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美东时间8月22日上午，耶鲁大学为2026届本科新生举办了开学典礼。耶鲁本科学院新任院长、比较文学 Douglas Tracy Smith 讲席教授伯里克利·刘易斯首次在开学典礼上发表演讲，主题为“论交流”。 以下视频来源于 耶鲁北京中心   演讲全文
President Salovey, Chaplain Kugler, Colleagues, Students, Families, and Friends, Good morning! 苏必德校长、库格勒牧师、同事们、同学们、耶鲁家属和朋友们，大家早上好！ Students from the Class of 2026, transfer students, and Eli Whitney students, and visiting international students, welcome to Yale! 2026届本科生、转学生、Eli Whitney 项目录取的学生，以及来访的国际学生们，欢迎来到耶鲁！ And family members and friends, in my role as Dean of Yale College, I extend my warm welcome to you as well, along with gratitude for everything you have done in supporting and guiding these young adults. 作为耶鲁本科学院院长，我要向今天前来的家人和朋友们表示热烈欢迎，感谢你们对这些年轻人的全力支持与引导。 This Opening Assembly is one of my favorite formal events of the academic year because it introduces us to each other, just as you, our new students, have begun introducing yourselves to your classmates. And I also think of it, less formally, as the beginning of a conversation with your peers and instructors that will go on for many years to come. 开学典礼是学年中我最喜欢的正式活动之一，因为它给我们提供了介绍彼此的平台，就像你们这些新生已经开始向同学介绍自己。当然，这也意味着一个开始，一个你们与同学和老师们展开对话交流的开始，未来，这场对话将持续许多年。 You will find great fellowship here, and also you’ll find the great pleasure of learning. 在这里，你们将建立良好的伙伴关系，也会在学习中得到无比的快乐。 At the beginning of his “Analects,” the Chinese philosopher Confucius provides words that are as relevant today as they were 2,500 years ago. Here he is, as though addressing you now: “Is it not a pleasure to learn and – when it is timely – to practice what you have learned? Is it not a joy to have friends coming from afar.” 2500年前，在《论语》开头，中国哲学家孔子就阐述了时至今日仍然意义颇丰的哲思。他仿佛正对你们娓娓道来：“学而时习之，不亦说乎？有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？” And I am delighted to welcome you, our new students, who come from near or far to experience the pleasure of learning together. 我非常高兴欢迎每一位新生的到来。你们中的一些人可能离家很近，也有些人可能不远万里，而你们将一起体验学习的乐趣。 Yale Professor Annping Chin emphasizes that the purpose of learning, for Confucius, consisted in the opportunity to develop our moral and aesthetic sensibilities, to fulfill our humanity, and to do so with humility. 耶鲁大学教授金安平强调，对孔子而言，学习的目的在于有机会修养自我德行、培养审美能力、实现我们心中的人道，并始终抱持谦逊的态度践行这一切。 In a parallel with Socrates, who lived about a century later, we know most of what Confucius taught through conversations that he had, and accounts of his disciples. 我们对孔子教诲的了解大部分通过其弟子的论述，而这些论述往往以对话的形式呈现，这与我们了解比孔子晚一个世纪的苏格拉底如出一辙。 In fact, his book “The Analects” is known in Chinese as “Luny Yu,” which means “conversations” or “dialogues.” And like these ancient thinkers, the community that you are now joining is that one learns through dialogue. Thoughtful conversation can allow each of us to develop our own sensibilities and to fulfill our humanity. 事实上，《论语》书名的中文含义即“交流”或“对话”。正如这些古代思想家们一样，你们现在加入的这个校园也是通过对话和交流开展学习的。经过深度思考的对话，能够帮助我们增强自己的同理心，并实现我们心中的人道。 The Yale College community has a long history, shaped by the many generations of students who have come before you. 耶鲁本科学院有着悠久的历史，经过了数代耶鲁学子的发展和完善。 And this week, more than 1,500 of you have come to New Haven from all over the world. No single racial or ethnic group makes up a majority in this very diverse student body. 本周，超过1500人从世界各地来到纽黑文。在这个非常多元的学生群体中，没有任何一个种族或族裔群体占据多数优势。 Almost a fifth of you will be in the first generation in your families to graduate from a 4-year college. Approximately a fifth of you have received Pell Grants for lower-income students. 128 applied through the QuestBridge program. 47 were admitted through the transfer and Eli Whitney Students programs. 13 of you are US military veterans, and 21 of you began your college education at a community college. 你们之中，近1/5的人将成为家中第一代大学毕业生，约1/5的人获得了为低收入学生发放的 Pell 助学金，128人通过 QuestBridge 计划提交申请，47人通过转学和 Eli Whitney 学生项目被录取，还有13名美国退伍军人和21名最初就读于社区大学的学生。 