That responsibility is quintessentially the work of universities -- calling upon our shared human heritage to invent a new futurethe future that will be created by the thousands of graduates who leave here today.Our work is about that ongoing commitment -- not to a single individual or even one generation or one erabut to a larger world and to the service of the age that is waiting before it.In 1884, my predecessor Charles William Eliot unveiled a statue of John Harvardand spoke of the good that can come from the study of what we might call the "enlarged" life of the man whose name this university bears.Eliot said: "He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fructified and multiplied beyond all power of measurement or computation.He will teach that from the seed which he planted... have sprung joy, strength, and energy ever fresh,blooming year after year in this garden of learning, and flourishing... as time goes on, in all fields of human activity."In other words, that statue we paraded past this afternoon is not simply a monument to an individual,
