2020 Fall Convocation Address
August 23, 2020
This is the first virtual convocation in the 271-year history of Washington and Lee. But it is not the first time our university has lived through a pandemic. Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1920, the student body gathered in the chapel for the opening assembly. President Henry Louis Smith exhorted the students to examine everything they did that year in light of whether or not it contributed to their self-cultivation. The urgency of maintaining this educational focus, the refusal to waste time on less important things, had been driven home the previous year, when W&L, VMI, and Lexington were stricken with the Spanish influenza. In the fall of 1919, the local hospital was filled to capacity, two of our dormitories were used to accommodate the overflow, and the University librarian, Miss Annie Jo White, gave up her own house to provide an infirmary for the sick. Two W&L students died that year. The Virginia State Health Commissioner warned the public: “Don’t spit in anybody’s face and don’t let anybody spit in yours!” That continues to be good advice.
As in 1920, much will be different in 2020: dorms, dining halls, classrooms, extracurriculars, social life. We will miss many of the things that typically animate our community — athletic contests, concerts, plays, Homecoming, and Parents Weekend. But this is what we must do if we are to be here at all. Necessity is the mother of invention — and we have seen extraordinary creativity from our faculty and staff, reinventing their courses and every aspect of our operations, and from our students, adapting to new ways of being together. None of this is easy. None of it is what we would choose. But each of us must do our part so that we can be here for what matters most. Necessity has a way of revealing our priorities, of clarifying what comes first when so much else has to be set aside. And what remains in 2020, as it remained in 1920, is the intellectual life that lies at the heart of Washington and Lee. It is why we are here, it offers intrinsic satisfaction, and it provides welcome distraction from a world in which everything has been turned upside down. I urge our students to turn these challenging circumstances, in which there is so much we cannot do, into an opportunity. Immerse yourself in your education. Discover new disciplines. Explore new ideas and develop new skills. Make this a time of deliberate and intensive self-cultivation.
W&L exists to give young people opportunities for self-cultivation that are ultimately of great communal benefit. This is our mission statement:
Washington and Lee University provides a liberal arts education that develops students' capacity to think freely, critically, and humanely and to conduct themselves with honor, integrity, and civility. Graduates will be prepared for lifelong learning, personal achievement, responsible leadership, service to others, and engaged citizenship in a global and diverse society.
On Friday evening, our first-year undergraduates began their college careers by discussing three articles by Ibram Kendi that spark reflection on our educational mission. Professor Kendi will speak to us next Sunday at 6pm and I strongly encourage you all to join me in tuning in for his talk. With the title of one of the pieces we read — “Robert Smith’s Real Gift to Morehouse” — Kendi suggests that the value of Smith’s extraordinary thirty-four million dollar pledge to eliminate the loans of the entire graduating class of 2019 was exceeded in significance by Smith’s emphasis that he, a Black billionaire investor, is not a self-made man but a community-made man. Smith credits his success not only to his own considerable ability and effort, but also to the opportunities others afforded him to discover, develop, and make the most of his potential. Chief among these was quality education, which began for Smith when his school-teacher parents put him on Bus #13, which transported him across town to an elementary school better than the one available in his own neighborhood. Kendi calls us to consider “all the buses — policies, initiatives, schools, mentors, networks, familial assistance, friendships, institutions, and programs that benefit certain groups or individuals more than others.”
Washington and Lee is a powerful bus. Our mission is to provide great opportunity to those with great ability who are willing to give great effort. Many of those who have had the good fortune to ride the W&L bus have enjoyed long and successful journeys. Our bus does not have enough seats for every young person who wants an education. We have 460 first-year undergraduates and 120 first-year law students. Our deliberately small size enables our educational engine to produce exceptional acceleration. Competition for the scarce seats on the W&L bus is fierce. To fulfill our mission, it must be possible for talented young people from every background, regardless of family financial circumstances, to get on board. This is why we are committed to becoming need-blind in admissions, and to continuing to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need without loans. These are the preconditions of ensuring that all young people with ability, determination, and the desire for a first-rate education have a fair shot at attending W&L.
