NYU President Andrew Hamilton’s 2021 Commencement Speech
May 19, 2021
纽约大学校长安德鲁·汉密尔顿2021年毕业典礼演讲
2021 年 5 月 19 日
Hello graduates.
毕业生们，你们好。
Every year, I choose a different theme to address the graduating class at commencement. But while the topic varies, the last word of the speeches is typically the same. “Congratulations.” After all, every NYU class deserves to be recognized for their accomplishments and sent off into the world with our best wishes.
But now a spoiler alert. Today’s speech will also end with the word congratulations, but its meaning to me is very different this year.
但现在剧透警报。虽然今天的演讲也会以“祝贺”这个词结束，但对我来说今年的意义大不相同。
Class of 2021, one of the most consequential years of your lives, the year in which you complete your undergraduate or graduate degree. That year coincided with one of the most consequential years in modern history. The past 12 months have seen the most serious public health emergency in a century, also a reckoning of racial justice amid appalling continued acts of violence, and also a polarizing U.S. presidential election coupled with threats to our institutions of democracy.
Now, philosophers tell us that it’s possible to find meaning in hardship. At the same time, a high schooler echoed the view of many of us this spring. When she told the New York Times, “Making history is way overrated.” And they are both right.
Over the past year, some of you responded to the momentous events we faced by finding a new sense of purpose. Some of you changed your career or your research plans. Some of you discovered new reserves of grit and some of you relied on the support of friends and family.
On some days, it was a victory to change out of your pajamas. Some of you never changed out of your pajamas. And that’s okay, too. Many of you at some point felt grief, anxiety, outrage, or fear. But even though each of your experiences was unique, there is one triumph that you all share. You kept moving forward. You kept writing papers and evaluating lab data and composing music and completing case studies. You kept tapping that daily access screener and Zooming into classes sometimes across distant time zones. You studied for finals and defended dissertations. You each completed a demanding course of study. And today, you are earning a degree from one of the premier universities in the world.
There is something else that each one of you has earned over this past year: the certain knowledge that you can do difficult things. And that will always be with you. When challenging circumstances arise in your life, you will be able to draw on this year and say, “I’ve got this, I’ve done something extraordinary before.”
So this year, Class of 2021, “congratulations” honors each of your experiences. It honors every hopeful, messy, enlightening, exhausting, inspired, maddening, transcendent moment that brought you to this point. Today, you are New York University graduates.