The next day - having spent the intervening hours educating myself - I was able to remind everyone else that Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, chose Die Luft der Freiheit weht ("The wind of freedom blows") as the informal motto. It still can be found in the President's seal, which adorns the front cover of your printed program. It is obvious - at least it is obvious to me - that Jordan put it there in German, rather than in English, in order to enable me to speculate, at my first press conference, that the trustees had chosen me because they wanted a president who could pronounce the original properly.
Alas, I have bad news for the Board of Trustees. Historical research shows that the original of the original is in Latin and reads videtis illam spirare libertatis auram. Since it is notorious that no two students of Latin the world over can agree on its pronunciation, there is no particular reason why my pronunciation should be preferred. If, under these circumstances, the trustees would feel it appropriate to renounce their contract with me I would understand perfectly. All I ask for is the opportunity to finish this speech.
However, in case the trustees would rather not start the presidential search all over, I now formally and with a strong sense of my own shortcomings accept the responsibility Stanford University has seen fit to confer upon me. After Canadian-born Wally Sterling I shall be the second Stanford president of foreign origin - though I wager the English taught me by Frau Beza in Hamburg is more distinct than the English Wally Sterling learned growing up in Ontario.
Permit me to quote at the outset from the opening of Sterling's own remarks at his inauguration in 1949 and to adopt his words as expressing my own sentiments at this occasion. Sterling said:
I accept this responsibility with pride. I am proud to be one of that noble company of men and women whose business is education, and I am proud to be associated with this University.
I accept my responsibilities with humility. . . . I have read something of Stanford's history. It has not been untroubled by adversities and disappointments. But it is essentially the story of strong growth from good soil and, as any person is enhumbled in the presence of greatness, so I am in the knowledge of what has been accomplished here.
Stanford University is a wondrously varied institution: rich in talent and educational opportunities; rich in research and scholarship; rich in athletic challenges; rich in artistic creativity; rich in loyalty of alumni and friends; rich in past and present contributions to California, the nation and the world. As measured in terms of what Stanford should contribute to the future, it may not be rich in financial resources, but it is rich in its capacity as a university to pull together and to do its work, the work of a university - the work of a great university - with integrity and determination.
The true university, however old, must draw together and reinvent itself every day. To put it differently and to exaggerate only slightly, even after 100 years - or, for that matter, 500 years - the days of a university are always first days. The work of the university is work that cannot be done unless it is continuously reconsidered and supported afresh and jointly by faculty, students, staff, and, last but not least, by alumni and friends. I am looking forward with much hope and much confidence to our years of "first days" in common at Stanford.
I should like to return to the motto. David Starr Jordan's choice of Die Luft der Freiheit weht shows a high degree of learnedness on his part. By scientific discipline he was a biologist. I am, of course, not suggesting that I find this degree of learnedness surprising in a biologist. Perish the thought. However, Jordan was famous - not to say infamous - for his preoccupation with his field of specialization, ichthyology - the study of fishes.
When the bacteriologist Zinsser, in 1910, took up an appointment at Stanford, he was given advice on how to get along with President Jordan. I quote:
If you wish to be a success at Stanford, work on fish. Jordan himself, when he works at all, works on fish.... [T]he physiologist ... works on fish.... The geologists, the paleontologists, the botanists, the English Department, the Romance Languages, even the philosophers - they all work on fish. Go there, my boy, be happy, and work on fish.
How did we get a motto that nowhere mentions fish? The just-quoted calumny notwithstanding, David Starr Jordan had the most wide-ranging interests. Among these was the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten, who had lived from 1488 until 1523, and who, in the course of the 19th century, had captured the public imagination as an early fighter for secular freedom. The famous theologian David Friedrich Strauss had published a two-volume biography of Hutten that Jordan had read in the German original and on which he based his own sketch of Hutten's life, first published in 1886. It is in Strauss' biography that we find the German version of Hutten's Latin text that Jordan, after suggesting it to Mr. Stanford, got accepted as the unofficial Stanford motto. In Jordan's words: "Mr. Stanford was impressed with the winds of freedom - which we hoped would continue to blow over Stanford University. . . ."
As I have mentioned, Hutten was born in 1488. He belonged to the lesser German nobility that at the time found itself severely squeezed by the princes of the Holy Roman Empire and by the Church. On account of his weak constitution, young Hutten was sent to a monastery school for a career in the Church. However, at age 17, the age of some of you in the audience this morning, he fled the monastery and became a vagrant student, moving from one university to another in search of humanistic learning, first in Germany, then in Italy. He had greater difficulties in finding the right place than you have had in settling on Stanford.
