friends. You may be excited about what comes next, but also anxious. This sort of contradiction—the bittersweet quality of many of life’s milestones—is obvious.  Less obvious is how we manage the conflict and contradictions in everyday life. 

As we gather here today to celebrate your accomplishments, we gather against a backdrop of tremendous tension in our world, our country, and even in our academic communities. We feel divided in ways that most of us who are old enough to remember would say we have not felt for sixty years.  

What do we do with this contradiction?  Is it fair to celebrate—to be joyous—when others are suffering? Many of us felt this way during COVIDcovid. I know I did. For me, COVIDcovid was an oddly precious time.  With my husband in the next room, our adult daughter down the hall, my dog at my feet, and two cats that our daughter brought home from Tennessee, I loved working at home. It was a relief to travel less, to talk less, and to think and write more.  Yet, my contentment sat alongside heartbreak: that my students were losing an important part of their college experiences. And that everywhere, people were struggling, suffering and dying.  

Or consider this. We are at Bard College, home of the Hannah Arendt Center, the place where Arendt found an intellectual home after the horrors of the Holocaust and devastating destruction of World War II.  World War II destroyed tens of millions of lives, thousands of cities, and countless dreams. Arendt was one of the century’s great witnesses to this destruction, reified in the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. More cogently than almost any other thinker, she confronted the question of how evil comes to dwell in our midst.  She coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the ways in which extreme evil can insinuate itself into daily life and be perpetrated by people who in other respects seem ordinary. Evil—Arendt made us see—rarely announces itself. More often it creeps up upon us. 

Yet, Arendt—one of the century’s most acute observers of Nazis—was the student and lover of the Nazi, Martin Heidegger.  Martin Heidegger was a Nazi.  He was a member of the Nazi party.  His private notebooks contain numerous unequivocally anti-semitic comments. He subscribed to a belief in heroic violence. In the words of one recent commentator, Heidegger’s “outlook reflects a clear and deep-seated commitment to the worldview of Nazism.”

Yet, at the same time, Heidegger was a great philosopher, in fact one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.  Many concepts that we take for granted today—and in particular, concepts that people who consider themselves to be progressives—have their origins at least in part in his work.  

Martin Heidegger was a great philosopher and a great fascist. That’s a hard thing to get your head around.  We want our great thinkers also to be great people.  We want ourt heroes to be entirely good, and our villains to be entirely bad.  But often they are not.  Good people sometimes do bad things. Bad people sometimes do good things. After all, Hitler was a vegetarian, something my students are almost always disturbed to learn.  Nazi scientists were also pioneers in understanding and documenting the hazards of tobacco use.  

Or consider John Locke. A man who owned stock in slave trading companies, Locke justified the appropriation of Nnative American lands on the grounds that Nnative peoples who did not farm could not be said to own the land on which they lived.  Property rights, he believed, arose from labor of a particular sort that was eligible to Europeans like himself. As the philosopher Charles Mills wrote, Locke’s social contract “could…be regarded as founded on an exclusionary intra-white ‘racial contract’ that denies equal moral, legal, and political standing to people of color.” 

People are contradictory. That is a fact as surely as the claim that the Earth is an oblate spheroid and that e=mc2.  In fact, the foundations of modern physics rest on a contradiction: that light is neither a wave nor a particle, but in some way neither and both. Physics tells us that in certain circumstances, Schroedinger’s cat is both dead and alive.  

Bard is proud of its status as a liberal arts college, and rightly so.  But liberalism has its own well-known contradictions—or at least tensions—such as the oft-remarked tension between our cultivation of expert knowledge and our commitment to democratic decision-making. 

It's an instinct for many of us to want to resolve contradictions. To conclude that Heidegger must be either a great thinker or a fascist—because how could he be both? To say that Locke, as a racist, cannot be an inspiration to us today. To insist that Schrodinger’s cat must be either alive or dead. 

Knowing that Heidegger was a Nazi, we could “cancel” him. We could decide that his ideas do not merit consideration.  We could expunge him from our philosophy classes. But to do so would be to deny the course of history, to deny the impact his ideas have had, for better or worse. The same goes for John Locke. Locke’s ideas on governance and natural rights were so central to Thomas Jefferson and the framers of the U.S. Constitution, that we would be hard pressed to understand the creation of this country—again for better or for worse—without understanding Locke. 

So what I’d like to suggest today is that not resolving contradiction is actually central to  intellectual life, and the core mission of great colleges and universities like Bard. 

The answer to many problems is indeed both/and, and many conflicts arise in part because we insist that there must be an answer. We succumb to the fallacy of the excluded middle:  It’s either capitalism or communism. It’s either individual rights or the common good. It’s either censorship or free speech absolutism.  

