A Sort Of Homecoming Full Movie Online Free LINK

- Welcome home. Avery, the last time I saw you, you looked different. A little bit more hair, yeah. You look wonderful, thank you for that generous introduction. So, good morning. How beautiful is it today? Very, very, very beautiful and I'm so happy for you that it is. It's been a glorious fall, as I said to some of you last night, absolutely glorious and sweet on this campus. One of the most enjoyable falls I've spent here in my ninth year now. We have with us the most senior member of our alumni, Bill Whiston here in the balcony, class of 43, is that right? It's wonderful to have someone so youthful and dedicated as Bill. The world needs its Amherst's. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. The world needs educational institutions that value intellectual rigor, not just for its own sake, but in pursuit of understanding the world. It needs colleges and universities dedicated to freedom and integrity in the pursuit of truth. It needs colleges devoted to opportunity for academically talented youth, regardless of their circumstances and college is dedicated to their success once they arrive. We need forms of education that can be scaled, that can serve large numbers of people, we need large research universities, we need better funding for our great public flagships and our regional public institutions, we need online education to reach people all over the world without access to the education that we have here, but we also need colleges that operate at a scale of the sort Amherst operates on that allow for what at Amherst we call, closed colloquy between faculty and students. Institutions with a culture that promotes the flourishing of each individual student, each individual student. That offers the kind of education that engages the whole person, the mind, the heart, the spirit. That promotes friendship and civic responsibility. The world needs colleges like Amherst that expose us to the fact and the benefits of human difference and teach us how to embrace these differences without fear or hatred. I don't know what college means anymore than I know what America means if it doesn't mean opportunity, openness, integrity, equality and individual responsibility. Negotiating the tensions that can arise among those terms requires the ability to think in complex ways. Seemingly, a losing art, but not here. Complexity is a beautiful thing, that's what our minds are made for and at Amherst, we aim to educate students who can think with great complexity, who can embrace it, who can foster it and promote it, who can use it to change the world. A great education fosters the belief that other people's views are valid and valuable, as long as the views are based on evidence and have integrity. Amherst combines the identification of talent with the nurturing of talent and a commitment to opportunity. Those are our values, those have been Amherst values, those are still Amherst values and they matter. I believe after my eight plus years here, that it's safe to say Amherst graduates have an impact on the world that's disproportionate to our size and to the number of graduates in the world and I think that that is owed in large measure to the quality of our faculty, the quality of our students, the intensity of their interactions with each other, a commitment to individual students and it's also indebted to the environment in which all of this education occurs. Place matters, natural beauty matters, architectural beauty matters. This place impresses upon us, I think you'll agree, a respect and a love of a natural environment in which we are just a small part, just a small part. It builds a sense of humility. This fall has been the best in years when it comes to the profusion of colors in our leaves. I've been waiting for another fall like this, it makes it exciting to walk around the campus. It feels like a celebration every step I take. This year walking around the campus, the difference that the Science Center and the new landscaping of the Eastern campus have come into view, now that we're in our second year with the new building and also with the new landscaping. We actually have an Eastern part of the campus now that doesn't feel just like a hill that some buildings tumbled down, but instead, like a planned kind of landscaping that complements the iconic first-year quad, but doesn't compete with it or take away from it in any way. Some of you probably went to panels on the Science Center in one year out and heard our faculty speak about what it does to help them in their pursuits which are research as well as education, I hope some of you did. Some of you probably went to here Adam Sites and Marissa Parem talk about how they teach and why they are the winners of the first ever Jeffrey Ferguson teaching prize at Amherst. Did any of you make it to that session at 10 a.m.? Were you impressed? Yeah, I'm impressed by them too and Jeffrey Ferguson, does everyone know who Jeffrey Ferguson was? No, Jeffrey Ferguson was a faculty member here. He was in Black Studies. He chaired Black Studies for a while, but what he did that has lasting significance for Amherst was to build a curriculum in Black Studies that attracted students from all over the campus, why? Because he used fundamental rhetoric textbooks and built a curriculum on the basis of levels beginning with critical reading, making arguments and doing research for undergraduates and every part of the Black Studies curriculum had as its foundation the intellectual skills that students need and that lie below the content of a course. He was a wonderful human being and we lost him a couple of years ago to cancer and in his honor, we now honor Amherst faculty members who are doing extraordinary jobs, not only of teaching in the classroom, but of thinking about what teaching can be going forward. It's a little bit controversial to have a teaching prize at Amherst. So committed are we to the notion and actually the reality that we have so many outstanding teachers that it might make no sense to single people out. In my view, celebrating anything is a celebration of its significance to everyone and so the prize, I think will over time come to mean a lot to the campus. So thank you all for attending that event. The campus events all fall have been extraordinary. Some of you may have read my fall update. Did anyone read it? Okay, well I'm going to take responsibility for how few of you read it because we sent it out late on a Friday afternoon and I think it was buried in your inboxes, otherwise I know you would have read every word, but the fact that not everyone read it gives me an opportunity just to say a few things about what goes on on this campus and why it's been such a wonderful fall. First of all, in honor of the incredible Professor Benjamin DeMott, we had a lecture for new students given by author Min-Jin Lee whose novels are Prize winners and whose most recent novel, Pachinko I hope many of you will have read. It's an extraordinary novel in which a family's history is embedded in the histories of Korea and Japan and in particular, Japan's colonization of Korea. It's quite an extraordinary book. We asked all new students to read it over the summer. I invited two groups of students to my house for dinner to discuss the book. It was way over subscribed, the dinners, but not because I was there, but because Min-Jin Lee agreed to attend both dinners and to interact with the students, you'll have to forgive me, I can't believe that's happening. I'm not so good with the electronics, that was my watch. Min-Jin Lee gave a talk that managed to embed facts about the history of Amherst that I think none of us knew into a talk about the history of her family and its embeddedness in the histories of Japan and Korea. She got two standing ovations from our students right here in this Chapel, it was an extraordinary talk. The fact that students share a reading of that sort and that so many students, but I would wager, not every single one read this 600 page novel is part of our effort to build more shared intellectual experiences into the campus. We had a point-counterpoint event which is part of our first-year seminars and which some of you in this audience are probably part of having funded and this is our effort to bring to campus, people with differing perspectives and different political views to talk on a theme. The theme this year is the question of progress. What constitutes progress from different points of view? Have we made progress over the past 50 years based on that point of view? Will we make progress over the next 50 years? And the two speakers were Jill Lepore who is a Harvard historian, an author of a book I wanna recommend to you all if you haven't read it, it's called These Truths and this is one of the first efforts on the part of an historian in a long time to write a history of the United States in one-volume. It's an incredible book and she interacted, I moderated a discussion between Jill Lepore and Ross Douthat who is also an author and a columnist. I made time to read Ross's book, Bad Religion which asks a question about how much modernity can we tolerate and by we, he means in his book Catholics in particular without losing the fundamentals of a religion and it's a very interesting set of questions that he asks. He's been here before, he gave a lecture two or three years ago on the history of conservative thought in the U.S. which is one of the best lectures I've heard here in a long time. He got up without notes and gave a 40 minute lecture that was captivating, rich. So the two of them interacted on the question of progress. It was a wonderful event, packed audience of students, faculty, staff and then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived on campus and she was here from 3 p.m. in the afternoon until 10 p.m. at night and I can tell you honestly, because I was with her every step of the way except when the federal marshals put her in a car and drove her to