Hutten's earliest claim to fame is his role in a celebrated controversy concerning the preservation of Hebrew literature against efforts to have the emperor order the collection and destruction of all Jewish books. When Reuchlin, one of the leading humanists, spoke out in favor of the Talmud and other ancient Hebrew texts, he was tried for (and, eventually, convicted of) heresy. Hutten and a friend employed the weapon of satire in defense of Reuchlin and against the scholastic enemies of learning and scholarship. Their satirical "Letters from Obscure Men" provoked both approving chuckles and admiration from such fellow humanists as Sir Thomas More.
Its serious aspects aside, the Reuchlin affair also was exhilarating for the young scholars. You catch some of Hutten's enthusiasm for his world of scholarly and scientific endeavors in what he wrote to a friend in 1518: "It is a pleasure to live. . . . Studies blossom and the minds move."
In 1521, at the time when the church reformer Martin Luther was called before the Diet of Worms to abjure his beliefs and teachings, Hutten, in support of Luther and the "cause of truth and freedom," published, in Latin, three so-called Invectives. In the third of the Invectives he admonished his own and Luther's enemies among the clergy with the words videtis illam spirare libertatis auram. Strauss rendered the Latin text into German by transforming the affirmative statement into a rhetorical question that Jordan translated into English as "See you not that the wind of freedom is blowing?" Stanford's motto is the abbreviated affirmative statement Die Luft der Freiheit weht.
For Hutten, what was the freedom whose wind was blowing? Clearly, freedom from as yet unreformed Church orthodoxy, freedom from the Inquisition, freedom from Rome's worldly aspects. But freedom was also intellectual freedom, the freedom to engage in fearless inquiry and the freedom to speak your mind robustly and without inhibition. Hutten certainly used robust and even harsh language. The 19th-century Swiss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer composed an epic poem of almost 200 pages, entitled "Hutten's Last Days," in which, as I discovered to my bemusement this summer, he rendered what Jordan chose for Stanford's motto as "The harsh wind of freedom blows."
The reasons for Jordan's interest in Hutten are easy to discern because as early as 1886 he had published an account of the life of Hutten that implicitly and explicitly tells us what David Starr Jordan considered important about Hutten and therefore about the "freedom" in "The wind of freedom blows." The opening paragraph of Jordan's sketch says much about what he himself valued. I quote:
Four centuries ago began the great struggle for freedom of thought which has made our modern civilization possible. I wish here to give something of the story of a man who in his day was not the least in this conflict - a man who dared to think and act for himself when thought and act were costly. . . .
Elsewhere Jordan writes that Hutten "was a man not of free thought only, but of free speech, and knew no concealment." Jordan also refers to Hutten as somebody who was "intolerant of intolerance."
Why, you started asking yourselves some time ago, is the new President telling us all this - or, rather, since this is informal California, you have probably been asking "Why is Gerhard telling us all this? Just because he was embarrassingly ignorant way back in March?" Well, that is part of it. My ignorance got me to read and what I read impressed on me what a splendid choice Jordan and Stanford made when they invoked the "winds of freedom" as the short expression of principle to guide Stanford University. What does this principle entail? Permit me to make a few brief suggestions.
A university's freedom must be first of all the freedom that we take mostly for granted, though the humanists had to fight for it and others must still do battle for it even today: the pursuit of knowledge free from constraints as to sources and fields. Hutten and his friends rose up when they were told that Hebrew instruction and Hebrew texts should be banned because they were in conflict with the Christian message and mission.
Second, a university must be free to challenge established orthodoxy. Erasmus, Thomas More and Hutten put forward their "new learning" in opposition to the ruling scholasticism that they found wanting. A university is the ally of change, and change is the ally of the university. The main task of the university is to question and to challenge fundamental assumptions and practices - that is, by implication, to favor change if these assumptions and practices prove to be wrong. The university's commitment is to knowledge and research, not to a particular content or program or to specific results. Only in one respect must the university be rigidly conservative: It must protect the openness, the rigor, the seriousness of its work in education and research.
Third, a university's freedom must be the freedom to challenge new orthodoxy. Just as traditions should not be embraced merely because they are traditions, the newest intellectual fashions should not rule just because they are new. While Hutten supported Martin Luther, he hardly wished the latter's teachings to become dogma. Erasmus, for his part, eventually broke with Hutten, whom he considered too radical. And Sir Thomas More has become Saint Thomas because he died a martyr defending the old faith against Henry VIII's new orthodoxy.
