You’re Excellency, honored guests, Mr. Vice President, Madam Provost, members of the faculty, staff and students, Good morning. I am indeed honored and humbled to have been invited to give this keynote address at the opening convocation for such a young and vibrant university as Zayed University. Actually, to tell you the truth, I am more humbled than honored because I know that I was actually not the first choice to be your keynote speaker this morning!

It reminds me of a dinner I had with the novelist, John Updike. What John Updike told me was that he once received a phone call. The young lady on the other end of the phone said Mr. Updike, I am so pleased to tell you that you have been selected as the greatest living American author. Updike was very honored. He’s a very humble man. He said “I am very grateful, thank you so much.” And then she said to him, “And we want you to come to New York where we will make the presentation on November the 5th.” He said “thank you so much, let me just check my calendar. Oh I’m so sorry, I promised to give a reading of my writings to a University that day,” fully expecting her to say, “well we’ll just change the date,” but she didn’t. She paused a long time and she said,” Mr. Updike, could you suggest to us another greatest living American author?” Updike, being a very fine man, said “Well, why don’t you try Toni Morrison?” Another long pause on the phone and the lady said, “Mr. Updike, we tried her last week and she said she was busy on November 5th too.” So I take no umbrage at being your second choice! I’m simply honored to be here. In fact a very dear friend of mine recommended me when she was not able to join you today.

Humble is in fact a good state for a University administrator to be in. I bring along to my speeches my chief humbler and that is my wife, Barbara. After my time in Georgia, which was a wonderful period of transformation in that state led by a great partnership between government, business and education, as I got ready to go to my farewell dinner at the governor’s mansion, a black tie affair, I’m standing in front of the mirror and I’m straightening my tie and I’m a little self satisfied. I’m saying to the mirror, “I wonder how many truly great chancellors there are in this country?” Behind me, my wife overheard me and she said, “One fewer than you think.”

You may not be entirely familiar with the term Chancellor. You don’t use it in your University. It has origins going back into medieval times. I’m often asked to be a commencement speaker and I say to the students, I give them only one piece of advice. “Students, get a job your mother understands. Because if you have to explain to your mother what your job is, it’s a long haul.” My mother had no idea what a chancellor was, and since she’s English and in England a chancellor is an honorary position not a not an actual job, she was very worried that I didn’t have a real job. So I went to my favorite book, the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells you the origins of every word. I looked up chancellor—this is absolutely true, you can check it for yourself—first used in 1588 and the definition in 1588 was “a petty official in charge of children, idiots and lunatics.” See how little this changed in all those years? But now as a chancellor emeritus—and for those among you who are not Latin scholars, “emeritus” loosely translates means “without merit.”

I have now had the opportunity working with some of the great universities in America to ponder a very important fundamental and profound question. And that is, what makes a great university? That’s my topic for today, along with the consideration of how each of you as an individual member of the faculty or staff can contribute to the greatness of the university. Now, as an English professor, I always look for a text to help guide my thinking. And the text I came across was in an unlikely place. I happen to be a great cynic about all these business books , “Seven Great Ways to Make a Fortune” and all those other books you see on the bookstands. But I came across a very interesting little book, actually written by a business guru who had written a blockbuster book where he had studied and researched what distinguished a great company from a good company. The title of that book was “From Good to Great.” Then he started to puzzle, how might that apply to not-for-profit organizations, such as charities and schools , the Girl Scouts and such entities. He wrote another small little book, which he called, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” where he tries to understand which of the business principles apply to places like charities and universities and which don’t.

So, with appreciation to Mr. Collins, I want to look at some of what he suggested. He starts with a very basic premise which I think is very important and that premise is that good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. In other words, you can not be satisfied with just being a good teacher, scholar or staff member. You cannot be satisfied with having just built a good university, you must aspire to greatness. It is clear that this is a nation that aspires to greatness. Just as it builds the world’s tallest building, just as it models peace and prosperity. No great nation is built without the power of the intellect and the greatness of its education system. You in this room can be a partner with this nation as it aspires and builds its greatness.

