寫環境污染作文400字

時間：2025-10-12 21:25:40 400字我要投稿

寫環境污染作文400字

　　Thank you, President Torres. Welcome, Governor Patrick. Thank you, everyone, for being here.

寫環境污染作文400字

　　The 146th annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association at the 364th Commencement ofHarvard University. It's a particular pleasure to welcome former Governor Deval Patrick of theCollege Class of 1978 and the Harvard Law School Class of 1982. Throughout hisdistinguished career in government, he forcefully argued for the power of education totransform lives. Nothing made that case more persuasively than his own remarkable life –from Chicago's South Side to the Massachusetts State House. When he was sworn in asgovernor, he took the oath of office with the Mendi Bible, presented in 1841 by the Africancaptives who had seized the slave ship Amistad to the man who had won their legal right tofreedom, John Quincy Adams. Governor Patrick can claim connection with both the Africanheritage of the Amistad rebels and the institutional roots of their defender. Adams, as youheard before from President Torres, was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1787, andwas both the first president of this alumni association, and himself the son of an earlieralumnus, John Adams, of the Class of 1755. That kind of continuity across the centuries is notthe least of the reasons that we congregate here every spring to renew and reinforce our tiesto this extraordinary place.

　　Let me start by noticing what is both obvious and curious: We are here today together. Weare here in association. It is an association of many people, and many generations. Wecelebrate a connection across time in these festival rites, singing our alma mater, adorningourselves in medieval robes to mark the deep-rooted traditions of Harvard, and of universitiesmore generally. Even in the age of the online and the virtual, an institution has brought ustogether, and brings us back.

　　We have also sung – or rather the magnificent Renée Fleming has sung – "America theBeautiful," to honor another institution, our democratic republic, which the men and womenwhose names are carved in stone in Memorial Church right behind me – and Memorial Hall justbehind that – gave their lives to protect and uphold.

　　When the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived on these shores in 1630, they cameas dissenters – rejecting institutions of their English homeland. But I have always found itstriking that here in the wilderness, where mere survival was the foremost challenge, theyso rapidly felt compelled to found this seat of learning so that New England, in the words ofWilliam Hubbard of the Class of 1642, so the New England "might be supplied with persons fitto manage the affairs of both church and state." Church, state, and College. Three institutionsthey deemed essential to this Massachusetts experiment. Three institutions to ensure that thecolonists, as Governor John Winthrop urged, could be "knit together as one" in a new society ina brave new world.

　　Dozens of generations have come and gone since then, and the University's footprint hasexpanded considerably beyond a small cluster of wooden buildings. But we have never lost faithin the capacity of each generation to build a better society than the one it was born into. Wehave never lost faith in the capacity of this College to help make that possible. As an earlyfounder, Thomas Shepard put it, we hope to graduate into the world people who are, in hiswords, "enlarged toward the country and the good of it."

　　Yet now, nearly four centuries later, we find ourselves in a challenging historical moment. Howdo we "enlarge" our graduates in a way that benefits others as well? Shepard spoke ofenlarging "toward" – toward, as he put it, "the country and the good of it." Are we succeeding ineducating students oriented toward the betterment of others? Or have we all become so caughtup in individual and personal achievements, opportunities, and appearances that we riskforgetting our interdependence, our responsibilities to one another and to the institutionsmeant to promote the common good?

　　This is the era of the selfie – and the selfie stick. Now don't get me wrong: There is much tolove about selfies, and two years ago in my Baccalaureate address I concluded by urging thegraduates to send such pictures along so we could keep up with them and their post-Harvardlives. But think for a moment about the implications of a society that goes through life takingits own picture. That seems to me a quite literal embodiment of "self-regarding" – a term notoften used as a compliment. In fact, Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers "egocentric," "narcissistic," and "selfish" as synonyms. We direct endless attention to ourselves, our image,our "Likes," just as we are encouraged – and in fact encourage our students – to burnishresumes and fill first college and then job or graduate school applications with endless lists ofachievements – with examples, to borrow Shepard's language, of constant enlargements ofself. As one social commentator has observed, we are ceaselessly at work building our ownbrands. We spend time looking at screens instead of one another. Large portions of our lives arehardly experienced: They are curated, shared, Snapchatted and Instagrammed – rendered asa kind of composite selfie.

　　Now, a certain amount of self-absorption is in our nature. As Harvard's own E.O. Wilson hasrecently written, and I quote him, "We are an insatiably curious species – provided thesubjects are our personal selves and people we would know or would like to know." But I want tounderscore two troubling aspects of this obsession with ourselves.

　　The first is it undermines our sense of responsibility to others – the ethos of service at theheart of Thomas Shepard's phrase describing Harvard's enduring commitment to graduatestudents who are "enlarged" to be about more than themselves. Not just enlarged for their ownsake and betterment – but enlarged toward others and toward the world. This is part of theessence of what this university has always strived to be. Our students and faculty haveembodied that spirit through their work to serve in our neighborhood and around the world.From tutoring at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston to working in Liberia to mitigate the Ebolacrisis, they make a difference in the lives of countless individuals. The Dexter Gate across theYard invites students to "Enter to grow in wisdom. Depart to serve better thy country and thykind." Today, some 6,500 graduates go forth. May each of them remember that it is in someway to serve.