Of course, we cannot be satisfied simply with getting people on the bus. We must attend to the quality of the ride. This doesn’t mean it always ought to be smooth. Education is challenging. It is supposed to be difficult. Our bus takes people a long way over the course of their lifetimes precisely because it teaches them how to handle getting bounced around. This is Rockbridge county. We have a lot of narrow, winding, unpaved roads. Our classes and our extracurricular programs are designed to make every seat rattle. This is a feature, not a bug. But the journey shouldn’t be disproportionately bumpy based on your background or financial circumstances. We are committed to raising funds to ensure that all of our students can participate in the full range of opportunities at W&L. That is a challenge, but one I know we can meet.
More challenging still, yet critically important, is improving the lived experience on the bus for our fellow passengers. The first step is paying attention, listening carefully to people’s accounts of what it is like for them to be at W&L. This is hard. It is painful to hear that the school we love is not serving all of its people as well as it should. And yet if we truly love our school, and if we truly care for all of its people, then we need to know how we are falling short, so we can figure out how to do better. This summer, against the backdrop of national protests against racial injustice, many W&L students, alumni, faculty, and staff have recounted their own stories of racism and exclusion on our campus. There is no simple solution but let us simply state: it is unacceptable. W&L must be a community where everyone — absolutely everyone — is welcome, treated with respect, and fully included. We have work to do.
To succeed in this work, we must not despair that it can be done. Ibram Kendi rightly emphasizes — in another of the essays we read, “The Hopefulness and Hopelessness of 1619” — that “in order to bring about change, we have to believe change is possible … Cynicism is the kryptonite of change.” The problems we face can seem intractable. Inequality and injustice are old. Kendi’s title draws our attention to this fact by pointing to the year in which enslaved Africans were first brought to this land. Inequality and injustice are also widespread. They are found right here, at W&L, but also everywhere we look, around the nation and the globe. Confronted by such pervasive and persistent problems, it would be easy to despair. It would be easy to doubt the goodwill of others in our community and become mistrustful. But Kendi is right that if we succumb to this cynical perspective then all is lost.
We must channel our feelings of hopelessness, frustration, exhaustion, and outrage into collective efforts for constructive change. W&L has many strengths, and chief among them is the quality of our people. All of us want our school to be the best it can be. All of us want the university to fulfill its mission, which means making it a place where every member of our community can thrive. This is not something any of us can accomplish alone. When I became president, I was given this gavel for calling meetings to order. Unfortunately, no one anticipated virtual meetings, which render a gavel useless. Even more unfortunately, it’s not a magic wand. I need your help. We all need each other’s help — with everything, and especially with making W&L a great place for every student and employee. It’s an all-hands on deck project. I want each of us to ask what we can do ourselves, and how we can support and work with others who are striving to make a difference. Let us talk to each other. Let us reject the temptation to point fingers, cast blame, and criticize. Instead, let us each be a positive force and inspire others to be the same.
I’m excited to get back in the classroom on Tuesday. I’ll be teaching Plato’s Meno, a dialogue that examines whether virtue can be taught. In other words, is the mission of this university even possible? A reminder to my students out there: do the reading before coming to class! Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, is devoted entirely to the question: what is justice? As I said earlier, this is an old problem. Plato’s answer, I believe, is that a just society is one in which every individual has the opportunity to become his or her best self. And the way we get there, according to Plato, is through excellent education, in which teachers and students who genuinely care for one another help each other become the best versions of themselves. It’s the ultimate bus, it’s what W&L aspires to be, and it’s why it is so important that we are back together. What we do here matters, each of you contributes to it, and doing it well should bring you a deep and deserved sense of satisfaction.
I would like to thank the Class of 1942, whose generous gift supports this convocation each year.
With that, and in my capacity as the President of Washington and Lee, I officially open the 2020-21 academic year. May it be a good one for all of you.
We are adjourned.