To understand my basic philosophy of what education is, I’d like to share with you two quotations that sum it up. One is from my favorite author, anonymous, and the other is from Tom Peters, who talks about global business. Anonymous: “Education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught.” That’s good news for most of us who don’t have a very good memory! Education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught. And Peters said, “Victory in the competitive global environment will go to the perpetually curious.” So, our job as educators, is to form the habits of the minds, so that as our students go out in a world that changes so much more quickly than in our time. They have the skills and the knowledge to adapt and to lead those changes. That’s the power of education and that is the job of us as educators. So, how do we build a great university? How do we have that greatness in the university, to be a partner as the nation builds its greatness?

Collins suggests there are five essential steps to greatness. Number one, you must first define greatness and then you must be able to measure it. This is quite easy in the business sector, of course. The bottom line, the profit statement, your return to your shareholders is fairly easy to measure. People consistently say it cannot be done in education and we must reject that, because you can measure greatness and we must do so. Let me share with you a few of my thoughts on what makes a great university. I’m sure you have your own list and could complement my list. First thing I think great universities have to have is outrageous ambition. I spent eight years in Atlanta and they tell the story of back in the 1950s when Atlanta was just a small hick town, not much different to any other southern town and a leader came along , Hartsfield, and he we are going to have the world’s greatest international airport. If you saw the little grass fields where the airport was in those days, that was the most outrageous thing anyone could say in this small backwoods southern town. For most of you in this room, you have experienced the Atlanta airport today, and that was the thing that suddenly made Atlanta an international city and a place where people came through and so much else followed. But at the time it was an outrageous ambition. This followed in the 1990s, and I was greatly privileged to be part of the movement that put on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as many of the venues were at our campus. And again if you think about it, a small group of four or five men who had gone to school together, got around one evening and said we are going to bring the Olympics to Atlanta. An outrageous ambition, especially since Greece was competing for it as a centennial Olympics. And yet because they believed and had that outrageous ambition, Atlanta was selected.

I’m working with a very interesting college in America right now called SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. It reminds me a lot of your university. It has two campuses, one in Savannah and one in Atlanta. It intends to add a third, intends to go international. It’s only 25 years old, and it is today the largest art and design college in the world because the president had the outrageous ambition that they were going to be the biggest and the best, and recognized as the best international art and design school in the world. They are not there yet, but they will get there because they have an outrageous ambition and they have a plan solely focused on realizing that ambition, and that seems so possible for Zayed University.

So with an outrageous ambition, how do you measure whether you are accomplishing it? As his Excellency stated, the way I see most great American Universities doing it today is by having a very strong strategic plan which is clear on mission, clear on vision, explicit about values, and which has goals and objectives which can be measured. And you can measure it by progress towards your outrageous ambition.

What else do great universities have? Great universities always have gifted teachers, active scholars and what I call “early adopters of innovation” in the classroom and in research. I have always loved the faculty member who kept bugging me as an administrator, “I want to try this, I want to do that. I hear this new pedagogy is available, can we try it?” That is the type of faculty member that you need here, willing to innovate both in teaching and in research.

As I travel around the world working with strategic planning in many great American universities, I keep asking, “how did they become great?” One that comes to mind, having visited your beautiful campus in Dubai, but also seeing that it is in a desert, in the middle of the desert right now—won’t be for long I suspect. It made me remember going to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne. It is in a desert of corn fields, it’s 3 _ hours away from Chicago or other major city. It’s a tiny little town that’s too hot in summer, too cold in winter. When you’ve eaten at the two restaurants, you’ve eaten at the two restaurants. But the day I visited, they announced the Nobel prizes; two of their faculty were awarded Nobel prizes in the same year. They have built a great university and I asked the leaders, “How did you build a great university in the middle of corn fields?” They told me vision, leadership, but the third thing they told me is they stockpiled talent.

