2026 Convocation Address

“Into the Heart of It”
By Ken Ruscio, Emeritus President and Interim President
September 2, 2026

Robert Penn Warren, best known as the author of that great American novel All the King’s Men, was first and foremost a poet.  In one of his poems, A Few Axioms for a Young Man, he offers this advice:

When swimming in heavy surf, never
Wait for a breaker to lean heavily over you.
As it begins to make a marked curve, dive
Into the heart of it, low to undercut it before
It breaks. A strange moment of philosophical quiet is there, 
At its heart. This principle
Has more than one application.

Let our time together this evening be a moment of philosophical quiet. Tomorrow the wave of the fall semester will come crashing down. Undergraduate classes begin, following the lead of the law school.  Eventful weekends loom ahead.  Alumni will return.  Parents and families will visit. Concerts and plays will be rehearsed and performed.  ODAC and NCAA championships will be pursued and won.  Prominent speakers will be welcomed.  There may even be a party or two.

But tonight, let’s pause and reflect.

In fact, let this transition period for the university become a fortuitous opportunity to take stock.  We will soon complete a successful strategic plan and capital campaign and welcome a new president.  There are things to do in the months ahead, and we will get them done.  But this is also a time to dive into the heart of that marked curve, to ask not what we do but why we do it.

What defines us?  What guides us?  What are the heart and soul of this university?  What is our character?

No strategic plan discussions tonight.  No capital campaign update.  No itemized to-do list for the next few months.  There’s a time and a place for that. But sometimes you just need to think about what counts not what we count. 

My words tonight are an invitation not a pronouncement.  I won’t pretend to define W&L for you.  But as I look back on a long history here, and as Kim and I return—yet again (or as Kim has said, “Not again?”)—to a place we love with people we truly admire, I feel a responsibility to offer a few thoughts to get us started. 

I often find myself reaching for three touchstones.  They may not be yours, or they may be variations of yours.  But for what they are worth, here are mine.

I

First, W&L offers one of those rare experiences in life when you can grow so much as an individual yet feel so much a part of a community.

None of you will leave here unchanged by the education you receive.  Maybe a faculty member will see an aptitude in you and nurture it into a passion.  Maybe a staff member will help you through a rough patch and you will learn the meaning of gratitude.  Maybe a coach will teach you not only how to win but also how to lose with grace and dignity.

You’ll sharpen your interests, taking on new ones and discarding old ones.  An unleashed curiosity will take you down unexpected paths.  You’ll develop your unique and distinctive personalities.

But you will also learn the importance of being members of a community where people truly care about each other.

Many years ago, while still a faculty member, I ran across an essay in the Ring-tum Phi, our student newspaper.  It has stayed with me.  I’ve lost some of the details, but this is the gist.

The writer, a student, was trying to make sense of a decision she made.  She had been given a take-home exam with just a couple of parameters.  She could devote only a defined amount of time to it, and she could not consult with anyone or refer to her books or notes once she started.

Late at night—actually early in the morning—she felt ready.  After locking the door to prevent interruptions and setting her books and notes aside, she began writing.  Soon enough she encountered a question she couldn’t answer.  Her notes were an arm’s length away.  No one would know if she used them.  But she resisted and suffered the GPA consequences.

Why, she asked herself?  What led to a decision so contradictory to her self-interest?

Upon reflection she realized she had taken seriously her commitment to a community of trust.  She instinctively understood the obligation that entailed. Had she violated the trust placed in her, her attachment to a community she had grown to love would be diminished, perhaps irrevocably.

She discovered something about herself by realizing she had developed a commitment to something greater than the self. 

That’s a story about the Honor System at W&L.  But I’ve long thought that integrity is simply the brightest star in a constellation of virtues we acquire at W&L.  I don’t know how one spends time here without understanding that civility, humility, and respect for others matter for a life of meaning and purpose.

When you are handed your W&L diploma, you’ll also be receiving a kind of ethical compass.  You won’t wake up every morning thinking about it.  It’ll become a part of you, resting just below the surface of your consciousness, revealing itself—to paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville—as habits of the heart rather than calculations of interest.  But at some point in your life it will come roaring to the surface when you face, as you inevitably will, one of those difficult decisions: to speak or stay silent; to sacrifice self-interest for a common good; to accept obligations along with your privileges. 

