普林斯顿大学校长2021年毕业演讲：六英尺，这是人与人之间的距离，也是生与死的距离！（附视频&演讲稿...
英语演讲视频，第一时间观看
每年的五六月，是全球各大高校举行毕业典礼的日子。很多人也想知道，在美国参加毕业典礼是一种怎样的体验？尤其是美国常春藤名校的体验？
今天英文演讲君来分享美国著名的常春藤联盟成员，也是世界顶尖的私立研究型大学普林斯顿大学的2021年度毕业演讲，校长伊斯格鲁布（Eisgruber）在2021年度的毕业典礼上发表了题为“在一起，相距六英尺”的演讲，讲述了疫情对学校和世界的影响，举办现场毕业典礼的意义，并对毕业生们送上祝贺。
在疫情期间，出现了一种新的社交礼仪——六英尺远（six feet apart），这是人与人之间的距离，也是生与死的距离（six feet under）。
↓↓↓ 上下滑动，查看双语演讲稿 ↓↓↓
Tradition allows the Princeton president to share a few thoughts each year with our graduating students at Commencement. I regard that as a great privilege in any year, but especially so in this one, when all of you have persevered valiantly and brilliantly to overcome unprecedented challenges.
By completing your studies amidst this awful pandemic, you have distinguished yourselves even by the standards of this University’s long and illustrious history. And in so doing, you have earned the right to participate in this unique and memorable Commencement ceremony, a ceremony that, I submit to you, provides a surprisingly apt metaphor for the past year.
We are together, gathered through creative planning, technological assistance, the tireless work of many people, and a fierce determination to mark with physical presence this important moment in your lives. And yet as we are together, we are also apart, masked, separated by carefully marked six-foot intervals, and denied the joyous embraces that we would ordinarily exchange on graduation day.
Such combinations of separation and sharing have permeated the last fifteen months. The separation is obvious. We have endured quarantines and lock-downs. We have learned the term “social distancing,” which — hard though this is to believe — almost none of us had heard two years ago. We have had to give up communal dining, large events, small parties, and interpersonal contact of many kinds. We have met and learned through video conferencing rather than in person.
The sharing may be less obvious than the separation but it is equally real. It begins with the separation itself, and, more generally, with losses that people throughout the world have endured over the past year. The losses inflicted by COVID-19 have undoubtedly differed significantly from person to person. They have also differed across racial and economic groups, reminding us once again of the need to dedicate ourselves to achieving genuine social justice, not only in this country but around the world.
We should recognize these disparities while also recognizing that in real and meaningful ways we have shared the anxieties and burdens of this pandemic with people not only throughout this stadium, or this country, but across social divisions, international borders, and, indeed, vast continents. We fight a plague without boundaries, and our experience informs connections we feel with those suffering from the terrible outbreaks afflicting India, South America, and other parts of the globe.
To take another, smaller piece of this phenomenon: you now share with other graduating college students throughout the world this year a parallel experience of disruption, constraint, challenge, persistence, and achievement in response to this pandemic. Rarely, if ever, has humanity experienced such durable and unfamiliar forms of loss so widely and simultaneously.
The last year has also involved sharing in a second sense. Though we have been unable to interact in person, we have connected online in ways that most of us would not have thought possible, and indeed that would not have been possible even a few years ago. Most of us are thoroughly Zoomed-out and eager to return to physical forms of togetherness, but I doubt that any of us will abandon entirely our new virtual mechanisms of communication.
We may perhaps find some wisdom about these newest aspects of human community by considering very old ideas about the topic. Two millennia ago, Aristotle observed that people must cooperate with one another because they cannot otherwise satisfy their most basic physical needs. But, he noted, once people are forced together by their physical needs, they inevitably begin discussing and pursuing ideas about human flourishing. His insight was that because we must make and break bread together, we must form a common good together.
As this year’s countless Zoom calls vividly illustrate, human technology has transformed, if not diminished or severed, this connection between the physical and intellectual realms of human activity. We can now interact politically, academically, artistically, and socially without ever being in the same room, the same state, or even the same country.
What technology made possible, the pandemic made compulsory. For most of this past year, we were present to one another in only two dimensions, as flattened figures on screens, while our three-dimensional bodies inhabited vastly different spaces. We shared an emaciated world.
