布隆伯格哈佛毕业演讲.docx

1、布隆伯格哈佛毕业演讲 Thank you, Katie卡地 and thank you to President Faust, the Fellows of Harvard College哈佛大学研究员, the Board of Overseers督学委员会成员, and all the faculty, alumni, and students who have welcomed me back to campus. Im excited to be here, not only to address the distinguished graduates and alumni at Ha

2、rvard Universitys 363rd commencement but to stand in the exact spot where Oprah stood last year. OMG. Let me begin with the most important order of business: Lets have a big round of applause for the Class of 2014! Theyve earned it! As excited as the graduates are, they are probably even more exhaus

3、ted after the past few weeks. And parents: Im not referring to their final exams. Im talking about the Senior Olympics, the Last Chance Dance, and the Booze Cruise 买酒一日游 I mean, the moonlight cruise月光巡游. The entire year has been exciting on campus: Harvard beat Yale for the seventh straight time in

4、football. The mens basketball team went to the second round of the NCAA tournament 美国大学生篮球联赛锦标赛for the second straight year. And the Mens Squash team won national championship. Whod a thunk it: Harvard, an athletic powerhouse! Pretty soon theyll be asking whether you have academics to go along with

5、your athletic programs. My personal connection to Harvard began in 1964, when I graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and matriculated here at the B-School. Youre probably asking: How did I ever get into Harvard Business School, given my stellar 一流的academic record, where I always made

6、 the top half of the class possible? I have no idea. And the only people more surprised than me were my professors. Anyway, here I am again back in Cambridge坎布里奇. And I have noticed that a few things have changed since I was a student here. Elsies艾尔西的店 a sandwich spot I used to love near the Square

7、is now a burrito玉米煎饼 shop. The Wursthaus which had great beer and sausage is now an artisanal gastro-pub手工艺主题酒吧, whatever the heck that is真糟糕. And the old Holyoke Center 霍利约克中心is now named the Smith Campus Center史密斯校园中心. Dont you just hate it when alumni put their names all over everything? I was th

8、inking about that this morning as I walked into the Bloomberg Center布隆伯格中心 on the Harvard Business School campus across the river. But the good news is, Harvard remains what it was when I first arrived on campus 50 years ago: Americas most prestigious university. And, like other great universities,

9、it lies at the heart of the American experiment in democracy. Their purpose is not only to advance knowledge, but to advance the ideals of our nation. Great universities are places where people of all backgrounds, holding all beliefs, pursuing all questions, can come to study and debate their ideas

10、freely and openly. Today, Id like to talk with you about how important it is for that freedom to exist for everyone, no matter how strongly we may disagree with anothers viewpoint. Tolerance for other peoples ideas, and the freedom to express your own, are inseparable values at great universities. J

11、oined together, they form a sacred 神圣的trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. But that trust is perpetually 持久地vulnerable to the tyrannical 专横的tendencies of monarchs君主, mobs暴徒, and majorities. And lately, we have seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often, both on college camp

12、uses and in our society. Thats the bad news and unfortunately, I think both Harvard, and my own city of New York, have been witnesses to this trend. First, for New York City. Several years ago, as you may remember, some people tried to stop the development of a mosque清真寺 a few blocks from the World

13、Trade Center site. It was an emotional issue, and polls showed that two-thirds of Americans were against a mosque being built there. Even the Anti-Defamation League反诽谤联盟 widely regarded as the countrys most ardent 热心的、激烈的defender of religious freedom declared its opposition to the project. The oppon

14、ents held rallies集会 and demonstrations. They denounced谴责 the developers. And they demanded that city government stop its construction. That was their right and we protected their right to protest抗议. But they could not have been more wrong. And we refused to cave in认输 to their demands.我们拒绝向他们的要求妥协 Th

15、e idea that government would single out 挑出a particular religion, and block its believers and only its believers from building a house of worship in a particular area is diametrically opposed与完全相悖 to the moral principles that gave rise to 导致our great nation and the constitutional protections that hav

16、e sustained it. Our union of 50 states rests on the union of two values: freedom and tolerance. And it is that union of values that the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, 2001 and on April 15th, 2013 found most threatening. To them, we were a God-less country. But in fact, there is no cou

17、ntry that protects the core of every faith and philosophy人生观 known to human kind free will more than the United States of America. That protection, however, rests upon our constant vigilance警觉. We like to think that the principle of separation of church 消除不同的宗教信仰and state is settled. It is not. And

18、it never will be. It is up to us to guard捍卫 it fiercely and to ensure that equality under the law means equality under the law for everyone. If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so or not do so as well. W

19、hat I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways that you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice.用不损害自己自由权利的方式去限制他人的自由是不道德的。 We cannot deny others the rights and privileges 特权that we demand for ourselves. And that is true

20、 in cities and it is no less true at universities, where the forces of repression压制 appear to be stronger now than they have been since the 1950s. When I was growing up, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy麦卡锡 was asking: Are you now or have you ever been? He was attempting to repress and criminalize those who

21、 sympathized with an economic system that was, even then, failing.他试图压制那些质疑经济体系的人们，加罪于他们，然而，最终以失败告终。 McCarthys Red Scare 血腥镇压destroyed thousands of lives, but what was he so afraid of? An idea in this case, communism that he and others deemed dangerous. But he was right about one thing: Ideas can be

22、 dangerous. They can change society. They can upend traditions颠覆传统观念. They can start revolutions. Thats why throughout history, those in authority have tried to repress ideas that threaten their power, their religion, their ideology, or their reelection再选 chances. That was true for Socrates苏格拉底 and

23、Galileo伽利略, it was true for Nelson Mandela曼德拉 and Vclav Havel瓦茨拉夫哈维尔, and it has been true for Ai Wei Wei, Pussy Riot暴动小猫, and the kids who made the Happy video in Iran. Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness, and it is up to us to fight it at every turn. Intolerance of ideas whether

24、 liberal自由主义者 or conservative保守派 is antithetical相对立的 to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship学识. There is an idea floating around college campuses including here at Harvard that scholars should be funded only if their wo

25、rk conforms 符合to a particular view of justice. Theres a word for that idea: censorship审查制度. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism. Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repres

26、s conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species面临遭受清扫的风险. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League常春藤联盟. In the 2012 presidential race, according to Federal Election Commission data, 96 percent of all campaign contribu

27、tions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama. Ninety-six percent. There was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors. That statistic should give us pause and I say that as someone who endorsed支持 President Obama for reelection because

28、let me tell you, neither party has a monopoly on truth or God on its side.没有哪个政党可以永远独占真理，没有哪一个政党可以一直受到上帝的青睐。 When 96 percent of Ivy League donors prefer one candidate to another, you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a great university should offer. Div

29、ersity of gender, ethnicity, and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous政见雷同. In fact, the whole purpose of granting tenure 授予终身职位to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul纠缠 of university pol

30、itics and societal norms. When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against碰撞 conservative norms. Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research and the profess

31、ors who conduct it will lose credibility信誉. Great universities must not become predictably partisan事先预谋好的党羽. And a liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism. The role of universities is not to promote传播 an ideology. It is to provide scholars and students with a neutral

32、 forum for researching and debating issues without tipping the scales in one direction不偏不倚, or repressing unpopular views非主流的观点. Requiring scholars and commencement speakers, for that matter to conform to certain political standards undermines 暗中破坏the whole purpose of a university. This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw 退缩 or have their invitations rescinded取消 after protests from students and to me, shockingly from senior faculty and administrat