The Provost told me “The year I came out of graduate school as an engineering Ph.D., I was considered very hot property, I was very talented. But the University of Illinois actually did not have an opening in my field of study, they hired me anyway. It’s like a football team or a cricket team, they hire the best available talent whether they need that position or not. The University of Illinois, over the years, stockpiled talent. That makes for a great university. That is one of the challenges that you must rise to, to go from your present goodness to that greatness. Teaching and learning and greatness in the faculty can be measured, and people say it can’t, but it can be measured. It can be measured in the way you evaluate teaching and learning. I’m delighted to see you have a teaching and learning center and give great importance to that. The faculty productivity can be measured both on the student level, from something called the Delaware study, and on the faculty research side there’s a new tool available at Stony Brook—research and scholarship productivity which then again will let you measure the quality of your faculty.

Great universities also have wonderful students who are prepared, talented and engaged. I think that that is going to be another of your great challenges, and I was absolutely delighted to hear His Excellency talk about the topic of student preparation and that being both a national and a university and a public school responsibility. What we see too often is universities sitting back and saying,“The schools are not sending us well prepared students, they’re failing us,” and they sit and point the finger. And the schools, in America anyway, often point the finger back and say “Yes, but you are preparing our teachers who then come and prepare these poor students.”

I want to talk about something called P16 for a moment. If Al Gore, in fact invented the internet, I invented P16! P16 is a movement that started in 1994, invented in America, which was aimed at connecting all elements of education from pre-kindergarten all the way through the completion of a bachelor’s degree. We started this in Georgia, and it’s now in practically every state. We started this in Georgia because over a third of our students were needing remediation, and we could not get to where we needed to be with great universities if we had to spend as much time and resources on correcting remediation. We could have sat back and continued to wait and accuse the schools of doing a poor job, or we could become part of the solution. We chose to become part of the solution. In fact, we invited the business community leadership to join us because they needed skilled workers for the knowledge economy, and we convinced them that they had to help us get better students coming through the system so they could have better workers.

In fact, the first investment in this movement came from the private sector, not from the government. Once we had proved ourselves, both the state and federal government invested heavily in us. The importance is that we in the universities share a responsibility, we need to help the schools. We need to have our students mentor school children who have aspirations to go the university early on, maybe when they’re 15, 16, even earlier because we must be part of the solution. I mention pre-kindergarten because it is not just about the senior year in high school and making that transition. It’s about a whole spectrum of education.

My wife is an art teacher and she came home one day when I was first in the university and she said “I can tell you today which of my first grade students in art will go to the university.” I said ,”You can’t do that.” She said “Yes I can.” She said the students that come to my first grade art class already knowing their colors and using a pair of scissors will go to the university. A very unscientific way to predict but in fact a very accurate way. A wonderful book called Inequality at the Starting Gate talks about how much learning occurs before a child even enters school. We need with our gifts and talents to research that and to work with parents and pre-kindergarten all the way through so that our students can come to us prepared from day one to do superior academic work. That again is what the great universities do.

We know how to measure preparation in many traditional and non-traditional ways and we also now have a wonderful tool for measuring whether students are engaged in their learning. It’s commonly known in America as NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement, and it’s a very fine way to see if students are not just passive learners but are active learners. If, in fact, education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught, you must be an active learner and we must facilitate that active learning. As I’ve visited your university, I’m very impressed with how very well along you are on assessing student learning outcomes, and that will be a very important thing when the accreditation team comes. It’s a thing I actually think they look for most today, and I think you are in a good position, but must continue to work on that, particularly this coming year.

