This morning I had the pleasure of making my first address to an incoming class of Duke undergraduates. This afternoon I return to greet students equally central to this university's mission: the new entrants to Duke's graduate and professional schools. When you were freshmen, and I'm sure that day seems almost inconceivably remote from the maturity you have attained to now, you were probably looking to four years of college as the end of school-but in a troubling recidivism, here you are back again. (What's the matter? Couldn't you take life on the outside?) In truth you've come here for the next chapter of your education, training, and personal growth, and I hope it will be a splendid one. On behalf of Duke University, I welcome you most warmly.

Though this is, as the program notes, the 167th year of Duke's institutional life, Duke did not always have the schools you've enrolled in. What was founded 167 years ago was a one room elementary school called Brown's Schoolhouse.  But as I have come to know the history, what I have found striking is that this first creation had the gene of self-advancement built into it from the start. Unlike the hundred other backwoods academies created at about the same time, the school that became Duke always had a special drive to extend itself toward the highest known levels of education, and, by offering training in the higher learning, to put advanced knowledge to a larger social use.

While this school was still in its infancy, its leaders got wind of the ideas of the Common School Movement emanating from states like Massachusetts, ideas since codified in this country's public school system-a familiar feature in our time but a radical novelty in the 1830s. Inspired by this notion, these educators in the hinterlands of one of the South's then-poorest states remade their little institution into a normal school, a place for preparing trained teachers: one of the Common School Movement's principal innovations. Having barely survived the devastations of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, this school had the presumptuousness to hire as its leader a trainee from the brave new world of graduate education, an outsider with the newfangled degree called the Ph.D. This person brought Trinity College ambition for the activities that marked the new advanced university of the 1880s: intercollegiate varsity athletics and systematically organized graduate and professional study. (Not everyone knows that these two American staples were contemporaneous developments.)

President Crowell succeeded in introducing football to Trinity College and moving the school to the more metropolitan Durham, but he did not realize the rest of his dream. It would not be long, however, before that ambition would reassert itself. As the relocated undergraduate school grew in strength, another of my predecessors, William Preston Few, proposed a vision of a college with a full array of graduate and professional schools constellated around it, and a great industrialist-philanthropist from the school's principal family of backers, James Buchanan Duke, put up the money to make the vision real. In the late 1920s and early 1930s a gothic campus was thrown up in thick woods; bright young faculty were raided from the Johns Hopkins Medical School and elsewhere; and the Duke we know was born.

The founders of this university had two dreams in mind. One was to make this a place of outstanding intellectual eminence, "a place of real leadership," as Mr. Duke called it. But in Duke's idea such leadership also involved harnessing the power of higher learning for the larger social good. The schools you are about to enter were formed to the end of training men and women who, by virtue of their special knowledge and depth of reflection, would be equipped to staff and lead the world's great institutions-its hospitals, churches, corporations, universities, courts-and so  to meet the world's great needs: the need for intellectual understanding; the need for bodily care and healing and for spiritual inspiration; the need for justice; the need  for economic productivity; and the need to understand and care for the natural world. We are proud of what you will go on to accomplish in the careers you came here to prepare for. When you succeed, we will boast that you owe it all to your time at Duke. If I could ask one thing to you as you start out, it would be to set your own sights sufficiently high.

This new phase of your education is governed in a fundamental way by the rule of specialization. Your very enrollment was organized through the idea of the division of labor and knowledge. You were admitted to the graduate program in philosophy or economics or neuroscience, and will now begin the study of law or medicine or engineering. But there was a time when the highest intellectual and social creativity did not obey the law of specialization quite so strictly. James Gleick's recent biography of Isaac Newton reminds us that Newton was not just the great physicist of mass and motion but also a great student of optics, a great astronomer, and a great mathematician, and in addition a master of scriptural arcana and caballistic lore pertaining to Biblical prophecy, and, as well, the man who figured out how to standardize and stabilize the national currency of England. With nothing like Newton's formal education (he founded a university but never attended one), Ben Franklin made famous contributions as a printer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, and deviser of the first national communications system, the Post Office.

If we do not find such astonishing ranges in the careers of our time, it is not principally because humans in our latter day have shrunk in power. It is because, in one of the decisive historical developments of the last century or so, the place of major discovery has become the place of specialized expertise. Within the memory of living people, medical research has brought us closer to the secrets of life and health than would ever have been imaginable a short time before. The action and possible regulation of hormones was not understood until the 1920s; the discovery of antibiotics is little older than I am; this is only the fiftieth anniversary of the unraveling of DNA. But none of these discoveries was made by a generalist, nor, realistically, could they have been. In our day, if colleagues work on a single organism or gene or protein year after year, subjecting smaller and smaller objects to the play of more and more complicated techniques of inquiry, it is not because they have limited curiosity.  It is because they are convinced that only this sort of tightly focused inquiry will be able to puzzle out the clues through which larger mysteries will one day be understood.

Given this linkage of deepened expertise with tightened focus, and every field has had its own version of this development, there is no way to access the most powerful forms of contemporary knowledge except by passing through the narrow gate. Omnicompetence may be a legitimate object of nostalgia but is likely to look like amateurism or worse when we meet it in practice. When people start talking to me about my area of expertise on the basis of some general knowledge of that and other fields, I am usually struck not by the larger wisdom or deeper truth of what they say but by its superficiality or banality; and when I want someone to advise the University on a complicated issue of intellectual property rights or the comparative merits of rival healthcare models, I'm unlikely to call on a jack of twenty other trades.

