Parents and friends of the Class of 2008, since Duke Chapel has just enough room for the winners of the 2004 admissions sweepstakes, I must greet you at a distance in the simulcast mode. But though my greeting is virtual, I welcome you to this happy event and your new bond with Duke. After this ceremony I will be outside to meet you in person; but truth to tell, your location this hour makes a kind of sense. One of the kindest humans I ever met said this to parents on the opening day of college: "You've done so much for your sons and daughters, supported them in so many ways, now there's one more thing you must do for them. Go home." You know what he meant. Your goal when your children were younger was to help them grow into splendid independent people who could carry on on their own. Well, the day has come to make the test, and your hour in Page Auditorium could be thought of as a trial separation. Will your daughter wake herself up in time for class without you there to help? If you don't call every ten minutes, will your son eat regularly and go to bed at a sensible hour? I trust the answer is yes, but the honest answer is, we shall now see! In fact your children will thrive here, but for them to get the good of their new life, you need to back off. Parents, I join you in this day's sorrow but still more in its excitement and pride.

Well, I got rid of them! Now for you, my Dukies! As I'm sure you have already felt, you and I have everything in common. I too spent last year deciding where to go to college; I too weighed alternatives while others were weighing alternatives to me; I too was lucky enough to have the choice of Duke; I too was clever enough to take it. And since the orientation for presidents starts a bit earlier than yours, I've already scouted the territory and can report on what's ahead. Your faithful scout brings you this news: you'll love it here. Duke is very beautiful, very stimulating, very challenging, but very friendly and fun. It may take a week or two to settle in, but you have this on high presidential authority: you stand on the verge of a great new life.

When I asked myself what I could say to you on this occasion, I could only think to begin with this overwhelming fact of newness. This is, for you, like the earliest days of creation. Everything stands before you in its primal freshness and strangeness; you have not yet marred a single hour or messed up in a single way. As I reflected further, my mind gravitated to a feature of this convocation that's completely new to my experience and that helped symbolize the larger fact of newness: the chance you will have, after this ceremony, to sign the Duke Community Standard.

I won't comment here on the content of the Standard, which is printed in your program and straightforward enough. (If you plan to have trouble being honest and behaving honorably while you're at Duke, please raise your hand now so the ushers can eject you). What I found myself puzzling at was the idea of a public signing. My response to this had a certain complexity. On the one hand, I said to myself, what's the point of requiring a visible, physical affixing of the name? These are minimal moral expectations and, to my mind, just as binding whether you sign them or not. (Plus if the legalistic among you should someday say "But I never signed them," we will reply "Oh yes you did!" You agreed to these conditions when you signed your acceptance of Duke.)

But as I continued my reflections, I came to think that there was something interesting, possibly even something quite wonderful, about the idea of this ceremony. If the physical act of signing doesn't make these norms more obligatory, it does give your embrace of them the quality of a deliberate, conscious, voluntary act. Further, it enacts the thought that you become a member of this community by embracing certain values-an idea I much admire.

From there I found myself thinking of the larger historical and philosophical resonances of a ceremony of this sort. As you'll have the chance to learn, early modern philosophy is full of the thought that human societies are not something established by nature or divine law but something humans themselves make through some primal founding act. Thomas Hobbes, who did the thinking for his great Leviathan (1651) during the English Civil War, posits that in the state of nature, no man was enough stronger than any other to be able to protect himself to an absolute extent. The state of nature was a state of endless competition and self-assertion in which men were independent and, for that reason, radically and incurably insecure. According to Hobbes, civil society began when, in face of this intolerable condition, men formed a contract: covenanted with each other to each give up a measure of freedom in order to create a collectivity, the commonwealth, that could supply the security no individual could win on his own.

There are many variants on this theory of the social contract; and as you may know, contemporaries of these thinkers put such theories into practice in real historical events. In the first document printed in English in America, an oath devised by the Puritan leader John Winthrop, men and women were asked to make a community, literally to call one into existence, by affirming their acceptance of certain values and obligations. One hundred and thirty years after the Freeman's Oath, the United States came into being through conscious founding acts of public profession and agreement: the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.

From here my train of thought led back to you. For what all this served to remind me is that each of you, this day, has the signer's power, the power to author a community through your agreements. The reality of your life at Duke has as yet no determinate character or shape. It's you who will create that reality, through the habits you lay down. What will be the nature of that way of life? That's not resolved yet. It is you who will settle it, through the choices that you make. I could imagine some relatively thoughtless choices that would result in a relatively uninteresting (though still perfectly pleasant) Duke experience; I could also imagine a far more fulfilling version that you could build from the same set of opportunities. But in the hubbub and stress of arrival you may be scarcely aware that you have such choices, let alone recognize their fateful nature.

In this state, this morning's signing ceremony could have a special value. My bright idea is that this signing could be your chance to envision and affirm all the good intentions you could live by at Duke: all the intentions that, individually and collectively embraced, would construct the best commonwealth for your new life.

I have the microphone, so I get to propose some terms for your compact. For starters: Four or five years back, Duke adopted a set of curricular requirements (recently simplified) that mandate that you take courses in certain competences, areas of knowledge, modes of inquiry-you know the rest. How are you going to deal with this somewhat complicated beast? One choice would be to approach these as a set of troublesome requirements handed down by some obscure and ill-natured bureaucrat to no end except to complicate your life, which you could nevertheless manage to outwit without too serious discomfort, checking off all the boxes, by appealing to the great "they say"-the news you heard fifth-hand that Course X is a painless way to fulfill Requirement Y.

