Remarks: Leadership & Character Scholar Induction

Remarks given Friday, October 27, 2023 at the Program for Leadership & Character’s Scholar induction.

I am so delighted to be here with all of you at this special Leadership and Character induction ceremony for our newest Scholars.

My most heartfelt congratulations to each of you inductees.  It is no small feat to have been selected a Scholar. Each of you is exceptional; each of you have already demonstrated impressive leadership, character, and service in your communities.

As a Scholar in our Leadership and Character Program you have committed to leading a life of character at Wake Forest, and indeed you have committed to leading a life of character for the rest of your life – wherever it may take you – for which everyone in this room commends you. 

This Program reflects the highest ideals and aspirations of our university. As you know so very well, the Program for Leadership and Character is animated by Wake Forest’s motto, Pro Humanitate, which calls us to develop the qualities of character that enable us to serve humanity.

While many would argue that those qualities of character are forged by the choices we make amid life’s many challenges, and there is certainly some truth to that, I want to underscore instead the importance of your liberal arts education in character-making. 

That education, which is becoming increasingly unique in our fast-paced, social media driven, all too pragmatic world, gives you an unparalleled opportunity to think deeply about what it means to lead a good life, an ethical and meaningful life, surrounded by expert scholars eager to support and mentor you.  That education lets you study ethical  leaders, and unethical ones too, across place and time; it invites you to ponder what makes a good leader and to determine how you yourself will lead. 

That education gives you the time and space to examine the making of, and the meanings of key texts that have shaped the human experience, from ancient Greece to the present, and discuss and debate the meanings of those texts with like-minded friends and colleagues in your classrooms, your resident halls, in the Pit, and on a run around Reynolda Gardens.  

I hope you remember President Wente’s invocation to you at Opening Convocation – to really embrace this time of discovery – discovery of your passions, of your personal potential, of the multiple news ways you can come to understand society and the world.

Across these four special years, you will find what is really the luxury of discovering and pursuing humanity’s ideas and actions in all their complexity – ideas and actions that shape our contemporary principles, values, and virtues, for better and sometimes for worse.  If you do this discovery work well, if you think and study hard, it will help you immeasurably, and across your entire lifetime; it will help you to discern how best you, with all your own unique traits and talents, can always make sure you are learning, discovering and contributing meaningfully to the common good.

You could not be in a better program from which to launch your life’s journey. This program, with its incredible mentors and its powerful programs, has already ignited your moral imagination, I know.

It will make sure that that moral imagination, steeped in your liberal arts education, not only remains lit, but burns brightly across your four years at Wake Forest and long after.  This special Leadership and Character community will help you learn how to make the hard ethical choices that have the capacity to reshape politics and the professions, to generate innovation and creative problem solving.  I am certain you will wind up practicing true civic engagement and building strong community as a truly compassionate leader wherever your amazing life takes you. I so look forward to each of your futures, as does everyone in this room and all of Wake Forest.

Let me close by thanking our wise and generous donors who have made these wonderful Leadership and Character scholarships possible. 

Your commitment means those values that Wake Forest holds so dear will always be embodied in these special young people before us today. Please know how grateful all of us at Wake Forest are for your life changing gifts.

– Michele Gillespie, Provost