What else do great universities have? They usually have a dynamic curriculum. A curriculum with rigor, creativity and relevance. The most significant trend in curriculum, which I think again you are so well positioned for, is towards interdisciplinary curriculum and research. For example, if you take the three letters, B-I-O, bio, and then close your eyes and open a catalog at any other discipline and add the two together, you understand what I mean by interdisciplinary. Bio-medicine, bio-engineer, bio-ethics, you can go on, but that is absolutely a pervasive and powerful trend in higher education that the curriculum must be responsive to. It also is important in this very fast changing world that the curriculum is nimble. Nimble to respond to new opportunities, new fields of knowledge, new needs for economic and social development in the nation. You and—I’m assuming in this country particularly the Ministry—are going to have to be ready to respond very quickly to both opportunities and new fields of knowledge.

What do I mean by new fields of knowledge? Ten years ago, nobody has ever heard of nanotechnology, but now nanotechnology is pervasive across many disciplines and we have to be prepared to respond to that in ways we’re not used to doing. One wag used to say, “It is easier and quicker to change the course of history that it is a history course!” We can’t allow that to characterize our universities as we work on our curriculums. What else do great universities have? Some of the greatest universities I’ve visited have inspirational space. Some people underestimate the importance of having space and facilities that inspire. Clearly I saw that at your Dubai campus, and that was in someone’s mind as that was designed. The other thing I notice with space is what I call “accidental learning.” Incidental learning is given great credence. I went to one university once where they didn’t waste the wall space. They had pictures of great authors and great scientists hanging in the hallways. They had models which said “If the world was a triangle or trapezium, what would it look like?” They had maps of the world, and now we have new technology that would allow incidental learning and we must take advantage of that so that when students are not in their formal classes, they’re gathering, or when walking from one place to another, they still have a chance for learning. Every moment must be a learning opportunity for our students, and every space must give them that opportunity. Again, technology is something we must be at the cutting-edge, for great universities I see may have ivy colored walls, but they also have cutting-edge technology inside those walls.

While we talk about technology, I see technology as a learning and resource tool, nothing more, nothing less. You may have heard of Drucker, the great American futurist, he predicted within 10 years that there would no longer be any university campuses left, that every student would be studying online in their own time and place. That puzzled me, because I actually really admire Drucker as a great thinker, and I thought he was dead wrong on that piece of thinking. As you may know he died recently, and I read his obituary and I hadn’t realized he was over 90 years old. What an amazing man to be a futurist, and using that wisdom to share, and then I realized why he was wrong on technology in universities. If he was 90, he hadn’t had an 18 year old live in his house for a very long time. If you’ve had an 18 year old live in your house, you know there’s something magical about that age that tells you they’re meant to go to college right around then. Most of your 18 year olds share that same feeling. Universities and colleges are the greatest invention of halfway houses that society has ever created!

So technology isn’t going to mean that students are not going to come to campuses where students can learn from one another, and can learn from that interaction with the faculty and the staff. What it does mean that we have been blessed with powerful new tools so that our time can be spent shaping that learning. We don’t have to spend time sharing basic information, students can get that on their own. So, as individual faculty and staff I think the challenge here in defining greatness, measuring it and making it a daily reality is that you have to be committed to being the best teacher-scholar you can be. You have to commit that you are going to work with school children before they come to the university, in some way or another. You have to engage your students, and you have to challenge them in the words of the poet, Robert Browning: “You have to challenge them so that their reach exceeds their grasp.” In the end, you have to contribute to a dynamic curriculum and a learning environment which cannot fail our students.

So, that’s the first thing Collins said. The second thing he said is that you need leadership for greatness, and here’s where he made a distinction between not for profit and profit. He said in the profit sector, you need executive leadership, decisive leadership. In the not for profit, you need both executive leadership and something he calls legislative leadership. The first thing he said is that true leadership only exists if the people follow when they have the freedom not to follow. That is a true leader, when people will follow because of the power of your ideas and the passion which you can bring to your work. That is true leadership. So, in talking about leading a university, leading a faculty, one wag once said leading a faculty is like trying to herd cats—you have to have a special skill set. And that skill set has to be both executive and legislative. Executive leadership is that ability to make a decisive act to avoid what some people call “paralysis by overanalysis.” I think data should inform decisions but should not paralyze decisions. Churchill had a wonderful statement, I thought. He said, “Sometimes the second best decision made at the right time is better than the best decision never made.”