I’m not suggesting we always make the decisions we should.  Along with integrity, humility is one of the brightest stars in that constellation.  But you’ll leave here carrying a standard to live up to—the belief that character matters.  That may be the greatest gift this university bestows upon you.

This is what I mean when I say that at W&L you will grow so much as an individual even as you embrace what it means to be part of a community.  You’ll learn many things about yourself, including that you will develop commitments greater than the self. 

II

My second touchstone is the university’s attempts to reconcile continuity and change.

If any institution should get the balance right, it is W&L.  The arc of our history traces the arc of our nation’s, in all its glory and imperfections, in all its efforts to draw from the past, even as it strives to better fulfill its lofty ideals.

Not all change is good simply because it is change.  Neither is all change bad simply because it is change.  These are choices calling for discernment and judgment.  If W&L doesn’t always get it exactly right, it gets it mostly right and does so more carefully and thoughtfully than any other institution in higher education. 

Here’s what I hope W&L teaches you: when it comes to continuity and change, you don’t have to pick sides. 

That requires some explanation, even persuasion.

Members of every generation suffer from a conceit that they are living in an era of unprecedented turmoil and complexity.  The historian David McCullough was having noneof it.  He asked us to consider a couple soldiers crossing the frigid Delaware River with George Washington the night before their surprise attack on the Hessians in Trenton, NJ.  One turns to the other with a sigh and says, “Ah, yes. But at least we live in a simpler time.”

McCullough’s point—and mine—is this: the tug between continuity and change is a constant, a feature of the human condition, as are debates about whether we are moving too slowly or too fast.  If it often occupies a particularly prominent part our thinking at W&L, I believe it’s because we care about it more than other places do.  Further, I believe we have come to understand that change is not necessarily a rejection of the past but often is undertaken to preserve the best of our past.

Some of you may recall my fondness for the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa. It is set in the late 1800’s in Italy, as it moves from a bunch of city-states to a unified country with a republican rather than an aristocratic form of government. It was not a simpler time. In one scene, a young nephew who embraces the new order turns to his beloved uncle who fears it. He says, “Uncle, if you want things to remain the same, there will have to be some changes.”

During my senior year at W&L—1976—I had a conversation with a couple alumni who were on campus for their 50th reunion. They were from—let me do the math for you—the Class of 1926. They were appalled and shocked by the changes they saw, especially the elimination of Saturday morning classes and the coat and tie dress code.

They predicted a lifetime of moral depravity and laziness for the Class of 1976.

They were wrong of course.  I mean, sure my classmates can be described that way today, but not for those reasons.

And as night follows day, when my class returned for our 50th Reunion last spring we reprised the litany of shock and dismay.  Heck, I was appalled by the changes I saw, and I was responsible for many of them.

And yet, and yet, we also knew deep down that W&L was a better place than when we graduated.  Imagine our disappointment if it were not.  It wouldn’t possibly be serving you as well as it served us so many years ago—back when there were no Mudd, Delaney, Harte, or Connolly Centers.  No Shepherd Program, no Center for International Education.  No Johnson Program.  No Powell Archives, Frances Lewis Law Center, or Transnational Law Institute.  No Childress Hall.  No Lindley or Lenfest Center.  No Leyburn Library.  Among the undergraduates, no women.

The law school was wedged into that corner behind us in Tucker Hall, and what is now the Williams School was crammed into Newcomb Hall.  I could go on. 

But in 1926 and in 1976 there were, as there are now, in 2026, an Honor System, a Speaking Tradition, an ethic of professional responsibility in the law school, academic rigor, education for character, unparalleled student-faculty relationships—all flowing into a steady river of continuity of features not lost over time but made even stronger by the changes.

Those who came before us at W&L worked tirelessly on our behalf and sacrificed so much.  They were “not unmindful of the future,” and we are filled with gratitude.

The lesson from our past, the example our forbearers provided, is to look to the future.  I believe in continuity, in preserving the essential qualities that define this university; and I believe also that sometimes for those things to remain the same there have to be some changes.  

