哈佛大學(xué)校長在清華大學(xué)演講稿

1、哈佛大學(xué)校長在清華大學(xué)演講稿（中英全文）-大學(xué)與氣候變化帶來的挑戰(zhàn)2015年3月20日 07:05 新浪博客party secretary chen xu, assistant president shi yigong,distinguished faculty, students and friends. itis a privilege to be back at tsinghua, with an opportunity toexchange ideas on the most pressing challenges of ourtime. one challenge that will

2、 shape this centurymore than any other is our changing climate, and the effort tosecure a sustainable and habitable worldas rising sea levelsthreaten coastlines, increasing drought alters ecosystems andglobal carbon emissions continue to rise. there is a proverb that the best time to plant a tree is

3、 20years agoand the second best time is now. when ifirst visited tsinghua seven years ago, i planted a tree withpresident gu in the friendship garden. today, iam glad to return to this beautiful campus, founded on the site ofone of beijings historic gardens. i am glad thetsinghua-harvard tree stands

4、 as a symbol of the many relationshipsacross our two universities, which continue to grow andthrive. more than ever, it is a testament to thepossibilities that, by working together, we offer theworld. that is why i want to spend a few minutestoday talking about the special role universities like our

5、s play inaddressing climate change. last november here in beijing, president xi and president obamamade a joint announcement on climate change, pledging to limit thegreenhouse gas emissions of china and the united states over thenext two decades. it is a landmark accord,setting ambitious goals for t

6、he worlds two largest carbon emittingcountries and establishing a marker that presidents xi and obamahope will inspire other countries to do the same. we could not have predicted such a shared commitment seven, or evenone year ago, between these two leadersboth, in fact, ouralumnione a tsinghua grad

7、uate in chemical engineering and thehumanities and the other a graduate of harvard lawschool. and yet our two institutions had alreadysown its seeds decades agoby educating leaders who can turn monthsof discussion into an international milestone, and by collaboratingfor more than 20 years on the cli

8、mate analyses that made itpossible. in other words, by doing the thingsuniversities are uniquely designed todo. the u.s.-china joint announcement on climate change represents adefining moment between our two countries and for the world, amoment worthy of celebration. china deservesgreat credit for a

9、ll it has done and is doing to address a complexset of economic and environmental issues. while lifting 600 millionpeople out of poverty, you have built the worlds largest capacityin wind power and second largest in solar power. as one harvard climate expert put it, chinas “investments todecarbonize

10、 its energy system have dwarfed those of any othernation.” and last year, chinas emission indeeddid drop two percent. yet, even as we make real progress, the scale and complexity ofclimate change require humility and long-termthinking. we have made abeginning. but it is only a beginning. the recentv

11、ideo under thedome reminds us how much work is left to bedone. the commitments of governments can becarried out only if every sector of societycontributes. industry, education, agriculture,business, finance, individual citizensall are necessaryparticipants in what must become an energy and environme

12、ntalrevolution, a new paradigm that will improve public health, carefor the planet, and put both of our nations on the path toward aprosperous, low-carbon economy. no one understands this better than the students and faculty oftsinghua, where these subjects are research priorities and youroutgoing p

13、resident chen jining, a graduate of tsinghuas departmentof environmental science and engineering, has just been appointedminister of environmental protection. he has beencalled a bridge-builder, a man of vision and fresh ideas, and aninspiring leader. the promise of the 2014 joint climate pledge wil

14、l require thosequalities of all of us. it will call on each ofus to do our part to transform the energy systems on which we relyand mitigate the harm they cause, to “think different,” as applessteve jobs used to sayto imagine new ways of seeing old problemsand, as he put it, to “honor the people who

15、 can change the worldfor the better.” universities are especially goodat “thinking different.” that is the point i wantto emphasize today. to every generation falls a dauntingtask. this is our task: to “think different”about how we inhabit the earth. where better tomeet this challenge than in boston

16、 and beijing? how better to meet it than by unlocking and harnessing newknowledge, building political and cultural understanding, promotingdialogue and sharing solutions? who better tomeet it than you, the most extraordinary students, imaginative,curious, daring. the challenge we face demandsthree g

17、reat necessities.the first necessity is partnership. globalproblems require global partners. climate change is a perfectexample. we breathe the sameair. we drink the same water. we share the planet. we cannot live in acocoon. the stakes are toohigh. in an essay widely reprinted in chinese middle sch

18、ool textbookscalled “the geese return,” naturalist aldo leopold describes aneducated woman, an outstanding college student, who, and i quote,“had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year fly aboveher well-insulated roof.” could this womansvaunted “education,” he asks, be no more than, in his

19、words,“trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”adding that thegoose who “trades his awareness is soon a pile offeathers.” we all risk becoming a proverbial“pile of feathers” unless we cultivate awareness of each other andour common environmental crisis, and then work together to solveit. we ha

