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Building a community

Yale's new president welcomes the Class of '28.

By Maurie McInnis ’96PhD | Nov/Dec 2024

In her first Yale College Opening Assembly Address, the university’s new president, Maurie McInnis ’96PhD, encouraged the Class of ’28 to really engage with one another, to listen and respond, as they work on developing a sense of community that can feel elusive. McInnis delivered her address to incoming Yale College first-years and transfer students on Cross Campus on August 19.

Good morning, everyone! I am delighted to join Dean Lewis, Provost Strobel, and so many of my distinguished colleagues from across the university in welcoming you to Yale. This is a big moment—for both of us. As you get introduced to campus, after nearly thirty years I am so thrilled to be returning to it in my new role as president. What a wonderful way for us to begin afresh together.

I would also like to acknowledge your loved ones, family members, friends, and supporters in attendance.

To all the parents here today, I can imagine the mixed emotions you may be feeling at this moment.

Having dropped off my second (and last to leave the nest) only two years ago, I remember well the immense pride I felt mingled with sadness for how much I was going to miss her.

So, I want to thank you for entrusting your children to Yale.

Students, over the coming weeks, you may find yourself marveling at the beauty of this campus. I know I did.

Such an extraordinary collection of buildings and landscapes, with grand, awe-inspiring sights where you may wonder if you have walked onto a Harry Potter set. These Yale landmarks will be your home for the coming years. Spaces you will always associate with memories you create here. Because here you will live, dine, learn, debate, listen, laugh, grow, and discover. You will sit in classrooms and work in laboratories to explore subjects ranging from the structure of a cell to the vastness of the cosmos. From the history of nations to the literary contributions of a single writer. From how our bodies function to the inner workings of our mind. And your education will extend well beyond the classroom, to so many iconic places, including Yale’s extraordinary museums and libraries, such as Sterling Memorial behind me.

By the time you leave here, you will have developed a very personal association with the places and spaces at Yale. You will develop your favorites that you will visit again and again as you return to Yale as an alum.

For me, one of those places has always been the Yale University Art Gallery. So today, we are going to take a journey there, but since we can’t all fit, I invite you to open your program, where we have printed a copy of Edward Hopper’s Sunlight in a Cafeteria, which hangs just a few steps away in the American galleries. [1]
I have long been drawn to Hopper because his works so powerfully capture essential truths of modernity.

In this painting, two individuals are seated in a New York café as the harsh morning sun enters at a steep angle through large plate windows.

Though separated by only a short distance from one another, they appear miles apart, each lost in their own thoughts.

The acrid colors, the slashing diagonal created by sunlight, and the eerie stillness leave us with a twinge of discomfort.

We feel their sense of isolation and loneliness.

Perhaps, like me, when you look at this painting, you are reminded of an experience from your own life. I know I can remember times when I entered a dining hall or a party and even though there were many people there, because I knew no one, I still felt alone. That is an experience shared by many. In fact, we know that many college students report feeling lonely at times. After all, most of you probably do not yet know many others here.

For context, Hopper’s evocation of modern loneliness captured mid-twentieth-century New York at a time when most Americans had now moved to cities, leaving their small-town communities behind.

And just months after Hopper completed his painting in the late fifties, the field of psychology first raised awareness of the very modern problem of loneliness. [2]
Over the next half-century, social connections would continue to fracture and fray to the point where yours is now said to be a generation of loneliness.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy [’03MD, ’03MBA], the Yale alumnus who spoke at this year’s Class Day ceremony, warns that social disconnection represents an alarming risk to our well-being, “associated with a greater risk of depression and anxiety.” [3]
Here on this campus, mental health is the challenge that students find most pressing. [4]
Too often, the ways we “connect” are through technology and social media.
“Likes” and retweets are poor substitutes for real interaction.

For society, loneliness and isolation can provide fertile ground for division, even extremism, to take root and flourish.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt, who taught here as a fellow and would later receive an honorary Yale degree, articulated that risk in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she proclaimed back in 1951, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience . . .  has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” [5]
And so it is today as we see ever-growing strife around the globe.

So as you are embarking upon this next chapter in life, know that community is an antidote to loneliness, division, and isolation. And Yale is your community.

You have been given a remarkable opportunity—the chance to immerse yourselves in this shared community; one that is structured quite differently from most American universities.

In Yale’s residential colleges, for example, you will live and interact with peers from many different backgrounds and perspectives.

