Members of the NYU Shanghai Class of 2028, all of you achieved something extraordinary when you earned admission to this school. Then, by choosing to come here, you seized the opportunity to receive an education that is unique in the world, an education that is profoundly different from the education that you have received before, and profoundly different from the education that your friends will receive at other universities.
This morning I want to take a few minutes to tell you the secret to ensuring that, when you graduate four years from now, you will stand triumphant, having taken full advantage of all the opportunities your NYU Shanghai education offers you. This secret requires you to do two very difficult things, every day, to take full advantage of the qualities that make our school so very special.
It won’t be easy for you to do these two things. If you fail to do them, don’t worry, we will still love you. But I want to be very direct and honest with you this morning: if you fail to do these two things, you will have missed a golden opportunity.
The good news is, if you commit yourself to this journey, you will not be alone. Almost all of your classmates will be right there with you, and you will help each other. We on the faculty and on the administrative team are here to coach you. And we now have an exciting track record – eight classes of graduates who made the commitment, did the work, and are now enjoying the benefits.
The two parts of this secret are stretching yourself and mastering civil disagreement. I will discuss them one at a time. First is stretching yourself.
Now maybe you are thinking, “That’s easy! I’ve always stretched myself. I’ve always worked hard and pushed myself to succeed.” So let me clarify what I mean by stretching yourself. It’s not just a matter of hard work. You can work hard by using muscles that you have already developed, doing things that you have become good at.
When I say you should be using your time at NYU Shanghai to stretch yourself, I mean you should be using muscles you have not developed yet, doing things you are not good at yet, indeed doing things you are really bad at.
I mean committing yourself to take risks, to make mistakes, even to make a fool of yourself in front of your classmates and teachers by saying things that you may later regret and want to apologize for having said. Let me assure you, this is going to be very challenging.
The most fundamental stretching involves who you spend your time talking with. At NYU Shanghai, as at other universities, you have the opportunity to spend time talking with people who share your language and your culture. That is pretty easy. When you are speaking your first language to people who share your culture, it is not hard to convey ideas that are complicated, subtle, and profound. To be clever and funny.
It is much, much harder to talk with people who grew up in a different culture, especially if it requires you to speak in a second language. When you do that you will often be misunderstanding one another. You will struggle to express your ideas. Instead of being your usual clever and funny self, you will hear yourself sounding simple and boring.
Now, for the first week or two, it will not be too hard to push yourself to stretch in this way. But after a couple of weeks, I promise you, you will get tired. You will get so tired that you will be tempted to give up and start spending all your time with people from your home country, speaking in your native language.
So here’s my message. Two hours a day. Every single day. Don’t give in to the temptation to give up. Don’t quit. Keep going. Spend two hours a day stretching yourself to be really engaged, speaking a second language with someone from a different culture.
Just sitting in class next to such a person doesn’t count. I mean two hours of really talking with them or actively doing something with them. It can be talking about what the professor said to you that day in GPS, or it can be talking about videos, or it can be talking about the meaning of life. But I mean actively engaging.
This will be the most difficult challenge you face during your first semester here, but you cannot postpone it. If you do not do it during the first semester, you will not be able to catch up later.
But here’s the good news. If you follow the two-hour rule, if you stretch yourself in this way, you will graduate from NYU Shanghai in 2028 with a new set of skills that will make you stand out in everything you do. It will completely change the opportunities that you will enjoy for the next 60 years after you graduate.
The second secret to an NYU Shanghai education is mastering civil disagreement.
This secret has two elements to it – disagreement and civility. Both elements are equally important. Disagreeing without civility doesn’t do it; being civil and avoiding honest disagreement doesn’t do it either. The skill you must acquire is the ability to integrate the two, the ability to disagree with civility.
NYU Shanghai is a small community, but it has been constructed as an exceptionally diverse community. A community of people who have had very different life experiences, who see the world from very different perspectives, who hold very different beliefs about what is important in life.
This diversity means that we will often have different ideas from one another. Not only about trivial things, like what flavor of ice cream is best. But also about deeply important things. When people have different ideas about important things, it can be tempting for them to take one of two approaches that are contrary to the spirit of NYU Shanghai.
