View the full video here.

Greetings, thank you all for coming. Today is your dean’s final state of the school address.

I see a few grins out there. Just remember the old proverb that begins something like, be careful of what you ask for…

Today I’m going to do three things:

1.    First, brag a bit about our recent accomplishments.

2.    Talk with you about some big and exciting new programs coming at the university level that intersect with the school.

3.    Last, I will talk about the largest of these initiatives through a somewhat winding history lesson about the role of the Virginia Cavaliers over the last couple hundred years, and how that fits into what the university is doing today.

So, let’s start off with the state of the school. The state of the school is strong. No better words. There are too many new initiatives going on for me to list them all so let me give you a few highlights:

•    This past year, we had our largest fundraising year on record outside of the founding 100 million gift—we received pledges in matching funds that over the next few years will add 30 million dollars to the school’s endowment to support graduate education and create our school’s first set of endowed chairs.

•    The school’s budget in the upcoming year will approach 20 million dollars, now for those of you who want a little context, five years ago the school’s budget was 8 million dollars, so that’s more than 100% increase in the scale and breadth of operations we have.

•    Non-endowment giving has grown from tens of thousands to over a million in the past year.

•    With regards to students, the school is now at its goal set out 10 years ago for 330 students. Probably the most important aspect of this, as the number of our students have grown, we have become more selective.

•    Faculty winning awards across the university as well as nationally for both teaching and scholarship. Hats off to Dan Player for winning university-wide teaching award. Well deserved.

•    The School has become a recognized leader through special relationships with firms in the private sector, such as Deloitte and public sector, like the CIA.

•    The President Emmitt-Ivy task force recognized the hard work of the past few years and will recommend the Batten School as one of the anchor tenants for the upcoming development of the 14-acre parcel, more on that in a minute. That’s a big one.

•    This year we have started implementing the redesigned MPP curriculum for entering students.  This involved a fully integrated CIBO and new first-year classes.

•    In the past year, we’ve hired five new full-time faculty, both tenured track, and nontenured track.

•    A number of students have received the Frederic S. Bocock Fellowship; they represent policy areas ranging from criminal justice to national security.

•    Building upon the success of our Batten School Employer-Partner program, we have increased the number of guaranteed internships.

•    Our Career Services office used data from Salesforce Advisory Link (SAL) to inform advising trends and presented this work at two national conferences.

•    Salesforce, in turn, selected the Batten school as one of a handful of national trailblazers recognizing our innovative uses of information technology at their annual conference that’s attended by over 180,000 individuals—it is the largest conference held in the US annually. It’s nuts. 

•    Two of our professors have been nominated for national Carnegie Fellowships, Christine Mahoney, and Phil Potter. UVA was permitted to select two faculty members from over the thousands of faculty—both went to Batten faculty.

•    Outside of the classroom, professors are launching businesses aimed at addressing real-world issues. Professor Bala Mulloth, together with an engineering professor, Gaurav Giri, launched HAVA, a start-up that creates affordable life-saving air filtration products.

•    New faculty members are already making an impact. Brian Williams set up a student fund that aims to encourage student-led engagement efforts that enhance the town and gown relationship in Charlottesville and surrounding areas of Central Virginia.

•    Once again, Batten leads the nation with eight students who are finalists for the Federal Government’s highly competitive Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program.

•    Batten along with Princeton, Berkley, and Harvard are ranked at the top of policy schools by AEI for their internship and fellowship programs.

•    We have 10 new admissions partners, which we announced at the end of 2018 to reflect our school’s role of “conversation changer.” Our new partners represent that commitment to diversity of thought and mind. They include: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; Congressional Hunger Center; Howard University; University of Pennsylvania; American Enterprise Institute; Bonner Foundation; Virginia Wesleyan University; Christopher Newport University; Furman University; and Hampden-Sydney College.

•    Our events— support our own interests as well as the university at large. National Security Career Day, a university-wide event that was co-sponsored and hosted at Batten this past semester is a great example. This was the largest gathering of intelligence recruiters ever at UVA.

Enough of the braggadocio…we’re doing great. Our students are doing great. This past year, from a career services perspective, our students enjoyed full employment. You can tell your parents that the odds of you ending up in the basement are excruciatingly low.

On to point two, world democracy and the university’s coming democracy institute.

Democracy

If we look back over the past five years, one significant change in the news and talk about town is that we are hearing much more about democracy. There is a great deal of concern as well as fundraising and spending and effort on and about democracy of late.

For example, the Board of Visitors has just committed some 20 million to support a pan-university democracy initiative. The law school received its largest gift ever to create a $43 million investment in a center for law and democracy. We hear almost daily threats to democracy, of the need to save the world for democracy. Interestingly, the Batten School will be the academic anchor for what will become known as the democracy nexus at Emmitt Ivy.