III

My third and final touchstone is yet another example of how on our best days we reconcile two opposing ideas: conviction and doubt.

It begins with a story from beyond W&L. 

In 1944 with World War II still raging, a crowd gathered in Central Park in New York City.  They were immigrants, many of them refugees from war-torn Europe.  They were there to take an oath of allegiance to the United States and become our newest citizens.

Several dignitaries gave brief remarks before the featured speaker, Learned Hand, took the podium.  He was a distinguished jurist, and as such might well have talked about what judges are expected to talk about: the judicial process, the rule of law, trial by jury, innocent until proven guilty, the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

With the fate of democracy still uncertain, he instead spoke of liberty, or more to the point, the spirit of liberty.

What then is the spirit of liberty?  I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith.  The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias …

One of my predecessors, John Wilson, who served as our president from 1983 to 1995, was fond of describing a college education as one big, ongoing conversation—conversations with each other, with our teachers, and with the great thinkers and writers of the past.  My own definition of the purpose of a college is that we learn together what we cannot learn alone.  I’d like to think that spirit of liberty captured by Judge Hand finds its W&L expression in a collaborative spirit of inquiry that “seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.”

Here’s what I wish for each of our students: that you have the courage of your convictions alongside the willingness to listen and learn from others. 

Hold fast to your principles and values.  But don’t let conviction, which is a good thing, become certitude, which is not; and don’t mistake doubt, which is a good thing, for ambivalence, relativism, or a “whatever” shrug of the shoulders, which are not good things.

Conviction without the guardrails of humility and doubt becomes fanaticism.  And surely, we have our fill of that these days. 

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it best:

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt.  I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding what it is to be human.

W&L is just not a place for those who seek to escape from the hard questions of the day by tucking themselves into the comfortable beds of dogma.  W&L should be, and often is, the place for understanding what it is to be human. 

IV

One final thought before you go.

At the risk of a late-night visit from the spirit of David McCullough, I have to say these are complicated and worrisome times. 

One writer has said we live in an age of arrogance.  That sounds right.  And arrogance brings with it a trunkful of associated pathologies.  It coarsens our discourse.  We mistake certitude for wisdom, and crude opinion for deep-seated conviction.  Sounding sure of yourself trumps being sure of yourself. 

But the decibel level of an argument, the size of the font in which it is written, or the number of times it is reposted can never be measures of its quality.

If we live in an age of arrogance, it may be because we also live in an age of complexity and uncertainty.  That breeds anxiety, which itself breeds a longing for simplification, which itself breeds a temptation to follow meekly those who claim they alone can fix it, who offer easy explanations and painless solutions for complex problems. 

I’ve come to think of the belligerence and bluster we see all around us as symptoms of fear not confidence, of insecurity masked by swagger, of cowardice not courage, of avoidance rather than engagement, of theatrics substituting for substance.

In other words, out there in the real world, the tide of affairs forcefully cuts against the grain of what we seek here.

W&L’s ethic has long been one of service to society.  I feel the weight of that now more than ever.  The world and indeed our increasingly fragile democracy could use a little more of what we cultivate here: reminders of what unites rather than divides us; examples of how change and continuity both matter; and most assuredly a balance between conviction and doubt.

W&L will, I am quite confident, prepare you for a life of accomplishment and achievement.  But we have long sought to do more: to instill within you a sense of responsibility, duty, and obligation to others; and to develop character and the ambition to do good even as you do well.

I say that with a dose of humility to be sure.  I’m not suggesting we have the answers.  But as you pursue your education, and as you pursue your lives later, know that the intellectual temperament and the ethical sensitivity that serve as our ideals are not in fashion.

 Jon Meacham, the historian, calls himself a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.  That’s how I feel these days, the pessimism coming from what I read in the daily news, the optimism from what I see in each of you sitting in front of me today and from what I imagine of your futures. 

You will face headwinds, inevitably, or maybe even some heavy surf.  But when you do, dive into the heart of it, seek a moment of philosophical quiet as a reminder of who you are, and emerge with the fortitude to remain true to yourselves and to the university you will come to call alma mater.

Thank you.  Have a great year.