These couplets are some of my favorites from “Bright College Years,” and, in my experience, they are truthful. I suspect they will prove accurate for you as well. But it is the song’s final lines, popular at alumni gatherings and always sung with gusto, complete with the waving of handkerchiefs, that I want to use to launch my topic for today:

Oh, let us strive that ever we

May let these words our watch cry be,

Where’er upon life’s sea we sail:

“For God, for Country and for Yale!”

“For God, for Country, and for Yale:” A member of the Yale College Class of 1881 named Henry Durand wrote this ballad, and the final lines were meant to be a rallying cry. It made sense in those days to presume, as Durand did, that most Yale students shared, or at least professed to share, the same god and the same country. Most Yalies, until recent decades, were white, Protestant, and American. And of course, until fifty years ago in Yale College, they were all men.

Today, Yale is a different place from the college Durand knew. We welcome people from around the world, from every background and from every walk of life.

I am proud to be a Yale graduate. I received my Ph.D. in psychology from Yale in 1986. A hundred years earlier, I may have been less likely to have been admitted to Yale on account of my background; I am Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe. My wife Marta, another proud Yale graduate, received her master’s degree in public health in 1984; her family is from Puerto Rico. Our stories are not unique. Over the past decades, Yale has opened its doors wider and wider. We have expanded the circle of belonging.

Yet despite our differences and diversity, we have at least one very important thing in common: we all share Yale. No matter where you are from, or who you are, or your path to arriving here, now you are—among other things—a member of this community. You belong here. You are citizens of Yale.

In our country and our world today, questions about citizenship and immigration are hotly contested. But at Yale, we share none of this uncertainty about the critical importance of immigrant and international students and scholars. The work of the university—education and research—requires the free movement of people and ideas across national borders. On behalf of this university, I advocate for policies that will allow us to welcome students and scholars from around the world to our campus.

Our Yale citizenship, however, is not based on national origin. Our students hail from 121 countries. Nor is it based on our adherence to a certain set of beliefs or dogma, as we bring an enormous range of viewpoints and perspectives to this campus. Instead, we are citizens of Yale because we share a desire to know, understand, and create. We are members of an academic community dedicated to Urim v’Thummim, lux et veritas, light and truth.

We are poets and psychologists, historians and scientists, physicians and deans, and yet we all share the same fundamental goal: to expand the horizons of the known world. To ask questions that shake the foundations of knowledge and to rebuild them again with new answers.

Our world is desperate for new ideas and solutions. We need to understand the human condition and our planet. We need insights into the genome. We need breakthroughs in our ability to fight disease, alleviate suffering, and find justice. We need answers to urgent and long-standing questions.

You will tackle this important work at Yale. The experiences you have here will shape the rest of your lives, and you will have opportunities that most people only dream of.

And because a Yale education is a great privilege, it comes with certain obligations. I want to speak today about some of the most important obligations of Yale citizenship. I will delineate four of them:

So, the first obligation concerns our intellectual and scholarly work. Our campus must be a place conducive to deep study that will motivate both a lifetime of learning and the development of character that will serve you well as future leaders.

Yale will demand much of you. There will be times when you don’t understand an assignment or struggle with a problem set. You may do poorly on a midterm. At least I hope so! Those failures—as much as your successes—mean you are doing something right. Be kind to yourself, and remember that you have come to Yale because you don’t know everything—not yet.

The faculty will be alongside you, as teachers and mentors. This is my thirty-third year on Yale’s faculty, and I know that working with students is one of the great joys of this profession. Go to office hours. Get to know your professors, and they will help you deepen and expand your expertise. Most of all, allow your curiosity to take wing—to take you in unexpected directions and lead you to new areas of study, practice, and discovery.

I enrolled in courses in college that I hadn’t planned to take, and they changed the way I see the world now, forty years later: a course in the history of theater styles, a course in writing poetry, a course in real-world (applied) sociology, a course in geology that involved fascinating fieldwork. Make sure you explore the great range and diversity of academic experiences available to you here.