Hear, hear. And together, you represent 51 states and territories of the United States and more than 50 countries. Amidst this great diversity, you also share much in common: you are promising students with wide horizons and an excitement about learning. 你们共同代表了来自美国51个州和地区以及50余个国家和地区的群体。尽管你们非常多元，但也有很多共同点：你们都视野开阔、对学习充满热情，都未来可期。 Now, when you hear me talk about horizons, I should say that when I wrote this speech, I was expecting good weather. So I’m hoping that, you know, the horizon will hold for at least a little bit longer. 说到视野，我想说，我在写演讲稿的时候期待今天能有个好天气。所以我希望这个好视野多维持一段时间。 Together, you’ve come to Yale to pursue a broad, liberal education. And you will find one here, in both formal and informal settings. Here we stand in front of Sterling Memorial Library, the heart of campus, which holds over 2 million books in all fields of knowledge. And I will say to you all, undergraduates, that while underneath you is the Cross-Campus Library, which is a great place to study, do go up into the stacks of Sterling even if you’re not gonna take out any books, just to get a sense of the range of knowledge that is out there and that you might someday explore, recognizing that, in your whole lifetime, you won’t make it through all 2 million books. But you’ll learn in the classrooms and discussion sections that start next week; you’ll learn in the libraries, in the galleries, and in the laboratories where you will broaden and test what you have learned; and in the desk or the carol that you may reserve for solitary study. 你们一同来到耶鲁，接受通识教育。在这里，无论正式还是非正式场合，你们都能找到适合自己的教育。可以在矗立于校园中心的斯特林纪念图书馆中博览群书，那里拥有超过200万本囊括各类领域知识的书籍（我要告诉所有本科生，虽然下面的跨校园图书馆也是个学习的好地方，但你们一定要去斯特林的书架间走走，即使不打算取下任何书，只为感受那里浓浓的知识氛围，有一天你可能会在其中探索，不过要知道，穷尽一生，你也不可能读完所有200万本书）；可以在下周开始的课堂和研讨会中开展学习，并在图书馆、美术馆和实验室中拓展和检验所学；也可以在书桌前或研读间独自学习。 And you’ll experience the less formal part of your education when you talk with people around you, in the student groups that you join, with your instructors during their office hours, or with the stranger or new friends sitting beside you at the long table in your residential college dining hall. 至于非正式场合，你将在与周围人的交流中有所体会。这些交流可能发生在你参与的学生社团里，可能是在老师办公室中与老师们的沟通，也可能是与陌生人或新朋友在住宿学院食堂长桌旁的对话。 Yale’s traditions and communities form their own civil society that exists in parallel to the official curriculum taught by the professors. Of course, you are here to pursue the formal study. But I also encourage you to explore various ways to learn outside the classroom or the library. 这是耶鲁的传统与校园形成的独特社交文化，而这将与正式的课程安排并驾齐驱。当然，你们是因耶鲁的学术氛围而来求学，但我也鼓励你们去探索各种课外或图书馆外的学习体验。 This is a campus designed, often intentionally and sometimes just by happy accident, for conversation. Together, the books, and the classrooms, and the more informal lessons that you’ll learn from each other – all of these form part of a single, broader conversation – the conversation of a scholarly community that defines the pursuit of knowledge in a great university. 有意无意之间，耶鲁成为了一所旨在产生交流的校园。书本和课堂知识，加上你们彼此互相学习的过程，共同构成了统一又广泛的交流。像这样在学术社区内发生的交流，体现出一所好大学对知识的追求。 Now you come here knowing the state of public discourse in our polarized society. You know already that, at times, it simply reaffirms our existing beliefs; at other times, devolves into partisanship or even violence. 在座的你们一定见识过这个极化社会中的公共言论，它们有时会固化我们已有的思维，有时会助推党派的偏见，甚至是暴力。 Universities are not immune to dogma, but they do aspire to a higher type of conversation. As you join or start your own conversations in the semesters ahead, think about how you can expand your horizons. 大学难免受到教条的影响，但也确实渴望追寻更高层次的交流。当你们在未来四年中开展对话时，要时刻铭记交流对于开拓视野的重要性。 One of the distinctive things about human experience is that each of us is born in a particular body, at a particular time and place. And therefore we see the world from a given perspective. But we also have the chance to expand our worldview as we grow and learn and travel. 