Intellect is not enough - Harvard Gazette

Sanders Theatre hosted Phi Beta Kappa’s 234th literary exercises, inducting Harvard’s top-performing juniors and seniors into one of the nation’s oldest academic societies. Speakers emphasized that academic intellect and drive are not sufficient for responsible citizenship or a meaningful life. New members were urged to cultivate intellectual courage and to confront the next challenge: deciding what they will ask of themselves. The program included reflections on pride in completing required work and on the fear involved in defining personal responsibility. References to James Baldwin framed the tension between public certainty and private inquiry, encouraging graduates to continue growing beyond credentials.

"But the celebrations were cut liberally with injunctions and warnings - sometimes stern - about the great responsibilities that fall upon new chapter members, half of whom are poised to graduate on Thursday. The intellect and drive of these students are not in question: The chapter admits, at most, only one in 10 undergraduates based on their academic performance. But throughout the 90-minute program, speakers insisted that, on their own, intellect and drive are not enough, for responsible citizenship, or even for a meaningful life."

"The chapter's new members were enjoined to keep, and cultivate, their intellectual courage, in an opening invocation by the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the Pusey Minister, and by Meghan O'Rourke, the exercises' poet. O'Rourke - herself a PBK graduate of Yale, and now a professor and editor on that campus - noted that as she joined the society ahead of graduation, she felt "proud to have done what was asked of me, and done it well.""

"The difficult part comes next, she said, as each young person figures out "what you are going to ask of yourself." It is frightening work, she said, drawing upon the tradition of James Baldwin, who was a teenage preacher long before he was a writer. Baldwin came to see the two roles as almost antithetical, she noted: "'When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as if you know what you're talking about. When you're writing, you're trying to""

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