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!
Jeff Bezos: 'Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice', Princeton - 2010
30 May 2010, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans — plodding as we are — will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!