30 May 2023, Princeton, New Jersey
In a few minutes, all of you will walk out of this stadium as newly minted graduates of this University. Before you do, however, it is my privilege to offer a few words about your time here and the path that lies ahead.
I want to begin by saying something about the honorary degrees that we conferred just a few moments ago. Our purpose in awarding those degrees is not only to recognize the extraordinary achievements of the recipients, but to offer them to our new graduates as inspiring examples of the many ways that one might live a life of leadership and service to others.
One great pleasure of my job each year is getting to meet our honorary degree recipients, welcome them to the University, and learn a little about them.
In 2015, I was honored to share this stage with, among others, the vocalist and civil rights leader Harry Belafonte. Though many people remember Belafonte as an entertainer, Princeton conferred upon him an honorary doctorate of laws in recognition of his social activism and humanitarian work.
Harry Belafonte passed away just over a month ago at the age of 96. I would like to offer you some reflections prompted both by his memory and by current events.
I want, in particular, to tell you a story drawn from the struggle for racial equality in America. It is a story about Harry Belafonte and the origins of the American right to free speech. And it is a story about the moral courage of young people, about how their leadership played a crucial role in our country’s long and unfinished quest to establish a more perfect union and a more just society.
It is also a story that connects very directly to the history that Congresswoman Terri Sewell spoke about in her inspirational Class Day address yesterday.
Harry Belafonte was one of the principal fundraisers for Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaigns, and he had a leadership role in the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom.
In March 1960, that committee published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The headline for the advertisement was “Heed Their Rising Voices.”
The “rising voices” were those of Black students in the American South, who, in the words of the advertisement, were engaged in “non-violent demonstrations in positive affirmation of the right to live in human dignity as guaranteed by the [United States] Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
The advertisement pled for help and support, because, it said, the students were “being met by an unprecedented wave of terror by those who would deny and negate” the freedoms promised by the American Constitution.
The advertisement also contained some serious errors. It said, for example, that Alabama universities had padlocked their dining halls in an attempt to starve the protesting students, which was not true.
L. B. Sullivan, who was the police commissioner in Montgomery, Alabama, sued the New York Times. He claimed that the advertisement had libeled him, and he won a $500,000 award.
That was the largest libel award in Alabama history, and, if it had been upheld, it might have been enough to put the New York Times out of business.
The Times took the case to the United States Supreme Court. Their chances did not look good. The Court had a lousy record in free speech cases. It had never held that the First Amendment limited libel law in any way, and it had for the most part turned a blind eye to McCarthyism and earlier instances of political persecution.
In Times v. Sullivan, however, the Supreme Court rewrote the law of free speech. It ruled unanimously in favor of the New York Times, and it created a new and powerful restriction on libel law. The Court held that everyone had the right to criticize public officials without fear of legal liability unless their statements were not only false but also made with “actual malice.”
The Supreme Court thereby, suddenly and in a single decision, created one of the most speech-protective legal doctrines in history—and, for that matter, in the world today.
Justice William J. Brennan, from the great state of New Jersey, wrote the opinion of the Court and declared that there is “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
When people talk about free speech rights in America, they often depict them as the legacy of the American founding in the 18th century, or as the product of elegant dissents authored by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis in the early 20th century.
Without meaning any disrespect to the Constitution’s framers or to those legendary justices, this much is clear: the expansive, legally enforceable free speech rights that Americans cherish today first emerged in the 1960s during and because of the fight for racial justice in the South, a fight whose leaders included Black student activists.
I insist on this point today because there is a movement afoot in this country right now to drive a wedge between the constitutional ideals of equality and free speech. There are people who claim, for example, that when colleges and universities endorse the value of diversity and inclusivity or teach about racism and sexism, they are “indoctrinating students” or in some other way endangering free speech.
That is wrong. It is wrong as a historical matter, and it is wrong as a matter of our constitutional ideals, which require us to care simultaneously about the achievement of real, meaningful equality and what Justice Brennan called “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate on public issues.
These ideals are at risk. PEN America, an organization dedicated to free expression, reported in February that, in just the first two months of this year, state legislatures had already introduced 86 “educational gag orders” that restrict the ability of schools, colleges, universities, and libraries to teach or disseminate information about inequalities within American society.
