Students, as for you, men and women of the Class of 2010-the Double Dimes, as my internet spies tell me you have dubbed yourselves: if this day is harsh for others, it's great for you. Today you are promoted: you are the premier attraction here, the person it's all about. This summer I've run into a number of you as you whiled away the days waiting for school to start. I met future Dukies in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in Korea and in Beijing. I spent an evening with 70 or 80 of you from the slightly less distant Durham and Wake counties. I've greeted many of you as you tromped off in preorientation trips to the woods, or to the ocean (welcome back, Pirates of the Carolinas), or to do good works in Durham. On all the migratory routes that brought you here, I've seen one thing in your faces: pride that you are about to enroll in one of the world's great universities; a look of shining promise and eager anticipation; a sense that some great thing is about to begin.
Some great thing is about to begin. But what, exactly? In coming to college you're traveling through a great transition. What's on the other side of that transition is, or could be, a great transformation. I don't exaggerate. The chapters of childhood are now behind you. This is where your adult self will take strength and disclose its shape. You've done a lot of preparation. Here you can forge the knowledgeable, capable self you'll carry forward into later life. Your larva or creepy stage is past; your pupa or cocooned days are done. Now it's time to emerge in splendid maturity-and Duke is here to help realize this empowered version of you.
If you have any lesser idea of what's in store for you in college, then you're underestimating the meaning of this day. But unlike moths and butterflies, this transformation is not guaranteed by the action of genetic switches. The main fact about the possibility that's now before you is that to be actualized, it requires you to want it and actively to seek it. What Duke could give you won't be impeded by any lack of ability on your part: having chosen you over many thousand others, we know you have the requisite gifts. You also won't be hindered by lack of opportunity: you'll search a long time before you find the thing you can't do at Duke. But what could reduce the value of your years here is your failure to reach for the self-enlargement that could await you, and your clinging to ways you're now free to outgrow.
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It's also part of the distinctive character of Duke that it offers rich access to real-world experience that can help you test and amplify classroom learning and put it to human use. You "have to" take a foreign language at Duke, it's true. But which would have a better payoff: to do just as much as you "have to" and call it a day? Or to take your Spanish to the Durham public schools that are experiencing a massive influx of Latino population, where you could get real-world practice using your language, perform a real-world service to people new to a very foreign land and learn something beyond frozen political slogans about contemporary American immigration? Students in the Pratt School "have to" learn all sorts of things to master the disciplines of engineering. But you'd also learn the power that knowledge gives if, like students I know, you bring classroom-trained design knowledge to bear on the challenge of designing prosthetic devices for disabled children or assisting victims of natural disasters, like the students of Duke's Engineers Without Borders.
I'm pounding on you and I may be preaching to the converted, but I don't want one of you to miss my point. You're about to start a new life here. As you do so, you need to know that there are choices about how you could put that life together, and that some choices will yield a far richer experience than others. If you want to hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign over your brain-or if, like cabs I'm always hailing in New York City, you plan to turn on your mind's 'Off Duty' sign whenever you finish your required tasks-that would be one choice.
But it's not the one that will make life most interesting here day by day; and it's not the one that does long-term justice to your talents and potentials.
When I think about the resources here for you, high on my list would be your fellows, the women and men sitting here today. With every one of you I've met, I've thought: lucky classmates to have you in their midst! You apparently share this view, since even before arriving, you've been filling cyberspace with your fast-evolving friendships. So far so good. But here I remember something else about high school, which can be a place of friendship, but of other facts as well. Those years can be a time of painful self-consciousness and vulnerability, with all the demoralizing things they spawn: desperate anxiety to be found acceptable; pressure to do things to win acceptance that one would never have chosen on one's own; mutual enforcement of highly reductive identities based on a few salient social traits (X is cool, Y is dorky, X is a jock, Y is a wimp-my language may be old-fashioned but I doubt the current vocabulary is any more humane); a profound if invisible hierarchy defining who you should mix with, who one would not be caught dead with, and so on.
On the day you enter Duke, you come to the blessed moment when you can outgrow such things, step out of them and leave them with the castoffs of your immaturity. However you've been defined heretofore, here you can entertain a fuller, freer version of yourself. And together, you can construct a new community that will be at once more mutually liberating and more humanly interesting-unless you are so benighted as to wish to make college a second high school, and to re-erect that social prison just when you are free to escape.
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My friends, I've been speaking as if your future fate hangs in the balance depending on how you approach this place. And I do believe there's a great and a merely good way you could go to Duke -- and I do believe that getting the choice right is largely in your hands. But though I've enjoyed the chance to lay a sermon on you from this great pulpit, I'm not all that anxious about your souls. My guess is that you came here intending to make a magnificent use of Duke, and it's your own best aspirations I've been voicing as I speak. Just remember them when life gets hectic. When a weight of custom threatens to dull your first hopes, recall what the berobed man in the dazzling necklace told you in Duke Chapel when you were starting out. This is your place. Help yourself to its riches. Come here with the intention of being transformed. I welcome you to Duke.
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