GW President Steven Knapp
Inaugural Remarks
Friday, November 16, 2007

Thank you, President Brody.

Trustees, faculty, students, staff, and alumni; distinguished guests; neighbors and friends: thank you for being here this morning to celebrate this special occasion in the life of The George Washington University, and to welcome me to the challenging, humbling, and exhilarating honor of serving as GW’s 16th president.

Mr. Ramsey, I thank you, and the entire Board, for the trust you have placed in me. Dr. Brody, I am gratified that you and so many friends and colleagues have joined our celebration. And I am especially glad that, in addition to my wife Diane and my children Jesse and Sarah, so many members of my family have traveled from far away to be with me this morning, including my father Arthur Knapp, my sister Susan Greathouse, and my brother Jeffrey Knapp.

It’s a pleasure to stand before such a large assembly of those who have worked to make the name of The George Washington University so important to so many different people for so many different reasons. My job from this day forward will be to do everything in my power, working with all of you, to make that name synonymous with the highest degree of excellence in the pursuit of our mission: a mission of learning, discovery, and service to the nation’s capital, the nation itself, and the global community to which we all belong.

Today’s inauguration marks the formal beginning of that new job, even though I actually began serving in August. “Inauguration”: it has always struck me as a peculiar and somewhat mysterious word, in part because its root refers to the ancient Roman priestly office of the augur. The augurs were Rome’s official soothsayers; so official that, during the Republican period, they were actually elected to office! Their duty was to read the course of future events in the flight of birds, and the fate of nations was quite literally dependent on what they saw.

To inaugurate, in other words, is not simply to begin but to envision the future. And it is worth recalling, from that point of view, that ours is the only university in the history of this nation that can trace its origin to what was envisioned by the founder of the nation itself. Here is George Washington, spelling out, in his last will and testament, the vision that inaugurated this university:

[I]t has been my ardent wish to see a plan devised on a liberal scale which would have a tendency to spread systematic ideas through all parts of this rising Empire, thereby to do away with local attachments and State prejudices . . . from our national councils. . . [M]y mind has not been able to contemplate any plan more likely to effect the measure than, the establishment of a UNIVERSITY in a central part of the United States to which the youths of fortune and talents from all parts thereof might be sent to the completion of their education . . . and . . . by associating with each other . . . be enabled to free themselves from local prejudices.

At the time he inscribed this vision—in July of 1799—the city that would bear his name and house his university was hardly a city at all. The grand capital—less than a decade old—was really just a village with great stretches of tree stumps and swamps. It was picturesque, but, as one resident wrote, “it had a wild, desolate air from being scantily and rudely cultivated and for want of population.” There were no schools; no churches; and very few stores. Work was far from finished on the Capitol building and President’s House. Only one structure had been completed to accommodate the new government—a plain two-story building that housed the Department of Treasury.

As the architect of the capital, Pierre L’Enfant, observed when he first arrived, it was not a city that would happen over the slow accretion of time—it was a city that would have to be made. And so, too, would this university. If there were to be a university campus to achieve George Washington’s vision, it would be a campus in one sense carved out of, in another sense built into, the fabric of this improbable city, with far too little space and far too little money in both cases for the extraordinary ambitions they were both meant to express.

If the idea for The George Washington University grew out of an abundance of vision, it was also born out of a poverty of means.

In the same document in which he articulated his vision for this university—the relevant pages of which, I should add, are on display today on this very campus—President Washington also set aside shares in the Potomac Company, which had been given to him by the Commonwealth of Virginia, toward the endowment of that university to be established within the limits of the District of Columbia. But those shares soon lost their value. It fell to Luther Rice, a Baptist minister inspired by the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, to take the active measures needed to create the university Washington had imagined, raising, by 1820, some $10,000 for that purpose from a list of subscribers that included James Monroe and John Quincy Adams.

The following year, President Monroe approved an Act of Congress granting a charter to Columbian College. For most of the nearly two centuries that followed, the administrators, staff, and faculty of this institution would have to be as diligent as Luther Rice in finding the resources and facilities to realize George Washington’s vision.

In the early years, Columbian College was passed back and forth between its Baptist founders and the United States Congress. Its doors opened, and then nearly closed. Classes were suspended and then begun again. It endured one funding crisis after another. And it nearly ceased to exist during the Civil War, when President Lincoln ordered federal troops to commandeer our facilities, one building eventually burning to the ground.

As we evolved from Columbian College to Columbian University to The George Washington University, we searched for a campus to call home. We moved from College Hill, now known as Meridian Hill, to 15th and H Streets in the 1880s, and finally to Foggy Bottom in 1912. At the time, Foggy Bottom wasn’t exactly virgin farmland, waiting for a university to be added to it. Instead, we became neighbors of two breweries, a lime kiln, an ammonia factory, rail yards, and a gas-storage facility with a large, unsightly drum that dominated the landscape.

