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Good morning. It’s an honor to join you and help celebrate the 313th anniversary of one of the most venerable and successful colleges in our country.

I thank you for the honorary degree I receive today. The first honorary degree William and Mary conferred was given to Benjamin Franklin in 1756. Almost thirty years later, the College granted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws to Thomas Jefferson. He is among a number of presidents to receive that honor, including one of my personal heroes, Harry Truman. What a surprising honor it is to join those ranks.

William and Mary’s story is America’s story. Twice, your classes were suspended and your campus was damaged by warfare. Twice, your buildings were converted to military headquarters and hospitals. Twice, the national government paid for campus reconstruction. And twice, you have resisted efforts to move your school to Richmond.

Despite those challenges, despite the fires, floods and financial hardships that have frequently stood in the way, William and Mary has persevered. This college educated those who led the radical and revolutionary effort to establish self-government in this country. William and Mary is home to the nation’s oldest law school, the first honor society and the first coeducational classes ever offered in a state college. You have hosted dozens of international leaders, at least 17 presidents and a few debates under presidential contenders. And your academic success has earned you the ranking of U.S. News & World Report as the nation’s leading small public university. One of my predecessors accurately labeled this institution “the alma mater of a nation.”
As impressive as all of that is, what is most striking is the spirit of the students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and public servants like Jim Dillard. The spirit leads the William and Mary community to gather each year on Charter Day and say, yes, we celebrate our past, but what can we learn from it? And how can we be better, bolder and more successful tomorrow? There is great value in this regular self-examination.

The fate of this school depends on strong leadership and that’s one of the reasons why this Charter Day is so special. It’s the first for William and Mary’s new president, Gene Nichol. An outstanding scholar, passionate teacher and proven administrator, Gene is a leader who understands the role of education, the need for public service and the value of our laws and civil liberties. Like me, he is a wandering Midwestern refugee from the Big 12 Conference, still learning the refined ways of the Commonwealth.

I pray that President Nichol has a better tenure than President Thomas Dawson, who led this institution when young Thomas Jefferson arrived as a student. President Dawson was arraigned before the Board of Visitors for habitual drunkenness. His chief ally, Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier, attempted a novel defense, saying “he had been teased by contrariety of opinions between him and the faculty into the loss of his spirits, and it was no wonder that he should apply for consolation to spirituous liquors.” President Nichol, no doubt you will have occasional contrariety in this position, but you will be a great president for this college. Virginians are lucky to have you and I am exited to work together.

It was four weeks ago today, just across town (in weather that I am beginning to call “Williamsburg weather,” and that Williamsburg residents now call “Tim Kaine weather), that I asked for help in keeping the promise of Virginia strong. I pledged then, as I do now, an administration that will do its all to ensure that the promise rings true for every son and daughter of the Commonwealth. The core of that promise is the mission of this College, ensuring that the natural talents liberally bestowed by God throughout our population are advanced and refined through the best possible education.

As a child of public and private education, a father of public schoolchildren, and a public servant, I affirm one of Virginia’s basic truths. Education is the single most important domestic public priority. Each governor, each legislator, each college president, has to protect the good we have and seek to extend and improve it.

If the centrality of education is a timeless truth, it has a particular force today. Knowledge is the currency of our time. Young people entering the world of work today will likely change careers seven to ten times over the course of their life. The ability to learn and re-learn—the ability to adapt—will determine the success of our children. And that quest for success is not just among individuals. Today, America faces a world of nations and peoples marshaling their resources to accelerate educational attainment in a global economy that allows them to take opportunities that were once safely ours if we do not compete with the same focus and ingenuity.

So, if the protection and advance of our education system is our first state priority, how do we achieve it? I’m no educational expert. As far as I know, I’m the only governor of Virginia who was ever principal of a vocational school—teaching carpentry and welding to teenagers as a missionary in Honduras. But, my thoughts about the future of higher education pale beside the insights of the educators gathered here. Still, I have a role as a steward of Virginia’s higher education system for the next four years. And, my service in that role will be guided by a few simple principles.

First, those of us in leadership positions should meet our obligations. In Virginia, we have a fair and comprehensive formula for funding higher education. But, when I was elected lieutenant governor in 2001, I began to wonder why state funding for your colleges and universities ranked so low, compared with other states, and why our in-state tuition ranked so high. I wondered what it said about our priorities that we were under-funding, by hundreds of millions of dollars, our funding formulae for K-12 education and higher education. The current gap between our actions and words—between the funding obligation and the state’s appropriation for higher education—is $377 million per year.

