Academic Convocation Readings
Excerpt and adaptation from A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (1995), written by Ben Bradlee, Class of 1933
When I was ten years old, my mother sang at Assembly one morning at Dexter School in Brookline. She forgot the words. I thought I’d die. Miss Fiske was the Head of School. Her motto was: “Our Best Today, Better Tomorrow.” She thanked my mother much too profusely, but I never really forgave her, even if I was only ten. I did not know then how long those words would stay with me.
Many years later, after a career in journalism and after years at The Washington Post, I found myself thinking about what a newspaper ought to be. I’ve always had trouble developing theories of journalism that were much more sophisticated than the motto of Miss Fiske at Dexter, my old grade school: “Our Best Today, Better Tomorrow.”
Put out the best, most honest newspaper you can today, and put out a better one the next day. That was about as sophisticated a theory of journalism as I ever needed. And perhaps it is a good theory for more than journalism.
Do your best today. Be honest about what you do. And tomorrow, try to make it better.
Excerpt from “Acceptance of the Presidential Nomination,” delivered in 1960 by the 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Class of 1929
We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.
I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not.
Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
It would be easier to shrink back from that frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past. But I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, and decision.
The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.