Good morning! It’s a great pleasure for me to welcome all of you as you start out on your NYU Shanghai lives, our wonderful Class of 2028.
Indeed, today you are setting out on the next phase of your journey through life. During your time as an NYU Shanghai student, you are not only going to gain knowledge as part of your studies, whatever major you end up choosing, but you are also going to start to learn who you are and who you want to be as a person, and to experience enormous personal growth, in the sense of the development of the moral character that will shape the rest of your lives.
Now, as you know, our university has a double identity, Chinese and American. And that double identity will impact your every waking moment. It’s as though you are looking in multiple directions at the same time, all the time, as you move through the day.
Each of us in this auditorium has multiple identities. And identities matter, because as my NYU colleague Anthony Appiah puts it, having an identity can give you a sense of how to fit into the social world, and a reason for doing things, for what you do and how you think and who you connect to. It can also give other people a reason to behave towards you in a particular way. For example, someone might help you because they think you share an identity with them, or they might seek to harm you or to exclude you because they think you don’t. And here I want to make an important point, which is that the way you see yourself is not necessarily the way others see you, and that’s something that is really important to keep in mind.
We may identify ourselves in many different ways: in terms of our gender, in terms of our nationality, in terms of our ethnicity or our race, in terms of our appearance, what we wear, what we like to eat, or how and when we eat, and also in terms of what we think we are not. Also, at least some parts of how we identify ourselves are not necessarily something fixed or static; they can change in different circumstances and at different moments in time.
Our identities are formed by many different things, by family background and life experience and country of origin and social interactions and so on, and that means that no two people are the same. That’s important to remember, even if it seems obvious, because we all have a very strong tendency to think in categories, which means that we tend to generalize about the groups that we encounter, and we tend also to think that all the individual members of that group are pretty much the same, even though on some level we are quite well aware that that isn’t true.
Thinking about people in categories is very dangerous because it leads us to think in terms of stereotypes. Now stereotypes often have some basis in reality so they may not be altogether wrong, but they’re almost always not altogether accurate. They generally rest on an assumption that the members of any given group are fundamentally all alike, whether the group is, for example, women, or Chinese people, or Europeans, or vegetarians, or mathematicians, short people, or whatever. But individual members within a group or something that might look to someone like a group are not usually all alike. Women, Chinese people, British people, vegetarians, mathematicians, or short people may be alike in some ways but they are different from one another in some ways too. So we should never assume either that someone’s identity is, or is only, what we assume it to be, or that everyone whose identity seems to be similar is in fact identical.
A third point about all of this is that we also tend to think in terms of us and them, our own group where we feel comfortable and another group or groups, where we may feel less comfortable. And while we know the individuals in our own group as individuals, when we think about other groups, we may fall into the trap of making assumptions about them as a group that in fact are altogether incorrect. We might think that all British people have a warped sense of humor, for instance, or that all mathematicians are interested only in numbers to the exclusion of all else. We all know perfectly well that these sorts of generalization are at best misguided and at worst damaging—whichever group we belong to we can imagine ourselves saying “but I’m not like that at all”--but even so we sometimes do rely on generalization and on stereotyping, as a kind of lazy shorthand. At NYU Shanghai the temptation to generalize and to stereotype is sometimes a strong one, and my first message to you today is that it’s really important to make a big effort to resist generalizations and stereotypes, because they are very likely to mislead you in more or less undesirable ways.
Finally, as I mentioned, we all need to be conscious of the fact that how we identify ourselves or think about ourselves can be very different from how others identify us, or think about us. At its simplest, you may be the smallest person in your family and be used to thinking of yourself that way, but here you may be much taller than a lot of your classmates, who won’t think of you as small at all. Or you may have a run of mishaps, and think of yourself as just a completely unlucky person, while other people who may or may not know that much about you may see you as much more fortunate than them. What this means is that you should be wary of the temptation to make a snap judgment about someone you don’t know well: make the effort to really get to know someone first. I promise you it will be well worth your while.
So: back to our institutional double identity. What does that mean in practice? It means that the social rules and social practices that generally apply in Chinese society may or may not apply to us or they may apply partly or in a modified way, sometimes and sometimes not. And it means that the social rules and social practices that generally apply in American society may or may not apply to us or they may apply partly in a modified way, sometimes and sometimes not. It means, in short, that you should not take anything for granted and that there is nothing that you can assume that “everyone knows” or “everyone does.”
And in turn what that means is that as you move through each day here you have to be self-consciously aware all the time about the impact your actions and your words may be having on others, and how it makes them view you, and that self-awareness is something that may not come naturally to you.
In practice this may affect those of you who are international students somewhat differently from how it affects those of you who are Chinese students, but it’s just as important in both cases.
