First, I think, like most of America, I was shaken, stunned, horrified by some of those
videos. To watch someone suffocate to death as people walked by, as he pleaded for his
life. And to think in that eight minutes and 46 seconds, 400 years of history seemed to
converge, and people realized in a more awakened state and a shaken state that we had not met
our promises of full citizenship. We had fallen short when it comes to justice.
And I am pleased. I think that this fervor, rather than dying down from everything that
you can tell, seems to be growing and including individuals who have not participated in the
past. So there is a growing majority that want change.
People told me when I arrived in Kentucky that the University of Kentucky was the most
positive force for change in the commonwealth. And I'm going to admit it first, I found that
a little incredulous. But with every day that I've spent here, I've seen that that's the
case. We are a beacon of hope and we set a standard
of how things should be. We represent a promise of a better day. And so what we do and how
we do it, and how quickly we do it, I think sets a model for the commonwealth.
Certainly the events over the last several weeks have, I think, reminded everybody why
you should be impatient. I grew up in the Deep South. Witnessed violence, bombings,
intimidation. I watched a passage of civil rights laws and voting rights, acts, that
were supposed to change things. I did watch state legislatures in the south
become more representative of the populations. I saw many federal judgeships filled with
African-Americans. And so there was encouragement that there would be change, and yet, when
we peel back, we found that it's been halting, or uneven, or in some cases didn't meet the
mark. I do believe that people will have a more
enduring commitment. And I think, too, we can change our laws and our policies, and
those are very important. But this involves a change of heart and a change of consciousness,
and you can only do that within yourself and with others, and in relationships that maybe
you've never had in your life, and in conversations you're going to find offensive, and terms
that make you uncomfortable. But we've got to commit ourselves to confront these.
Well, there's nobody who's more self-critical than the University of Kentucky. I like to
say I am the president of 30,000-40,000 presidents who remind us that we've always got to do
better. I am very proud that in the last several years, when you look at public higher education
in Kentucky, we've set the standard. We have led, by far, the increases in the numbers
of undergraduate degrees awarded to African-Americans and underrepresented minorities. We set the
standard, by far, in terms of the number of degrees awarded to low income Kentuckians.
And this inequality that exists, starting with an education, is something where we have
a responsibility. But you also found in academia the curiosity, the answer, the questions--
why haven't our strides been enough? What is it within our systems of justice and social
support and tax policies and transfer of wealth? Why has none of that also moved? How can it
move? You can look at studies that show when an
African-American, for instance, gets a college degree, things are still difficult. The acceleration
you may see among others up the social and economic class ladder don't move as quickly.
But when you had redlined, when securing a home by your parents was impossible, something
that a lot of people enjoy as a benefit, transfer some wealth. Even the equity that's in a home,
that wasn't possible. So that extra leg up wasn't there that many of us could be experienced.
And we all have to recognize that when you look at the workplace, or your social interactions,
your informal networks, many of those can be influenced by the neighborhoods in which
you lived. Coming to college gives an opportunity to meet people who are different than you,
who had a different circumstance, or a different color of their skin, nationality, ethnicity.
All those stories are rich. I mean, that is the United States of America-- wave after
wave of immigrants. And my grandparents were immigrants. My grandmother,
especially, had difficulty speaking English. She lived in Atlanta. Her husband worked hard
running a cafe and we used to go visit them on the weekends.
I remember walking in the front room of her house, a little den living room, and she had
the TV, a black and white TV, and she had the American flag on top of that TV. She hadn't
been in this country then but 30-40 years. 20 years after she was in this country, she
sent her son into World War II. He was missing in action at the Battle of the Bulge.
I mean, this love of a new country, and I see it with those individuals who are new
to Lexington today. But the opportunity for you to engage in conversation and develop
a level of understanding for history through relationships I think is what higher education
can do uniquely.
Well, I think they are exciting challenges, first of all, because I think the mood on
this campus is a willingness to make a big difference. And I see it, for instance, when
Lisa Cassis, our Vice President for Research, assembles a group to start a new cluster or
alliance of research, interdisciplinary research from the incredible number of disciplines
we have on this campus, and instantaneously, 85 people show up for a Zoom meeting. That's
a tremendous response. They want a system that equalizes a social circumstance, our
health circumstance, and they want to be a part of it.
We also start with our people. I think there is a recognition that we all, all of us, have
more to learn about this, and I'm encouraged that people want to learn. And I'm encouraged
that we're going to have an aggressive program to touch every employee, faculty and staff,
all our students, in ways that raise their knowledge and consciousness about these issues.
I think, too, we have to recognize the impact of space, and where we are, and where we can
congregate, and what we see when we walk through this campus. We can make our campus in its
physical sense more of a place to learn, to reflect, to interact. And we have some exciting
ideas about doing that, to deepen that sense of belonging.
To me, the opposite of belonging is something that is so damaging, and that's loneliness.
And we watched in this COVID epidemic, when people had lockdown, stay at home orders and
all, you saw the prescriptions for antidepressants take off. Lots of other measures showed that
people's lack of interaction was an unhealthy experience.
We've got to learn how to have those experiences in a safe way in a COVID world. We've got
to live it. But we can't set that opportunity aside. To belong, to share a common set of
ideals and principles and beliefs that may differ but have some commonality, I think,
is an opportunity we provide at this university-- to find our deepest sense of humanity.
I think we all are recognizing in a greater sense today terms like systemic and systematic
racism. If you take it away from this issue, and looked at quality assurance and health
care, for instance, the fathers and mothers of this movement, I used to say, individuals
don't make mistakes, systems do. So you can see within health care today, new
systems-- from checklists when someone starts surgery to protection so that when someone
uses a needle, they don't stick themselves. To test that our blind color and culture and
so forth. So you started changing the system. And I think and I assume good to start with.
I believe we have people of goodwill. I think what we've got to do is turn all those levers
within what we do to make the system bring out our better angels.
So I hope people will be able to look at us and say, you know what, they changed the way
they did things. They changed the structure. They changed the system and it's enduring.
I don't expect this is going to happen overnight. To unlearn biases, to realize that some system
we had in place may not have been entirely fair, that's a tough recognition. And the
most powerful experience on a college campus takes place in that classroom. And I think
most faculty will admit guiding a class discussion that centers around white privilege or unearned
benefits or white fragility-- those are hard subjects. Many people, their discipline didn't
include it in the curriculum. So how can we best help our faculty to use
that powerful experience? They can become very tense. I've seen them go entirely the
wrong way, but I've also seen them have a transformative effect on individuals who were
there. And so I hope we see changes big, but I know they're going to have to be made up
of an aggregation of very small changes.