Opening Exercises 2025: A Community of Scholars

For Opening Exercises on August 31, we gathered on the front lawn of Nassau Hall to celebrate what I called “our New Year’s Day.” I welcomed students to Princeton’s scholarly community and encouraged them to embrace the qualities that define it. Here is what I said to our new transfer students and members of the great Class of 2029 that splendid Sunday afternoon. — C.L.E.

Please let me begin by saying once again what a pleasure it is to welcome you to Princeton!

Today is one of my favorite days of the calendar. It’s our New Year’s Day, a moment when Princeton starts fresh. Though most of you attending this afternoon are incoming undergraduate students, the ceremony also welcomes graduate students, colleagues on the faculty and staff, and everybody who returns to campus to begin another academic year.

Indeed, while undergraduate education is essential to Princeton’s mission, Princeton is more than an undergraduate college. Graduate education and research are equally important to this University’s mission.

This combination is by no means inevitable. In fact, Princeton had no graduate school, and only a modest research profile, for the first 150 years or so of its existence, during which time it was called “The College of New Jersey.”

At the modern Princeton, however, we regard teaching and research as inseparable from one another. That is partly because we know that world-class researchers will be able to provide accurate, state-of-the-art accounts of the subjects they teach.

We also insist that our undergraduates be participants in the research enterprise. The senior thesis requirement is the most obvious example of that commitment, but we aim to infuse the research ethic through your academic experience more broadly.

We want you to participate in the research activity and scholarly ethos of the University because doing so will equip you with the skills, knowledge, and character required to distinguish fact from fiction, knowledge from opinion, and science from pseudoscience.

Dean Michael Gordin, in the book that you read this summer and that we will discuss tonight, shows how hard it is to draw these distinctions. There is no simple test or rule that can distinguish a scientific argument from a non-scientific one.

Much depends on the judgments and practices of what Dean Gordin refers to in his book as “the scientific community.” If we widen our gaze to encompass not just the sciences but the full range of subjects taught at Princeton, we might talk about the “scholarly community.”

We today welcome you not only as students, but as the newest members of our community of scholars. I accordingly want to note some of the commitments that define academic life not only here but across America’s research universities.

One commitment is to respect standards of academic excellence when evaluating scholarship. Universities divide knowledge into branches or disciplines, such as philosophy, physics, art and archaeology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science.

Each discipline has its own set of methods, models, concepts, and assumptions by which to test arguments and claims.

When Princeton decides whether to hire or promote professors, we evaluate their scholarship by reference to the standards of their disciplines, not by whether their work is popular with the public, government officials, or powerful interest groups.

We expect faculty members and students to be loyal to the truth, not to the preferences of any party, official, agenda, or ideological platform.

Universities must be independent sources of data, theory, and argument. Faculty members and students should have the incentive, the responsibility, and the freedom to pursue scholarly excellence even when the arguments they generate might anger or displease powerful people.

That independence gives universities a unique and essential role within a free and democratic republic. It also guarantees that they will be controversial.

You will find that the scholarly disciplines represented on this campus pursue truth from varying angles and perspectives. If, for example, you ask an apparently simple question—such as, “what is color, and why does it matter?”—to an art historian, a physicist, and a philosopher, you will likely get very different answers from each.

And, by the way, when I propose asking professors a question, I mean the suggestion literally. One of the great privileges of being a student here is the access you have to faculty members who are not only world-leaders in their academic discipline but also dedicated teachers.

Go to their office hours. Invite them to lunch or to your athletic competitions or artistic performances. Find out what they know and who they are beyond the classroom.

I strongly recommend going to office hours early in the semester. You don’t have to ask about the course. You can ask them about color. Or, for that matter, you can ask them whether they agree with what I’ve said in this speech. They have no obligation to agree with it, and I find they often disagree with what I say. They have no obligation to agree with it, and neither do you.

That brings me to another of the commitments that define scholarly communities. We treat respectful disagreement as desirable and beneficial. When people ask hard but fair questions about our ideas, we should regard their inquiry as a compliment: it means they are taking our thoughts seriously enough to care whether they are correct.

Princeton physics professor Jim Peebles exemplified this spirit in comments that he made after receiving the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, which honored him for his theories about the origin, structure, and evolution of the physical universe. Professor Peebles said that he hoped that the cosmological theory to which he contributed would eventually be proven wrong.

That, he said, is how science works: new generations of scientists replace older theories with better ones.¹

To live up to the ideals of a scholarly community, we all need to recognize that some of our opinions will turn out to be wrong.

We should want to find our errors. To do so, we need to seek out criticism and test our views against the most cogent objections.

Let me mention one other principle that is fundamental to this and other scholarly communities. That is a commitment to honesty. At Princeton, the undergraduate honor code is one especially visible manifestation of this important commitment.

I trust that I don’t need to explain why honesty is better than dishonesty, or why it is wrong to steal other people’s ideas or claim credit for words that are not our own—even words generated by a machine. You have known that since childhood.

I will add, however, that honesty bears a special connection to scholarship and education. A dedication to truth requires, among other things, truthfulness about the sources for our ideas and claims.

We must own up to our ideas, including our mistakes, if we wish to learn from our errors and benefit from criticism of our thinking.

There is value and honor in being wrong. Being wrong is an indispensable part of improvement, learning, and discovery. There is, however, neither value nor honor in cheating, not in scholarship and not in any other domain of human activity.

Scholarly standards, respectful disagreement, personal integrity: these qualities, among others, help to define the community that you now join.

I am so glad that you will be a part of that community. I look forward to getting to know you in the years ahead as you explore this University and find your own place within it.

To Princeton’s Great Class of 2029, to our incoming transfer students, to our new graduate students, and to everyone who joins or returns to our community as we begin a new academic year, I say:

Welcome to Princeton

1 Joel Achenbach, “The Laureate:  Why Jim Peebles *62 Got the Nobel Prize,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 4, 2019, https://paw.princeton.edu/article/laureate-why-jim-peebles-62-got-nobel-prize; Tom Garlinghouse, “A ‘joy ride’ of a career: Peebles wins Nobel Prize in Physics for tackling big questions about the universe,” Princeton University, October 8, 2019, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/10/08/joy-ride-career-peebles-wins-nobel-prize-physics-tackling-big-questions-about