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164TH COMMENCEMENT
164TH COMMENCEMENT
On May 25, 2024, Bard College President Leon Botstein conferred 395 undergraduate degrees on the Class of 2024, 229 graduate degrees, and 40 associate degrees on students from the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard Microcolleges. The Commencement address was given by earth scientist Naomi Oreskes.
“In this moment of joy, I’d like to talk today about something slightly difficult: the problem of conflict and contradiction. We all know—and to some degree understand in our hearts—that joy and sadness can reside in the same place, even at the same time. Today, you graduates are happy to be graduating, but probably sad to be leaving friends.
You may be excited about what comes next, but also anxious. This sort of contradiction— the bittersweet quality of many of life’s milestones—is obvious. Less obvious is how we manage the conflict and contradictions in everyday life. Bard is proud of its status as a liberal arts college, and rightly so. But liberalism has its own well-known contradictions—or at least tensions—such as the oft-remarked tension between our cultivation of expert knowledge and our commitment to democratic decision-making. It’s an instinct for many of us to want to resolve contradictions. What I’d like to suggest today is that not resolving contradiction is actually central to intellectual life, and the core mission of great colleges and universities like Bard. The answer to many problems is indeed both/and, and many conflicts arise in part because we insist that there must be an answer. We succumb to the fallacy of the excluded middle: It’s either capitalism or communism. It’s either individual rights or the common good. It’s either censorship or free speech absolutism. As members of a living and learning community, it is our job to explore ideas and, where necessary, do the hard work of explaining why certain claims are false, harmful, or otherwise problematic. It is our job not to suppress bad ideas, but to expose them as bad. And, especially in these times when it sometimes seems that everyone is yelling at each other, to find the capacity to listen and, where appropriate, just be quiet. Not everything that can be said should be said. Civility, decency, and just plain kindness sometimes require us to hold our tongue. Sometimes the right answer in the face of a problem is not to do something, but just to stand there. To wait, to watch, to listen.”
—Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