This is all somewhat ironic given that just 25 years ago Francis Fukuyama published a book based on an article, The End of History and the Last Man.

The end of the cold war marked the hoped-for end of great power conflict, the triumph of western liberalism over communism, fascism, totalitarianism, and a host of other competing ism’s that had festered for the previous few centuries.

It also marked what many hoped would be the beginning of a new global democratic era, one of the open and cooperative universal institutions that would serve to manage the affairs of all humans.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way as any sentient person who has been watching our politics of late can attest to. Those who had hoped that Fukuyama’s claim would mark the arrival of a new and permanent era of universal institutional management of the international system have been sorely disappointed.

At home, we have seen a breakdown of comity, tolerance, decency, mutual recognition, and respect. These unhappy trends have taken place at our university, in our community, in our commonwealth, and our nation over the past two years.

At the international system level, we have seen a retreat from democracy and global institutionalism towards authoritarianism and nationalism.

Recognition of these facts has precipitated a call for action here and elsewhere; a call for all of us to reengage the effort to create and sustain a more perfect union. A better democracy. For us, for our state, for our nation.

UVA is the home to the newly announced Institute for Democracy of which as I mentioned, the Batten School is a founding partner. Faculty and students alike share a sense that something must and can be done to help sustain our democratic systems in the face of great challenges. Ironically many of these changes and challenges arising from grassroots’ complaints about leadership, public policy or lack thereof.

One set of concerns points to individuals in specific offices. Others share concerns about the rising impact of unelected judges with lifetime tenure. Others still point to unelected members of the administrative state, technocrats whose policy judgment in many areas appears to be replacing that of elected representatives.

But why UVA, why us, why you in this room? Isn’t it being presumptuous of us to think we might actually be the ones that have something of value to say about the future state of our ever-evolving democratic institutions and way of life?

Put another way, who are we to tell the rest of America what is wrong with our democratic institutions? Isn’t it somehow presumptuous of us?

Actually no.

UVA is the place for the development and nurturing of American democracy—of world democracy. Now there are others that would object to this claim. The Yale University political science department, for example, post-WWII’s community included some of the greatest political thinkers, theorists, and philosophers on the state of democracy— Robert Dahl….Ian Shapiro, among many others.

But they were all academics. They don’t pass the Teddy Roosevelt “Man in the Arena” test. They wrote about it, they thought about it, but they were not there to do it.

Now onto the third piece, the history lesson…

When people are asked to describe the University of Virginia, they often think of the American South, placing UVA rightfully among the good and great as well as greatly challenged universities of the American Southern region.

Other times they focus on the Commonwealth of Virginia and think of the university as the flagship of a state public university system. Sometimes, when we are in an expansive mood we describe the University of Virginia as a truly national university. One whose students and faculty come from all fifty states of the United States of America. Our graduates today represent the leadership cream of this crop.

And yet, each of these views sells the University and the Batten school short. Each view underestimates the University’s role and place in the world, not just in our country.

The University of Virginia is a global university, not just because we draw our students today from over 80 countries, or that our faculty conduct research in and on every continent of the globe.

UVA is the leading university in the world, public or private, in the context of producing the people and institutions that have shaped our individual and collective understanding of international political liberalism and liberty. In other words, democracy.

Let that sink in for a moment.

No other university—in the world—has served the development of the modern democratic political-economic international system than the University of Virginia.

A handful of individuals, founders, and students of our university laid out intellectual visions and blueprints that today serve as the intellectual and most importantly, practical basis for the known political enlightened order.

For the world.

In the world.

Then, and more importantly, today.

Others, other UVA people, other Wahoos, in the post-world War II era helped design and implement today’s great institutions that provide order and security for citizens of all countries. Let’s think about some of these to understand the impact that UVA and its associates have had on world democracy.

The starter is an easy one – the proposition that forms the foundation for modern democracy: the proposition that all men, all people, are created equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable right traces its foundation back to Jefferson’s declaration of independence.

In that document, Jefferson put in writing ideas that had been fomenting both in Europe and America for the better part of a half century. Some people would say in fact Jefferson was a plagiarist, he stole the ideas of others—Locke, Rousseau, other members of the enlightenment. They weren’t solely his ideas, but they were his words. There was a committee of five that drafted the declaration of independence and in the end, it was Jefferson that took the lead of that committee of five and wrote those fateful words. One man wrote a sentence that has served as the basis for the global political order that we all still aspire to today.

Regardless of the individual, peccadilloes, failings, weaknesses of Jefferson, the notion “all people are created equal” is as relevant and as important today as it has been ever.

Jefferson’s declaration, signed by his compatriot revolutionaries, lays out not only the right of all people to be free and political equals but also equally important but less appreciated is the obligation of all people to throw off the yoke of intolerable illiberalism. He even lays out the specific conditions that constitute intolerable.

