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To the class of 2019

By Zach Horton

From a recent grad to the incoming Class of 2019: congratulations — and welcome to what may well be the four most formative years of your lives. My advice to you is this: make friendship your top priority in college. An excellent education begins with and thrives upon sound friendship.

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Point number one: joy is the key to it all. In all you do, radiate joy and you will find friends in abundance and intellectual enrichment everywhere. A wise fellow once wrote, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.” Such things elevate the mind and lead to joy. The joyful person inspires others and cultivates friendships, no matter how vehemently others disagree with him or her intellectually. There is nothing so utterly disarming and contagious as true joy.

Point number two: learn by dialogue. The ancients did so and they created that amazing thing known as Western civilization. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens, both taught and learned through conversation, and the Western tradition is one enormous (and somewhat cacophonous) conversation between great thinkers. Dialectic is how we approach the truth. It’s also how we come to know others and make lasting friendships through the back-and-forth of meaningful interaction.

Friendship in its fullest form involves mutual character development and intellectual growth. Sure, there are other aspects of friendship: friends scratch each other’s back (i.e. the utilitarian aspect), and they do fun stuff together (i.e. the pleasurable aspect). But, as Aristotle rightly noted over two millennia ago, the most important aspect of a close and meaningful friendship is mutual goodwill. This doesn’t mean some wishy-washy reciprocation of warm feelings; mutual goodwill means a profound hope and desire that the other flourish (viz. live the good life). And flourishing means living in accord with right reason: attaining happiness through the cultivation of both the moral and intellectual virtues.

At Princeton, you’ll be in the very best place to form and develop this rich kind of friendship — both with your peers and professors. The classroom is important. The dinner table, perhaps more so. Discuss the big ideas. Solve the world’s problems with your roommates in the common room over a local brew. The richest friendships spawn the richest conversations, and the best of friends don’t always have to agree: to the contrary, often they do not. And that’s okay. Friends characteristically will the good of each other, and even when they disagree as to what that good is, the foundation of mutual goodwill — and above all, their heartfelt trust in such — is unshakeable. It is this trusting foundation that leads to intellectual and moral growth.

My college friendships significantly shaped my education, affecting me in countless ways: in my mode of thinking, in my intuitions and principles, in understanding my faith. I chose to study philosophy, for instance, not out of some innate interest in symbolic logic or meta-ethics, but rather, because a friend shared with me her joy in seeking wisdom. Another friend, with whom I disagree about everything from aesthetics to zygotes, challenged me to seek zealously an understanding of his premises and arguments before returning the challenge — in so doing, we together grew in the virtue of patience, learned a lot, and sometimes even changed each other’s minds.

It’s a fact of human nature that people rarely (if ever) change on force of brute argumentation. Friendship, on the other hand, is powerful reason for action, and the relationships we build with others change both us and them — sometimes radically so. At Princeton I witnessed conversions both intellectual and spiritual: two of my roommates and several other friends entered the Church; other close friends reevaluated and revised their worldviews to very considerable degree. While deeply rational, all of these conversions (and many others besides) were motivated by and supported through pre-existing friendship.

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I think there’s a lesson to be gleaned from this that goes beyond the University bubble and your impending undergraduate years, and it’s this: if you mean to ‘change the world’ (as you were likely instructed at your high school graduation), you’ll do best to do so with the joy of friendship, not the shrill cry of activism. Leaders befriend; partisans fight. Civic friendship, rooted in fruitful dialogue between reasonable people of goodwill, is the surest route to political and cultural reform.

A sound liberal education over your four years — if you do it right — will give rise to leadership as you grow though mutually educative relationships with your fellow students and your professors. This is precisely the kind of leadership we need: principled, thoughtful and joyful.

So, as you go forth into the big unknown of university life, bear this in mind. Focus on what is true and good and beautiful; be joyful always; seek to learn through conversation; and in all your collegiate interactions, be a friend. In so doing, you will grow to be a leader, and, more importantly, as you’ll later realize, you will live the good life during those halcyon days of college.

Zach Horton is an alumnus from the Class of 2015. He can be reached at t.z.horton@alumni.princeton.edu.

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