Issue of
September 22, 1999

'I share your sense of apprehension and melancholy'

This is the text of President Gerhard Casper’s Convocation speech to new students and their parents on September 17, 1999.

Freshmen members of the Stanford Class of 2003 and those among you who had the splendid good sense to transfer to Stanford: On behalf of the university's faculty and staff, and your fellow students, both undergraduate and graduate, I warmly welcome you.

Equally warmly I welcome parents, other relatives and friends who have come along to lessen the apprehensions that our new students might have. For many of you parents, this is not the easiest of tasks, since you yourselves are full of apprehension about this rite of passage and great adventure, and about what lies ahead for your daughters and sons. And you no doubt feel a tinge of melancholy, as well, over the fact that beginnings often imply endings--and today signals for you the ending of one phase of the relationship with your child.

Sarah's father, Rick Chandler, sent me an e-mail earlier this week that told an anecdote out of his and Sarah's life that was most poignant. He remembered his strong emotions when, at the Hartford airport, Sarah referred to her going back to Stanford from a summer on the East Cost as "returning home." If, one day, you have a similar experience, don't hold it against your child.

I share your sense of apprehension and melancholy for another reason as well. Today will mark the last time I give this address to incoming freshmen. As some of you may know, on Tuesday I announced that this shall be my last year as president of the university. You, then, Class of 2003, will have a special place in my heart as the last class I welcome to Stanford. You will, as it were, be part of my legacy. In a way, my fate and reputation are in your hands. From Dean Kinnally I have learned that yours are not just good, but excellent hands to be in.

Our university, yours and mine, is a wondrously varied institution: rich in talent and educational opportunities; rich in research and scholarship; rich in athletic challenges; rich in artistic creativity; rich in loyalty of alumni and friends; rich in past and present contributions to California, the nation and the world. It is flourishing because many of your predecessors, now alumni, have felt and presently feel a moral obligation to give something back to Stanford. Their support thereby helps you and future generations to obtain the benefits that come from the pursuit of knowledge. Tuition has never in the past covered, nor will it ever cover, the full cost of a college education. One day, Stanford will therefore call on you, too, to display the same sense of moral obligation that others now show on your behalf.

In 1884, while in Italy, Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, lost their only child, Leland Jr., to typhoid fever. They had been on a European tour before Leland Jr. was to do what you are doing today: enter college. Legend has it that the night following his son's death, the father, in a dream, was lamenting that he now had nothing to live for. Again, according to legend, he was rebuked by his son's voice: "Papa, do not say that. You have a great deal to live for; live for humanity."

Even before returning to the United States, the bereaved parents drew up a will providing for an educational institution in Palo Alto. They had decided to use their wealth to do something for "other people's" children. On Nov. 11, 1885, Leland and Jane Stanford, "desiring to promote the public welfare," conveyed their Palo Alto Farm for the purposes of a "University of high degree" for both sexes. It was this act that led to the opening of our university on Oct. 1, 1891.

I can think of no more appropriate passage to cite as I seize my last chance to say to incoming students what has been my most important theme since coming to Stanford myself. You are about to begin one of the most elevated, noble, honorable forms of public service that I know. That is, you will promote the public welfare through the increase of knowledge: your own knowledge, your fellow students' knowledge, your faculty's knowledge and society's knowledge.

I shall take these one by one, beginning with you, the new students. I appreciate that it may sound a little strange to suggest that the public welfare will be promoted by your increasing your knowledge. To Jane and Leland Stanford, however, that was obvious. They knew, to quote the university's charter, that "cultivation and enlargement of the mind" were necessary conditions "to qualify students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life." They thought of education as a prerequisite of good citizenship.

There are those who would answer the question "Which is worse--ignorance or apathy?" by saying "I don't know and I don't care." This university was founded on the premise that both--ignorance and apathy--are anathema. Or, as an alumnus put it recently: Stanford's moral creed holds that it is better to know a thing than not to know it.

This alumnus, Thomas Beresford from Colorado, wrote a letter last year to two students who, like you, were about to begin their Stanford careers. I shall show restraint by quoting only a brief portion.

The essence of a great university lies in its ability to teach its students how to think critically . . . If all goes well, the school will help you develop the tools that will allow you to look at life's circumstances and ask "What can I learn from this?" If four years from now you can make independent judgments on the matters that affect your life, and do so in a way that includes doubt as part of the process, the university will have served you well. If you can carry forward the ability to learn and to think critically as you progress beyond Stanford, you will have served it and your education well.

The search to know, the search for truth, has always been characterized by the need to doubt, the need to be critical, including being self-critical: looking not just for the evidence, but for the counterevidence as well. As Thomas Huxley, the great 19th--century British scientist, formulated it: "Science . . . warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for the one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations."

I urge, I implore, all of you to be brave and rigorous in your pursuit of knowledge. Your own future contributions to society depend on how well you are prepared. The university's seriousness of purpose must also be yours, the university's commitment to intellectual values must also be yours.

You also will promote the public welfare by increasing your fellow students' knowledge, just as they, in a wholly dialectical process, will make major contributions to increasing your knowledge. Very few among you have graduated from a high school or lived in a community with Stanford's diversity of interests, talents and backgrounds. Not many will have had much personal experience of interacting with people of different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. As you cross bridges to meet strangers at Stanford, the going will sometimes be rough. That, however, is an inevitable part of the excitement--and the education--that college offers you.

