Remarks by Richard Levin

I am greatly honored to be with you today and to extend on behalf of colleges and universities throughout the nation and around the globe the warmest greetings to Shirley Tilghman as she assumes the leadership of this great institution. The entire community of higher education is grateful to Princeton's trustees for their inspired choice of a distinguished scientist and independent thinker -- a woman well suited to take a prominent place in the great line of modern Presidents of Princeton from Woodrow Wilson and Harold Dodds to Robert Goheen, William Bowen, and Harold Shapiro.

By all objective measures, Princeton is poised for an era of almost unbounded opportunity. You are blessed with abundant financial resources, a faculty of exceptional distinction, devoted alumni, and students the equal of any university in the land. You are well prepared to undertake your planned expansion of enrollment and to invest in broadening the scope of your outstanding research and teaching programs. We all hope that the course of events set in motion on September 11 will neither diminish these opportunities nor deter Princeton's progress. But there is no doubt that the recent developments present difficult challenges, not only for our nation, but for its great universities as well.

In the short term, all of us must help our students cope with what is for their generation a first experience of national tragedy. It is for those of us who have lived through the assassination of a president, his brother, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to help today's students appreciate fully the resiliency of this great country. Some of that resiliency is already in evidence. But we need to remember that today's students face a future that looks far different than it did three weeks ago.

We must also remember that our nation's strength derives from a commitment to freedom and democracy that makes America still a beacon of hope for humanity. And our universities have a crucial role in the preservation of these essential values. This is the second, longer term, challenge facing us: in our commitment to freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry we must be models for the nation.

America faces difficult choices in the months and years ahead: how to strike a balance between civil liberty and security at home, and a balance among diplomatic, economic, and military actions abroad. By drawing upon the accumulated knowledge of our faculties, our universities have much of substance to contribute to this discussion. To be most effective, we must be willing to tolerate dissent from a national consensus, but we must also resist convergence toward a consensus of dissent. Our universities must remain places in which opinions on every side can be expressed and subjected to critical scrutiny. This is the great legacy of the Enlightenment that inspired both the founding documents of our nation and the intellectual tradition of its universities. From James Madison through Woodrow Wilson to our own time Princeton has helped to shape this great tradition.

The challenge that President Tilghman will share with the rest of us who lead educational institutions is to hold participants in the coming debate to the same standards of evidence and reasoned argument that have governed the advance of knowledge throughout Princeton's 255 years. We must encourage in today's students and tomorrow's scholars the same mode of thinking that Thomas Jefferson urged upon his nephew Peter Carr when he wrote: "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. ... [L]ay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons ... have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven..."

I don't imagine that the tasks I have just described were highlighted in the job description the trustees gave Shirley Tilghman six months ago. But somewhere in the fine print it undoubtedly said: "The President will need to rise to unexpected challenges." We know that she will. President Tilghman, we wish you well, and we offer our support as you lead Princeton in the nation's service, in the service of all nations, in the service of reason and freedom.

top