UC Berkeley Web Feature
Nobelist George Akerlof addresses Berkeley graduates at December Graduate Convocation
BERKELEY – With some 2,800 seniors completing their studies this month, UC Berkeley celebrated their graduation on Saturday, Dec. 6 at a December Graduate Convocation at Zellerbach Hall. This year, for the first time, December graduates dressed in traditional caps and gowns for a formal graduation ceremony.
Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, professor of economics at UC Berkeley and co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics was the keynote speaker. Akerlof's research illustrates how markets malfunction when buyers and sellers - as seen in used car markets - operate under different information. The work has had far-reaching applications in such diverse areas as health insurance, financial markets and employment contracts. Following is the text of Akerlof's prepared remarks:
Trained to be a Hero
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 George Akerlof, UC Berkeley professor of Economics (Peg Skorpinski photo) |
I am honored to address you at this graduation ceremony. For you, the graduates, this ceremony is, in the words of the anthropologists, a rite of passage into adulthood. For you, the parents, it signifies that you have completed a job well done. You have raised a fine young adult. What is more, you parents have also raised a Berkeley graduate. You are the mother, or you are the father, of a Golden Bear. For the graduates, for the past few years all of you have been so busy doing what it takes to become a Golden Bear that I doubt that you have spent much time thinking about what it means to be such a graduate. But every educational institution has its purpose. It is trying to turn out a certain type of human being.
What does it mean that you are graduates of this institution? What have you become? Who have we trained you to be?
I have recently been reading books about military education, especially at West Point. The rigor and the drill of West Point purposefully make raw recruits into potential heroes. This system is extremely successful. It trains a remarkable cadre of students who are imbued with a sense of honor, and duty, and commitment to the US military.
West Point graduates typically view themselves as representing what American society should be, but is not. The West Point graduate believes in a non-materialistic simplicity that follows a nobler calling than civilian life. They are trained to be heroes. They are trained to be military heroes.
Of course, the cadets have it right about their own training. But they have it wrong about other great institutions of learning. Your education has also taught you to be heroes. But you have been taught to be a different sort of hero.
And I shall talk here about what the education here implicitly means. I will talk about who a graduate of our great University is expected to be. And what sort of hero the everyday education at Berkeley trains you to be.
Above all, this University is a research university. For some reason, in the last century it was decided that faculty members of accredited U.S. colleges and Universities should have Ph.D.'s. That degree is not just based on taking tests and on knowing a body of knowledge, like the SAT or civil service exams. Its leading requirement is completion of an original research project.
Why does it make sense that this should be a requirement to teach? Why, for example, should a Ph.D. be necessary to teach calculus?
Because there is a concept in the University about knowledge and how one should behave toward it.
This view of the University is that there is more knowledge out there than you could possibly know. We cannot and will not teach you everything. But we will teach you something that is yet more valuable. We will teach you what it means to acquire knowledge. In the case of Ph.D.'s we will go the whole way. We require that you learn everything about some field. So much so that at the end of your journey, your Ph.D. thesis, you will know more than anyone else about the chosen topic of your dissertation.
That same philosophy is duplicated fractally in undergraduate education. In undergraduate education you are told quite early on to specialize. You major in some field. You may spend a good share of your senior year writing a senior thesis. We want you to learn as much as you can about some specialized field in four years' time.
Our view of education then is two-fold. On the one hand we want this to be a humbling experience. We want you to know that the knowledge to be learned is vast. At best even the greatest genius among all of you can know only a tiny fraction of it. Think about how long it takes to read a single book. Then think about the Berkeley course catalogue. And think about the fact that for each course in that book-length catalogue there is a whole syllabus of articles and books. Think about the library. And also the checkout room, with its paneled ceiling that lists the greatest scholars. They include Shakespeare, Descartes, Dante, Newton, and Rousseau. Someone planned those names to be carved in those gold letters as a humbling experience. When you go into that library you are being told how little you know relative to how much there is to know, in a great University like ours, and in that great library of ours, how much there is to know.
But the purpose of the University is not just to leave you humbled. It is our real purpose also to teach you, like Frodo, how to operate in a world that is so potentially humbling.
Little by little, step by step, the aim of this education is to show you how in any chosen area, you can acquire the wisdom to deal with any given problem. An education is not a game of Trivial Pursuit. It is not just cramming odd facts into your head so you can win $1,000,000 on a TV quiz show. An education teaches you how to relate existing knowledge to any situation that may arise. This is what we are teaching when we tell Ph.D. students that their education is not complete until they have completed a new piece of research. They must understand then the relation between all existing knowledge and the question that they are trying to answer. By learning the procedures to sort out how all existing knowledge impacts one question, you learn the discipline necessary to do that for every other question.
I am a social scientist. As a social scientist I see the University then as changing who you are. I see the University as not just changing your views toward science, like physics or biology, or astronomy, or chemistry. I see it also as changing your attitude toward other people.
Every one of the social sciences teaches us that we can understand the motives of other people. People may be very different from us. Their motives may be very different from ours. Their means of expressing those motives may be strange indeed. Our knowledge about other people's problems makes their motives comprehensible to us. That means that we can see other people and their motives in our terms.
The uneducated too often believe that a conflict of interest occurs because other people are evil. The educated believe that conflicts of interest naturally occur. Moreover, these conflicts occur especially because other people are basically so very much like ourselves. So the University teaches us to see other people's views. We have mercy for them.
Finally the great thing - especially about Berkeley -is that none of you is passive. I see each and every one of you asking yourselves: what can be done about it? How will we have greater justice?
I have been here for 37 years. I know that, like West Point cadets, Berkeley students are also trained to be heroes. 2,500 years ago the Prophet Micah asked the question: and what does the Lord require of you? What should you do to be a hero? The prophet answered that question: you should act justly. You should love mercy, and you should walk humbly with your God.
Twenty-five-hundred years later, your education reverses this dictum. It first leads you to act humbly. It teaches you that wisdom involves humility in the face of ignorance. But then it teaches you also that you are not alone. There are many people like you, even though they may appear different and even though they may act differently. And so you learn mercy. With mercy and knowledge, you then act. You do justice.
That is the lesson that we teach every day by our lives in the University. No matter what you know of any special subject; no matter what you know about Lie Algebras, or about 12th century Byzantine painting, or about the relation between DNA and RNA, or about quantum mechanics, if you have learned that, then you have learned the basic lesson that we wish to teach here at the University.
Like the cadets at West Point, you have learned your lesson.
You too are a hero.