Inauguration and Investiture

Gene R. Nichol
April 7, 2006

Thank you Justice Lacy. Thank you Madam Rector—members of our distinguished Board of Visitors—including our new addition, Justice John Charles Thomas. I am grateful for your support, for your confidence, for your votes. I'm sorry to note that Rector Magill's already-extended term ends in a little over a month. She has led this university with an encompassing skill and a reassuring grace. The entire College community—most particularly its new president—is hugely thankful for her efforts. Will you join me in saluting Susan Magill?

I'm grateful to Professor Kate Slevin and the Inaugural Committee for their relentless efforts to make the events of these two days possible. As her sociology students know, Kate would have preferred to peg today's start time to 8 a.m. I'm thankful she relented on that—if nothing else.

I am also pleased to add my welcome and thanks to friends and colleagues from here in the Commonwealth, from institutions of higher learning across the land, particularly so many presidents from Virginia colleges and universities, and from the broad and inspiring William & Mary family. Your presence today lifts our hearts, enlivens our efforts, and emboldens our will. I offer particular welcome to old friends from North Carolina, Colorado, West Virginia and Texas. I trust that you will behave yourselves. And tell no stories.

I am delighted, if daunted, to follow our new Chancellor to the podium. If a university president can still claim the mantle of student of the constitution, I should say that over the past two decades, Justice O'Connor clearly became the most influential member of one of the most powerful tribunals in American history. With a singular combination of courage and wisdom, she ennobled the exercise of judicial review. Our new Chancellor will lift the character and the fortunes of the College. And it is my surprising good fate to welcome a personal hero to our ranks.

If I could exercise a moment of personal privilege, I am deeply touched that my mother and brothers, and my close family from Texas are here. Joined by Glenn's family from North Carolina and D.C. It is much in our hearts that my father is not with us—he died five months ago. My father was a tough and plain-spoken man. I can only imagine what he would have had to say about all this pomp and circumstance. And his son's unlikely role in it. It would not, perhaps, have been generous. But it would surely have been true.

Woodrow Wilson once said that the purpose of "a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible." But Wilson was often wrong. As I think of my parents, and their parents, and their parents—and all those who came before them—never having enjoyed the opportunity of a college education—I am no smarter, no more committed, no stronger, no more worthy than they. But I was given a remarkable foundation upon which to build—a foundation made possible by excellent, accessible, empowering public higher education. The treasure we celebrate today and that we work to assure in the years ahead.

And finally to my wife Glenn, and our daughters Jesse, Jenny and Soren—the most appealing eighty percent of the George-Nichol household. [That's going by headcount, rather than weight.] Universities and presidencies are marvelous things—but none so fine as a family that defines your life, enlists your soul, creates your purpose, and delivers your joy. I know no better news than that, in a few short weeks, we will again all be living under the same roof—even if it is a very old one.

I begin by conceding it is near impossible to describe the sense of honor and challenge I feel at becoming the 26th president of the College of William & Mary—the second oldest, but most beloved, institution of higher learning in the nation. Literal wellspring of an American enlightenment political philosophy. Honed by Small, Wythe, Jefferson and Marshall—ideas that not only changed a Commonwealth and a nation—but that have become the most powerful force for progress in the world.

Called to be the most foundational and revolutionary of institutions. Pushing frontiers of understanding in the sciences, the arts, the humanities, in our social orderings, in commerce, in education, in marine study, in law. Preparing its charges for lives of intense personal meaning and compelling public consequence. Offering what Robert Coles has called a "gift of grace."

And the College can boast a staff whose commitment to an appealing and supportive residential learning program—often in the face of scant resources and inadequate compensation—literally enables the William & Mary experience. Its students—among the most highly credentialed in the world—come believing they will be challenged more rigorously and engaged more transformatively than at other venues. They seek the larger contribution. Offering energies and talents to a complex and troubled world—in ways that lift the hearts and inspire the sentiments of their elders.

And its faculty—which I have been honored to re-join—embracing a fusion of teaching and scholarship not replicated elsewhere. Scholars who teach, as I've heard it put, "teach because they can't help it." Scholars who deserve a framework of research support—which I commit to secure—to match their aspirations and their attainments. Scholars who have enjoyed the brilliance, the courage and innovation of great leaders—like my friends and predecessors President Tom Graves, President Paul Verkuil, and my former dean and mentor, President Tim Sullivan.