　　There is yet another danger we should note as well. Self-absorption may obscure not only ourresponsibilities to others but our dependence upon them. And this is troubling for Harvard, forhigher education and for fundamental social institutions whose purposes and necessity weforget at our peril.

　　Why do we even need college, critics demand? Can't we do it all on our own? Peter Thiel, SiliconValley entrepreneur, has urged students to drop out and has even subsidized them – includingseveral of our undergraduates – to leave college and pursue their individual entrepreneurialdreams. After all, the logic goes, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out and they seemto have done OK. Well, yes. But we should remember: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg hadHarvard to drop out of. Harvard to serve as the place where their world-changing discoverieswere born. Harvard and institutions like it to train the physicists, mathematicians, computerscientists, business analysts, lawyers, and thousands of other skilled individuals upon whomFacebook and Microsoft depend. Harvard to enlighten public servants to lead a country inwhich Facebook, Microsoft, and companies like them can thrive. Harvard to nurture the writersand filmmakers and journalists who create the storied "content" that gives the Internet itssubstance. And we must recognize as well that universities have served as sources ofdiscoveries essential to the work of the companies advancing the revolutions in technology thathave changed our lives – from early successes in creating and programming computers todevelopment of prototypes that laid the groundwork for the now-ubiquitous touchscreen.

　　We are told, too, that universities are about to be unbundled, disrupted by innovations thatenable individuals to teach themselves, selecting from a buffet of massive open online coursesand building do-it-yourself degrees. But online opportunities and residential learning are not atodds; the former can strengthen – but does not supplant – the latter. And through initiativeslike edX and HarvardX, we are sharing intellectual riches that are the creations of institutionsof higher learning, sharing them with millions of people around the globe. Intriguingly, we havefound that a highly-represented group among these online learners around the world is teachers– who will use this knowledge to enrich their own schools and face-to-face classrooms.

　　Assertions about the irrelevance of universities are part of a broader and growing mistrust ofinstitutions more generally, one fuelled by our intoxication with the power and charisma of theindividual and the cult of celebrity. Government, business, non-profits are joined withuniversities as targets of suspicion and criticism.

　　There are few countervailing voices to remind us how institutions serve and support us. Wetend to take what they do for granted. Your food was safe; your blood test was reliable; yourpolling place was open; electricity was available when you flipped the switch. Your flight toBoston took off and landed according to rules and systems and organizations responsible forsafe air travel. Just imagine a week or a month without this "civic infrastructure" – without theinstitutions that undergird our society and without the commitment to our interdependencethat created these structures of commonality in the first place. Think of the countries in WestAfrica that lacked the public health systems to contain Ebola and the devastation that resulted.Contrast that with the network of institutions that so rapidly saved lives and containedspread of the disease when it appeared in the United States. Think about other elements of ourcivic infrastructure – the libraries, the museums, the school committees, the religiousorganizations that are as vital to moving us forward as are our roads and railways and bridges.

　　Institutions embody our present and enduring connections to one other. They bring ourdisparate talents and capacities to the pursuit of common purpose. At the same time, they linkus to both what has come before and what will follow. They are repositories of values – valuesthat precede, transcend, and outlast the self. They challenge us to look beyond theimmediate, the instantly gratifying, to think about the bigger picture, the longer run, thelarger whole. They remind us that the world is only temporarily ours, that we are stewardsentrusted with the past and responsible to the future. We are larger than ourselves and ourselfies.

　　That responsibility is quintessentially the work of universities – calling upon our shared humanheritage to invent a new future – the future that will be created by the thousands of graduateswho leave here today. Our work is about that ongoing commitment – not to a single individualor even one generation or one era – but to a larger world and to the service of the age that iswaiting before it.

　　In 1884, my predecessor Charles William Eliot unveiled a statue of John Harvard and spokeof the good that can come from the study of what we might call the "enlarged" life of the manwhose name this university bears.

　　Eliot said: "He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fructified and multipliedbeyond all power of measurement or computation. He will teach that from the seed which heplanted … have sprung joy, strength, and energy ever fresh, blooming year after year in thisgarden of learning, and flourishing … as time goes on, in all fields of human activity."

　　In other words, that statue we paraded past this afternoon is not simply a monument to anindividual, but to a community and an institution constantly renewing itself. Your presencehere today represents an act of connection and of affirmation of that community and of thisinstitution. It is a recognition of Harvard's capacity to propel you toward lives and worldsbeyond your own. I thank you for the commitment that brought you here today and for all itmeans and sustains. I wish you joy, strength, and energy ever fresh.

　　Thank you very much.

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