Usefulness to Mankind
To the viewbooks, tour guides and fundraising publications I will leave discussions of the brilliance of my peers, the ways Harkness has shaped my mind and the bounteous opportunities I have had at this institution. But I cannot resist the Exeter cliché of reflecting on goodness.
In addition to the usual pressure to perform well academically, I have long felt the weight of a greater investment upon my time at Exeter. My parents’ money, the money of generations of alumni, the time of my teachers and friends and the entirety of the human web upholding this noble enterprise—the millions of people now and throughout history without whose continuous labor my leisurely and exciting life would be unimaginable.
A mere four years before the founding of this school, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to the Abbés Chalut and Arnaud that, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” As though in direct reply John Phillips wrote in the Deed of Gift that “The first and principal design of this institution is the promoting virtue, true piety, [and] useful knowledge.” At the founding of this Republic, the need for an educated and virtuous citizenry was more than apparent in the quest for self-government and the liberty which that principle promises.
This, then, is my response to this weight. I bear a responsibility simply by virtue of being a citizen. And it is greater still when I receive such an investment as this society has made though this school. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Bill Jordan spoke about the temptation to separate goodness from politics, that ugly circus. It is a temptation, he suggested, that we must overcome, because politics is more than the antics of Donald Trump or the most recent inane email scandal, it is our medium of democracy.
Through political discourse and through informed voting we have the ability to impact the daily lives of millions of people. And indeed as individuals afforded the rare gift of free time—yes, even at Exeter—our responsibility to participate in this process is yet greater. We are a minority with the means to spend time and energy improving the state of this country. We owe it to those who have laboured for it and for us to do so. It is not for ourselves that we have received these gifts.
But the lessons of civic virtue apply to engagements at every level; they are demanded of us every day in the “great and real business of living.” In the last four years, this under-quoted phrase has come to mean ever more to me. Where at first I took note of the real, if perfunctory, aspects of dorm life and greater independence, it did not take long to find that physical distance from my parents implied more than a lax bedtime. I doubt that many people, Exonian or otherwise, make it through ages 14–18 without some level of emotional turmoil. Being here meant that I had to rely on myself and my friends more than any adult. Or if I didn’t have to, I did.
And that fact more than any other made the business of living with my friends real. When my mother left me on campus in September 2012, Liuba, a Dunbar proctor, seeing that my roommate had not yet arrived on campus, decided to introduce me to a couple of preps on the third floor. An outgoing historian and athlete from Tennessee and a tiny, shy and stressed out Singaporean-slash-Emirati-slash-Chinese-slash-Saudi girl. And the three of us stuck together merely because we had been left together. Over the next four years these incidentals became my friends. It was with them that I first talked not merely to stave off loneliness but because some part of their souls had become accessible to me. For the first time I joyfully did the Slightly Tedious or even Unpleasant in anticipation of some joy in my friends.
That is all to say, the greatest lesson I have learnt here is to live for other people. For those affected by my vote, my career and the way I interact with the world. I am not so presumptuous as to pretend that this idea is in any way novel, yet I can hardly resist repeating it, if only as a benediction. In doing so, I imagine the seniors I so admired prep year learning and reflecting on the same thing in the same place where I now sit. I imagine generations of students stretching back two centuries struggling with calculus and anxiety and growing up getting enough sleep. How in their years here they too must have become tied closely to each other and were influenced so greatly by the older students. How they shaped the ideas of younger students in ways they could not have understood.
Some tenuous thread of land and joy and pain connects me to John Phillips as he wished to build a stronghold of piety and virtue. And I will not discard piety here. Though I am not Protestant, yet I will contest, as Benjamin Franklin did, that the central message of Christianity is not to say prayers but to love one another and to do good.