Brown College Banquet Speech, April 29, 2024
My father didn’t finish the 10th grade. If it hadn’t been for the United States Army, he’d have been homeless at 17, since by that time his mother was dead and his father was incapable of taking care of him, or anyone, having survived a bullet wound to the head in Korea. My dad was luckier in Vietnam — he only had to see people get shot. He never got shot himself. “A lifetime of PTSD is better than no lifetime at all,” he surely would have told each of you if he could have.
He can’t. He died in August of 2021, the very week I moved into Monroe Hill House. His death was unexpected and stupid. His bile duct was obstructed. Doctors knew they had to clear it with surgery but there were no ICU beds available because of COVID. (Many or most of the people in those beds were unvaccinated.) After days of waiting, his gallbladder became infected. An ambulance drove him to the only ICU bed available at the time, about an hour south of Seattle in a town called Puyallup. By the time he got there, the infection was too severe for surgery and had to be dealt with first. But sepsis had already set in. His other organs began to fail. I got there just in time to hold his hand as he died.
I’m sad that my dad never got to visit Monroe Hill House. I’ll have more to say about that later, but I want to explain why it’s so important to me. Some of you may know that I myself am a first generation college student, and a low-income one at that, earning me the acronym “FGLI.” This is a new term for me. The FGLI office at UVA pronounces it “figly,” which I find felicitous, almost onomatopoeic. When I first went to college, it was big news in my family. We knew about college, of course, but sort of the way we knew there was a place somewhere in Africa called Timbuktu, or that George Washington was America’s first President. We had knowledge that college existed but no experience of it.
So, yes, going to college was a big deal. I started in earnest, by the way, in my 20s. By the time I was an undergraduate, I had good friends — my age — with children. Imagine that!
The news that I would go on to graduate school was met with relative indifference, not because my family didn’t care so much as that they didn’t know what graduate school even was. They were proud when I got my PhD, though, no one more so than my dad. For him, earning a doctorate was more or less the equivalent of becoming an astronaut. He even told me that. “You’re like Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon,” he said. Where was there to go after that?
Well, the University of Virginia.
I’m going to tell you something now that’s weird but true: I was at least 30 years old, and well into graduate school, before I even knew that UVA existed, or that Charlottesville was a place. (I was a figly student from the West Coast, so these places had just never come up for me. At that time I was more familiar with Timbuktu!) So when UVA came calling about this job, I learned only then about its significance and history, and its association with Thomas Jefferson, and on and on. And when I told my dad about all that, he fairly freaked out. He wasn’t a reader, but he bought every audiobook he could find on old TJ. He named his dog Jefferson. He was very proud of me. And I learned what could top going to the moon: Becoming a professor at Thomas Jefferson’s University.
So imagine his reaction when I called him up in the Spring of 2021 and told him that I’d been asked to be Principal of a place called Brown College, and that part of the job entailed me moving my family on grounds into the former home of President James Monroe.
What was he supposed to do? I’d already surpassed the moon. He got so excited that part of me worried he might just catch on fire or something. Having left astronauthood behind, I was now like some kind of Biblical monarch. And he was right. This position was a privilege beyond my wildest dreams.
Think of this: When I first went to college, about 20% of Americans had bachelors degrees. By the time I got my job at UVA, that number had increased to a little over 25%. Now, 20 years later, it’s a little over 35% — still a minority. And some much tinier minority — probably well below 1% — got their degrees from the University of Virginia, a place that is firmly embedded in the history of our country, features a UNESCO World Heritage site, and, to my dad, was more amazing than the moon.
Now think about the number of people from anywhere who not only got their degrees from the University of Virginia, but also spent part of their time doing so in residence at UVA’s Brown College, eating, for example, pizza, in President James Monroe’s house. That number, friends, is vanishingly small.
As I said, my dad never got to visit Monroe Hill House. A stupid gallbladder infection and the COVID crisis made sure of that. But I’m told that in the few months between the news that I got this job and his death, it was the only thing he would talk about. At his memorial, it was common for one of his old friends to say to me, “oh! You’re the one who moved into the President’s house!” One mourner put it even more candidly. “Man,” he said, “your dad wouldn’t shut up about that.”
This matters to me. Had my dad been able to enter Monroe Hill House, I know that he’d have gone dry-mouthed and lightheaded with awe and wonder and an overwhelming sense of connection to our country’s history.
I guess I want you all to know that.
Because being a student at Brown College, at the University of Virginia, is a tremendous privilege enjoyed by very few people. I’ve felt that. It has been one of the great honors of my life to be here, whether I’ve been any good at it or not. And I’ll never forget it.
As we wind up this year, I’d ask each of you to take a moment, right now, or as you walk around grounds, or the next time you’re in Monroe Hill House, to pause and reflect on just how amazing all this is, and how rare. And then live up to that as best you can.
That’s all!
If I don’t see you before you leave, have a great summer.
