A few years back, the students producing Gaieties came up with the title “Being John Hennessy”—a production (very) loosely based on the movie Being John Malkovich. The plot was a little thin, as is typical with Gaieties, but even the casual observer would conclude that it wasn’t much fun being me.
Certainly, there are days when one might make that observation. The sheer size of the institution, the ongoing challenge of enhancing academic excellence, the vastly different constituencies, the competing interests for limited dollars, the special demands posed by academic medical centers, the pressures to maintain a first-rate athletic program—all these can make for sleepless nights.
Nonetheless, I can’t imagine a more exciting and thought-provoking job—one that makes my life a continual mind-stretching exercise. It can be stressful, but there are great pleasures as well. And chief among those pleasures is the opportunity to interact with Stanford’s exceptional students. In fact, one of my favorite experiences each year has been the two weeks I spend teaching in Sophomore College before the beginning of fall quarter. I’ve always said the best job in the world is being a professor, and it is the job that those of us serving in leadership posts look forward to returning to.
Many of you who have had the opportunity to meet today’s Stanford students have commented on how exceptional they are. Your views were confirmed recently by the action of the Rhodes scholarship selection committee, which recently chose two Stanford students as American Rhodes Scholars from a pool of 963 applicants. In those two students—Tess Bridgeman and Jared Cohen—I believe one can see the extraordinary talent and commitment that we have come to appreciate in our students at Stanford.
Tess graduated from Stanford last June with majors in human biology and international health and development. A Truman Scholar, she now works at the World Bank as a John Gardner Public Service Fellow, a one-year scholarship sponsored by Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service. At Stanford, she won many departmental, University and national awards and was president of Stanford Students for Choice. She will pursue development studies at Oxford.
Tess has done extensive community work and research addressing birth defects in Mexico. While at Stanford, she co-founded Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, or Bridge to Community Health, a nongovernmental organization in Mexico that helped reduce birth defects by adding folic acid to the diets of women.
Russell Fernald, the Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology and hum bio’s former director, says Tess has “wisdom beyond her years. She brings a powerful intellect to complex social issues. And she is a wonderful person.”
Jared is a senior who has worked and traveled in 21 African countries and is fluent in Swahili. At Stanford, he founded Six Degrees: A Journal of Human Rights. He plans to pursue a doctorate in African studies at Oxford.
Jared will graduate this summer with bachelor’s degrees in history and political science with a minor in African studies. Last June, he received the Hines Prize for the best senior honors thesis, which he wrote as a junior. The Absence of Decision-Making: U.S. Policy Towards Rwanda from the Arusha Process Through the Genocide contains original scholarship focusing on why the United States and the international community did nothing to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide until 800,000 people were killed.
Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, Jared’s mentor, said the thesis would be turned into a book. “Jared has an intense curiosity and a very profound moral sense,” Diamond told Stanford Report. “He was so morally appalled [by the genocide], he was compelled to understand it to try to prevent it from happening again.”
What strikes me most powerfully about these two students is that they share a passion for research and a deep commitment to making a difference in the world. Their scholarship and their life goals are imbued with a belief that education is best used when it helps improve the lives of others who have not benefited from the same opportunities available to most Stanford students.
This theme of contributing to a better world has its roots in the Stanfords, who wrote in the founding grant that the University should seek to “qualify students for personal success and direct usefulness in life,” and should “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.”
Leland and Jane Stanford could not predict the future, but by building this university they expressed their profound hope for a better world. I imagine they would be exceedingly proud of Tess, Jared and the thousands of other Stanford students who dedicate themselves to a similar vision. I hope you share in that pride, just as I do.
