But having been here awhile, I know that the great gift this place extends to you is ready access to the unfamiliar. What Yale offers you, as a great educational institution, is a million doors out of the prison of your insularity. But let's not pretend that living in the neighborhood of the foreign is an automatic route to education. For every case where the crossing of cultures has produced an alphabet or an Internet, there are a dozen where it has created reciprocal dread, hostility, and a recoil into a tight, narrow version of one's own side. For the unfamiliar to become a source of education, it has to be approached with authentic openness.
Openness involves removing mental obstacles to what's outside, like prejudice and preconception.
But the openness I'm speaking of is not only a matter of passive accessibility. It requires an active reach outside, a willingness to project yourself out into the unfamiliar, to enter into it sufficiently to see the different way things look from its different position. It occurs to me there may be people in this room who will warmly agree with everything I've said but then go out and defy my teachings with no awareness that they are doing so. To make my message harder to mistake, I will stoop to a few particulars. You've taken the trouble to get into a school that offers nearly 2,000 undergraduate courses, and where virtually every subject can be studied in extraordinary depth.