A word before you go ...

President, Boston University

Boston University, Boston, Mass.

Looking back from today on the two decades following the American Revolution, what stands out is not the image of people exhausted by war and riven by factionalism, but a nation brimming with new ideas and eager to seize the opportunity to try them out.

The 20 years from 1783 to 1803 may have been not only the most creative in American history, but among the most creative in human history. The world we know today – a world of constitutional democracy, respect for human rights, individualism, and religious toleration – was born in that era.

I have ventured to remind you all of this history to offer a fresh perspective on the situation that confronts us today.

In 1783, the United States was born; today it is the world's oldest continuous democracy. But that is merely a cold fact. The warm truth is that in May 2002, the United States is once again newborn.

Democracies do not exist like insects preserved in amber. Rather they must continually re-create themselves.... [T]his American democracy urgently calls upon your creative energy, your intelligence, your discipline, your imagination, and your vision....

[The] past was only eight months ago, and the people who committed the atrocities are still heroes to millions. Turning your attention exclusively to your own pursuit of happiness is not an option.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.

You and I and all of us live in a land abundant with choices. No people in history have ever had so many choices....

Do you realize, for example, that every time you go into a grocery store – a modern supermarket – there are 30,000 items to choose from?... Go into any one of the giant bookstores that are everywhere today and there are about 150,000 titles on the shelves....

Today, according to the US Department of Labor there are no less than 822 specific vocations to choose from in this land, and that's just the beginning, because all these definitions of vocation include a substrate of various elements....

I would like to suggest some choices. I suggest you choose to do work you love. I suggest you remain students all your lives. If there is a highway, if there is a road to take in the pursuit of happiness, that's the one.

Let's not be a nation of spectators. Let's be builders. Build your own library, for example. Read, read, read history. By all the surveys, alas, you know too little history, but you can begin now.... Some day, some day make the choice of doing something for your country.

Molecular biologist, and President, Princeton University

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Engagement is precisely what is needed, as we respond to the tremendous influx of new knowledge in science and technology that seems to accelerate every day, with reports in newspapers and on the television of the possibility of cloning a human or reconstructing aging organs from stem cells – prospects that either excite us or unsettle us.

But all this new scientific information is raising profound ethical questions that go to the root of what it means to be human.

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