John Stuart Mill is another “great” thinker whose legacy is mixed, but there is one point upon which I think he was absolutely right. To paraphrase just slightly: Mill said that in many conflicts, both sides are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.

It seems to me that Mill’s idea is central to what we, as intellectual communities, need to keep front and center: the idea that it’s rare for any one thinker—or any one position in a debate—to be entirely right and the other entirely wrong. We all prioritize the aspects of a problem that seem most salient to us. Had we come from a different place or had different life experiences, we would very likely view the matter differently. And down the road, in a few years, or months or even a few weeks, we may view the matter differently still. 

This is one of the central arguments for diversity: that people see things differently, based on their backgrounds and life experiences.  This is the moral of the old fable of the blind men and the elephant, as well as of the great Kurosawa film, Raoshomon: that we all only see partially. And for this reason—because vision and perspective is always partial—as isolated individuals we never apprehend the whole truth. When we bring diverse perspectives together, it does not guarantee that we find the truth, but it does make us more likely to see and appreciate the whole.  

If we think for a moment about the word—university—it’s immediately obvious that its root is the same as universal, and universe.  While the universities of mediaeval Europe were not, of course, universal, they did seek to comprehensively cover the major areas of learning recognized at the time: the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).

Today, universities and liberal arts colleges cover far more ground than these seven subjects. At Bard, students are offered 35 different degree programs, as well as numerous interdivisional programs and concentrations.  Why do we have so many different things for students to study? Why so many different programs and degrees?

The obvious answer is that, because the world is complicated and contradictory, we need to look at it from many angles. To meet people’s needs and solve the world’s problems, we need to embrace a wide range of disciplines, approaches, methodologies, and perspectives.  All these different disciplines—most of which did not exist 1000 years ago—are a response to the recognition that we need many ways of thinking. 

As members of a living and learning community, it is our job to explore ideas, and where necessary doing the hard work of explaining why certain claims are false, harmful, or otherwise problematic. It is our job not to suppress bad ideas, but to expose them as bad.  And, especially in these times when it sometimes seems that everyone is yelling at each other, to find the capacity to listen, and, where appropriate, just be quiet. 

Not everything that can be said should be said. Civility, decency, and just plain kindness sometimes require us to hold our tongue. Sometimes the right answer in the face of a problem is not to do something, but just to stand there.  To wait, to watch, to listen.  

We’ve heard a lot in recent months about free speech. We’ve heard a lot less about listening. Indeed, we don’t even have an equivalent phrase. “Free listening” doesn’t even make syntactic sense.  But what use is free speech if no one is listening? 

I’d like to close with the thought that in this difficult moment, a key role that we can play, at colleges and universities, is to find ways to create opportunities to listen, as well as to speak. And to watch as well as to act.   Because one way to help to resolve contradictions—to find what is right in divergent views—is by listening. Really listening. 

The world needs both speaking and listening. If no one spoke, there would be nothing to listen to.  But if no one listens, then there isn’t much point in speaking.  

Thank you for listening to me, and once again, congratulations to the class of 2024. 

×

President Botstein’s Charge to the Class of 2024

It will come as no surprise to the Class of 2024 that this has been a truly tumultuous and unsettling academic year for American colleges and universities. Here at Bard, however, the most memorable day on campus was the day of the solar eclipse, April 8. A large cross section of Bard’s community gathered on the upper campus—students, faculty, and staff—to witness this once in a lifetime event. Our physics faculty and student members of Bard’s physics club arrived equipped to help with special glasses and mingled with the crowd, eager to help explain and guide the astonished spectators.
 
For one brief moment, the Bard community was united in a spirit of trust around the task of learning and the wonderment of understanding. No one questioned the facts and explanations. The eclipse, its reality, its timing, its trajectory, its mystical beauty and astonishing light were not received as fake news, a colonialist or Eurocentric imperialist fraud, a pack of lies, a MAGA conspiracy, or a Zionist or Jewish conspiracy. The riches of generations of scientific inquiry—still incomplete and ongoing—the rewards of the centuries-long disciplined use of reason to better our grasp of the natural world, were on full view. The Bard community was the witness and beneficiary of the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, and the gradual refutation of elaborate, eloquent, arcane, and brilliant theories and divine superstitions about the heavens and the stars that sought to explain an eclipse. Spinoza would have been proud of this display of awe at the synthesis of reason, nature, and the divine.
 