20、ve seen the power of partnerships. formore than a century, harvard and china in particular havebenefitted from partnerships with histories that inspire us: john king fairbank in 1933, who caught the silver and blue busto tsinghua before dawn to teach his first students theperspectives of chinese sch

21、olarship he had absorbed from professorjiang tingfu, one of chinas most eminent historians and the chairof tsinghuas history department. thoseexperiences changed fairbanks life. and theychanged harvard, where the fairbank center for chinese studiestransformed the field, and where the study of east a

22、sia nowencompasses more than 370 courses from history and literature togovernment and plant biology. ernest henry wilson in 1908, who navigated the yangtze riverwith a team of chinese plant collectors, documenting cultures withphotographs and collecting thousands of plant specimens forharvards arnol

23、d arboretum. wilsons long-term collaborationthesubject of a forthcoming cctv special (and exhibit at the harvardcenter shanghai)established one of our deepest connections,celebrating the extraordinary beauty and diversity of chinasnatural world. zhu kezhen in 1918, who received his ph.d. from harvar

24、d afterpassing a scholarship exam at the school that would becometsinghua. he became the father of chinesemeteorology, pioneering 5,000 years of chinese climate data, and asa university president and vice president of the chinese academy ofsciences, shaped chinese education by “cultivating scientist

25、s,” ashe put it, and i quote, in “the scientific spirit the pursuitfor the truth.”that spirit defines the harvard china project, founded in 1993as an interdisciplinary program to study chinas atmosphericenvironment, energy system and economy, and the role of environmentin u.s.-china relations. based

26、 at harvardsschool of engineering and applied sciences, its collaborators havespanned more than half of harvards schools and more than a dozenchinese institutions, including some seven different departments attsinghua. when the program began, before climatechange made daily headlines, even its found

27、ersprofessor michaelmcelroy and project director chris nielsen, soon joined by tsinghuaprofessor collaboratorscould not fully imagine itsimpact. it has been a model partnership and anengine of broad environmental knowledge that has influenced policyin both countries, and improved the lives of our ci

28、tizens. let me give you one example: the case of two young women at thestart of their professional training, cao jing studying economicsand public policy at harvards kennedy school and wang yuxuan, atsinghua graduate getting her harvard ph.d. in atmosphericchemistry. both are now tsinghua faculty me

29、mbers. driven by common questions, they came together asmembers of a team studying chinese carbon emissions. over severalyears they worked across disciplines, in both countries, withenvironmental engineers and health scientists to assess costs andbenefits of emission control policy options and their

30、 effect onhuman health. the teams findings weregroundbreaking, demonstrating for policy makers that they could infact achieve enormous environmental benefits at little cost toeconomic growth. such collaborations with tsinghua continue toshape chinas clean energy future with new ideas, from linking w

31、indfarms with electrified space heating to evaluatingthe effects of a changing climate on renewableenergy sources. our collaborations in the field of design are powerful as well,shaping the responses to urbanization and environmental change inboth countries. what might an ecologicallyconceived city

32、look like? how can a village growinto one? harvards new center for greenbuildings and cities is working with tsinghuas evergrande researchinstitute to measure energy use for different building types inchina, a key to creating more efficient buildings andcities. a new collaboration with pekingunivers

33、ity advances more socially and ecologically inclusive urbandesign. partnerships like these, betweenharvards graduate school of design and chinese institutions, aregenerating innovations in urban planning, green building andsustainable development that will change how welive. for example, walk along

34、the reed-linedriverbank park in shanghai, as i have, where a constructed wetlandcleans polluted water from the huangpu river and a promenade nowconnects the old city with the new. its designer,yu kongjian, a farmers son trained at harvards school of designand founded chinas first graduate school of

35、landscapearchitecture, a field he describes as, and i quote, “a tool forsocial justice and environmental stewardship.” today, harvard partnerships with tsinghua and other chineseinstitutions span nearly every department across all of harvards13 schools, involving some 200 faculty members and hundred

36、s ofstudents, and now including the harvard center shanghai, onlinecourses through edx, and three new research centers oncampus. these partnerships are bearing fruit:from last years harvard-tsinghua conference on market mechanismsfor a low-carbon future, to open access education reaching millionswor

37、ldwide, to advances in human health and health-care policy thatwill improve and extend lives. tsinghua is building upon a similar array of partnerships, inchina and around the world. your new collaborative innovationcenter on urbanization convenes every field around the problem ofintegrating urban a

38、nd rural areas, and the tsinghua-berkeleyshenzhen institute supports among other things the search for newand low-carbon energy technologies. i have said before that there is no one model for a universityssuccess, no abstract “global research university” to which we allshould aspire. partnership ben

39、efits fromdifferent contributions and varied perspectives. our variety supports our strength. united, thereis little we cannot accomplish.the second necessity is research. a chineseaphorism tells us that, “l(fā)earning has noboundaries.” through research, universitiestranscend the boundaries of what any