Serendipitous encounters in dining halls and common rooms will lead to engaging conversations and enduring friendships.

And legendary traditions—Berkeley’s Thunder Brunch, Grace Hopper’s September Soirée, and Timothy Dwight’s Chubb Lecture, to name only a few, strengthen the bonds of community—and exemplify why our residential college system is one of the great glories of the Yale undergraduate experience.

The architecture of the colleges creates spaces designed to bring people together.
Take the initiative to start a conversation with someone you don’t know. Strike up a conversation with someone in a class or sitting by themselves in a dining hall. I promise the other person will be very glad you did so.

As you get to know other students, meanwhile, it is also important for you to meet faculty, staff, alumni, and our neighbors in New Haven, all of whom are part of the rich layers of connection that comprise this community.

You can do so, for example, through Dwight Hall, the only nonprofit umbrella campus volunteer organization run entirely by students, where two-thirds of our undergraduates participate in service activities.

And though it might seem intimidating to approach a professor who has won a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize, you should take every advantage of their eagerness to engage with students.

And I also encourage you to seek out someone who disagrees with you and make a connection, because as you will learn, Yale does not shy away from facilitating civil, and yes, often spirited, debate.

When we disagree, there are venues for us to do so, such as the “Dean’s Dialogue” series hosted by Dean Lewis; the Yale Political Union, which is this country’s oldest and largest collegiate debate society; and the Cultivating Conversations program led by University Life, which I suggest you visit after classes begin. [6]
I invite you to think through these and other layers of what it means to be a Yalie today—and to embrace them over the next four years, because as Dean Lewis noted moments ago, citizenship doesn’t work in the absence of community.

Because one of the most important skills you can develop here is learning to listen, particularly to those with whom you may disagree.

Truly listen—not just to formulate your rejoinder but to understand their perspective.

We must, as Hopper’s painting compels us to consider, pull up a chair and sit next to that fellow student dining alone.

And when doing so, listen and be curious.

Consider how different it would feel if rather than retreating from one another, the two strangers in Hopper’s painting were seated together, engaged in lively conversation.

Members of the Class of 2028, take a minute and look around at those seated near you, most of whom you do not yet know.

You share much in common, including this: Yale wanted each and every one of you to be a part of our community. You were chosen from a record applicant pool in part because you bring something unique to this place. But your uniqueness, naturally, is going to be distinct from somebody else’s. This campus is formed, very deliberatively, of people who are diverse—radically so, perhaps—from one another.

Your charge, then, while you are here, is to start your interactions with peers from an understanding of your shared humanity. From a place of mutual understanding that we are all part of this community.

Indeed, you would do well to remember the words of retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, who received an honorary Yale degree earlier this year: “Listen to what other people say, because if you talk long enough, you’ll discover they’ll say something you actually agree with. And then what you say is, ‘Let’s work with that.’” [7]
In a world trying with great force to get us to vilify others, to push us apart, and to focus narrowly—almost exclusively—on what makes us different, we at Yale want to focus on what we share as a community.

A community that doesn’t end in four years’ time, because then you will join the vast Yale alumni network of which you will always be a part.

Perhaps that is why the late George Pierson [’26], an official historian of Yale, memorably observed that our university “is at once a tradition, a company of scholars, a society of friends.” [8]

For Yalies, in other words, the great bounty of higher education lies not only in the knowledge you will gain but also in the bonds you will form.

In what you will learn, of course, but no less, in who you will encounter—in who you will become—along the way.

So today, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to a place of both scholarship and friendship.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Yale.

Thank you.  

 

[1] Edward Hopper, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, 1958, oil on canvas, 40 3/16 × 60 1/8 in., Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

[2] Lepore, Jill. “The History of Loneliness.” The New Yorker, March 30, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/the-history-of-loneliness.

[3] Office of the Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.

[4] Hernandez, Benjamin. “Internal Presidential Search Report Shows Student Opinions on Free Speech, Diversity, Mental Health.” Yale Daily News, January 30, 2024. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/01/30/internal-presidential-search-report-shows-student-opinions-on-free-speech-diversity-mental-health/.

[5] Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

[6] For more about free expression at Yale, resources, and guidelines, see https://belong.yale.edu/free-expression-yale.

[7] David F. Levi, Control, A Conversation with Justice Stephen Breyer, January 26, 2022. https://judicialstudies.duke.edu/2022/01/justice-stephen-breyer/.

[8] Pierson, G. W. 1952. Yale College: An Educational History 1871-1921. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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