Advancing the Cause of Our Collective Humanity

EILEEN BARROSO

To the Class of 2028, parents, family and friends: I’m honored to welcome you on behalf of Columbia College. Tonight — in this moment, and in this company — is an opportunity for you to reflect on who you are and all the things you carry with you to this new beginning.

I want you to hold in mind not just your accomplishments and academic aspirations, but also your passions, your humor, your creativity, your fear and anxieties, and hopes for the future — even, perhaps, a few regrets from your past; the entirety of the life that only you will ever truly know.

Whatever you hold true, and however you define yourself, this campus and this community is now your place — your home. Each of you is integral to it. The things you carry are singularly yours even as they are essential to the us that is becoming. An us that is strengthened by the opportunity to learn from each other.

When I headed off to college I had an ambitious set of personal and professional goals for myself; but I also carried with me a set of ideas about race and religion that had been formed while growing up in and around Boston. Before I could name them clearly, those ideas were challenged as soon as I landed on campus in Tulsa, Okla. — what was then, ostensibly, a foreign country to me.

Those experiences, over time, bloomed into a series of questions that stayed with me after college, and on a circuitous path through graduate school that eventually led to Columbia; questions that continue to enliven an abiding passion for teaching and learning.

I don’t share any of this to advocate for a life in academia but rather as a tangible reminder to follow those sparks of curiosity when they ignite inside you. Hold onto that curiosity. Take the risks attendant to following where it leads. And share it with us during your time here.

While here, you may come across the work of physics and mathematics professor Brian Greene, who lectures in Frontiers of Science in the Core Curriculum. His writing on the nature of the universe offers profound, yet basic, insights. He reminds us that, and I quote: “The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.”

As a community, Columbia is in the midst of a season of grappling with deep questions. Questions about war and conflict, the privileges and burdens of free expression and its limits, and about our shared humanity. Questions about the nature and purpose of the University itself, our obligations to each other in this context, and about the hard work it takes to ensure that ours is a campus in which every Columbian — faculty, students, staff, irrespective of where one falls across the lines of identity or ideology — is both fully welcomed and able to pursue their work free of harassment or discrimination.

The kind of flexibility that Professor Greene encourages is integral to that work, and it brings us to my second thought: cultivate humility.

To succeed at Columbia takes a particular skill set. It takes embracing an obligation to listen closely and carefully, and to prioritize the learning we came here to do. It takes seeking out, understanding and remaining in conversation with divergent ideas and points of view — particularly when it’s uncomfortable. All of this requires humility.

The Core Curriculum is meant to be your training ground to cultivate these habits, which we strive to develop in our students. The questions you encounter, the views that challenge you, the ideas you explore will and should change your sense of yourself and the world. The true promise of the Core is found in the collective engagement it invites with differences of opinion, of viewpoint and of interpretation — that is, with each other. Fulfilling that promise requires humility.

Yes, we will ask much of you, not the least of which is this delicate dance between curiosity and humility.

All of this requires respect for yourself, for those around you and for the spaces and structures that make this exploration — this very community — possible.

As you look for your own answers, challenge yourself with some questions. Are you willing to disagree, and admit to being wrong? Are you willing to stand up, and to sit down and listen?

Every one of you deserves to be seen, heard and valued.

But just as that obligation is owed to you — you owe it to every single member of this community you are entering — the us that we are together.

I believe in you. I believe in this community: the curiosity that led each of us here; our capacity for humility ...

It is my great privilege as dean to welcome each of you as we partner in this work — of learning, growing and advancing the cause of our collective humanity.

Josef Sorett
Dean of Columbia College
Vice President for Undergraduate Education
Professor of Religion and African American & African Diaspora Studies