Convocation for the Class of 2028
Remarks as delivered at the Ralph S. O’Connor Recreation Center
Thank you, Vice Provost Phillips. And now, to the great Class of 2028 and our terrific transfer students, welcome, welcome to Johns Hopkins University!
So, in case you may have forgotten or lost sight of this fact, let me remind you that the first day of classes, and the formal start of your academic journey here at Hopkins, is mere hours away.
How’s that for a stress-relieving icebreaker that you might expect from your president?
I can see the wheels churning.
How late can I get up, then, to fit in an intense workout at O’Connor, then scarf down breakfast at Hopkins Café—and still make it to my class in Mergenthaler with a minute or two to spare?
And, by the way, which red brick building is Mergenthaler, anyway?
This night always takes me back to my many “night befores.” And in each case, I too experienced that swirl of intense and contradictory emotions: exhilaration, trepidation, self-assurance, self-doubt, impostor syndrome that some of you, perhaps many of you, are feeling right now.
Don’t worry. I know you will settle into the rhythms of this place and soon enough find a clear sense of belonging. Of purpose.
Indeed, you may even find a life partner. We aim to be a full-service university.
I’m going to speak truth to you. I can’t count the number of times that I have met couples in this country and abroad at our alumni events who trace the start of their relationship to their time as undergrads at Johns Hopkins. Their story sometimes even starts with the words: “It happened when I gazed across the crowd at the President’s Convocation address, and I just knew …” OK, I took some license with that specific example. I never heard those words before exactly. But there’s always a first time, and maybe this is the one.
So, if you want to take a quick scan across the room … I can wait.
Apart from romantic endeavors, there will be many other memorable moments that you will experience here, and, among the most exhilarating will be those that occur when you are exposed to ideas that challenge, perhaps upend, your understanding of the world.
And here, I am carried back to one of these moments in a class that all first-year law students have to take: Introduction to Torts.
Now, as a former law professor, I would enjoy nothing more than to spend hours discussing the nuances of this august body of laws with you.
But let me spare you with the TL;DR version.
Torts are a fundamental concept in civil law, a body of rules that is all about how people treat one another. These are laws that help to regulate and harmonize human society by reducing the risk of injury or harm to one another. In simple terms, if you harm someone, you may have committed a tort.
Evolving over many years, the system of torts can be thought of as the sinew of a community; they set the ground rules for how we treat each other as neighbors and fellow citizens.
Now, as is true of any realm of law, there are some, let us say, dubious cases.
Like the son who sued his mother for taking away his cell phone. (Parents watching never fear: Mom won.).
Or the guy who sued his date for texting throughout Guardians of the Galaxy 3. (Clearly not a great Hinge match.)
But one landmark case in this arena that stands out to me, Donoghue v. Stevenson. It illuminates something important.
Allow me to take you back … 96 years ago almost to the day … to Sunday, August 26, 1928.
We’re in Paisley, Scotland, a small town on the outskirts of Glasgow.
Mrs. May Donoghue ambles across its cobbled streets to meet a friend for a drink and a good gossip session at Wellmeadow Cafe. Mrs. Donoghue orders a bottle of ginger beer …
[Picture of bottle]
pours half into her glass and swills it down with gusto.
She enjoys its piquant taste but notes perhaps that it is a tad earthier than usual.
And as she pours the rest of the beer into her glass, she is startled to find this at the bottom of the bottle.
[Picture of bottle with snail saying, “Gooo Hop!”]
OK, I get that maybe the snail didn’t say “Gooo Hop!”
But it is true that Mrs. Donoghue did find a snail at the bottom of her drink.
Mrs. Donoghue promptly filed a lawsuit against the company that produced the beer, claiming that she had suffered shock and gastroenteritis from the surprise ingredient.
I’ll leave it to the budding physicians in the room to debate the accuracy of her diagnosis, but she certainly claimed that it was the company’s responsibility to ensure the product was safe for consumption … or at the very least snail-free.
Now, contrary to all precedent until that time, the court ruled in favor of Mrs. Donoghue, asserting that one “must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor.”
This case laid out for the first time a key legal concept in Anglo-American law: That we owe a “duty of care” to our neighbors.
Now, at this point, you may have decided this is not the TL;DR version and that we are in the middle of a law seminar that you never signed up for.
And you may be wondering, what does any of this have to do with us or our time here at Johns Hopkins.
The answer is the duty of care to our neighbors is not confined to the legal sphere alone. It serves as a powerful idea that underpins our university’s culture and norms around how we ought to relate to one another.
The duty of care is an idea that is obvious and is right for us. Actually indispensable to our functioning. But tacit and discussed not nearly as much as it should be.
As you learned at this week’s Democracy Day, universities stand apart because of our foundational commitment to academic freedom, the freedom to pursue ideas wherever they lead.
This means that we honor and celebrate the right to challenge received wisdom; to advance ideas that are disquieting or even provocative, that can unnerve, upset, and confound others.
And we honor, honor this ideal because we believe firmly that open debate and discussion, the rigorous contestation of ideas, allows us to confront possible flaws in our arguments and refine, reimagine, or reject our own convictions in favor of more sound ones. And this moves us ever closer to truth.
Indeed, we fearlessly pursue this commitment to truth and discovery in a moment and a nation so deeply polarized that people—increasingly and distressingly—cannot imagine even sitting down for a ginger beer (with or without the snail) with those who hold different political views from their own.
But with our own bedrock commitment to open debate comes clear responsibility.
A responsibility that can be expressed in the metaphor of a duty of care to one another.
A duty that starts first and foremost with the obligation to speak your truth so that we can all benefit from the unique perspectives and experiences that each of you bring to this community.
A duty to recognize the humanity of others even as you oppose, perhaps strenuously, their views, their claims to fact, perhaps even their values, their core beliefs.
A duty to find ways to listen to the ideas of others—and truly open yourselves to the possibility that those ideas may just contain some seed, some germ of truth within them.
In embracing this duty, the goal is not to force agreement, but to resist the temptation to inflict maximal damage to those with whom you disagree.
In other words, simply, a duty to treat the person next to you as you would a neighbor.
A duty of care that is owed to our neighborhood.
And so, as you embark upon this journey of learning and of probing, testing and contesting ideas together, we cannot—none of us can—lose sight of this foundational duty we owe to one another.
And together, building on our common humanity, we become so much better equipped to fulfill our noble mission. To seek and to find truth, and to share that truth with each other and the world.
To the Class of 2028, welcome, welcome to our neighborhood. We are so glad you are here.
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