Classes met in rented spaces across the city, from office buildings to basements. In an extraordinary document produced in 1924 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of our first graduating class, GW proudly proclaimed its position as the largest institution of higher learning in the nation’s capital, the one true living monument to George Washington—while also articulating the need for student housing, athletic fields, auditoriums, and classrooms, deeming that “ninety percent” of the buildings, while well-located, were “unfit for college purposes.” As recently as 1958, arriving undergraduates were presented with a pamphlet that began with the words, “Well, here you are at GW, and you’re probably wondering: what campus?” Students called it the “only concrete campus in captivity.”

The university has faced significant challenges throughout its history, and there have even been moments when it looked as if we might give up hope and close our doors for good. But there have always been people of vision who have stepped forward to keep George Washington’s dream alive. We are fortunate to be joined by two of them today.

Assuming office at a time when the library was so small that it literally had no room for more books, Lloyd Elliott took up the task of developing facilities that would at last reflect the university’s aspirations. Under his leadership, GW added buildings totaling more than two million square feet, from the Gelman Library to the Marvin Center to the Smith Center, where we are gathered this morning—all while presiding over GW’s steady growth in academic rigor and reputation.

If President Elliott did more than anyone to develop GW’s physical campus, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is the person who most turned that campus into a community. Of course, he was a builder, too: opening or renovating nearly a dozen buildings in his two decades; adding two new campuses and five new schools, as well as a new hospital. He will also be remembered for steadily raising the academic caliber of our student body. That achievement is well illustrated by this year’s entering class, which had the highest scores and the most valedictorians in our history. Thank you, Presidents Elliott and Trachtenberg.

My predecessors have all faced challenges, and so will I. Today, I am reminded of a letter George Washington received in 1790 from “The Hebrew Congregations of Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond,” congratulating him on his election as the nation’s first president. His reply began with the following words:

Gentlemen,—The liberality of sentiment towards each other which marks every political and religious denomination of men in this country, stands unparalleled in the history of nations.

Recent events here and elsewhere have called into question that “liberality of sentiment.” At GW and on college campuses across the country, we are called upon to reaffirm the spirit of mutual respect that is an essential condition of reasoned debate about the urgent and frequently divisive issues of our time. GW’s location affords us the opportunity both to host important debates and to provide a model of the civility they require.

With our home in the nation’s capital finally secure, we can also take full advantage of our unique location by deepening our partnerships with institutions throughout the District of Columbia and across the broader capital region. The other day, as we celebrated our existing partnerships, their sheer volume and depth was overwhelming, indicating that one of our challenges is to understand and convey the magnitude of such activities, both to outside audiences and within the university itself.

Not long ago, I had an opportunity to tour the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to one of the world’s most distinguished rare-book collections. This semester, GW undergraduates participating in a one-of-kind class have each been assigned a Renaissance-era book, which each student will spend the year studying in all its aspects—not just language and content but how the book is physically constructed and preserved. At the same time, our graduate students are working today with some of America’s leading researchers at the National Institutes of Health to find cures for disease that affect the lives of millions.

In fact, our partners are everywhere in this city and its suburbs, engaging every one of our schools and departments. Those partners range from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of State to the Department of Homeland Security and the National Zoo. Countless GW students serve as interns in these and many other institutions, and the opportunity for students to work directly with leaders in their chosen fields is part of what makes a GW education so uniquely vibrant. We are actively seeking ways to expand those opportunities and make them even easier for our students to seize.

Such opportunities for our students have long been a hallmark of the GW experience, but we also have an institutional opportunity to play a role in the ongoing renaissance of the remarkable city that has been our home for nearly two centuries. We have an energetic mayor and an active administration committed to improving the academic health of the city’s public schools, and the physical health of its citizens. We already enjoy a rich array of partnerships between the city and our programs in education and public health; our Center for Excellence in Public Leadership has trained more than 500 city administrators; and our free legal clinics, staffed by law students, provide essential advice to underserved citizens throughout the District of Columbia.

For the first time in our long history, we are truly poised to realize George Washington’s vision. We have a fully established campus here in Foggy Bottom, to which we have added the beautiful Mount Vernon Campus in the Palisades neighborhood; and we have significant room for growth, particularly in research, at our 100-acre campus in Loudoun County, Virginia. We are a more selective institution than at any time in our past; our faculty is steadily gaining national and international recognition; and our Board of Trustees has charged us with the bold aspiration of rising into the very highest ranks of American universities. The three days of lectures, panels, and poster sessions leading up to this morning’s ceremony have amply demonstrated the astonishing variety of initiatives that have already laid the groundwork for that achievement, and I am deeply grateful to all who participated.

In two important respects, we have gone beyond what Washington had in mind, and our vision has evolved accordingly. One of those changes was already evident more than 80 years ago, when GW President William Mather Lewis wrote the following statement

The ideal which we seek is a University with national character and influence, a University taking full advantage of the great resources of the federal city for inspiration and for research, a University sending into every corner of the land an ever-increasing company of men and women with physical stamina, intellectual strength and spiritual power, a University true to the name of George Washington and pledged to the up-building of our America—to this we dedicate ourselves with the prayer that with clear vision and unfaltering courage we may serve the Nation we love

Washington himself had imagined that the university’s contribution would be its creation of alumni whose shared educational experience would have freed them from the local prejudices of their regional origins and transformed them into citizens of the nation as a whole. Lewis adopts that vision but adds something Washington did not mention: namely, research. The university, as he envisioned it, would serve not only by educating the nation’s citizens but through acts of discovery that would contribute directly to the nation’s intellectual treasury. In both cases, the university would achieve its full stature by drawing on the resources of the nation’s capital—as he says, both “for inspiration and for research.”