Over the next few weeks, you will hear and read a lot about the transportation debate that’s taking place in Richmond. We have a lot of work to do to address what I believe is the most urgent issue facing the state today. And you know, even if you don’t care about transportation, if higher education is your focus and that’s what you care about: the transportation debate is about you. We must find long-term, significant and reliable funding streams for transportation. We must secure that funding to ensure that it doesn’t come out of the General Fund – the money we use to support education, higher education, law enforcement, health care and the environment. I said in my State of the Commonwealth Address, and I will say it again: that would be a mistake, a road to fiscal disaster; a road paved with school books, nursing home beds and deputy sheriffs’ salaries. I won’t take the money for transportation from those commitments. That would be a mistake. I won’t take the money from institutions like William & Mary.

So, the simple question for the next four years is—can we do better? Of course we can. Virginia is in the top ten states in the nation in per capita income, and in the bottom ten in our tax burden as a percentage of income. The real question is—do we want to do better? I want to do better. The budget reform of 2004 moved us closer to our professed goal. This year’s budget, with its particular focus on expanding university research, will move us even closer. But, there is much room to improve. During my term of office, we will do better still.

A second principle is this—we must protect the wonderful diversity of our system. We do not have a centralized university system with flagship, and lesser, institutions. Instead, we have a collection of independently managed, distinct and even quirky institutions, with different strengths and personalities for the very different students who arrive to learn.

You could never mistake a William & Mary for a VMI, despite the two schools being quite small for public universities. And you would be taking you own life into your hands if you were to confuse Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia. Each of our public universities is blessedly different. Our network of community colleges offers still different options in every Virginia community. Our independent colleges round out a system of wonderful differentiation and complexity. This rich tapestry of higher education options is the outstanding feature of Virginia higher education and must be protected.

Protecting and promoting diversity were among the reasons why Virginia higher education boldly entered a new era of restructuring and individual institutional management agreements during last year’s legislative session. We are not in a “one size fits all” endeavor, and more flexibility for the diverse schools makes sense. I believe these individual arrangements have great promise for our schools if we can avoid the potential pitfalls they present.

If the new era of management agreements allows our institutions to better chart their unique and individual courses, and provides a means for clear discussion about legitimate public expectations, we will enhance the schools and our entire system. But, if the agreements provide an excuse for state leaders to further reduce funding or attention to our schools, on the theory that “they can figure it out for themselves,” we will have done damage to higher education in this Commonwealth.

A third principle flows from this concern. Despite the diversity of our schools, and the greater flexibility and autonomy allowed under our new approach, we can never forget that higher education is a public good. There’s a reason why the state invests in higher education, not just in our public colleges but also in our private colleges through tuition grants and other similar programs. It is inconsistent with this public mission to promote the attitude that each school can just cut its own deal and go its own way.

The notion that higher education at a state institution like William & Mary is truly a public good was impressed upon me in a vivid way on my first day as a freshman at the University of Missouri 26 years ago. A senior professor in an economics course introduced his class, told us of his requirements and then let us know that part of our grade was based on attendance. This was contrary to the norm, where work assignments and testing, true “outcome measures,” were the measure of one’s grade. When an intrepid student asked Dr. Kuhlman why attendance mattered, he said:

You are attending a public university where much of the cost of your being here isn’t paid by you, but by the tax dollars of millions of people, some who never had the chance to go to college, some who cannot afford to send their own children to school. You owe it to those people to make the most out of your time here. In fact, since you go to a public university, you owe those people something when you finish here. You have to use what you’ve gained here to help the community that has helped you get an education.

We know that a strong system of public education advances the entire body politic. William & Mary has educated, and will educate, scientists who move the frontier of human knowledge and diplomats who move the frontier of human understanding. There are regions and neighborhoods and hearts in Virginia that need the elevation that only higher education can provide.

Of course, this attitude of education as a public good has a venerable Virginia pedigree. William & Mary’s most notable student, Thomas Jefferson (whose original gravestone graces the campus of my alma mater—a public land grant institution in a state bought by Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase), summed it up when he wrote that “progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusions of knowledge among the general population.”

Jefferson saw and cemented the connection between individual education and public progress long before we had the Internet, computers or the insightful news reporting of your alumnus Jon Stewart. I look forward to striving for that mission with President Nichol and the entire William and Mary community over the next four years.

Thank you.

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