Almost a century ago, in 1919, another solar eclipse was closely scrutinized and studied. It provided the empirical proof, witnessed by measurement and photographs, of Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity: the bending of light by the force of gravity. Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921. Yet, by the end of the decade, relativity, despite the clear experimental proof, would be branded as false and a degenerate lie by the Nazis. It was the work of a manipulative, international Jewish conspiracy. The teaching of Einstein’s revision of Newtonian physics was banned from German universities by an autocratic and tyrannical regime that seized power in 1933. That ban lasted until the end of a world war against Nazism and fascism that cost the lives of 20 million soldiers and more than 40 million civilians, including the victims of the systematic extermination of distinct groups, particularly Jews, the Roma people, and homosexuals, and the civilians who perished from the atomic bombs this nation dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
We face the possibility that in our own time, the respect for reason, research, evidence, for the distinction between certainty and uncertainty, for the understanding of probability, the recognition of truth, and the willingness to reject falsehood, the love of beauty in proofs and persuasive arguments and the embrace of thoughtful dissent—such as Einstein’s—from reigning orthodoxies and inherited superstitions, including conspiracy theories that elude the rules of evidence because their presumed truth is intentionally and cleverly hidden—will disappear, destroyed by ideological terror from above—control and intimidation from autocratic governments—and from below, by the power and fear, now fueled in a historically unprecedented way by technology, of conformist mass prejudices, ostracism and abuse from the tyranny of the virtual public space we inhabit. Truth and understanding are not determined by popularity; they often are hard to understand without access to the kind of analysis, information, and learning Bard and other universities and colleges exist to provide and support.
 
Colleges and universities must defend dissenters and critics and protect the open and free pursuit of knowledge and understanding. They must be dedicated to resisting censorship from above and defying the self-censorship among students and faculty who fear the condemnation of dominant groups who cherish their convictions, even if those convictions might be wrong. We must remain committed to the free and open pursuit of thinking, research, scholarship, artistic expression, and the teaching of the rules and practices of reason, scientific discovery, considered criticism, judgment, and scholarship. We must rededicate ourselves to teaching, not to preaching. We must not abuse our academic authority to assert our beliefs in the classroom. Rather, we should open those beliefs up to reasoned scrutiny. Amidst the avalanche of statements and postings on the internet that emerged from this year’s campus politics was a statement that liberal education and the liberal arts were merely examples of the “soft power” of imperialism and colonialism. This assertion is derived from often hard to understand and jargon laden postmodernist ideas and critical theory that contest the claims of reasoned enlightenment; it is a frighteningly appealing distortion of the traditions of teaching and learning that Bard honors and that are being celebrated here at this commencement.
 
The plain truth is that thinking and understanding are difficult. They are demanding human endeavors. Our understanding of the natural world, whether of COVID, our brains and nervous system, the earth’s climate, or the universe around us remains imperfect; the progress we have made has been the result of the shared pursuit of knowledge and truth in institutions of research and learning that rely on reasoned skepticism. That gives us a common ground on which to change our minds and shed ignorance, and search further for more perfect understandings. The truth is also frequently counter-intuitive and complex. We cannot respond to the complexities that surround us by casting off recalcitrant details through simplification, clinging to slogans, stock phrases, epithets, and the unexamined language of opinions that are emotionally satisfying but dangerously inadequate and misleading. Too often we defend our unexamined judgments by assuming the rhetoric and stance of moral superiority thereby dividing every question into a simple opposition between right and wrong and turning dissent into offense and evil. What is true is not always common sensical, just as quantum mechanics, organic chemistry, economics, counterpoint, poetry, and photography all are. That is why institutions of learning exist, and why the degrees you are about to receive took so long to earn, and why we have laboratories, studios, and libraries, and why we employ a learned and accomplished faculty.
 
In the catastrophic congressional hearings from last December, the presidents of our leading universities, when asked about how to deal with a hypothetical case on campus calling for the death of a particular group of fellow human beings, sought to make a distinction between speech and conduct. This was utterly amazing, probably something crafted by clever lawyers. At colleges and universities, especially here at Bard, speech is conduct; language is the only instrument of learning. Violence has no place on the campus of a college and university. And the protection of the right of students and faculty to speak, with freedom and without fear, and the defense of academic freedom are fundamental to our existence and are at the core of the mission of the liberal arts.

I hold here one diploma Bard will hand out. You will notice, members of the Class of 2024, that at the center is an individual’s full name. Just one single name. There is no reference to that individual’s race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual preference, or nationality. At Bard, on this ground of learning, at your alma mater, only each of you as an individual—as one thinking person, a curious person, a good listener, with an active imagination and someone who loves to learn—counts. Bard’s diploma honors your identity and sanctity as unique, your individual achievement, and not you as a member or representative of any group.
 
Bard College may be one last stronghold in the defense of the universal virtues of a liberal education, as a place of reason and learning not corrupted by wealth or the arrogance of an elite club. As you walk off the stage, we ask each and every one of you to join us as alumni/ae to help us protect and defend this place and the joy of learning and study, the culture of freedom, empathy, respect, and kindness the college has sought to cultivate and nurture. The talent and accomplishment within the Class of 2024 remind me what an honor and privilege it is to serve as President of this unique institution.