Even loading your matrix in this relatively low-minded way (yes, I have heard of curricular bingo) would yield some educational profit. But do you know what? There would be another way to cover the same ground that would yield more pleasure and more profit. You could construe those same requirements as your own intellectual goals, guides to mental muscle-groups an educated person would want to develop, knowledges and competences that would help you build a capable, powerful mind. (If you really can't think what good being competent at writing or a foreign language or quantitative skills could ever do you, you'd better come see me.) Having turned bureaucratic hurdles into instruments of aspiration, you would then set out to find the classes that would give you the most interesting and engaging way to advance toward these goals-making your academic life an act of curiosity and exploration, not a mere exercise in compliance.

Since curiosity is a prime educational value, I'd ask you to have some curiosity too about those around you. Since Duke looks for students with the intellect and character to make a contribution to the world and since such people are found in every human setting, you'll have classmates from every state and global region, every ethnic origin, every income level, every religion, every political persuasion. Let me take this occasion to say to each of you, wherever you come from and whatever you believe: This is your place. You are all equally welcome to Duke, and equally entitled to all its benefits.

But you, far more than I, will be determining what kind of community grows up among you in practice; and since it's still the very first day-since you're literally still deciding whose music will be played and who gets which bed-nothing has been fixed yet about the world you'll build. More correctly, everything is being settled by your first acts, by the forms of interaction you initiate-and it's still in your power to reflect and choose. Though we all hate prejudice, we are all deeply skilled in the mental sorting devices by which humans parse a world of strangers and identify, on the basis of superficial external signs, whether they are "my kind" or not. With the guidance of this social positioning system, you don't even need to talk to a person-don't need to engage in conscious labor of any sort-to know that he's too fat, or she's too thin; she's too dark, or he's too light; he's too northern, she's too southern; one person is too jocky, the next too wimpy; one acts as if he owns the place (the jerk!), the other is way too retiring; and this inventory has just begun.

If you took seriously the notion that you are making the commonwealth you'll inhabit, then you have your choice here, and it matters. Proceeding on autopilot, you could locate the universe of those "like" you on such initial measures and silently erase the rest of your classmates; or, a little more adventurously, you could open yourself to other types and take a deeper measure of what you might share. Which do you suppose you will learn more in: a world of mutually repelling comfort zones or a world of free, spirited interaction across all real or imagined social lines?

Might there be friction in this sort of interaction? We would be absurd to doubt it; but even there you have a choice. Will you take those who annoy you and cast them out as hopeless, irremediable Losers? Or might you find a way candidly to identify differences, learn to see them from different sides, and work out a way to accommodate the rights and needs of all? In the larger world we see both courses at work and you know which comes to a better ending; but it's not settled yet which will prevail on your version of Planet Duke. It will be settled by your own conduct: by the way you handle a new life's strains.

But being respectful and open wouldn't be the highest you could aim. One of the problems of modern pluralism is that to the extent that heterogeneous populations have embraced the idea of getting along together, an amazing feat given the world's history of prejudice and strife, a new reality has sometimes emerged. Where the lion lies down with the lamb to the tune of "It's a Small World After All," peace and pleasantness can be purchased at an unspoken price, namely the suggestion that no one should feel or assert anything very passionately lest someone else should find it offensive.

We have to hope that the world of equal rights and mutual respect will not be a world of self-neutralized convictions and watered down consensus. Imperfect though it may still be, the new world the Civil Rights Movement created would not have come into existence without hot convictions and sharp elbows. But it requires work to get this balance right. Something I would love to see Duke pioneer-and for this to happen it will have to be our common creation-is a culture of positive intellectual difference or what the poet Blake called mental strife. American universities have taken far more trouble to host athletic contests than most sorts of intellectual contention. But since powerful differences shape the force-field of our lives, the sides had better learn something about each other, and, dare one hope it, learn something from each other.

In this election year, there are questions more interesting than which will be a red and which a blue state, questions it's hard to be certain of the answer to unless a partisan position short-circuits the inquiry. What rights should we give up as the price of collective security (Hobbes's questions have not gone away), and at what point does security ask too high a price at the level of individual freedom? To what extent is it better to go it alone in international affairs, and to what extent will any international effort fail without some larger consensus behind it? To what extent is the globalized economy a system for draining away jobs that should stay at home, and to what extent do its dynamisms increase economic vitality in all regions even at the cost of local dislocation? How can radical inequalities of health be kept from tracking other forms of inequality in America and the world, and how is the better care that is now scientifically available to be paid for and made economically available?

If you think these are trivially easy questions, then you need some education. Coming to college was a good start, but then you have a choice: whether to evade such challenges as best you can or learn to engage them with knowledge, subtlety and creativity. To do the latter, you'll need to be surrounded by people trying to answer hard questions and tune in to what they say. But you need to be more than a good audience: you'll need yourselves to become skilled arguers. By skilled arguer I do not mean a person who can achieve a technical knockout in the early rounds by goosing up the level of rhetorical force. I mean a person who can put forward what she understands with all the intelligence and sincerity she can muster while still staying open to the truth that lies on the other side; and who, while not eager to give (or quick to take) offense, is willing to engage in that struggle with contrary minds that produces deeper understanding for all.

The man whose statue stands in front of this chapel sent this message to the assembled student body when the old Duke library was opened: "Tell them every man to think for himself." I'd have you add this to the pact you make here today: an agreement that you would actively think here rather than lounging in passive acceptances; that you would protect the space in which others are also free to think; and that you would so engage and contend with each other within that space as to stretch and deepen one another's minds. Is this enough to sign your name to? Of course not, but you can write the remaining terms, and I count on you to do so. And lest you forget the pact we made this day, download these words in your iPod and let me croon them to you each night as you go to sleep. Men and women of the Class of 2008, my first four-year class at Duke, you will love this place-but you'll love it more if you help make it the place that you believe it should be.