Fourth, a university's freedom must be the freedom of its members, faculty and students to think and speak for themselves. A university must not have dominant ways of thinking. Hutten was, in Jordan's words, "intolerant of intolerance." No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an autonomous individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes.
Fifth, a university's freedom must be the freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point - that is, without endless hedgings and escape clauses. As Jordan wrote, Hutten was a man not of free thought only, but of free speech, and knew no concealment.
Sixth, a university's freedom should include the freedom to take pleasure in the life of the mind. I quote again Hutten's enthusiastic statement from his own student days: "It is a pleasure to live.... Studies blossom and the minds move."
Addressing myself especially to the first-year students and speaking as a faculty member, I should like to emphasize that your education is primarily about "studies blossoming" and "minds moving." The enterprise is a joint one: You must take it seriously and we must take it seriously. Or, as Paul Freund, a famous teacher at Harvard, once said, education "is a two-way process - the rubbing of mind against mind for the benefit of not only the student, but of the teacher."
I am sometimes asked these days whether teaching will be one of my priorities as president. Of course, it will. As will be research. The question is well meant, but ill conceived. In the best universities - and you are at one of the best universities in the world - teaching, learning and research are all equally important elements of the all-embracing search to know. This search to know takes place in the classroom, in the library, in the laboratory, in the study. It may even take place in the Main Quad. Your search to know and our search to know are interdependent: It is our task to inform and challenge you, and it is your task to question and challenge us and to seek out opportunities to do research with us so that the search to know may go on.
Seventh, the wind of freedom blows across national and cultural boundaries, it does not stop at them. Hutten, like many of his humanist friends, claimed the freedom to engage in fruitful contacts with whomsoever and wheresoever. His world was limited to Europe; ours comprises all continents. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has recently stressed that we are experiencing the formation of a world system of cultures, "a Culture of cultures," whose spaces are characterized by both differentiation and assimilation. I know few universities that are better positioned than Stanford to become a place of learning with a truly inter-national and inter-cultural character. We need to understand, appreciate and value differences, while realizing that without a common thread holding us together we shall be lost.
Eighth, the wind of freedom cannot blow in a closed and stuffy ivory tower. Members of a university community must not shy away from the social and political issues of their time, from shaping the social and political values of society, from engaging in public service. Public service is their freedom, indeed their obligation. It is not, however, necessarily the university's freedom. A university's freedom and obligation are to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues. But, as one of the century's foremost First Amendment scholars, my much missed Chicago colleague, the late Harry Kalven, has said, a university "cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives." This viewpoint arises "not out of a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints."
Finally, teaching, learning and research do not benefit from stagnant air but from fresh winds blowing. There can be no fresh wind without highest quality research. Mediocrity leads to nothing other than more mediocrity. In our pursuit of excellences at Stanford, let us not forget that Stanford, with the rest of the great American research and teaching universities, will become forgettable - and that means, will be doomed - unless the United States and we remain committed to the support of original investigation of the first rank, and the investments in education and training that go with it.
Apart from gathering the best minds and providing them with resources, hard work and a substantial measure of freedom in the setting of research priorities have always been among the conditions that make highest quality research possible. Good institutions and good work need a lot of breathing space. I worry that as we attend to the shortcomings of universities, we as a country are losing sight of the conditions that create good work and good institutions. We should also remember that burning the midnight oil, hard work in study and laboratory, remains the rule at Stanford and its sister universities even if those who see only shortcomings will not admit it. The research enterprise can easily be smothered by internal and external politics, pressures and red tape. The wind of freedom has been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making our great universities the envy of the world. Without that freedom, that greatness is imperiled.
I return to you, my fellow first-year and my fellow transfer students, as we enter Stanford together. When David Starr Jordan decided to leave the Midwest to come to Stanford, he wrote to his mentor Andrew Dickson White, the President of Cornell, that he was prepared "to take whatever came." It is evidence of Jordan's fascination with Hutten that even at this occasion he quoted two lines from a poem by Hutten entitled "Hutten's Song":
With open eyes I have dared it,
and cherish no regret...
"I have dared it" was indeed Hutten's personal motto. May you and I, in the course of our Stanford education, frequently dare to seize the opportunities that Stanford has to offer us. If we do, we shall experience the pleasures that come from studies blossoming and minds moving.