Peter Rodriguez – Inaugural Address

Chairman Farmer, Vice Chairs Bobbit, Pinkus, and Shah, Trustees of the University, faculty colleagues, friends, family and honored guests, it is my honor and privilege to speak to you today, and to share remarks from this moment in time about our extraordinary university. 

This occasion, both grand and humbling, represents the honor of a lifetime for me and marks the beginning of my profound duty to lead this community in its enduring pursuit of academic excellence and the formation of students who develop their talents and abilities for the greater good of humanity. 

My aim today is to express some of our fundamental duties as well as the foundations of my beliefs about what is essential to preserve and to grow at Wake Forest. 

Space

I begin my message on our university and its future, by reflecting on a powerful if under-recognized moment from our nation’s past. That moment occurred nearly fifty years ago, in 1977. 

Some of you, like me, will recall that year as a profoundly different time and moment for our nation, when at least half of the world’s population was politically and ideologically separated from ours, when the peak intensity of the Civil Rights Movement was less than a decade in our past, and when the recency of the war in Vietnam and the resignation of our nation’s President had left our nation reeling. 

Our national optimism threadbare. Inflation averaged 7% that year and the unemployment rate was even higher, at 7.7%. Economists refer to the sum of these two figures as the “Misery Index” No one born after 1980 has experienced a level of the misery index as high as it was in 1977.

Owing to high interest rates and escalating food costs, graduates of our nation’s universities worried deeply about their job prospects and the affordability of housing. We were aghast at the surge in gasoline prices, which had doubled from $0.39/gal to $0.78/gal. And, of course, there was the persistent existential angst over nuclear war.

Now I will say that we did get some great movies that year – like Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars, we got songs like Dancing Queen, Brick House, and Hotel California too, but overall, it was not an easy time in America.

And yet, in a nation beset by internal and external strife, fatigued by its recent past and fearful of its imagined future, a small sign of hope emerged, from science and from the academy. 

The small sign I speak of was the launch of the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Their missions embodied the eternal human curiosity about our world and our drive to expand our knowledge. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs are credited with building the probes, but they were the result of work by scientists and engineers from universities around the world and built on centuries of scientific research. 

Amid the economic pain of the 1970s, one could easily challenge the cost and value of the mission, or question the likelihood of any near-term benefit. The goal of the mission was simply to fly by Jupiter and Saturn and send back photographs and other scientific measurements. 

Embedded in the decision to launch the probes are all the fundamental questions we still confront today. What is the value of knowledge? How important is curiosity? If knowledge lasts forever and can be shared with everyone, what investment in it do we owe our children? 

The technology within the Voyager Space Probes seems impossibly rudimentary by today’s standards. To put it in context, the phone in your pocket has a computer that’s at least 2 million times more powerful than that in the Voyager Probes. And, your phone has 200,000 times more memory than the whopping 68 Kilobytes of memory in the probes, which was stored not on a hard disk, but rather on an 8-track tape. 

Please, those of you in the audience of a certain age, like me, explain to our students what an 8-track tape was.

These two simple probes accomplished their missions to Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, respectively. The photographs they sent back to us expanded knowledge around the world and for all time. 

And then, the probes with their modest technology, continued on their journeys. Incredibly, these probes are still on their journey and – fifty years since their launch – we are still in contact with them. 

Imagine where you were in 1977 and then all the life that was lived in the intervening next half century. All that time, the Voyagers were flying and sending back pictures. 

Soon, Voyager 1 will cross an astonishing milestone – it will be a full light-day away from earth, meaning that a beam of light sent from our planet will take a full 24-hour earth day to reach the probe. And, yet, our human creation, launched in the midst of turmoil with its 8-track tape memory system, will still receive our communications and send one back.  

We owe a debt of gratitude to the universities, the scientists, engineers, and to the people of our nation, who invested in human curiosity and scientific advance in a challenging time. And, we owe a duty to one of the fundamental purposes of the academy, to expand knowledge through research, and to generously and broadly educate our world and its peoples. 

Wake Forest University will fulfill this duty as we deepen our commitment to our students and to the expansion of knowledge through scientific research and in all the ways that humans seek to understand our world and ourselves. 

Today, the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM), is a world leader in translating cell therapy and tissue engineering into actual patient treatments. 

WFIRM scientists made medical history by becoming the first in the world to implant successfully engineered, laboratory-grown organs (bladders!) into human patients. WFIRM is actively working on developing therapies and replacement tissues for more than 40 different organs. Can you imagine what their science will do in 50 years?

In these and other areas we’ve yet to embark upon, we will advance scientific research in the spirit of our motto, Pro Humanitate. 

Humanity

Believe it or not, I have yet more to say about the Voyager mission. That’s because while the science of the probes is awe-inspiring, the contents of them is, for me, even more important. 