人生经历之所以独特，在于我们生而不同。在不同时代和地方出生的我们注定将从一个特定的角度看待世界。但随着我们的成长、学习和游历，我们有机会去拓展世界观。 The poet Tennyson has a beautiful image of this kind of learning in his poem “Ulysses.” He writes: “I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.” 诗人丁尼生在他的诗作《尤利西斯》中对这一类学习做了美丽的描绘。他写道： “我是我所见所闻的一部分； 而一切经历，也只是一座拱门， 尚未游历的世界在门外熠熠生辉， 来时的路逐渐模糊， 我们愈走愈远，永不止步。” There is always something to learn just over the horizon. Whether you have traveled a long way to get here or whether you have lived all your life in New Haven, you may feel that sense of an expanding horizon as you meet new friends and explore new intellectual territory. 在我们的视线之外，总有等待被探索的未知之旅。无论你们是不远万里来到耶鲁还是一直在纽黑文生活，当你们结识新的朋友、探索新的知识，你们的视野都将更加开阔。 I’ve spent almost half my life at Yale, so I see the world from a very particular vantage point. But I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how education allows us to transcend the limits of our horizons. 我在耶鲁度过了近半生，所以我看世界的角度很特别，而我也花了很多时间去思考，教育如何让我们超越视野的限制。 In his book “Truth and Method,” an important book about historical interpretation, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that “The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point,” and he argued that understanding involves what he called a “fusion of horizons” in which we become more thoughtful about how our own assumptions and the way we see things correspond to and relate to someone else’s vantage point. For Gadamer, interpreting an ancient text or having a conversation or dialogue with another person involves opening ourselves up to reassessing our own assumptions. 德国哲学家汉斯-格奥尔格·伽达默尔在其关于历史解读的重要著作《真理与方法》中写道：“视野是从一个视角出发，目光所及的一切。”他认为，理解一项事物需要我们深入思考自己与其他人视野的相关性，即他所提出的“视域融合”。对于伽达默尔来说，解读古老文献或与他人对话时，需要让自己持开放心态，并重新评估自己的观点。 Now, he focuses on interpersonal and humanistic knowledge, but a similar process is at work in testing scientific hypotheses. In fact, the work of understanding, and even just the work of living in this world, involves a constant mental journey through time and space that develops our views and changes our horizons – a journey like the one that Ulysses made, what the Greeks called an Odyssey. It involves an ongoing metaphorical conversation where we question our own assumptions and prejudices through our encounters with other people. 伽达默尔虽然是人际和人文领域的专家，但检验科学假设是一个同理的过程。事实上，理解，甚至只是生活在这个世界上，都需要我们的内心不断超越时空、建立我们的观点、转换我们的视野——一如尤利西斯的旅程，希腊人称之为奥德赛之旅。它意味着我们要持续交流，通过与他人的接触来审视自己的假设与偏见。 Ideally, if we are open to growing, we can talk to people whose standpoints differ from our own, and we can learn from those conversations. A crucial, in fact, even a defining prerequisite of learning, especially at the university level, is the willingness to open ourselves to views and ideas – and even ways of life – that challenge our assumptions, either so that we can learn to our assumptions and understand them, or in some cases to change and to reassess those assumptions. 理想情况下，只要我们对成长持开放态度，我们就可以与观点不同的人交谈，就可以从这些对话中学习。事实上，学习的一个关键，甚至是决定性的前提条件，特别在大学，是愿意接受挑战我们假设的观点和想法——甚至生活方式，这样我们才能够学会理解并捍卫它们，或者在某些情况下改变或重新审视它们。 This doesn’t mean that you need to accept every idea that your professors or fellow students propose to you. But in the years ahead, your job will be to consider the new ideas you encounter with an open mind, to weigh new perspectives and arguments, and to arrive at your own views about matters of great importance for yourselves and for your futures – matters such as the nature of justice, the understanding of the natural world, the meaning of art, the purposes of life. 这并不意味着你们需要接受教授或同学提出的每一个想法。未来几年，你们的任务是以开放的心态思考所遇到的新想法、权衡新的观点和论据，并就那些对你们自己和未来非常重要的问题形成自己的看法——如正义的本质、对自然世界的理解、艺术的意义、生活的目的等。 You will explore these questions not only in your classes but also over meals in your dining halls, on the athletic fields, in your campus jobs, in your student organizations, as volunteers serving the community, or in any of the many pursuits open to you as a student. One of the greatest opportunities to learn at Yale comes from the “peer effect,” that’s the chance to interact with talented people your own age. 