The call, the recognition that political institutions and democracy are imperfect at any one time, and that members and citizens of society have an ongoing responsibility to work towards the ever improvement of that culture, again, is as relevant today as it was over 200 years ago.

Now even less appreciated today is the risk those men embraced to make that declaration. Today, making bold statements carries relatively little risk. In the late 18th century making bold statements risked the death penalty.

Had they failed to deliver on the promise of the revolution, the leaders of the American revolution would have paid with their lives. Seriously. If Washington had lost at Yorktown and in turn been forced to surrender, he and all the revolutionary leaders would likely have been put to death. Why do you think Jefferson ran when as governor of Virginia, the British closed in on Charlottesville? He ran for his life.

This is why today, we define leadership as the art of getting things done. Back in the day, if you failed to get things done, you might be hung by the neck. America exists today because it’s planners and leaders focused on outcomes, not just process.

Moving ahead.

The United States’ fourth president and a member of UVA’s founding board of visitors, and the first rector of the university, James Madison, then established the basis for a post-revolutionary domestic political order.

This order is based on both a set of legal rights, legal obligations, and a political system based on the notion of distributed and decentralized authority and responsibility. A functional, but not necessarily abstractly perfect, democracy was Madison’s goal.

One could usefully think of that balance as the ying and yang that exists between democracy (a set of rights) and citizenship (a set of responsibilities). Today, we hear much more about rights and justice than about responsibilities –one of the things we need to think about is how to restore the balance in our democracy between rights and responsibilities.

In turn, the constitution that Madison authored has served as the guiding example of the longest lasting democratically ordered constitutional system in existence today. For all of its flaws and failures and there are many, there is no question about it, the system that Madison designed is better than all the alternatives if persistence counts for anything.

Following Madison in the White House, the fifth US president and third in this line of liberal visionaries from the University of Virginia was James Monroe, who began where Madison left off – he executed the blueprint of domestic political order laid out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Monroe, however, is the one who extends the UVA founders vision from the Commonwealth (Jefferson) to the nation (Madison) to a hemisphere—the creation of an international vision.

Boom, with James Monroe UVA thinking, just went international. Jefferson articulated the fundamental ideas. Madison wrote out the contract for the implementation. Monroe took it on the road. Monroe made it regional, inter-state.

James Monroe, who walked the grounds we are celebrating on today, staked out a claim for the role of the United States in an emerging international system. The US is the country which would later emerge as the global leader in an emerging liberal system. Monroe tasked the US with being the preeminent leader of its own destiny as well as the western hemisphere.

In doing so, by staking out this claim, by issuing what has become known as the Monroe Doctrine, President Monroe signaled that the old orders-the monarchic orders in Europe and the authoritarian orders of Asia were to keep their hands off the states of the new world’s political future.

Monroe’s assertion was that the emerging nation-states of the Americas should be independent nations that should be able to develop, both politically and economically, according to their own visions. Has the United States lived up to this leadership role? For sure not - imperfectly at best. But is the goal the right goal? Absolutely.

Let’s fast forward nearly a century, the fourth in this line of philosopher academic politicians was Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s 14 points that presaged America’s entry into World War I laid out the standard that today is accepted as the only legitimate basis for any nation state’s identity and legitimacy, that of national self-determination. The ideas are sketched out by Monroe, but Wilson actually lays them out in concrete terms.

A Wahoo led again.

Wilson’s vision of an international system was one comprised of a collection of independent and sovereign nation-states whose borders should be determined by national boundaries of language, religion, and cultural history. Today we call that, “Identity.”

This vision provided the intellectual foundation to extend the ideas of the enlightenment from the borders of the Americas to those of the entire planet.

No kidding. That was Wilson’s ambition.

Woodrow Wilson, a UVA guy, and also true, a committed and excruciatingly ironic racist, provided the vision to expand the UVA designed liberal vision from America to the world.

Monroe’s doctrine of American foreign policy envisioned a hemispheric system of independent nations. Their ability to pursue independent pathways was confirmed politically by Teddy Roosevelt in a series of speeches, notably his “Man in the Arena” speech delivered in Paris but guaranteed by American military power.

UVA student Woodrow Wilson predicated American entry into World War I on a final and truly audacious goal – a single internationalist vision for the world. Wilson’s vision was one based not on a single global elite, however, but rather on local distributed control and self-determination, consistent with the visions articulated by Jefferson and Madison and envisioned for the western hemisphere by Monroe.

