In the intellectual core of her speech, Sontag argued that the value of a liberal arts education lies in its cultivation of critical opposition — not as a political tactic but as an existential stance. She insisted that culture is not something given but an achievement that must be protected against all incursions, the opposite of provinciality of both intellect and heart. Sontag described a society in which the constraints on thought operate not through overt censorship but through the promise of self-fulfillment — a system that reduces mental life while claiming to expand it. She urged the Wellesley graduates to see opposition and critical thinking not as tools for reform but as the most authentic way to exist in the world, to maintain what she called 'the right to diversity, to difference, the right to difficulty.'