For those of you who are international students, it means that, like it or not, you are seen as representatives of foreigners in general and of the nation you belong to in particular. Being, in effect, a kind of ambassador may not be what you planned on when you came here, but like it or not it is how you are seen. If you do something good it boosts the reputation of the various groups you may be seen as representing--foreigners, westerners, Americans or Ghanaians or French people, say--and if you do something bad, it is likely to tarnish the reputation of those groups as a whole. If you are, say, an American student and you get into a brawl at a bar, local people will shake their heads and say “Young people from the United States tend to behave so badly.” And if you are from, say, Pakistan and you help someone who has been knocked off their bicycle, local people will shake their heads and say “Young people from Pakistan tend to behave so well.” That kind of perception isn’t a reason to do or to not do something, but there is no doubt that what you do or don’t do will be taken as emblematic of a larger group, whether it’s the university, or your nationality, or whatever. And that is worth keeping in mind.
The situation is different for Chinese students in that one of the groups whose perceptions of you matter in particular is students at other universities in China. Those students, some of whom may be your high school classmates, may see you as representatives of a certain kind of privilege. They may feel you have some advantages that students who study in a 100% Chinese university may not have—such as the ability to take your time to choose your major and the ability to study away in New York or Paris or elsewhere in the NYU Global Network. So you need to take care not to say to your Chinese high school classmate who attends another university, look what we have that you don’t, because that will cause them to feel resentment, not just towards you personally, but towards all of us. So you too are representatives, and you too have to be extra conscious of how you come across. That is my second point.
A third point I want to draw to all of your attention, whoever you are, is that you should understand that it doesn’t come across well when someone criticizes something about someone else’s country that they may or may not know a lot about, and that’s true even if the person you’re talking to happens to agree with you. They’ll feel attacked both personally and collectively, and they will probably wonder why you think you have the right to express a view that—even if this wasn’t at all your intention—seems to imply that you think you, and by extension the group they see you as representing, are somehow better, or superior, to them. That is not in any way to suggest that you shouldn’t express your opinion, but it’s to say that you should always think about how what you say comes across. So when you feel like criticizing something having to do with a group you’re not in—stop, step back, and imagine how you’d feel, if positions were reversed, and consider the full implications of what you were about to say.
Vice Chancellor Lehman asked you all to do the work of getting to know people from different backgrounds, every day, and I urge you to follow his advice to get out of your comfort zone as much as possible, every day.
We know it’s stressful to live all the time outside your comfort zone, to have to function in more than one language, as you are all going to have to do, whatever your native language is; it’s stressful to be with people who may think differently from you, or eat differently from you, or dress differently from you, or work differently from you, or play differently from you. So the natural tendency is to create a bubble of comfortable familiarity that can reduce that stress, where you hang out with people of similar backgrounds or you spend a lot of time online with your families and friends far away instead of engaging with the world in front of you, and to stay in that bubble and not engage. That is a terrible missed opportunity.
No one expects you to abandon everything you’ve ever known, but you’ll be wasting an amazing opportunity if you don’t spend some time each day making the effort to get to know people who aren’t part of whatever you see as your in-group, learning about them and what makes them tick, and gradually making friends with people who aren’t part of your in-group. Try to get in the habit of moving back and forth, in and out, of your comfort zone, at least for a little while every day. You’ll find it very rewarding and you’ll come to realize that it’s one of the very special benefits of coming to NYU Shanghai. One big advantage of doing this, too, is that you will come to see the person that’s different from you with whom you’re interacting, and they’ll come to see you, as an individual and not as an undifferentiated member of a group. Another big advantage is that it will make you both less likely to see the world in terms of us and them, and the less you do that, the stronger our community and the individuals who make up that community will be, and that means you. A third advantage as you do this work of overcoming difference, crossing invisible boundaries and developing empathy with people whose experiences so far have been different from yours, is that you will make friends who will be your friends your whole life long, and you will gain human skills that will be lifelong skills, and you will also as you learn about others and others learn about you, come to know yourself better, which is probably the most important thing that will happen to you during your four years in college. So that is where all my points come together:
- Be more than usually self-aware;
- Get to know people as individuals, including in particular people from different backgrounds and nationalities from your own;
- Be ready to move outside your zone of comfort;
- And resist stereotypes.
All this work that we’re asking of you is work that lies apart from your academic studies. Real communities—as distinct from groupings based on perceived commonalities--don’t just come into being, you have to work on them. They take time and effort to construct, and they are precious, fragile things that have to be constantly cultivated and nurtured, otherwise they’re at risk of falling apart. And if they fall apart something very precious is lost, friendships break up, feelings get hurt, people’s sense of well being suffers. So I would ask you in your interactions with one another as well as in the face that you present to the world beyond NYU Shanghai, to remember Confucius’ golden rule: do not treat others in ways you would not want to be treated yourself—in other words, do as you would be done by. And that will strengthen you personally and it will strengthen our entire community.
Speaking for myself, as one member of the NYU Shanghai community, who in the twelve years since our university launched has been privileged to learn so much about so many different things, in some of the ways that I described just now and in others, I am so looking forward to getting to know you over the next weeks, months, and years, in class and around campus. A warm welcome to NYU Shanghai!