Class Day Address

	Fareed Zakaria

by Fareed Zakaria
May 27, 2007

I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s a terrible and embarrassing confession: I actually missed my own Class Day. I don’t know exactly how or why; I think it had to do with an extended celebration the night before at an establishment called Whistler’s out on Chapel Street which is, alas, long gone. I wasn’t sure whether to bring this up because it is terribly embarrassing, but there it is. I slept through the whole damn thing. But, hey, look at the bright side; I’m wide awake now and ready for this one.

I’m guessing now that the senior class officials who invited me here are having some second thoughts. I’m sure that there was some concern anyway. I mean, Harvard gets Bill Clinton and you get me. When the Daily News reported that I was going to be the class speaker, it detailed the campus reaction in the usual way that we journalists do: using a thorough scientific survey, probably interviewing at least six students. And it came to the following conclusion: While most students said they expected Zakaria to deliver an interesting speech, some said other public figures who could deliver more lively talks would have been better choices. Daniella Berman, Class of ’07 — hi, Daniella — said that a figure that was not so heavily involved in politics might be able to keep the class more entertained. And that’s what they said on the record. The world of blogs really gives you the candid reactions. On ivygateblog.com one of the quotes by Yalie ’09 said that “Fareed Zakaria is definitely low-hanging fruit, considering that he is a member of the Yale Corporation. Y ’07 agreed: “Having a Yale Corporation member as Class Day speaker,” he wrote, “is like talking about your backpack on show-and-tell day because you forgot to bring something more interesting. It has zippers and two pockets,” he wrote.

So I stand before you today with no backpack and a small measure of anxiety. I’m actually anxious not so much about entertaining you but about this whole business of dispensing advice. Frankly, I think I’m too young for that. You know, I think there’s a point in your life when you cross over into the world of advice-giving. Woody Allen captures this very well in a movie of his called “Radio Days.” It’s set in the ’40s, and a mother is telling her son to stop listening to the radio because it’s going to ruin his life. This was when Cole Porter was thought to be bad for your morals. The son says, “But Mom, you listen to the radio all day.” She snaps back immediately: “That’s different. Our lives are ruined already.”

I’m not sure I’m quite there yet. But I have gotten a lot better at giving advice, ever since I’ve had kids. In fact, my wife Paula and my two kids, Omar and Lila, seven and four, are here with me today. See, I’ve discovered that parenthood is a unique opportunity to dispense a steady stream of unsolicited advice to a captive audience. For the parents in the audience, I know it gets more difficult as they grow up. I’m just savoring these moments.

You know, I’ve often lectured my kids that at their age, Abraham Lincoln walked nine miles each way to school every day. They have been nice enough not to point out that at my age John F. Kennedy was president.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m trying to speak to you now not as someone from a distant past importing words of wisdom but as a fellow journeyman, traveling together into this new world and new age that we live in. Many people describe the world you are going into as scary, calling it “The Age of Terror” or “The Age of Jihad.” And it’s true; these have been tense times. While you have been happily ensconced in Yale, political turmoil has swept the globe. The attacks of 9/11 have been followed by bombings in Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Riyadh, Madrid, London. We are engaged in two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then you have the deadlock in Palestine; Iran’s nuclear ambitions; North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal; Venezuela and Russia’s growing assertiveness.

But underneath all this, there is another deeper and much more hopeful reality. Consider this simple fact. Over the last five years, while you have happily been ensconced at Yale, the world has grown economically at a faster pace than at any time in four decades. The average income of a person in the world has grown faster in these five years than at any point in recorded human history. Markets are supposed to be smart. Why are they telling us that this political turmoil doesn’t matter? Perhaps it is because that the current era of globalization is more powerful, more resilient and more long-lasting than many think. We are living through something practically unique today: simultaneous growth in every part of the world. The United States is doing well, Europe is doing well, Japan is doing well, but so are China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, and on and on and on. The rise of these once poor, once stagnant, once Third World countries is powering the new global order, not simply economically, but socially and politically as well. It is world in which for the first time, everyone feels that they have a chance at being a player.

Now what does this mean for you? It means that thanks to Chinese and Indian companies that have kept prices of goods and services low, which has kept inflation low, which has kept interest rates low, your parents were able to take out affordable second mortgages and put you through the hell that is Yale College tuition.

But, you know, many people are very scared by this new age. They fear that America will not be able to compete with 2.3 billion hungry and hardworking Chinese and Indians; they fear that we are falling behind in science and technology, that we are becoming fat and lazy. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, said more people will graduate in the United States with a sports exercise degree than an electrical engineering degree. So if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way.

I do not share this pessimism. This new era of globalization has been accelerating furiously for the past 20 years, and the United States has benefited enormously. Over the past two decades, America has grown faster than any industrial country in the world. In 1980, the U.S. made up 20 percent of world economic output. Today, that has risen to 29 percent. Year after year, the United States is ranked as the most competitive economy in the world or in the top five. It is usually first in technology and innovation. The situation with regard to higher education is dramatic. In recent rankings of the world’s top 20 universities, 18 are in America. A list of where the world’s thousand best computer scientists were educated shows that the top 10 schools were all American. Don’t worry, Yale is on both lists.

