Brodhead to Students: Education in a Transforming World

With this splendid building framing 1700 faces bright with promise, your Duke debut makes an awe-inspiring spectacle-or as we say in the vernacular, this is awesome! But what if the picture suddenly changed? What if this scene melted like the fabric of a dream and you woke to find yourself one year back, with a year of high school left to go? Horrors! The whole college admissions slog would lie ahead of you. You'd still have all those applications to write, and all that anxiety about where you'd manage to get in. Plus you'd be trapped in a world that already felt too small for you, its boundaries too confining, even its challenges thoroughly known.

Back then, you didn't just want to get to the next place of schooling. What you really craved were new exposures and fresh opportunities, a chance to realize yourself on a larger scale. What a relief! It is not a year ago. You did get into one of the world's great universities. And your horizon is about to be thrown open as wide as you could wish.

If you feel some anxiety at the prospect, what would you expect? When people arrive at Duke, they all know how to appear masterfully relaxed and composed. This creates the illusion that everyone but oneself is already perfectly well adjusted, not to say radiantly happy. (Don't forget: that's what others are thinking of you.) But though people hide it well, the first hours of college are usually a tumult of contradictory emotions-immensely exhilarating and hopelessly confusing; frantically sociable but painfully lonely; filled with self- confidence but fraught with self-doubt.

These mixed feelings prove nothing about what in fact awaits you. The only thing they prove is that you are crossing the threshold from the too-familiar to the unfamiliar: the very thing you want and need. Soon this place will feel like home, and these strangers will be friends the likes of which you never knew. Do you doubt it? Trust me: it happens every year. But though I want you to be happy, I also hope you'll get the full measure of a Duke education, and this means having the courage to embrace the unfamiliar.

Your class has a funny historical distinction. When you were first in high school, the world economy seemed on a path of magical, endless growth. Your junior year taught us that the same dynamism that can bring great prosperity can also bring wrenching dislocation. And though the worst appears past, you're entering college at a time of what Fed chief Ben Bernanke has termed "unusual uncertainty" in economic prospects.

It's not just the economy that's uncertain. It is the nature of the world we inhabit to be totally connected and endlessly self-transforming, toward ends we can't now foresee. The day I started this talk, it was reported that China had eclipsed Japan as the world's second largest economy. You know that when national economies grow at uneven rates, the relationships change among all players in every possible dimension: think what the emergence of the US economy meant for global politics and global culture in the century just past. So where are current vectors leading? I can only think of one certifiably stupid answer: assuming the endless continuation of the status quo.

Meanwhile, since we're all connected through technologies that could scarcely be envisioned twenty, ten, or even five years ago, jobs can now be broken into parts, distributed around the world, and their parts recombined, just like messages on the internet. No one can say what this will mean in practice, but it's a safe bet that many familiar careers will be fundamentally restructured in ways we can only dimly foresee. Health care will be different when the meaning of genomics for personalized diagnosis is unraveled and consultation can be done across the bounds of place. How we build houses and fuel transportation, how we produce and enjoy entertainment, how we put deals together, how we teach: if you think a single one of these will be done twenty years from now the way it is today, you need to think some more.

My point is that "unusual uncertainty" isn't a transitory condition to be erased by a rise in the Dow. Learn to love it: "unusual uncertainty" is the normal condition of an interactive, metamorphic world. All this change will be very challenging if you have no skills for adapting. But it will not necessarily be bad, and could even be quite stimulating, if you approach it in a certain way.

People who bring fixed skills to a changing world are frustrated by the play of enigmatic forces over which they have no control. But what if you brought an active curiosity toward everything around you; and the alertness to notice emerging realities and tease out their implications; and the creativity to build local perceptions into new visions of what's possible; and the teamwork to combine your best ideas with the best ideas of others; and the entrepreneurial drive to carry visions into practical results; and the humane reflection to match your creations with deep human values and needs? Then you could shape and lead change, and ride the waves instead of being swamped by them. Such active, versatile, inventive intelligence helped create every good thing you and I take for granted every day. Our ability to solve problems and expand well-being in the future will be a function of how we train such intelligence today.

That's where you come in. We didn't accept you to reward you for your killer record in high school. We accepted you because we judged that each of you has the promise to make a difference to the life of your times. Being promising is a wonderful start. But to deliver on your promise you need to develop your powers, and that means that you need education. Duke will afford you virtually unlimited opportunities to exercise and realize your gifts-amazing new people to learn from (starting with each other), inspiring trials and memorable pleasures, the chance to play an active role in understanding every global challenge and advancing every frontier of discovery. To build the self that can bring intelligence, creativity and leadership to your world, you've got to embrace these opportunities and engage them as vigorously as you can.

I said this scene was awesome, but what's really awesome is what begins here today. You came here to grow into the person you could become. We're here to help you with that very project. Welcome to this great scene of becoming. Welcome to Duke.