Even Lewis, however, sees GW in strictly national terms: what we seek, he says, is “a University with national character and influence,” an institution dedicated to what he calls “the up-building of our America.” And that points to the second respect in which the university has gone beyond what both Washington and Lewis envisioned: we are today, and are ever more becoming, a truly global university, one that is proudly anchored in the capital city of the United States, but also one that draws students from some 150 nations around the world, and that measures the impact of its research not only in regional and national but increasingly in global terms.

The impact of our research has never been quite as visible as it deserves to be and as it must become. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that the very word “research” conjures images of beakers and test-tubes. And in fact, our natural science and engineering faculties have a record of Nobel-caliber research going back decades. Today we are doing work in fields like genomics, regenerative biology, high-performance computing, biomedical engineering, and hominid paleobiology that is at the forefront of those disciplines. But many of our most important contributions have occurred in the fields of law and policy—fields in which we benefit directly from the proximity of the federal and non-governmental institutions and agencies that surround our Foggy Bottom campus. Even in the fields of science and technology, our opportunities often lie at the intersection of basic research and public policy.

This is not the occasion for an exhaustive survey, but consider just a few of the areas in which GW research is achieving, right now, the prominence and influence it deserves.

-- Our project on racial and socioeconomic disparities related to cardiovascular diseases is just one of many examples of our work in the broader field of health disparities.

-- Our program in government procurement law—a field essentially invented by GW faculty several decades ago—has influenced federal policy here at home and has helped to shape the formation of legal systems around the world.

-- Our work on our Virginia campus in the field of transportation safety, in partnership with auto manufacturers and transportation policy-makers, has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, including those of young children affected by car seat design.

-- Our Institute for Corporate Responsibility addresses such critical areas as sustainability, corporate governance, and the achievement of international peace through commerce.

-- And finally, our internationally recognized work in the field of neglected infectious diseases like hookworm and river blindness is calling world attention to the causal interactions of illness and poverty.

These examples already suggest the global reach of the work our faculty and their students are engaged in. But GW is global in many other ways that complement the influence of our research:

Our Medical Center, through its partnership with Physicians for Peace and the Eritrean Ministry of Health, is training medical personnel who will study and then remain in one of the world’s most underserved countries. We send hundreds of students for semesters abroad—an endeavor in which we rank eleventh nationally. We also rank first among medium-sized universities in the number of our graduates who go on to work in the Peace Corps, and we recently established a medical liaison program that serves Peace Corps volunteers around the world.

And then there are our alumni, numbering some 220,000 world wide. The day I arrived on campus, I was greeted by a letter from our chapter in Seoul, celebrating the fact that the founding president of South Korea—Syngman Rhee—was a GW alumnus, as was the founding president of East China Normal University in Shanghai. Our alumni include distinguished American leaders as well, including former Joint Chiefs Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell and 14 current members of Congress, among them Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
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The potential to match the opportunities of our students with the experience and reach of our alumni is, in effect, limitless. Alumni I have met so far have been uniform in their commitment to the university and their desire to open doors for our students. And when they encounter those students, our alumni are as impressed as I am by their intellect, their drive, their curiosity, and their engagement.

Let me give just a single example. A month ago, I attended a block party for the neighborhood on our Medical Center plaza. A series of folding tables featured various services our students provide to the community. Standing behind one such table was a line of students, all neatly dressed in navy blue T-shirts with logos reading “Campaign GW.” They explained that they were among the GW students who had led the effort to win approval of the university’s 20-year campus plan, which was endorsed by the District of Columbia just this fall. Like all the student leaders I have encountered, they were amazingly articulate, thoughtful, and well-informed.

I knew already that GW students were politically engaged; in fact, our student body was ranked at the top of the list for political engagement by Princeton Review just this summer. I had come to discover that our students’ interest in politics was not a matter of abstract ideology but reflected a deep and tenacious interest in how the work of government actually gets done. I had never imagined, however, that I would encounter students with such a strong passion for zoning!

In the campus plan our students were promoting, we have laid out a 20-year vision for the sustainable development of our Foggy Bottom campus. The plan, for those who have not seen it, is a remarkably beautiful one; it combines the preservation of historic spaces with a reconfiguration that will harmonize our architecture, open more green spaces, and respect the interface between the university and its neighbors.

In all these ways, the campus plan is a physical model of what we seek to achieve, and must achieve, as the institution we have so long struggled to become. We will succeed by joining our partners in government, in industry, and certainly our partners in the other institutions of higher learning with which we share this extraordinary capital region. We will succeed when the nation’s capital itself is rightly seen as a home of intellect and not just a seat of power. And we will know we have succeeded when The George Washington University is, and is seen by all to be, the intellectual center of a national capital that is also, in so many ways, the capital of the contemporary world.

Thank you.