Other countries teach students how to take tests. The best American universities teach students how to think and how to solve problems, and those are much more lasting traits to be teaching in today’s world. So America remains in an enviable position, but the world is catching up. The new challenges are formidable, more so than ever before, and I have my list of specific programs and proposals to fix our problems — don’t worry, you’re not going to get them now.

But perhaps the most important thing for the United States to do is to nurture what has been our greatest strength: staying open. What is distinctive about the United States is not its ingenious government programs. It is that America keeps itself open, wide open to the world, letting in goods and services, commerce and culture, ideas and inventions, and perhaps most important, people. This openness has allowed us to develop fast and flexibly as an economy, to manage change and diversity as a society, and to push new boundaries of individual freedom and personal autonomy. For 100 years, America has invented the future, and we are even now inventing the first universal nation, made of different races, castes, creeds and religions, with a bewildering array of strange names and backgrounds, like mine. Look at the presidential field right now. You have as serious contenders for the U.S. presidency a woman, an African-American, a Hispanic, a Mormon and a Catholic. Joe Lieberman should get into the race just to complete this mosaic.

If you want to ask yourself what is America’s core competitive strength: We take in more immigrants every year than the rest of the world put together. And that is why the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that will not experience a decline in its workforce in the coming decades. And we assimilate these people into society better than any country in the world. And it is their incredible energy and hunger, from the brilliant engineer to the hardworking busboy, that enriches us and ennobles us, and makes us sure that the United States will not suffer the fate of other great and rich countries — which is it will never grow fat and lazy.

Over these last decades, we have stayed open, politically, culturally, economically. Dangerously open by some people’s estimation. But look at the result. We have become incredibly strong and vibrant, even as other countries have faced economic rigidities, demographic decline and cultural despair. We should be proud of this new world we have built; it is one that America has worked to build for decades. But now that other countries near and far are following America’s lead, it would be a tragedy and an irony if as the world was opening up, we — out of fear and nervousness and insecurity — began closing down.

Now, the task of every journalist is to make a heroic generalization from his own personal experience to the world at large. So I am going to explain to you how everything I’ve been telling you is rooted in my own personal experience. And this motto of staying open applies to countries and to people. I grew up 8,000 miles away in a very different country and culture, with very different expectations. Simply put, if you did well in school in India, you were meant to be an engineer. I specialized in science for the last two years of high school, and my first year at Yale I took a bunch of science courses. But I began to realize that what I really loved to do was to read newspapers and magazines and listen to my parents talk about current affairs and be immersed in their lives about it. So I moved from being a geek to becoming a wonk. Then I didn’t plan to be a journalist. I was finishing up my Ph.D. at an adequate university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was preparing to apply for academic jobs. A friend suggest that I should take a job in journalism, or apply for one, at a place called Foreign Affairs, a quasi-academic journal, so it seemed safe. I first said no, I wasn’t interested. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had been practicing journalism, and loving it, since high school. So I called the guy back. Years later, I got an offer from Newsweek. Now this time, I couldn’t pretend there was anything vaguely academic about Newsweek. And so I thought about it, realized I truly liked the people who worked there, and decided to make a jump into mass-circulation journalism. That led to television a few years later, which I also gingerly embraced. These turned out to be the best decisions in my life because I now realized that what I truly loved about the field of study I’ve always loved was the opportunity to help the average educated citizen make sense of the world. I find that a broad audience of smart, busy people brings out the best in me as a writer and a thinker.

People will tell you constantly this week: Do what you love. Except that I didn’t really know what I loved. I recognized my passion by watching myself, watching what I was doing with my time, and staying open to what was giving me joy and energy and being willing to move in that direction.

So if I have any lesson from my career, it is to stay open to that kind of exploration and discovery. And I don’t mean that just in a professional sense. I mean that personally too. Don’t block off the unfamiliar. Stay open to new people, new ideas, new experiences, new possibilities, new cultures, new ways of doing things, and you will grow, in your mind and in your heart. These new things may come from anywhere: from a professor, a poem, a child, a colleague, a New York cab driver. Yeah, even that guy, who had the energy and ambition to travel 6,000 miles, and is working 16-hour days and knows two languages — well, three if you count English — he has something to teach you. You can learn something from anyone.

It is easier to stick with the road well traveled and to close yourself off to something that is strange or unsettling. It may even be the right path for you. But stay open to the possibilities out there. For countries and for people: stay open, and you will grow stronger and more resilient.

Finally … you know somebody once said to me, about halfway through your speech, say ‘finally, it wakes the audience right up … but I am actually winding down. Let me say that I wish I could give you some specific and concrete advice about what to do to succeed in life. But I don’t really know whether nanotechnology or biotechnology is the industry of the future, whether you should work for hedge funds or venture capitalists, whether mobile telephony is a wave of the future or a passing novelty. But what I do know is this: If you want to make a good life, human beings will probably respect and reward those talents that they have always honored — intelligence and hard work, discipline and cooperation, honesty and courage, and perhaps above all, love and faith and hope. If you can embrace these qualities of mind and spirit, people will honor you as they have honored men and women for thousands of years. That’s what they built statutes for in the past, and that is what they will build statues for in the future — well, nobody builds statues anymore, they make weird abstract contortions of metal and steel with strange doodads hanging from them, but you get my point.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2007: Congratulations, best of luck and Godspeed.