It is not enough. The fractious, irritated, angry state of our national politics testifies to that fact.
So too, more poignantly, does our presence in this stadium today. We could have deployed technological machinery to produce a whiz-bang virtual Commencement, which you could have watched from the comfort of your homes. We concluded — with your vigorous encouragement — that it would be better to sit in this cavernous stadium, arrayed across a giant field and surrounding bleachers, together, six feet apart.
We lose an essential dimension of the human when we cannot be together physically. If indeed people must forge a common good because we need to make and break bread together, the pandemic suggests that something like the reverse is also true.
Simply put, our long, unwelcome separation teaches us this: to forge a common good together, we must break bread together. We must, in other words, relate to one another not just as disembodied intellects, interests, or ideologies, or as faces in Zoom boxes, but also as real, three-dimensional people who share basic needs and a common humanity.
I hope you will bear that idea in mind as you venture into this strange, uncertain world post-Princeton and post-pandemic. I also hope that you will find ways to break bread and reconnect not only with one another but also with people far outside your own social circles. As the political philosopher Danielle Allen ’93 has urged in a passage that riffs on Aristotle, we must find ways to convey “the techniques and expertise of friendship” into “the rivalrous realm of politics.”
We must all recover, renew, and reinvigorate the genuinely human forms of connection so missing from our world over the last year and all too absent, even before the pandemic, from our country’s conversations about America’s common good. As you venture forth beyond this campus, I hope that you will seize the opportunity to build the genuine community that we so urgently need.
The journey that commences today will take you into a new and changing world. I am confident that you are well prepared for the challenge. You have excelled here, and you have persisted through the pandemic with extraordinary determination, creativity, intelligence, compassion, and courage. We will need your leadership, your vision, and your dedication to the service of humanity.
