1. 演讲
Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
The Memorial Church
Cambridge, Mass.
June 3, 2008
As prepared for delivery
In the curious custom of this venerable institution, I find myself standing before you expected
to impart words of lasting wisdom. Here I am in a pulpit, dressed like a Puritan minister — an
apparition that would have horrified many of my distinguished forebears and perhaps
rededicated some of them to the extirpation of witches. This moment would have propelled
Increase and Cotton into a true “Mather lather.” But here I am and there you are and it is the
moment of and for Veritas.
You have been undergraduates for four years. I have been president for not quite one. You
have known three presidents; I one senior class. Where then lies the voice of experience?
Maybe you should be offering the wisdom. Perhaps our roles could be reversed and I could,
in Harvard Law School style, do cold calls for the next hour or so.
We all do seem to have made it to this point — more or less in one piece. Though I recently
learned that we have not provided you with dinner since May 22. I know we need to wean
you from Harvard in a figurative sense. I never knew we took it quite so literally.
But let’s return to that notion of cold calls for a moment. Let’s imagine this were a
baccalaureate service in the form of Q & A, and you were asking the questions. “What is the
meaning of life, President Faust? What were these four years at Harvard for? President Faust,
you must have learned something since you graduated from college exactly 40 years ago?”
(Forty years. I’ll say it out loud since every detail of my life — and certainly the year of my
Bryn Mawr degree — now seems to be publicly available. But please remember I was young
for my class.)
In a way, you have been engaging me in this Q & A for the past year. On just these
questions, although you have phrased them a bit more narrowly. And I have been trying to
figure out how I might answer and, perhaps more intriguingly, why you were asking.
Let me explain. It actually began when I met with the UC just after my appointment was
announced in the winter of 2007. Then the questions continued when I had lunch at Kirkland
House, dinner at Leverett, when I met with students in my office hours, even with some
recent graduates I encountered abroad. The first thing you asked me about wasn’t the
curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol
policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why
are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?

2. There are a number of ways to think about this question and how to answer it. There is the
Willie Sutton approach. You may know that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he
replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Professors Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz,
whom many of you have encountered in your economics concentration, offer a not dissimilar
answer based on their study of student career choices since the seventies. They find it
notable that, given the very high pecuniary rewards in finance, many students nonetheless
still choose to do something else. Indeed, 37 of you have signed on with Teach for America;
one of you will dance tango and work in dance therapy in Argentina; another will be engaged
in agricultural development in Kenya; another, with an honors degree in math, will study
poetry; another will train as a pilot with the USAF; another will work to combat breast cancer.
Numbers of you will go to law school, medical school, and graduate school. But, consistent
with the pattern Goldin and Katz have documented, a considerable number of you are
selecting finance and consulting. The Crimson’s survey of last year’s class reported that 58
percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. This year,
even in challenging economic times, the figure is 39 percent.
High salaries, the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut, the reassurance for many of you
that you will be in New York working and living and enjoying life alongside your friends, the
promise of interesting work — there are lots of ways to explain these choices. For some of
you, it is a commitment for only a year or two in any case. Others believe they will best be
able to do good by first doing well. Yet, you ask me why you are following this path.
I find myself in some ways less interested in answering your question than in figuring out
why you are posing it. If Professors Goldin and Katz have it right; if finance is indeed the
“rational choice,” why do you keep raising this issue with me? Why does this seemingly
rational choice strike a number of you as not understandable, as not entirely rational, as in
some sense less a free choice than a compulsion or necessity? Why does this seem to be
troubling so many of you?
You are asking me, I think, about the meaning of life, though you have posed your question
in code — in terms of the observable and measurable phenomenon of senior career choice
rather than the abstract, unfathomable and almost embarrassing realm of metaphysics. The
Meaning of Life — capital M, capital L — is a cliché — easier to deal with as the ironic title of
a Monty Python movie or the subject of a Simpsons episode than as a matter about which
one would dare admit to harboring serious concern.
But let’s for a moment abandon our Harvard savoir faire, our imperturbability, our pretense of
invulnerability, and try to find the beginnings of some answers to your question.
I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful,
but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together. You are not
sure if a generous starting salary at a prestigious brand name organization together with the
promise of future wealth will feed your soul.
Why are you worried? Partly it is our fault. We have told you from the moment you arrived

3. here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the
brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world. We have burdened you
with no small expectations. And you have already done remarkable things to fulfill them: your
dedication to service demonstrated in your extracurricular engagements, your concern about
the future of the planet expressed in your vigorous championing of sustainability, your
reinvigoration of American politics through engagement in this year’s presidential contests.
But many of you are now wondering how these commitments fit with a career choice. Is it
necessary to decide between remunerative work and meaningful work? If it were to be
either/or, which would you choose? Is there a way to have both?
You are asking me and yourselves fundamental questions about values, about trying to
reconcile potentially competing goods, about recognizing that it may not be possible to have
it all. You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices. And selecting one
option — a job, a career, a graduate program — means not selecting others. Every decision
means loss as well as gain — possibilities foregone as well as possibilities embraced. Your
question to me is partly about that — about loss of roads not taken.
Finance, Wall Street, “recruiting” have become the symbol of this dilemma, representing a set
of issues that is much broader and deeper than just one career path. These are issues that in
one way or another will at some point face you all — as you graduate from medical school
and choose a specialty — family practice or dermatology, as you decide whether to use your
law degree to work for a corporate firm or as a public defender, as you decide whether to
stay in teaching after your two years with TFA. You are worried because you want to have
both a meaningful life and a successful one; you know you were educated to make a
difference not just for yourself, for your own comfort and satisfaction, but for the world
around you. And now you have to figure out the way to make that possible.
I think there is a second reason you are worried — related to but not entirely distinct from
the first. You want to be happy. You have flocked to courses like “Positive Psychology” —
Psych 1504 — and “The Science of Happiness” in search of tips. But how do we find
happiness? I can offer one encouraging answer: get older. Turns out that survey data show
older people — that is, my age — report themselves happier than do younger ones. But
perhaps you don’t want to wait.
As I have listened to you talk about the choices ahead of you, I have heard you articulate
your worries about the relationship of success and happiness — perhaps, more accurately,
how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness, not just money and
prestige. The most remunerative choice, you fear, may not be the most meaningful and the
most satisfying. But you wonder how you would ever survive as an artist or an actor or a
public servant or a high school teacher? How would you ever figure out a path by which to
make your way in journalism? Would you ever find a job as an English professor after you

4. finished who knows how many years of graduate school and dissertation writing?
The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love —
whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most
meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin
with it.
I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with
students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll
never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.
You may love investment banking or finance or consulting. It might be just right for you. Or,
you might be like the senior I met at lunch at Kirkland who had just returned from an
interview on the West Coast with a prestigious consulting firm. “Why am I doing this?” she
asked. “I hate flying, I hate hotels, I won’t like this job.” Find work you love. It is hard to be
happy if you spend more than half your waking hours doing something you don’t.
But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of
me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own
choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road
you are taking is going to get you there. This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some
degree, our fault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well,
wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal
arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live self-
consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has
made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take
charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as
in liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of
discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is
to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember
the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible,
remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters
to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.
I can’t wait to see how you all turn out. Do come back, from time to time, and let us know.