You're about to enter a space of intense, demanding concentration. You have chosen to do so in the knowledge that this is the route by which expertise is struggled toward and won. I wish you the joy of your discipline, and the growth in understanding and power for which this discipline is its precondition. But let me add my hope that you will not let this focus narrow you beyond the point where narrowing is needed and productive.

For though it is true that many advances have had specialization as their enabling condition, the greatest contributions have come, arguably, from those who have retained a sense of the larger field of humanly interesting things even as they have narrowed their sights for strategic purposes. I was struck by the suggestion by Tom Cech, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA before becoming the head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, that outstanding research careers in the sciences correlate with liberal arts study in college-with an initial education that is broadly based and promotes multiple trainings, as a supplement to later specialization. China and Singapore, countries with a vigorous sense of the role educational development plays in sustaining economic development, have become increasingly interested in a liberal arts alternative to their system of tight early specialization, in the thought that this rival model may nourish a superior versatility and creativity. Further, we are all increasingly recognizing that many of the most interesting problems are radically interdisciplinary at their core. If so, the women and men equipped to attack them most constructively will not be those who have learned to work them in one dimension but those who have been trained to grasp the interaction of many sides of the puzzle and bring to bear multiple sets of analytic skills.

You had the genius to come to the American university (in my expert judgment) that sponsors the most vibrant culture of cross-disciplinary exploration. The care of those at the end of life is obviously a biomedical issue, and so the object of biomedical research; but it is no less a question of the management and delivery of care, and so part of the province of nursing; but it also involves a problem no medical school will ever cure, the spiritual crisis posed by death. Elsewhere, you might study one or another of these aspects in isolation from the others. At Duke, thanks to a program joint between the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Divinity, you might instead learn to see these dimensions as co-constituents of a single existential problem. Similarly it would be rare enough elsewhere, but it's quite natural at Duke, for health care to be studied at once as a medical issue, a matter of biological discoveries and therapies, and as an issue of management economics, in a joint program between the Medical School and Fuqua. At the time when the boundaries between the mechanical and the organic are being eroded in a way new in human history, Duke not only sponsors biomedical engineering but is literally building its research space between those of medicine and engineering. In our world every environmental issue has both a scientific and a social cause and will require both a scientific and a social cure. Typical of Duke that that when these issues are studied at the Nicholas School, the resources are at hand to grasp the science of environmental problems together with the legal, economic and policy dimensions of possible solutions.

Whatever you came to study, this place offers the resources to help you to that sharpened seeing that comes through a tight disciplinary focus and the means to rejoin fields of vision that academic study can put artificially asunder. But to get the full benefit, you have to reach out from your home base, and to remember to want to reach out.

I have been speaking as if only programmatic links forge bridges across disciplinary chasms. In truth you have another asset even nearer to hand. I am referring to your graduate and professional school contemporaries, people like you in intelligence who have chosen to direct that intelligence down a different path. My own graduate school experience was good in many ways but extremely lonely at first, and when I made friends (and I made wonderful ones; one is now my wife), they were almost exclusively people in my field. Easy to understand why. In a world organized by school and department, they were the people nearest at hand; and when I was spending twelve hours a day studying a single subject, they were the people I could most readily discuss it with.

But transposing the intellectual boundaries of the disciplines onto one's social life can be extremely impoverishing, since it shuts out a larger community of friends and shuts you in from what they could teach you of other fields. Here again, the special character of Duke can be of help. Of the major research universities I have been associated with, this is the one where the graduate and professional students are most emphatically welcome to participate in the life of the university outside their local borough. Duke is also, in my experience, simply an overwhelmingly friendly place. So as you enter this school, you should have the courage to join its community in the fullest sense. Make friends outside your academic island, as many as you can from across as many borders as you can. This will give you more than a happy life, though I do not underestimate the value of that. Every friend you win from outside your specialization could be your bridge to knowledge you have shut yourself off from.

If you can bear it, I have one final word of advice. You are very smart and successful people. You would not have been admitted to the schools you are about to enter if you had not compiled compelling academic records. You have also shone in those specialized feats that are America's intellectual equivalents for the Olympic games: the MCATs, the LSATs, and similar tests of strength. I salute you for your achievement, but all that success and discipline can also have a downside too, making you highly attuned to demands made on you from without.

Doing what you think your new schools officially expect of you will almost certainly assure a considerable success, both in your time here and in your later career; but this is not the road to the highest success. There is a lesser and a larger way to practice every profession. The difference does not lie in embracing or resisting the discipline of the profession: that is necessary for both. The difference comes from the degree to which you remember to think, deep down, what your studies are really about, what deep question they were meant to answer; and the degree to which you remember to ask what your knowledge is good for, what service it could render to human life in your time. The Duke culture of community service that will put so many of you to work in neighborhood legal clinics, medical clinics, small-business consultancies, and the rest will give you a splendid occasion to practice your new knowledge while still in school, and to think how this knowledge can be translated into a social good.

Hanging around in pulpits seems to have activated the preacher in me! And I confess, it's great fun to have you for my congregation. But the first truth about sermons is that they must be of bearable length; so I will hasten to my close. Graduate and professional students of Duke, we want you to get a great education, not a good one. But it's going to take some work from you to make this happen, and I do not mean only work of the homework sort. Approach this place with broad ambitions and high aspirations and you will get its greatest reward. Isn't that what you had in mind? If so, please signify by saying amen. I welcome you to Duke.