Some of these bills prohibit discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity. Some prohibit teaching disfavored views about race, racism, and American history. Others seek to undermine the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities or to abolish tenure, thereby enabling politicians to control what professors can teach or publish.
Christine Emba, who graduated from Princeton in 2010 and now writes for the Washington Post, visited the University of Florida last month to examine how that state’s censorship laws were affecting students and faculty.
She talked to a University of Florida student, Emmaline Moye, who said this about her college experience: “Being exposed to people who I’ve never been exposed to before, people of different races and ethnicities and genders and sexualities, and, as a queer student, hearing those things talked about makes me feel heard and seen.”
But Emmaline added that because of the newly passed laws, “I’m so scared for people like me … they won’t get that feeling of liberation, of getting to be who you are and know[ing that] you’re not alone.”
We must not let that happen.
We must stand up and speak up together for the values of free expression and full inclusivity for people of all identities.
As I said earlier, the advertisement that Harry Belafonte put in the New York Times more than 60 years ago began with the headline “Heed Their Rising Voices.” It concluded with the message, “Your Help is Urgently Needed … NOW!!”
To all of you who receive your undergraduate or graduate degree from Princeton University today:
Your help is urgently needed—now!
So, as you go forth from this University, let your voices rise.
Let them rise for equality.
Let them rise for the value of diversity.
Let them rise for freedom, for justice, and for love among the people of this earth.
Wherever your individual journeys may lead you in the years ahead, I hope that you also continue to travel together, as classmates and as alumni of this University, in pursuit of a better world.
All of us on this platform have great confidence in your ability to take on that challenge. We applaud your persistence, your talent, your achievements, your values, and your aspirations.
We send our best wishes as you embark upon the path that lies ahead, and we hope it will bring you back to this campus many times. We look forward to welcoming you when you return, and we say, to Princeton University’s Great Class of 2023, congratulations!
Jake Baum: 'On the importance of failure', Occasioonal Address, UNSW, Faculty of Medicine - 2023
2 May 2023, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Deputy Chancellor, Senior Vice Dean of Medicine & Health, colleagues, distinguished guests, graduating students & families.
I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of these unceded lands, the rolling planes on which UNSW Sydney sits, the Bidjigal and Gadigal communities. Bidjigal I believe means plane dwellers in the Dharug language – one of the languages native to this area of NSW. So today, as you walk around the campus with your friends & family, pause to consider the incredible history witnessed by these rolling planes, and the debt of gratitude we owe to it, privileged to be able to study, learn and work freely in such a unique place.
This is my first occasional address. Let me clarify that. This is the first time I have been to any graduation ceremony, including my own. I will explain why.
I grew up in Bristol, a small city in the Southwest of England. My father was an eminent Paediatrician, my mother was and still is an abstract painter. I was brought up to ask questions at the dinner table, to study the world. Consumed by David Attenborough television shows I decided very early on that I would be a biologist. Though I went to a very modest state school, with help I managed to beat the odds and gain a place at Oxford University to study Biology. Guaranteed life-long success clearly would ensue?
Not necessarily. What I want to stress today isn’t success. It’s failure. Most Occasional Addresses I’ve watched in preparation for today, stress that graduation is one of the most important days of your life. OK, for some of you it might be. But I can imagine there are a few here that carry – as I did – a sense of failure. Perhaps you’ve not done as well as you expected? Perhaps you feel you should have done medicine instead? Perhaps you have no idea what tomorrow brings and that scares you?
At the end of my degree at Oxford, I was due to enjoy this very same ceremony. Two things, however, conspired to change my path. The first was the sudden death of my father. I felt bereft and uninterested in any form of celebration. Consumed by grief, all I could focus on was that I wasn’t training to be a medic, like him. The second was that I didn’t do well enough in my final exams. A PhD in Cambridge studying Biological Anthropology was promised to me, but it required a Distinction – and I’d fallen a few grades short. It was too late to enrol in postgraduate medicine. I was lost, feeling a deep sense of failure.
