Senator Chuck Hagel SFS Commencement Speech (as prepared for delivery 5/16/09)

[Watch video of Sen. Hagel's remarks]

The words of Franklin Roosevelt at his fourth inaugural on January 20, 1945 echo as loudly today, as we are shaping and defining a new world, as when he offered them in the last months of World War II.

“I remember that my old schoolmaster said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled:  ‘Things in life will not always run smoothly.  Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights – then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward.  The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.’
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Business professor Ilkka Ronkainen receives the Academic Council Professor of the Year Student Choice Award during Friday afternoon's MSB tropaia ceremony.

The word “tropaia” is ancient Greek and refers to a monument constructed to celebrate a military victory. Today, trophies awarded for excellence may draw close comparisons to the ancient structures. Each year students, faculty and some alumni are recognized for their academic excellence and outstanding achievement during the tropaia ceremonies. Read Full Story.

As graduates integrate into a changing world, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark advised students to confront the future by heeding time-tested lessons.

His top advice: be aware of who you are and what you believe in.

“You’ve got to hang onto your principles,” said Clark, the featured speaker at MSFS’s award and diploma ceremony. “You can’t imagine how easy it is to compromise out there to get what you think you need. And, ultimately, when you do, you’ll have lost that which is more important to your achievement – which is yourself.”

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Looking back on the Walsh School of Foreign Service’s founding 90 years ago, Anthony Arend recounted how the world was in flux. Arend, director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program, reminded graduates at the MSFS tropaia and diploma ceremony that at the school’s founding in 1919 World War I had just ended, the League of Nations had been established and the United States was rising to a new position of global prominence.

In the midst of that changing world, SFS founder Father Edmund Walsh was convinced that the world needed a new academy that would prepare graduates for the new global realities, Arend said. Walsh stood on the stage of Gaston Hall, where this year’s MSFS graduates celebrated their tropaia ceremony, to outline the school’s vision.

“Father Walsh’s vision continues to be our mission,” Arend said. “To prepare students to enter an uncertain world, to prepare leaders who understand the complexities of this international system, to prepare leaders who can think creatively about solving problems and to prepare leaders who understand the deeper meaning of service.

“Father Walsh’s vision, our mission, is now your job. Welcome to this world.”

William Gyude Moore (G’09), the student speaker at the tropaia and diploma ceremony for the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program, is at peace with his uncertain future.

Better than any of his fellow graduates, perhaps, Gyude knows that current circumstances mean little. The Liberian born Gyude took the audience back to his adolescence in West Africa, where he and his family were forced to flee fighting. His mother had just given birth to twins days before the family ran for safety – his frail newborn sister did not survive the family’s journey.

Later in a refugee camp in Côte d’Ivoire, Gyude had a case of dysentery so acute that his family accepted his death as inevitable.

“It doesn’t require much creativity or imagination to appreciate the vast chasm between the child who lay dying in a refugee camp and the man who is delivering this address today,” Gyude said. “Just because a person is in one place today, that doesn’t mean that’s where he’s going to end up. I want you to remember that.”

Things won’t always go as planned for MSFS graduates, Gyude told his classmates, but with disappointments comes transformations.

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll shape the future,” he said, “it’s a matter of when.”

Click here to watch streaming video of the Walsh School of Foreign Service Commencement Ceremony on Healy Lawn.

Graduating seniors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) gathered with family members, friends and faculty in Gaston Hall on Friday morning for this year’s SFS tropaia ceremony. Eric Langenbacher, visiting assistant professor and honors program director, spoke to the graduating class about the serious challenges ahead of them and how it will be their generation’s task to “make the sacrifices and lead us out of the gravest domestic and international crisis in decades.”

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