What We Choose to Remember – and What We Found, Together

 Each year in February, we celebrate the founding of our great university in February 1834, originally in the town of Wake Forest, North Carolina. During my first Founders Day address to the community, I asked a question I have recently reflected on as it continues to feel poignant and relevant for our community: What will we found together? 

I asked this question then because I firmly believe that Wake Forest is in a constant state of “founding,” that our university has been shaped by many acts of founding across our nearly 200 year history. And each generation of Wake Foresters was and is called to decide what it will build, what it will name, and what it will choose to remember. 

Last week during our 2026 Founders Day ceremony, I returned to this question of what we will found together – as it has guided much of my presidency. And I reflected on an important step forward in our collective work to expand and deepen our shared understanding of Wake Forest’s story – work that brings together our efforts around honorific naming and memorialization. 

Wake Forest has taken careful, sometimes difficult, and always meaningful steps over the past decade to reckon more fully with our history. The Slavery, Race, and Memory Project – launched in 2016 – helped catalyze research, dialogue, and truth-telling about our institutional past. That work also created a foundation on which subsequent efforts could stand, including the honorific naming process developed during my tenure and the campus memorial project first endorsed by the Board of Trustees in April 2021. 

Honorific naming matters because names have the power to teach. They signal whose contributions we choose to elevate, whose values we celebrate, and whose stories are visible in the daily life of our campus. Through a transparent and community-engaged process, Wake Forest has named and renamed roads and buildings in ways that expand our narrative and better reflect the lived experiences of people who have shaped this university. 

The campus memorial project builds on this same commitment – using our physical landscape as a catalyst for learning and discovery, reflection and engagement with our shared history. Over nearly three years, the Memorialization Steering Committee has thoughtfully stewarded the process of engaging and listening broadly, gathering feedback on work by Baskervill, our architectural and design firm partner. Based on this work, earlier this month, the Board of Trustees unanimously endorsed my recommendation for the memorial’s conceptual design and future location – an amphitheatre-garden set at the corner of Eure Drive and Wake Forest Road in Lot S.

Our next steps are now to hire an architecture and engineering firm and move into construction design for the project. By choosing this location, the memorial amphitheatre and garden will not stand apart from campus life, but rather be woven into its fabric: inviting students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors to pause, gather, learn and reflect. It will honor the women, children and men whose lives and labor were bound to Wake Forest College, while also asking us – today and in the future – to grapple honestly with the legacies of that history. 

Together, these efforts reflect my belief that our campus is not just a collection of buildings, roads, and spaces but a tapestry that tells our story. Through named spaces, commemorative places, and intentional design, we create opportunities for education that extends beyond the classroom and across generations. 

The motivation for this work has never been about arriving at a final answer or closing a chapter. It is about building our shared capacity for asking better questions, listening more carefully, and acting with integrity and in ways that reflect our motto’s calling. As I said in February 2022, “to found” is a verb. Founding, acting for good, is something we will continue to do together. 

I am grateful to the faculty, students, staff, alumni and community members whose scholarship, engagement and candor have shaped this work during my tenure; to those who laid its groundwork in prior years; and to all who continue to ask what Wake Forest can become when we embrace the wholeness of our story more fully. 

As we look ahead, I remain both hopeful and optimistic for our future because of what I have experienced in this work with you. What we choose to remember, and what we choose to build, matters. And I look forward to what more we can found together, for the good of humanity.