So you do need a decider, and here you are blessed with a structure and a system with His Excellency as your president where you have that executive leadership. On the campus, with the leadership on the campus, the vice-president, the provost, the deans, they are responsible for providing legislative leadership. That’s about collaboration, consensus building on things like the strategic plan and then ultimately making the right decisions with a single focus on achieving greatness. I see many good universities who have a strong academic leadership, and they have strong administrative leadership, but they’re not great universities. The great universities—I visited one recently, the University of Texas at Austin—there they have very strong academic leaders, very strong deans and very strong administrators but they worked with a common purpose. In the good universities, the strong people work to protect their own turf and areas, and in great universities they have common purpose.

As you put in your new structure, as new people come to lead the university, common purpose working across academic and administrative boundaries is going to be crucial. The leadership of the university must motivate faculty and staff to excel. They must serve students, they must add value, they must remove bureaucratic entanglements. It’s a warning to you but I’ve seen it at other young universities who start with a very informal operation, and when they reach about this stage of operations start putting in all sorts of policies and procedures and never take away the original processes. So, bureaucracy becomes an entanglement and students spend more time trying to navigate beauracracy than they do learning, and we cannot allow that to happen. There are ways to redesign—process redesign of what we do—and in the end our university leaders must make every decision based on academic greatness, even if not everyone is pleased by that decision. You cannot always be a pleaser as a university leader.

Sometimes when I was chancellor I felt like the javelin thrower, who won the toss and elected to receive, but that’s what you have to be prepared to do. What Collins said, is that legislative leadership is personal humility and professional will, a combination of personal humility and professional will. So you need a strong provost, a strong vice president, strong deans to achieve this greatness, and you as faculty and staff must be willing to be led. You must respect, respond and embrace good leadership, for one day you may be one of those leaders, and then you will want others to do likewise. The third thing that Collin said—he said “Get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus and have the right people sitting in the right seats on the bus.” What did he mean by that? Hiring is crucial. As I told you with the Illinois story, the ability to retract and retain real talent is absolutely crucial to achieving greatness. You must never settle for less than quality in your hiring, you should never compromise. Your faculty hiring has to be strategic, and quite honestly, because of your location, it has to be innovative.

I’m working with the University of Virginia right now on its strategic planning, and it is targeting hiring some very strategic key faculty. The University of Virginia has a lot going for it, whereas you have some challenges as people are going to have to come a long way, and have to leave the comforts that they’re used to. So, here is where you’re going to have to be more innovative than any of your competition. I’m working with the University of Southern Florida, which is trying to go from good to great,and they’ve made the decision that they are going to hire, as they go to a higher research profile, about 60% of their talent from outside with a research profile. They’re going to hire new, but they’re also going to invest in bringing their existing faculty who they think have great potential be even more powerful than they already are and to constitute 40% of their research active faculty.

Other strategies that I think you clearly have to think about are people who are great scholars and teachers in other parts of the world who have a sabbatical, who might be tempted to come here. Somebody might come here for a visiting, a distinguished visiting professor. I was thrilled to hear about the endowed chairs because all of these great universities have endowed chairs and it allows them to do some very special things. You may want to attract some people who are finishing their dissertation who are wonderful scholars in the making and hope their experience here will help them to stay here and be part of your future. So, it is a challenge, but it’s one I think you can be up to.

Regrettably, as Collins said, you also have to make sure that you get people who are not clear about your mission and vision and balance and contributing to your march to greatness off the bus. We all make hiring mistakes, even if we prefer not to admit it. The sooner the one admits the mistake, and for the good of the individual, with grace and dignity, makes a change the better. That’s for the good of both the institution and the individual. True leaders are always looking to grow their own talent. I’ve been blessed in my career. I was 30 years old when I was first made head of a campus in Wisconsin because one person believed in me, saw something he thought was potential and invested in that potential and mentored me. At each step of my career, somebody has mentored me and given me opportunities. They’ve put me in a new seat on the bus and given me a chance to grow. So again, the challenge I think, for university leaders, is to be looking out there among the talent, and this room is full of talent, and spotting potential leadership and then grooming it and growing your own future leadership.