40、one thought was possible.research without boundaries means exploring acrossdisciplines. consider the goal of creatingsustainable cities. this is not just anengineering problem. it is a problem of ethicsand design; law and policy; business and economics; medicine andpublic health; religion and anthro

41、pology and my own field ofhistory, which can tell us how humans and nature have interactedover time. for example, think of the new fieldof “ecological urbanism” that explores this goalas a design problem for how best to live. orharvards center for the environment that brings together 250faculty memb

42、ers from every discipline. research without boundaries means taking an open stance, whereevery question is legitimate and any path might yield ananswer. knowledge emerges from debate, fromdisagreement, from questions, from doubtfrom recognizing thatevery path must be open because any path might yiel

43、d ananswer. universities must be places where any andevery topic can be broached, where any and every question can beasked. universities must nurture such debatebecause discovery comes from the intellectual freedom to explorethat rests at the heart of how we define our fundamental identityand values

44、. you might find a treatment for malaria in a 2000-year-old silkscroll from a han dynasty tomb, as chinese researchers discoveredin the 1970s. or follow your sense of smell, ascaltech chemist arie haagen-smit did in the 1950s, to discover thata container of car exhaust exposed to sunlight produces t

45、hebleach-like odor of smog. almost everyone toldhaagen-smit he was wrong, but he identified oxidized hydrocarbonsfrom automobiles, refineries and power plants as the source of themysterious air pollution that was choking los angeles, and launcheda revolution in american air quality. some fortyyears

46、later, showing the same ingenuity, harvards own study of sixcities conclusively linked fine particle pollutionto premature death. theresearchers invented fieldinstruments as they went alongdesigning airmonitors for people to wear at school and work and air qualitysensors for their homeslaying a foun

47、dation for air pollutionlegislation that has saved billions of dollars and hundreds ofthousands of lives a year. and research without boundaries means taking the longview. seeing beyond the horizon has always beenhigher learnings special concern. harvard is the oldestinstitution of higher learning i

48、n the united states, founded in theninth year of the reign of emperor chongzhen of the mingdynasty. cambridge university recently celebratedits 800th birthday. china has a deep tradition oflearning going back thousands of years. we arenot in this for one year, or ten, or even 100. weare in it for mi

49、llennia. universities thrivebecause of an insatiable yearning to understand ourselves and theworld. we are compelledto search the universe,to map the brain, to step into anothersexperience. and i want to emphasize that thehumanities have a special role to play in fostering this ability tothink and i

50、magine beyond ourselves and our own livesin enabling usthrough the study of literature, culture, history, and language todraw from other times, other places, other peoples as we seek tounderstand the present and chart a course for thefuture. we mold minds capable of innovationbecause we are able to

51、imagine a world different from the one welive ina world with “green” cities and adaptive buildings withskin-like membranes; a bionic leaf that can generate liquid fueland a metal-free organic battery, all long-range areas ofresearch. a third necessity is training students who will ask and answerthe

52、big questions. perhaps the most important mission ofuniversities is the education of the worlds youngpeople. todays students will lead the world in aperilous time. how do we prepare them for thedisruption of climate change? as one of harvardsleading climate scientists likes to say, “knowing what to

53、do is noteasy.” that is why universities play a criticalrole. we attract and train the best students. eachyear i tell the incoming harvard college class that they haveability not always measured by high test scores and top gradesthatthey are chosen not for the magnitude of their achievements but for

54、their capacity to invent, not for what they know but for what theycan imagine. we expose students to diverse points of view. this january, jahred liddie studied sustainable cities on a harvardundergraduate program in brazil, where he met students, as he putit, from “around the world as invested in t

55、hese problems as iam.” he saw how diverse backgrounds andperspectives are, in his words, “key to formulating sustainableurban development,” and how effective solutions and innovationsmight differ for different cultures. we hope toestablish a similar exchange program withtsinghua. finally, we train s

56、tudents across many disciplines, and allowthe youngest to work with senior faculty. eachlearns from the other: the deepest knowledge joins with thefreshest point of view. harvard created anenvironmental science and public policy field for undergraduates totrain students capable of refined judgment,

57、who understand thescientific and technical side of complex environmental problems aswell as their economic, political, legal, historical and ethicaldimensions. ethan addicott, a recent graduate pursuing a career in sciencepolicy, says the program gave him a broad education of the naturalworld, and,

58、in his words, “a deep understanding of how to analyzeand solve problems surrounding our complex interactions withit.” ethan did not need to wait until graduateschool to have access to senior faculty. hestudied the chinese energy economy with professor michael mcelroy,head of harvards china project. why thisopportunity? because the world needsethan. it needs the students in tsinghuasscience and technology studies program, where engineering andpre-professional students work alongside future sociologists andhisto