【正文】 e, a water crisis in detroit。 you engineered a better barbecue smoker—and tested it in a blizzard。 you joined the fight to end malaria。 and earned the award for best hockey player in the ncaa for strength of character as well as skill。 you became well connected—to alzheimer’s patients, to kids in kenya, to homeless youth。 and, as the inaugural class of ed school teacher fellows, 20 of you are preparing to help highneed students rise.and i understand you even rested with ambition, as you tried to “netflix and chill.”you made it all look easy—all while facing blows to the spirit that have tempered and tested you. you arrived just after a breach of academic trust that, by your senior year, produced the first honor code in harvard’s history, events that raised hard questions for all of us: what is success? what is integrity? to whom, or what, are we accountable?when a hurricane prompted the first harvard closing in 34 years, you rallied with generosity and goodwill—and did so again when we closed for snowstorm nemo—the fifth largest in boston history. and that was just a warm up, so to speak, for the winter of our misery—the worst in boston history—when you sledded the slopes of widener in a kayak.and when the bombs went off at the boston marathon, in just your second semester, we considered still larger questions: who are we? what matters most? what do we owe to one another? you told me that you became bostonians that day, bonded to a city beyond harvard square, and to each other during the manhunt and lockdown, when the university closed for an unprecedented third time in 6 months.who can forget the images—of the mayhem, of the people who ran, not for safety, buttoward the danger, into the chaos? the army veteran, who smelled cordite, and expecting more bombs, saved a college student’s life。 the man in the cowboy hat, who ripped away fencing in order to reach the most injured. and who can forget the moment when red sox first baseman david ortiz stood in the center of fenway park and said in eleven words of fellowship and defiance that the fcc chose not to censor, though i will today—“this is our [bleeping] city and nobody[’s] gonna dictate our freedom.”a few months ago as i was lucky enough to be sitting in a broadway theater, absorbing the final number of the musical hamilton, i thought of you, and that fierce spirit of inclusion and selfdetermination. i watched as eliza, center stage, sang, “i put myself back in the narrative,” and asked the question in the title of her song, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?,” the spirited summation of a production that, like you, has broken records. like you, has created a new drama inside a very old one.harvard, one might say, is a bastion of opportunity and unimaginable good fortune—for all of us, who find a place, with varying degrees of fort, at the center of its long and successful narrative. and yet the burden is on us—to locate the disfort, to act on the restless spirit of that legacy. as i thought about speaking to you here today, it occurred to me how much the question in that final song has framed your time here, and how much it will continue to affect your lives, as college graduates, as harvard alumni, as citizens and as leaders. who will tell your story?you. you will tell your story. that is the point that i want to leave you with today. telling your own story, a fresh story, full of possibility and a new order of things, is the task of every generation, and the task before you. and that task is exactly what your liberal arts education has prepared you to do, in three vital ways:first, telling your own story means discovering who you are, and not what others think you should be. it means being mindful of others, but deciding for yourself. it’s easy to tell a tale that others define, the one they expect to hear. a moment ago i sketched your harvard history. but what did i leave out? one of harvard’s legendary figures and reverend walton’s predecessor, the reverend peter gomes, used to put it this way: “don’t let anyone finish your sentences for you.” he loved being a paradox, an unpredictable surprise, but always true to himself: a republican in cambridge。 a gay baptist preacher。 black president of the pilgrim society—afrosaxon, as he sometimes put it. playful. unapologetic. unbounded by others’ expectations. “my anomalies,” he once said, “make it possible to advance the conversation.”advance the conversation. this is my next point. telling our own stories is not just about us. it is a conversation with others, exploring larger purposes and other worlds and different ways of thinking. your education is not a bubble. think of it as an escape hatch, from what nigerian novelist and former radcliffe fellow chimamanda adichie calls “the danger of a single story.” she has observed, “[h]ow impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story.” not because it may be untrue, but because, in her words, “[stories] are inplete. they make one story bee the only story,” even though “[m]any stories matter.” for four years you have learned the rewards of other stories, and the risk of critical misunderstandings when they go unheard—whether those stories emerge from the office for lgbtq life, or the black lives matter movement, or the international conversation on sexual assault—and perhaps most powerfully, from one another. this is precious knowledge. only by knowing that other stories are possible can we imagine a different future. what will medicine look like in the 21st century? energy? migration? how will cities be designed? the question, as one of you wrote in the crimson, is not “what am [i] going to be,” but “what problem do [i] solve?”which brings me to my final point: keep revising. every story is only a draft. we retell even our oldest sagas—whether of hamilton and the american revolution or of harvard itself. the best education prepares you because it is unsettling, an obstacle course that forces us to