So greatness must come in busloads and each of you need to help populate that bus. This is not Human Resources responsibility. It’s not the deans alone; each faculty member and staff member here has colleagues around the world that can help this university to greatness. Reach out to them, tell the story, bring them to be part of the bus. Each of you has an individual responsibility as well as the collective responsibility.

Fourth, Collins said, going from good to great takes focus, discipline and intentionality. I don’t know if you all can see this, but I brought a little friend of mine along, and I don’t even know if you all know what it is. This is a little English animal called a hedgehog. What Collins has pointed out is that a hedgehog doesn’t do very many things. It is a very proficient eater. It eats well and it has spiky things and can roll itself up into a ball and it can protect itself very well. I actually have a third—I think it’s rather cute. A hedgehog doesn’t do many things, but the things he does, he does extraordinarily well, and that I think is what distinguishes great universities. As I look at what I call some good universities in America and England that are trying to be great, they think the way to greatness is by doing many, many things. Instead of finding a few things they do well—and again I will applaud this University because your degree programs are intentional about preparing students for employment. You don’t try to be all things to all people and you must resist that as you go forward. That’s what separates I think the mediocre from the good, and the good from the great. You need to focus on those degree programs you add, such as engineering, which are consistent with your mission for preparation of students for careers and contribution to the nation.

I think the fascinating and unique opportunity that you all have here is to work in partnership with the nation as it develops a research agenda. The genius of American research universities is the unique partnership they have with the federal government, especially through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health. That’s why the science and health research is so robust in America, because the federal government funds it and faculty do tend to follow wherever research funding is. As a young nation, this nation is still developing what its research agenda will be, that serves the nation and stimulates her research activity. I believe you have an opportunity to partner with the nation in shaping both that agenda and then putting in place a simple entrepreneurial funding model which will get faculty engaged in research that is meaningful to where this nation wishes to go. Being in on the ground floor of the invention of something like that, to me, is a tremendously exciting opportunity and for everybody in this room. So focusing, with discipline, not being distracted by other opportunities, I think is a path to greatness. It’s common sense. We can only do so many things well. It is why one responsibility of administrators is to relieve faculty of too many burdens so they can concentrate on their teaching and scholarship so they can focus on what they can do so well, it’s common sense. I know this is a great horse country, I’m a horseman, I’ve raised horses and common sense is what some people call horse sense. Horse sense is defined as the sense horses have that prevents them from betting on people! So, when all is said and done, revert to common sense, try to do a few things well and then I think you will build greatness.

I think each of you, if you are focused and disciplined in your own teaching, in your own scholarship, making connections between the teaching and scholarship, engaging your students in some of your undergraduate research and using your time wisely and being unselfish to this university when it decides to focus on certain areas, even if they’re not your particular areas. Everybody contributes, but you must be willing to support in unselfish ways if you are going to build greatness.

Collins’s fifth and final step to go from good to great is to build momentum, early wins, the sense of inevitability. He often said its like a fly wheel, a fly wheel starts very, very slowly and as it gets more and more successful, it builds speed and builds speed and you can’t stop it. As I’ve been in this country only a few days, I think your fly wheels are already on steroids! They are just humming around. So you know about the momentum, you are demonstrating it everyday in this nation and the university must do likewise. Early wins, success.Accreditation will be an important milepost in that as well as the implementation of a new campus and a new degree program. It’s why I think the great universities don’t change much. They got that early momentum, and they’ve kept it. Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, Sorbonne—they’ve been at it a long time and every year now they keep that momentum going because its built almost unstoppable. Very hard to break into those ranks but that is your challenge.