Strange as it may seem, the leaders of the Voyager missions could not let go of the idea that the probes might one day encounter an intelligence outside of our own. This consideration prompted the question, “What message should we send them about our world?” 

The duty of determining a message fell to Physicist Carl Sagan and a team of other researchers. They devised a set of copper discs plated in 24 karat gold – the so-called Golden Records – to bear the message. 

The first message on the records is a letter that begins as follows: 

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours….This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

On the golden records were encoded 116 images, including the most important scientific relationships ever discovered, photographs of earth’s diversity of landscapes, its flora and fauna, and its diversity of people, smiling and dancing. 

The records contained audio greetings in 55 languages, including Latin, Urdu, and Navajo. It carried encoded human brainwaves, the structure of DNA, our celestial positioning, and hours and hours of music including a Flutesong from Japan, ancient Chinese folksongs played on the Zither, a classical vocal raga from India, symphonies from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Beethoven, alongside recordings from Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry, singing Johnny Be Goode.

I love that the Voyager mission gives us such a wonderful thought experiment. If you were compelled to share just one message about humanity, what would it be? What would you include on humanity’s ultimate playlist? 

I also love that the Voyager mission delivers clarity about who we are. It makes it clear that our scientific knowledge matters greatly, but our humanity matters more. 

To the invaluable and ever changing expressions of our humanity we owe continuous additions, examinations, expansions and the steadfast commitment to pass on our knowledge in all its richness to the generations of individuals to come.

Wake Forest will meet this challenge through our shared, continuing commitment to teaching and to excellence in the delivery of a liberal arts education for the enrichment of all our students. We shall expand our reach and our scale as we carry forward the essential knowledge of our world – and ourselves – long into the future.

Finally, I will close with a message on history, by which I mean personal histories. More plainly, I will comment on why the work of universities is so crucial and why our university is rightly and highly considered – why what we do best is so vitally important today.

I spent many years researching emerging economies around the world, especially those in Latin America. I traveled there extensively and frequently while I was growing up in Academia, but while I knew just about everything about economic matters, I knew very little about their cultures.

To remedy this deficit, I made a goal of reading Latin American authors and poets before each of my journeys to the region. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinean writer and poet. His early novels formed the foundations of today’s science fiction genre. Beyond this, he was a wise and colorful commentator on politics, history and life. 

I remember one interview he gave to a reporter for the Spanish Newspaper, El Pais. I connected deeply with a quote he gave during that interview and it has rolled around in my mind ever since. I’ve thought about it more and more, since coming to Wake Forest.

In an indirect way, the journalist was asking Borges about his identity – who he was and how he became that person. I’ll share his response to the question, “who are you” first in Spanish then translated. It rhymes in Spanish, which I find more poetic.

“Don Jorge… Quien Eres?“

“Pues, no estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Pero, soy todos los libros que he leído, todos los amigos que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Y todas las ciudades que he visitado. Y yo soy todos mis antepasados.”

Now the translation,

“Jorge… Who are you?“

“Well, I’m not sure that I exist, really. But, I am all the books I’ve ever read. I’m every friend I’ve ever made, I’m all the women I’ve ever loved. I’m all the cities I’ve ever visited. And, I am all my ancestors.”

When I first read that, I recall thinking, so am I. So are you. So are we all.  

All of our experiences form us. All of our relationships form us. We care so deeply about the lives we curate, we care so deeply about all the voices that influence our children –  because those choices and those voices are the current that takes us where we are going – they are the forces that lead us to our future selves. We are all continuously evolving, changing, growing, and becoming. What we read matters, what we see, who we meet, who we love and where we travel – all of it doesn’t merely happen to us, we do not just experience it – we become it. 

Universities do not merely educate individuals – we do not simply share knowledge with them – we also shape who they become. 

In turn, our graduates shape others, and in communities like ours, we maintain a living culture that supports us all, and so we must show great care in how we preserve it. 

Our students are the living portion of what endures from our efforts. For nearly two hundred years Wake Forest has welcomed students to its campus and those students have represented the vast, diverse, and complicated history of our nation, and much of the world. However different our paths here have been, they all have led us to this place where they connect, where they shape our futures and those of our descendants. 

Our duty is to welcome all to our path, to honor the lives of all those who will never be here themselves, but whose drive, tenacity and spirit lives on in us. 

Wake Forest University will recognize its power to unify people in a rich and welcoming culture. We commit to expanding our reach and to developing individuals of high character, from all backgrounds and from all histories. 

Wake Forest will endlessly pursue excellence in our mission – we will advance research, expand and improve our teaching – and we will match our ambitions with our authenticity. 

I pledge the fullest expression of my abilities to our university and to her profound and timeless mission. 

Thank you and Go Deacs!