The College of William & Mary is venerable, beloved and inspiring. It is also hungry and unsatisfied. Our forebears—both historic and recent—insisted on the boldest challenge. It was no modest undertaking, in 1693, to seek a new world, with paper charter—without ease, without resource, without comfort, without security. But James Blair and his cohorts nonetheless came remarkably well armed—with hope, with courage, with a stubborn determination to press enduring values and to paint visions anew. Rooted in such a heritage, we are again required to lift our sights higher. To, in Wallace Stegner's words, "dream other dreams, and better."

To more vigorously open our doors and open our lives to all who have the wit and the will to master our challenges—regardless of wealth or class or pedigree or station. Rejecting a status quo—now plaguing the most accomplished corridors of the academy—that acutely links membership to economic condition. Leading William Bowen to ask whether elite universities are "engines of opportunity" or "bastions of privilege". This College—with all its mastery and all its attentions—will make clear its recognition that talent, commitment, imagination and dedication are not the exclusive province of those with significant means.
To work—with renewed and patent and unyielding commitment—to assure that not only our student body—where some heartening progress has been made—but that our faculty, our professional staff, and our senior administration—become markedly more racially diverse. Recognizing, as our new Chancellor has eloquently written, that the path to leadership lodged in the country's great public universities must be rendered "visibly open" to us all. For me, an aging civil rights lawyer, these issues of inclusion touch core questions of equality and justice. But they are flatly pragmatic as well. This College cannot play the role of leadership for which it was literally born—unless it touches the imagination and triggers the aspiration of the entire human family.
To further open and expand our horizons—bringing the wonders of the globe to the College and the talents and capabilities of the College to the broader global community in return. Understanding, with Clifford Geertz, that "without the difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others … a case among cases, a world among worlds … objectivity is [mere] self-congratulation and tolerance [but] sham." We seek the world not just from self-interest or calculation, but to understand our fellows, to understand ourselves, to understand our futures—and to make a mark for the largeness of mind worthy of a great university.
To press, ever more imaginatively, the possibilities of our unique mission and structure. Alone among the great publics, this College operates, at heart, as a small-scale, engaged, life-changing liberal arts program. Ever shall it be so. We also seek to profoundly embed a culture of research into our undergraduate experience—offering path-breaking avenues for independent inquiry and unparalleled preparations for graduate and professional training—giving our students encompassing opportunities not only to master knowledge but to create it.
To explore and renew the unique claims of our own history. As birthplace of the American democratic experiment—probing the possibilities, challenges, and barriers to self-determination at home and abroad. As cradle of racial slavery on this continent—but also as crucible of African-American creativity and resistance—staging ground for ennobling efforts to make the promises of democracy real. And as home for stories and inquiries that are older still—stories of Powhatan and Werowocomoco and Tsenacommacah. Stories of hope and anguish, subordination and liberation, possibility and transcendence. Asking, in as clear-eyed and revelatory a way as humans can proffer, who we have been, who we are, and who we mean to be.
And, most importantly, let us open ourselves to new visions of the possible. Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that "patriotism is worth a competition with our ancestors." Few institutions could have as much to live up to on this front as the College of William & Mary. I said "few". I meant "none."

But now it is our turn to answer the call of history. The bell tolls. The trumpet sounds. This College—this compelling gift from one generation to the next—was founded to place the mightiest tools of intellect in the fullest service to a people. That large work remains our own.

To fulfill a charge to be both great and public—embracing the full mandate and the defining possibilities of those two noble adjectives.
To prepare and empower graduates inspired by bold visions of head and heart—lifted by insight, temper, character and skill to lead a nation and change a world.
To strive anew to compete at the highest levels of academic achievement—opening venues of discovery, imagination, innovation and rigor that mark the contributions of a community of scholars.
To recognize with Churchill, that "the price of greatness is responsibility," and that our talents and attentions can lighten and enrich the lives of our fellows—in a nation in which the scales of justice can often hang tragically askew.
To foster and sustain a scholarship of engagement—expanding the reach of our ideas and the impact of our lives.

Linking our fortunes to the efforts and aspirations of over three centuries. As direct descendants of American hope. Recalling with the poet that "we never know how high we are 'til we are asked to rise."

On these hallowed grounds, I pledge all that I can muster in the cause of the College. I ask you to join me in this crusade of promise and purpose, of challenge and consequence.

Go Tribe. And hark upon the gale.