One mistaken approach is to disengage. It is to say, “let’s just agree to disagree.” It is to treat the topic as purely a matter of opinion, a matter that is not susceptible to debate or reasoned discussion.
Please don’t ever say, “let’s just agree to disagree.” That is not the NYU Shanghai way. Here we are committed to a sensibility that says the entire human experience is susceptible to critical analysis and debate, a sensibility that says we will push ourselves to engage deeply with problems and arguments, to keep pushing together for a shared vocabulary and a shared understanding. Even if we do not agree, we believe we should be able to build a shared understanding of why we disagree.
The opposite mistaken approach from disengagement is engagement, but without civility. Sadly, this has become one of the dominant modes of expression on social media. The tone is one of outrage. “Anyone who disagrees with me is evil. I will show them no respect. I will treat their disagreement with me as a personal attack, an act of violence that demands an equally violent counterattack.”
Once again, that is not the NYU Shanghai way. Our university is committed to a fundamentally optimistic belief that, on the one hand, differences of view, background, and perspective are real and important, and, on the other hand, people who hold those differences can come together, listen to one another with tolerance and respect, and engage.
So how can you master civil disagreement? I have three tips: prepare to be upset, assume good will, and listen actively. First, prepare to be upset. In your classes, I predict that at least once this semester you will hear a professor or a classmate whom you respect put forward an idea that you find troublesome, perhaps even offensive. And outside of classes, I predict you will also experience a situation when a classmate says something you think rude, even insulting. You may even feel attacked by her or his words. You will be upset. You will be stressed.
I am telling you this now, because I don’t want you to be caught off guard. One of the goals of an NYU Shanghai education is to empower you with the skills to address and respond to ideas you believe are misguided. Practice is the only way to develop those abilities.
That brings me to my second tip. Assume good will. The fact that someone has said something you find upsetting does not mean they wanted to hurt your feelings. In fact, most of the time, you will find they did not. More often you will discover that they genuinely wanted to persuade you of something they believe deeply and sincerely, and they were thoughtless about how you might feel. You will be much more effective in your response if you assume sincerity and good will.
My third tip is that you should listen actively. An argument is not productive if people talk past one another, repeating over and over again why they believe what they do. In order for it to be productive, each person should be asking themselves, “How could a good and decent person, someone I respect, see this question so differently from the way I do?” Once you know the answer to that question, you hold the key to building an argument that might get them to change their mind.
What is active listening? It involves listening very carefully to what the other person says and then paraphrasing it back to them. “OK, if I understand you correctly, you are saying X.” That simple exercise allows you to move to the next step, when you explain to the other person why you see things differently from them.
This exercise of paraphrasing back opens up space for the two of you to work together, cooperatively, respectfully, to build a common explanation for your disagreement. You will find that, most often, the explanation is this one:
Both of you endorse the same values. In this case, two or more of those values are in tension with one another. And it turns out that one of you places more weight on one of the values and the other one places more weight on a different value.
The poet John Keats had a name for the quality that active listening helps you to develop. He called it, “negative capability.” Keats knew that whenever people are facing two conflicting arguments, they naturally seek rapid closure. Figure out which argument is right and which is wrong. Which is stronger and which is weaker. But, said Keats, the most insightful people like Shakespeare are able to “luxuriate in uncertainties and doubts, entertaining two opposing ideas without irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This ability to entertain two opposing ideas without irritable reaching after fact and reason is called “negative capability.” And you will develop it through active listening.
Stretch yourselves. Master the craft of civil disagreement. In order to achieve that mastery, prepare to be upset, assume good will, and listen actively so that you develop your negative capability.
Before I conclude, let me make one very specific, small point. It is about official communications. As NYU Shanghai students, you must make use of both our official communication channels – email and WeChat. At least once a day, you must log in to your email account and read it carefully. And you must log in to the official WeChat account. You will be held strictly responsible for any information that we communicate over those channels, and if you fail to check you could find yourself in trouble.
Members of the Class of 2028, you are beginning an absolutely amazing experience. Your four years as NYU Shanghai students will be among the most exciting and gratifying years of your life. You will feel yourself changing every day. You will feel your powers expanding, and it will be wonderful to hear others tell you how much you have changed.
We are going to have a lot of fun together. Welcome, and I look forward to seeing you again on Thursday morning, when we will talk about Antigone.