Investiture remarks by the Honorable Lamar Alexander, BA’62,
retired U.S. senator
Vanderbilt University
April 9, 2022
When Daniel was named Vanderbilt’s ninth chancellor, I told him: “Sometimes people ask me, ‘What’s harder? Being governor? Being in the president’s Cabinet? Being U.S. senator? Or president of a university?’ My answer always is, ‘Obviously you’ve never been president or chancellor of a major university or you wouldn’t ask a dumb question like that.’”
Daniel Diermeier not only took a hard job two years ago. He took it during hard times. Many universities were closing their classroom doors because of COVID-19. This is what Daniel told me about those hard times: “I would rather be prime minister of Great Britain in the 1940s than in the 1950s.”
Vanderbilt’s new chancellor likes a challenge.
One challenge has been to persuade the Vanderbilt community to stop comparing itself to others and become comfortable in its own skin. In other words, stop talking about being “the Harvard of the South.” This is a common disorder of human nature, trying to be someone other than yourself.
The American composer George Gershwin once asked the French composer Maurice Ravel to teach him. Ravel declined, saying, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?”
During the 1980s, when Tennessee was pursuing the Saturn plant, my wife Honey and I entertained General Motors executives at the governor’s residence. We invited Charlie McCoy to play the harmonica after dinner. One Nashville matron said as she left the dinner: “I am so embarrassed. Why did you have that Harmonica player? What will they think of us? Why didn’t you offer Chopin?”
I replied, “Madam, why should I offer average Chopin when we have the best harmonica player in the world?”
At about that time I had asked each of Tennessee’s 3,000 communities to celebrate something special about themselves rather than worrying about being like some other community. We called it Homecoming ’86. Those celebrations produced a more confident and successful state.
Already, Chancellor Diermeier has been busy defining what he calls “The Vanderbilt Way,” letting Vanderbilt be Vanderbilt.
While other universities closed their classroom doors during COVID, he kept Vanderbilt open.
Some elite universities deemphasized athletics to prove their academic excellence. Chancellor Diermeier committed $300 million to become excellent in athletics as well.
While it has earned national distinction, Vanderbilt has been careful to keep its Tennessee accent—following the wisdom of Vanderbilt alumnus Roy Blount Jr., who says that you start getting into trouble when you stop sounding like where you grew up.
Some elite universities banned ROTC programs. Vanderbilt’s chancellor visited Fort Campbell to reaffirm the university’s research partnership with the U.S. Army.
Vanderbilt prizes the diversity of its students. The university has honored alumnus James M. Lawson, a civil rights pioneer who shares the stage with us today, by creating an institute that symbolizes the progress made in the 60 years since I graduated from Vanderbilt. Then, the undergraduate school was segregated by race—until protesting students in that year convinced the Board of Trust to change its policy.
But more than most universities, Vanderbilt has sought to turn its diversity into unity. Chancellor Diermeier’s Project on Unity and American Democracy seeks to create a campus culture in which students and faculty and visitors of many different backgrounds and views can live together, speak civilly to one another and find a common purpose.
This is not incidental stuff.
We live in an internet democracy with all our feelings on full display. Our country is being ripped apart by those who cannot speak civilly and work toward a common purpose. They seem to have forgotten that while diversity creates strength and excitement, what makes America unique is that we have found a way to combine all that magnificent diversity into one country.
That’s why the motto above the presiding officer’s desk in the United States Senate is E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. That is the American way.
Ken Burns, America’s best storyteller, quoting the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., says that today our country “could use less pluribus and more unum.” Burns says, “America is facing the greatest threat it ever has…COVID and the…political problems that we are dealing with have made it the fourth great crisis. The others are the Civil War, the Depression and World War II. It’s going to take a concerted effort…not to stand by and just say, ‘I don’t agree with what’s going on’ but to somehow get involved in the political process and shore up these institutions.”
Biographer Walter Isaacson says: “The founders show us that innovation is a team sport, and you have to have a group with different talents. You needed a person of high rectitude like Washington and smart people like Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and passionate people like John and Sam Adams, and you needed the glue to pull them together, which was Franklin. Franklin’s talents are the most relevant today, because we’ve got a lot of smart and passionate people, but we need people who are the glue that will hold us together.”
Burns and Isaacson suggest a great legacy for our new chancellor: a university producing graduates who not only are diverse, smart and passionate, but who also have developed the skills that hold the campus together and who are equipped during their lifetimes to hold our country together.
That legacy certainly would be consistent with Commodore Vanderbilt’s gift after the Civil War to endow this university to help unify the country. And, if forging unity from diversity turns out to be Daniel Diermeier’s legacy, I don’t think you’ll be hearing much about a “Harvard of the South.”
Instead, people will be talking about how The Vanderbilt Way is helping to restore the American way, by turning pluribus into unum.