You cannot hide your success. I think as I look again at great American universities that I’m working with today, every one of them has engaged outside help to brand and market. Even though they’re very famous universities, they’re concerned about branding and marketing. The reason for that is within the last five years, they are truly competing in a global higher education market. The emergence of China and India and their commitment to their universities—the European common market is actually getting the European universities to agree on something common like transcripts and length of terms. This was unthinkable when I was going to an English university, that they would ever worry what a French university was doing, but for a particular process they have now accomplished that. So, now we are competing in a global market and we must brand and market to do that. So again, I challenge each of you. We are in a business that is reputational. To gain a great reputation you have to be intentional. And so my challenge to each and everyone of you in this room as a faculty or staff member is to build your own personal reputation to assist this university in building its reputation. To assist this university when it sponsors international conferences and other activities that bring people to the university from around the world. You need to be supportive and assisting in those activities because it builds reputation. Only by coming to see you, to see what’s special going on here, can people truly appreciate it. We are in a reputational business, and so I challenge you to help this university in that regard.

So, we begin and end with the same basic question. Can Zayed University go from good to great? Can you, in your own career, go from good to great? Are those actually authentic goals? Or are those rhetorical goals? And we need to be honest about that. I believe they are authentic goals if you follow those five principles of Collins and get a strategic plan that leads you to where you need to go. And if the nation determines its greatness will best be assured by having a great P-16 education for its nationals, and to have a research agenda which not only enriches lives but improves the quality of life for people.

Going from good to great is not about a destination. It is about a journey, and the journey has to be one of patience. I always say in education that you must be urgent to begin and patient for results. One of the things we do very poorly in education, often because we get pressures from politicians who want quick results, is that we’re not patient for results. I told you that in 1994 I started something called P16 in Georgia, which is helping to transform the preparation of students there. What is sobering to remember is that not one student has been through that entire program yet. It will be 2011 before that first student who started in the first grade or in pre-kindergarten will have a bachelor’s degree, because we’re dealing with human life and the time it takes for the development for an intellect and a person. So we must be patient for results. We must resist those who want to switch course all the time. There’s always a new educational fad out there. You must stay focused and disciplined, and if you can do that I think you will be well on your way. You’re going to have to measure it, and you’re going to have to measure it with great honesty and integrity. You can’t fudge “Oh we almost made our goals and objectives.” You must hold yourself accountable for reaching them. You can’t fudge it like James II. I’ll tell you a wonderful story about James II. He and Parliament in England were having big fights about Parliament’s power versus the king’s power. Parliament to spite him, knew he liked to go for weekends to Brighton, to the seaside. He had a palace in Brighton and he loved to go there. Brighton was 52 miles from London, and so Parliament passed an act which said the King could not go more than 50 miles from London without the permission of Parliament. King James, being a very smart man, ordered all the mileposts changed, and you can still see the mile posts saying 49 miles from London to Brighton.

To get where you need to go, you can not change the mileposts, the progress must be measurable and those responsible must be held accountable for meetings those mileposts. I have good news for you, we have reached a milepost in this speech, the one where I need to end this particular conversation. I end it with a story about Adlai Stevenson, who ran for President of the United States and he was a wonderful speaker. He gave a brilliant stump speech and a lady rushed up to the front and was overcome with enthusiasm and wasn’t very specific about the words she chose. She said “Mr. Stephenson, that was an absolutely superfluous speech, you ought to publish it.” He was a bit of a wag, and he said, “Yes ma’am, I think I will postuhumously.” She still, overcome with enthusiasm, said, “The sooner the better!”

I think the sooner I finish, the better, but I don’t want to end without thanking you, Your Excellency, the University for inviting me to come and join you on this occasion without expressing my optimism for your future. As I look out into this room and see the assembled talent, this is possible, if each of you will dedicate yourself to a career of greatness, as a member of the learning community. You have an opportunity that so few have in an academic career and that’s to make a good university a great university, and by so doing to leave a legacy of contributing towards the transformation of a nation. This is your destination, this is your destiny. Thank you very much.