Qur next speaker is Rebecca Kuang Rebecca
Rebecca Kuang graduated from the Wash School in 2018 where she majored in international history
a Carol fellow she was awarded a Marshall scholarship after her Georgetown graduation which she used to
pursue a master's in philosophy and Chinese studies at the University of Cambridge and a master's in studies at
Oxford in contemporary Chinese studies also in 2018 Harper Voyager published her first novel The Poppy War after a
heated auction that coincided with her 20th birthday she has gone on to produce the
Poppy War trilogy her fiction combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling at just 27
having already published five novels she has been named a number one New York Times and a number one Sunday Times
best-selling author her work has won the Nebula Locust Crawford and British Book Awards she was listed in the 2023 time
100 nests list and the Forb's 30 under30 class of 2024 while continuing to publish fiction
she is currently pursuing a doctorate in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale where she researches cop literature
and Asian-American literature she speaks to you now on behalf of all those Georgetown classes who have gone before
you into the world as people for others
Rebecca:
Good afternoon class of 2025 seven years ago I was sitting where you are waiting to start the rest of my
life and it's such an honor to be invited back to help send you along your way it felt strange to write a commencement speech
at a time when higher education is under federal attack universities were once national treasures but today the tides of our
culture have shifted so that now intellectualism inquiry and curiosity are sins.
When I began my PhD I knew the academic job market would be tough i didn't know that entire departments would just close up shop.
But the decline of the university started a long time ago and our generation entered college
when public faith and higher education was at an all-time low now the perception is that college is
where you go to be politically
brainwashed change your
gender have chat GPT write your papers
get high on someone's village a
apartment
balcony and talk about
derided and pay exorbitant tuition rates
you'll never earn back because now
college doesn't even help you land a
job we are so accustomed to speaking of
the
university as a
frivolity as a
luxury that we've forgotten how rare a
space like this
is and I'd like to share the story of
how the men in my family have been
trying to get educated for generations
my
greatgrandfather was from a small
village in Hunan
Province he was the first in his family
to become
literate and he graduated near the top
of his high school class
he would have attended Lingnan
University in
Guanghou but a civil war was raging at
the
time and his family feared that if he
traveled down to Guanghou he would get
killed so instead he became an
elementary school
teacher but the Mauist regime cracked
down on intellectual dissent in the late
1950s
and he was persecuted and sacked and
made to become a peasant
farmer my grandfather only got as far as
middle
school those were the famine
years they were just too poor and
schooling was a luxury
good he never got an
education and he regretted it for the
rest of his life
my
father was born in the middle of the
cultural
revolution that was a decade of
ideological
hysteria when intellectuals were
beaten imprisoned and
executed when universities were shut
down and students sent to the
countryside for political re-education
but Maong died when my father was eight
years
old and the national college entrance
exams in China were reinstated the
following
year the whole family was so
excited this was it this was when they
were going to finally send someone to
college
so my great-grandfather made the rounds
visiting his old teacher
friends trying to find any textbooks
that had survived the
purges and as my father puts
it we had someone who could teach and we
had someone who wanted to learn and we
were
happy and my father was pretty good at
learning
he wound up at Beijing
University the best school in the
country and there he was drawn to
physics because the natural laws of the
universe seemed objective and
definable the truth was clear and no
amount of ideology could dim that light
he scored well on the China US physics
examination and
application and was admitted to pursue
his PhD here in the
states and he graduated from Beijing
University in the summer of
1989 something else happened that summer
hu Yao Bang the former general secretary
of the Chinese Communist Party passed
away he had been a reformer within the
party a supporter of economic and
political
liberalization for which he had been
forced to resign
and when the news broke of his death
students in Beijing flooded Tiennaman
Square in
protest and my father joined his
classmates in the
streets demanding freedoms of speech
freedoms of press and democratic reforms
i've asked if he was ever
afraid in those early days of the
demonstrations and he said
no he said the students were happy
golucky in the
beginning we thought we're on the right
side of
history we were all swept up in it
we thought the students were going to
win and it was just a total
shock something none of them could have
imagined when the state sent in the
tanks
so when he boarded a plane for
California America represented this
utopia where one could think and speak
freely you'll never find a bigger
patriot than my
dad he flies the red white and blue on
the 4th of July he rocks a cowboy
hat he loves fishing and grilling and
driving his truck
he says he's already fled one
authoritarian state and he's not going
to flee another
now flash forward to
2013 in the entire history of my family
i was in the very first generation not
to wonder whether I would be allowed to
finish high school whether universities
would even be open when I applied
whether I could speak and study freely
when I got
there i became a Hoya simply because I
wanted to and I changed my major three
times just because I
could so yes the university is a
luxury and when you think about your
time
here I hope you remember the sheer
luxury of thought and I mean luxury in
every sense of the
word remember idling through the course
catalog like it was a buffet
reading Aristotle one
semester Kant the
next misinterpreting
Milton pretending we'd read
Joyce dozing through
lectures begging extensions for papers
because we got
sick when actually we were hung
over and killing off our grandparents to
excuse
absences in early morning
sections i have seven grandparents
what a blessing this
was to have time and space to think and
procrastinate and be wrong and try again
i was a Carol fellow when I was at
Georgetown and we were taught to live by
the motto
menti the life of the mind for the life
of the
world and to a lot of people the life of
the mind is an ivory tower for spoiled
brats and they're not always wrong
there is so much rot in the contemporary
university and sometimes it resembles
more an amusement park a members club
for the elites a
corporation anything except a place to
produce knowledge and share it with the
world
in the contemporary
university the gates are always locked
and honest dialogue has almost become a
fugitive act but at its best Georgetown at her best a university is such an impossible fantasy.
A place where we can test dangerous unorthodox ideas where we can dream up better worlds where we can make
mistakes where we can change our minds the life of the mind is a utopia and history proves its procarity it will die if we stop fighting for it.
so if I can charge you with anything class of 2025, it is to hold on to that luxury refuse the poverty of thought stay curious avoid dogma question everything seek the hidden and the inconvenient truths learn things because they're useful, learn things for the sheer pleasure of learning.
jump down rabbit holes just because you can think in the round we're out of Eden now and the trials ahead of you will make you question the foundations of that
utopia if ever it was one.
Now you will put your ideals to the test and more likely than not watch your dreams meet the crushing anvil of reality you are stepping into a world
now where if you hold on to your principles sooner or later you will be staring down a tank but my father emerged from that bloody square and the first thing he did was seek out another classroom so some of us will remain in
the university some of us will trade the life of the mind for the life of the world.
But wherever you go I hope you'll remember these Houseian days when all that was asked of us was to look for the light congratulations class of 2025 hoya Sax