英文开学典礼演讲

英文开学典礼演讲

英文开学典礼演讲

英文开学典礼演讲

Nimen Hao! and Good morning!

I am delighted to be welcoming you to Duke Kunshan University on behalf of the faculty. \feelsomething more akin to what the ancient Greeks would label deinos, a feeling associated with human regard for things too strange or divine or complex to comprehend, a word that connotes a great dealof respect, even reverence, and more than a little bit of awe or even fear. We see this word in the first half of dino-saur,literally a \American slang, the adjective that leaps to mind is awesome,and so perhaps I should best say that I am both delighted and awed to welcome you on behalf of the DKUfaculty. This is an awesome undertaking, and yes, not so unlike a dinosaur, large and impressive, something to respect, even reverence, hard to wrap your mind about as a being —and a bit scary too.

My name is William Johnson, and I am a Professor of Classical Studies at Duke. Classics or Classical Studies in the West means the study of ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and the term

\from roughly 800 BCE through to about 300 CE. I am, in particular, a scholar of ancientGreece -- its language, literature, history, and culture.

The two most common questions about DKU that I get asked —and I assume the same is true for my faculty colleagues— are: (1) why is Duke interested in starting a campus in China? (2) why are you interested in it?

Why Duke in China? Answers of course will be many and multiform for such acomplex undertaking, but tend to center around issues like the importance of China on the world stage, China's burgeoning economy, its interest in further development in areas like management, science,

health, together with Duke's strength in areas like business, science of all kinds, and global health. Inmore vague and general terms DKU can be

described an extension of the global strategy that Duke now embraces. These are all important. But in my view, amore essential answer could well flow from what happened just now, in the simple act of me

introducing myself. Think about what happened there. I could not assume, as I could in America or England or Italy or Germany, that even a highly educated audience would know what \meant.

Moreover, I had to position this as what is classical in the West, since I am well aware of the factthat there is a very different classical in the East, with a very different notion ofthe ancient that one looks back to —and by implication the beginnings that one looks back to. Ancient philosophysuggests not Socrates and Plato, but

Confucius; ancient empire brings to mind not the Persian and Athenian empires but the Qin and Han dynasties; ancient historiography begins not with Herodotus and Thucydides but Sima Qian; the birth of drama means not Greek tragedy but early Chinese opera. So, I have to specify what it means that I am called a Classicist, since I am not a student of what is classical or even ancient for many but a Western viewpoint.

Now that may seem a small thing, but it's a big thing, a very big thing, deinos as the Greeks would say. In the West, when we sketch out a rough developmental history of what we call the cosmopolitan perspective, that historyruns something like this: at first people

identified with their family and kinshipgroup (a person might say, \one of the Alcmeonidae, a powerful Greek family\

developed civic institutions, that identity could then embrace not just the family clanbut a tribe or a city (\Alcmeonidae\Near East by Alexander the Great, identity shifted to includeall those who spoke your language and had shared cultural traditions (\an Athenian, one of the descendants of the Alcmeonidae\

Then as nations developed, identity could center on the national impulse,which is essentially cultural but also territorial (\American, a Greek American, who speaks Greek and English, and whose parents came from Athens and claim to be from aprominent family\how in each developmental turn, the perspective becomes wider: one can now be American, even if Greek in heritage and in language, and

ultimately from Athens, which, however, like the identification with a family of prominence, is at a remove. This is an increasingly

cosmopolitan outlook, with all thatflows from that, but it is still very much rooted in the Western perspective.

Duke's global initiative in general, and DKU in particular is, by this analysis, another turn of the screw. In order even so much as to introducemyself, I have to step away from my comfortable Western

assumptions about who Iam (a \fact that Classics should be a more embracing term, and thatonly from a blinkered or even half-blind vision can words like\\possibilities for global collaboration at DKU will be rooted in

particulars, like management and science and health and archaeology and humanistic inquiry, but underneath all this is a much larger issue: the potential for working out shared visions and mutual understandings that lead, on both sides, not only to engaged interactions but to the development of a more cosmopolitan viewpoint that, however,remains

rooted in the particulars of who we are and where we come from (onemight say,\an American, Greek by heritage whosefamily is said to have come from a once-powerful family in Athens\that is truly deinos, huge, dynamic, complex, something to respect, to nurture,to admire, an undertaking that in its sweeping possibilities truly inspires awe.

Now as to the second question, What is myinterest in DKU? that will be a more personal matter for each of the faculty.Part of my own answer I have already given: I am very excited by the possibilities of DKU, and I too want a share in this fresh cosmopolitan view.Moreover, like several of the faculty, I have close personal ties to China.

Atcenter on the screen is what we used to call our \of my daughter, Benita Xiaogu on the very evening of her adoption in August 2003, in Guangxi Province. (Benita is now twelve years of age, and you will see her around.) But we decided to adopt in China for good reasons, andhigh on the list was a deep interest in coming to know and be a part of this other ancient culture — that is, a culture of similar antiquity to the Greeks and Romans we had studied for our Yale

doctorates (my wife Shirley Werner isalso a Classicist; you will see her around too).

That these two independently forming ancient civilizations — the Mediterranean peoples on the one hand, and \— mayhave an interestingly larger story to tell than the individual