这些问题的探索将不仅发生在课堂上，还将在食堂、运动场、校园工作站、学生组织、社区志愿者服务站，以及任何作为学生可以抓住的机会中发生。在耶鲁学习的最大机遇之一来自“同侪效应”，即和其他优秀的同龄人互动的机会。 The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, who also happens to have received her master’s degree at Yale, offers a similar vision to Gadamer’s when she discusses learning about other people’s experiences, especially in the context of living in a college community. 尼日利亚小说家奇玛曼达·阿迪奇埃在耶鲁大学获得了硕士学位。她在谈到本科期间要借鉴他人经验这一问题时，与伽达默尔的看法不谋而合。 So Gadamer focuses on understanding different horizons through time and history, Adichie emphasizes listening to different stories through space and geography. 伽达默尔从时间和历史的角度理解不同的视野，而阿迪奇埃则强调聆听空间和地区的不同故事。 In her speech on “The Danger of a Single Story,” she tells of arriving at the age of 19 at another fine American university (I won’t mention the name of the other university) where her roommate knew nothing about Nigeria and made certain stereotypical assumptions about Adichie’s homeland and way of life. So at first, Adichie was annoyed at her roommate’s lack of understanding. 在她题为“片面叙述之殆”的演讲中，她讲到自己19岁时去另一所优秀的美国大学求学，她的室友对尼日利亚一无所知，还自己想象出很多关于阿迪奇埃的家乡和生活方式的刻板印象。起初，阿迪奇埃对室友的不了解感到恼火。 But after spending some time in the United States, and thinking about her own limited knowledge of rural parts of Nigeria that she had never visited, Adichie came to realize that her roommate’s assumptions were due to her limited exposure to more accurate stories about Africa. Adichie goes on to tell both positive and negative stories of her childhood and then she says: “All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” 然而，在美国住了一段时间之后，阿迪奇埃意识到她的室友对非洲的看法是由于她能接触到的有关非洲的真实情况十分有限。于是，她讲述了童年经历中好的方面和不好的方面，然后说：“所有这些故事造就了现在的我。但是，如果只讲述负面的故事，我的经历不会很立体，许多其他塑造我的故事就被忽略了。片面的叙述会造成刻板印象，而刻板印象的问题不在于它们不真实，而在于它们不完整。它们让事情的一面成为事情的全部。” Adichie concludes that “it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.” It is all too easy to make assumptions about others that we meet, or to take offense at assumptions others make about us, but our goal is to engage in dialogue so that we can overcome initial misunderstandings and learn from one another. 她总结道：“如果不了解一个地方和一个人的所有故事，就不可能很好地融入那个地方或与那个人互动。”我们很容易对遇到的人做出预设，或者因为其他人对我们的预设而生气，但我们需要做的应该是交流对话，这样才能跨越最初的误解并相互学习。 As you settle into your residential colleges and begin your classes, I invite you to participate in a dialogue. Like Confucius, enjoy the pleasure of learning. Like Ulysses, seek out new worlds. Like Gadamer, strive to expand your horizon of expectations. Like Adichie, explore the complexity of other people’s stories, share your own stories, and create new stories together. You may find the most interesting conversations in seminars or lab meetings, or you may find them in your extracurricular activities, or late at night in the college buttery. 当你们在住宿学院安顿下来、开始上课时，我鼓励你们加入一场场对话。像孔子一样，享受学习的乐趣；像尤利西斯一样，寻找新的世界；像伽达默尔一样，努力扩大你的视野；像阿迪奇埃一样，探索他人故事的复杂性，分享自己的故事，并一起创造新的故事。你们可以在研讨会或实验室会议中体验到妙趣横生的讨论，或在课外活动中各抒己见，亦或在校园食堂中深夜畅谈。 You’ll find those conversations where you seek them. In order for them to succeed, I ask you to open yourselves to learning from each other. Enter into conversation in a spirit of generosity. Assume good intentions. Value complexity and nuance over self-assurance and stereotype. These conversations are an integral part of your Yale education. The lessons they teach you will show you how to develop as human beings. And they will show you how to shape the conversations that shape our society. 美好的交流诞生于你寻找它们的那一刻。为了让这些对话顺利进行，我希望你们敞开心扉、互相学习、宽以待人、不恶意揣测、重视事物的复杂性和差异性，而不是自以为是、心怀偏见。这些交流是耶鲁教育不可或缺的一部分。它们将教导你们如何为人、如何构建对社会有塑造力的交流。 Thank you, and welcome to Yale. 谢谢大家，欢迎来到耶鲁。  |
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