On behalf of the University, its faculty, administration, trustees, and alumni, I offer you best wishes as you go forth. We hope you will always consider this campus one of your homes, and that you will return often, so that we can be together again in the future — together again, without also being six feet apart! I, and all of my colleagues, extend our sincerest congratulations on this happy day to all of Princeton’s doctoral and master’s degree recipients and to Princeton University’s Great Class of 2021!
Congratulations!
学校传统让普林斯顿校长每年都能在毕业典礼上与学校的毕业生分享一些想法。我认为这在任何年份都是一种莫大的荣幸，尤其是在今天，当你们所有人都勇敢而出色地坚持克服前所未有的挑战时。
在这场可怕的疫情中坚持完成了学业，即使是以这所大学悠久而辉煌的历史标准来衡量，你们也已经足够出类拔萃。也正是因为你们的坚持，才获得了参加这个独特而难忘的毕业典礼的权利，我相信，这一仪式极好的反映了过去一年的努力。
我们在一起，通过创造性的计划，技术援助，许多人的不懈努力，并最终在你们生命中这一重要时刻的坚定决心聚集在一起。然而，当我们在一起的时候，我们也被分开了，戴着口罩，小心翼翼地以六英尺的间隔隔开，并且放弃了我们通常在毕业那天会交换的那种欢乐的拥抱。
这种分离和分享的结合在过去的15个月里一直存在。这种分离是显而易见的。我们经历了隔离和封锁。我们学了“社交距离”这个词，尽管这很难让人相信，但两年前几乎没人听说过这个词。我们不得不放弃公共餐饮、大型活动、小型聚会以及各种各样的人际交往。我们无法见面，只能通过视频会议见面和学习。
分享可能没有分离那么明显，但它同样真实。它始于分离本身，更广泛地说，始于世界各地的人们在过去一年里所承受的损失。疫情造成的损失因人、种族和经济群体而异，这再次提醒我们必须致力于实现真正的社会正义，不仅是在这个国家，而且是在全世界。
我们应该认识到这些差距，同时也认识到我们不仅以实际和有意义的方式与整个体育场或这个国家的人民，而且与跨社会阶层、国际边界、乃至广大大陆的人民共同分担了这一疫情的焦虑和负担。我们与一种无国界的疫情作斗争，我们的经验使我们与那些在印度、南美和世界其他地方遭受可怕疫情爆发之苦的人们产生了联系。
从另一角度来说：你们现在与世界各地的其他应届毕业生分享在应对这场疫情的过程中所经历的混乱、约束、挑战、坚持和成就。在此之前，人类很少在如此大的范围和规模上经历过这样持久和难以预料的损失。
在过去一年，我们彼此也进行了另一种意义上的分享。虽然我们无法面对面交流，但我们已经在网上实现了彼此互联，用以往大多数人认为是不可能的方式联系，甚至在几年前也是不可能的。我们中的大多数人都是通过Zoom彼此安慰，渴望能够真正面对面的沟通，但我不认为我们中会有人完全放弃我们新的虚拟交流方式。
或许我们可以通过对这一话题的旧观念的思考，找到一些关于人类社会的这些最新方面的智慧。两千年前，亚里士多德指出，人们必须相互合作，因为他们无法满足自己最基本的物质需求。但是，他指出，一旦人们被迫因他们的物质需要共同协作，就必然会地开始讨论和追求关于人类发展的想法。他的见解是，因为我们必须共同谋生、进餐，我们必须形成一个共同利益体。
今年无数次的Zoom沟通生动地说明，人类技术改变了，即使没有减少或切断人类活动中身体和脑力的联系。我们现在也可以在政治、学术、艺术和社会领域进行互动，而不必身处同一个房间、同一个州，甚至同一个国家。
技术使之成为可能，疫情使之成为强制性的。在过去一年的大部分时间里，我们以二维的形式呈现在彼此面前，就像屏幕上扁平的图形，而我们的三维身体居住在截然不同的空间。我们共享一个脆弱的世界。
我们今天在这个球场上的表现也是如此，这更令人痛心。我们本可以使用技术机器来进行一场的虚拟毕业典礼，你们可以舒舒服服地在家观看。但考虑到你们的想法，我们最终决定还是在这个巨大的体育场里，在一个巨大的场地和周围的露天举办这场典礼，彼此间隔6英尺。
当我们不能聚在一起的时候，就失去了人类的基本维度。如果人们确实必须为共同利益而共同努力，因为我们需要一起聚餐，那么大流行表明，相反情况也同样如此。
简单地说，我们长期的、不受欢迎的分离状态教会了我们这一点：为了共同的利益，我们必须一起进餐。换句话说，我们不能仅仅把彼此当作无实体的智力、兴趣或意识形态，或Zoom盒子里的面孔，而是把彼此当作真实的、三维的人，拥有共同的基本需求和共同的人性。
我希望你们在从普林斯顿毕业后，在进入这个陌生的、不确定的、后疫情时代的世界时，能牢记这一点。我也希望你们能找到聚餐的方法，不仅能与彼此重新建立联系，也能与远离自己社交圈的人重新建立联系。正如1993届普林斯顿毕业生、政治哲学家丹妮尔·艾伦(Danielle Allen’93)在一篇反复引用亚里士多德的文章中所敦促的那样，我们必须找到将“友谊的技巧和专业知识”传达到“政治竞争领域”的方法。
我们所有人都必须恢复、更新和振兴我们的世界在过去一年中如此缺失的、甚至在疫情之前也完全缺失的、关于美国共同利益的对话。当你们走出校园，我希望你们能抓住机会，建立我们迫切需要的真正的社区。
从今天开始的旅程将带你们进入一个崭新而多变的世界。我相信你已经为这个挑战做好了充分的准备。你们在这里表现出色，以非凡的决心、创造力、智慧、同情心和勇气坚持度过了这场疫情。我们需要你们的领导，你们的远见，你们为人类服务的奉献精神。
在你们前进的道路上，我谨代表普林斯顿大学、全体教员、行政管理人员、理事和校友向你们致以良好的祝愿。我们希望你将永远把这个校园当作你的家，你们会经常回来，这样我们就可以在未来再次在一起——再次面对面，而不是相距六英尺! 在这个快乐的日子里，我和我所有的同事向普林斯顿所有的博士和硕士学位获得者以及普林斯顿大学2021届的优秀毕业生们致以最诚挚的祝贺! 恭喜你们!
普林斯顿大学
2021年度优秀毕业生致辞