Obviously, Wilson’s vision was a brilliant failure. World War II happened. Now, I could spin a story where it was Wilson’s fault, but that would be unfair. It would let off the hook Tojo, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. In the big picture, Wilson is not the bad guy, those are the bad guys. Wilson had his failings, but he was a liberal, not a brutal totalitarian. We should not judge the leaders of the past by our standards of today. The reason is that if we were to do, and to set aside what we learned from then we would block our ability to continue progress

Now, back to our story.

World War II was the greatest and worst cataclysm mankind has imposed on well, mankind (womenkind has never done anything like that—ever!) There has never been a female genocidal chief executive in the history of the world.

There is no violence occurring on the planet today that compares, by at least two orders of magnitude, to what took place during WWII. Today we cannot imagine how bad it was. The violence that is occurring in Syria today in a half mile by mile area would be replicated by areas of hundred if not thousands of miles in WWII. But we have not since then experienced anything close to what our grandparents or great grandparents lived through. If you think today’s problems are insurmountable, read some history. Things have been way worse in the past and we got through those periods and came out better and stronger for having survived them.

Why? Because to a great extent of the international institutions—these emerged after WWII to create a new international society.

In the post-world war II international society, UVA students played a continued outsized role.

Edward Stettinius, Secretary of State near the end of the war, represented the United States at the commission in San Francisco that designed and led to the formation of the United Nations.

The United Nations is the international system’s greatest organizing institution. The UN was designed to a significant extent, as was the US constitution, by a Wahoo. Following the UN’s establishment, Stettinius then continued on as the US’s first ambassador to the UN.

As envisioned by Stettinius, the UN has evolved into the most extraordinary international institution ever. It is true that it is bloated, bureaucratic, sclerotic – pick your adjective to describe waste and inefficiency.

It is also, however, the institution of last resort, that has made the largest impact on global public health, child mortality, and done more to sustain international peace than any other set of institutions ever. And it was designed and led by a Wahoo.

Now, you might think the story ends there…. one more minute.

International order is not maintained solely through pieces of paper and administrative institutions.

Javier Solana, a Spaniard who spent six years at UVA in graduate school and then as a teaching fellow and then moved from being a teacher to eventually head of the class as NATO’s secretary general for 10 years, he helped to shape the post-cold war security system in Europe.

When the cold war ended, a large number of political scientists and national security analysts predicted this is the end of NATO. Solana was the leader of NATO at that period that led that transformation to what NATO is today.

Solana guided the most innovative and powerful security institution yet devised. He negotiated France’s return, Spain’s entry, and he guided relations between NATO and non-NATO states.

After Solana stepped down as Secretary-General, you might think he would retire—that was the apex of his career. Instead, he became EU’s secretary general of foreign affairs. He helped develop stronger intra-European relations, he was the principal architect of the “Road Map For Peace” in the middle east. He is perhaps the most influential European diplomat of his generation.

His advice to would-be negotiators, “Make no enemies, and never ask a question to which you do not know or like the answer.”

Each of the men in the 200-year lineage of philosophy, leadership, and action led lives devoted to the development and dissemination of knowledge, the development of their home nation’s economic and political development, and the relations between and among the liberal states of the world.

Their actions and leadership demonstrate that it is not necessarily an inherent contradiction in being an advocate for one’s family, one’s university, one’s state, one’s country, and a world order based on international interaction grounded in commerce and diplomacy.

These great Cavaliers led the US and the world in delivering a vision of liberal internationalism grounded in the preservation of individual nation-state sovereignty while recognizing that true security and prosperity flows also from the relations between nations as well as their people.

Today, we are presented a false dichotomy between internationalism and nationalism—the history of the last 200 years through the leaders of the UVA suggest there is no tension there.

As students, alumni, faculty, and supporters of the University of Virginia, you should be proud to be party to and part of a unique intellectual political history and heritage.

UVA and its associated students and faculty have served as global leaders in declaring the rights of individuals, their collective responsibilities, and have drafted the visions that serve to this day to guide the free people of the world and all those that aspire to those freedoms.

This great university’s members have done more to shape and to protect the future of human liberty, dignity, security, and democracy, than any other on the face of the earth.

So what’s missing from the picture? What’s not there in this picture.

Shortcomings are obvious and screeching-ly ironic.

For all of the talk about equality and inclusive representation, the group of people who laid out these visions were all white men.

There are two ways to react to this: The first, and one that is all too common today, would be to reject the ideas and associated progress and lessons learned in the past because we feel some enmity and antipathy towards the leaders that preceded us.

Alternatively, each of us regardless of our own personal identity, can take the best lessons from the past and work to extend them to the future with meaningful work to address prior generations’ leaders’ shortcoming and failings.

Each of us, in turn, will be looked back upon by the future as people who had shortcomings and failures.

So, to all of you, look to the future, learn from the past, and commit to a personal mantra of ever forward.

I wish you, your classmates, and the school the best of fortune in the years to come.

Thank you and Godspeed!