With no fallback plan I picked myself up and wrote. Pre-email, I mailed letters to every research lab I could find on the internet that looked interesting. To my surprise, a few months later a letter came from a parasitologist in Jerusalem offering me a 1 yr job in his lab. I said yes. This single year changed my whole life’s journey. Working with Palestinians and Israelis on the ancient relationships of Levantine goats – a fascinating subject I assure you - and living in one of the most complex and amazing cities in the world, I realised a profound lesson. You have to follow your own path. I was discovering a world of parasites, population genetics, and ancient human history. Maybe I didn’t need to become a medic after all.
With fresh perspective, my luck changed, I acquired a Ph.D. back in the UK jointly in Oxford and London to explore human genetics & malaria (a subject that I still work on today). Now, clearly my success was guaranteed!
At the end of my Ph.D. I submitted 3 applications for fellowships to study malaria further and applied to several jobs. Rejection followed rejection – I had failed again. Perhaps I was deluded, maybe this path wasn’t meant to be. Medicine?
Another year out followed. I considered throwing in the towel and finding an alternative career. Then, on a chance recommendation from a friend, I was introduced to Professor Alan Cowman, the world leading authority on malaria parasite cell biology. Over coffee he took a chance and offered me a 2-year position in his lab at the WEHI in Melbourne. I said yes, telling my mother soon afterwards that I’d be back from Oz in 2 years, she needn’t worry.
Within 2 years, I had met my now wife Andrea, I’d become a resident, we got married a few years later and our first child was born and my mum forgave me for living in the lucky country. Clearly now I could assume things would run smoothly? I worked my guts out in Alan’s lab and after 5 years, I had discovered and described a small protein – called RH5 – that I believed was destined to be the foundation for a universal malaria vaccine. We submitted the paper to the most prestigious journals we could, waiting for the almost certain accolades to follow. But, after 6 months of waiting we received a brutal rejection – worse still, another group published on Rh5 before us. I had been scooped. We rushed publication into an Australian journal – colleagues advised I move on. Failure?... Not so fast!!
RH5 is now in clinical trials in Tanzania, and its working. I’m not involved with those trials, but that paper I published is one of the most highly cited papers from my career. What am I trying to say?
As CS Lewis (the famous author) said “Failures are sign posts on the road to achievement.” or as civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, "It may be necessary to encounter defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
I now passionately believe failure is a key part of any journey. Or to quote Einstein, “Failure is success in progress.”
So, for those of you here reflecting on how everything has gone your way – relish that feeling, celebrate it, but don’t take it for granted. It won’t always be like this, but thanks to the amazing lessons you’ve undoubtedly learned here at UNSW through teachers and friends, you should feel confident that you can achieve great things. And for those of you nursing a sense of failure or uncertainty – well, you went one better than me, you showed up to your graduation, you smiled for the camera, and you can say to yourself, this too shall pass – or as Richard Feynman said, the most important thing in life is not being afraid to fail.
As the Head of School of Biomedical Sciences, I want to close by saying something about the Biomedical journey itself.
My father used to tell the story of the starfish - his metaphor for the importance of being a Clinician. This is the story:
As an old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a young girl picking up starfish and putting them into the sea. He asked the girl “why are you doing this?”. She answered that the stranded starfish would die if left out in the morning sun. 'But the beach goes on for miles and there are thousands & thousands of starfish,' countered the old man. 'How can your effort make any difference?' The child looked at the starfish in her hand and placed it safely into the waves. 'It makes a difference to this one!'
It’s a powerful story – make a difference to one patient. Save one life! But I’ll let you in on a secret (and I might ask any clinicians present to close their ears). There is a way to save not just one but every starfish on that beach and it isn’t necessarily by becoming a medic. In the COVID pandemic, it wasn’t clinicians that changed the game, it was biomedical research, it was finding the cures and treatments, the vaccines & diagnostics and the decades of research that came before – which included a HUGE amount of failure! Dame Sarah Gilbert who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine is a researcher, not a clinician. So, whether you stay in biomedical sciences, pursue medicine (I do still love clinicians) or go onto something completely different, the perspective you’ve gained these last few years should still empower you to make a profound difference to the world.
So, in closing, whatever today means, go from here. You’ve got a jump start on life with a degree from UNSW, use it well, be prepared to fail, fail often, and get up again. Blaze your own path.
Thank you.