And, in those encounters, you should remember that you were admitted to Stanford as individuals, not in groups. No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an individual, and can speak and be listened to without regard to labels or stereotypes.

While the university will not presume to tell you who you should become, with what group to associate or not to associate, university citizenship entails the obligation to accept every individual member of the community as a contributor to the search to know. That obligation is an indispensable part of the public service you are entering. In a university nobody has the right to deny another person's right to speak his or her mind, to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point. In a university discussion, your first question in response to an argument must never be, "Does he or she belong to the right group?" Instead, the only criterion is whether the argument is valid. An argument must not be judged by whether the speaker is male or female, black or white, American or foreign.

You have a few wonderful years ahead of you at Stanford when you can discuss extensively with "strangers" and then befriend them. Look around you: Among the people in the audience are many of the friends that you will make in the next few years and that will stay with you for the rest of your lives.

Your role in one another's education will be as important as the faculty's role. As the poet Goethe, whose 250th birthday is celebrated this year, once wrote: "We derive great benefit from lively and frank association with educated people. A nod, a warning, encouragement, timely opposition are often capable of changing our lives." Deliberateness and serendipity will continue to be dialectical elements of your lives.

Even if you found it strange for me to suggest that Jane and Leland Stanford thought one way to promote the public welfare would be for you to increase your knowledge, it will not surprise you that I urge you to learn from the faculty, from the great amount of knowledge they have to impart. You may, however, find it outright weird that I take the position that the public service career you are about to embark on includes increasing the knowledge of your faculty.

I trust that one reason you have chosen a university for your undergraduate education is that here you will have an opportunity to work with faculty who themselves work at the frontiers of their fields. Students who seize the initiative and seek out the incredible range of opportunities offered at Stanford and other research-intensive universities are rewarded in ways that cannot be matched in other settings. At a research-intensive university, research and teaching have a dialectical relationship.

A 19th--century scholar whose impact on universities the world over has been profound--Wilhelm von Humboldt--expressed this relationship in the following blunt formulation. The university professor does not exist for the sake of the students, he said.

[B]oth teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge. The teacher's performance depends on the students' presence and interest--without this, science and scholarship could not grow. If the students who are to form [the teacher's] audience did not [gather round] of their own free will, [the teacher] would have to seek them out in [the] quest for knowledge. The goals of science and scholarship are worked toward more effectively through the synthesis of the teacher's and the students' dispositions. The teacher's mind is more mature but it is also somewhat one-sided in its development and more dispassionate; the student's mind is less able and less committed but it is nonetheless open and responsive to every possibility.

Not only do students profit when taught by scholars who are themselves engaged in creative endeavors; rather, scholarship itself is enriched when the younger generation consciously, if naively, questions it. This assumes, of course, discussion and the willingness for discussion in lectures, seminars and laboratories. That is why this university, through Stanford Introductory Studies, offers all of you, from the very start, small group interaction with regular faculty, in Freshman Seminars, Sophomore Seminars and Sophomore Tutorials. There will be 242 such offerings in the coming year.

Before finishing, let me make an important aside. Stanford will afford you opportunities for public service in the more ordinary sense of the term. I urge you to get engaged. Members of a university community, whatever their views, must not shy away from the social and political issues of their time, from shaping the social and political values of society, from engaging in service to the public. Stanford's culture is very supportive of these individual and group endeavors, though the university itself, which has no political mandate, must mostly restrict itself to the pursuit of knowledge. Involvement in service while here provides you, in your role as citizens, with a chance to make yourself as effective as possible by applying the same critical reasoning and honest pursuit of knowledge to public issues that is otherwise prized within the university. One of my predecessors as president, Richard Lyman, once said: "Enthusiasm without competence is at least as useless--and perhaps more dangerous--than the reverse."

I come to my final point--the public service universities render by increasing society's knowledge. In an address to Stanford's "pioneer class," the Class of 1895, Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, highlighted the importance of education fitted to individual needs. His talk stressed education as strengthening individual character, "the growth of the power of choice." Said Jordan: "The best political economy is the care and culture of men. The best spent money of the present is that which is used for the future . . . The university stands for the future." To put it differently, Jordan believed the university is "the best political economy."

There is much talk in government and industry of "technology transfer" from universities. However, the most successful method of knowledge transfer lies in educating first-rate students who have been engaged in the search to know--men and women who will then be able to take on leadership roles in industry, in business, in government, and in the universities themselves. From the education of such leaders, a great stream of blessings has flowed and will flow in the future to promote the public welfare, here and abroad. And by no means does this stream consist only of scientific and technological innovations: It includes the capacity to reflect about the human condition in history and diverse cultures, and to develop an understanding--likely not a complete understanding but a probing one that stresses different ways of looking at the world within the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Stanford's motto, "The wind of freedom blows" (Die Luft der Freiheit weht), was chosen by our first president after he had encountered the phrase in a biography of Ulrich von Hutten, a humanist who had lived at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century and who, in the course of the 19th--century, had captured the public imagination as an early fighter for secular freedom. I do believe that our motto sums up most everything I talked about this afternoon. In his own student days, at the height of the Renaissance, Hutten made an enthusiastic statement about the search to know. He wrote in a letter to a fellow humanist: "It is a pleasure to live. . . Studies blossom and the minds move." I wish that you may fully experience the pleasures that come from studies blossoming and minds moving.

Welcome to the Farm, Class of 2003! SR