---

Overcoming Adversity
Virginia then and now
How Virginia has moved forward
 

Thank you all so much and good evening. Thank you, please have a seat.

I’ve decided just in the last 5 seconds that I want my political career to be over and done before Jesse starts running for office - I do not want to have to compete with him!

It is truly a treat to be here, and Jesse said it right:  I came here tonight to celebrate with you, to celebrate your hard work and your accomplishments. Accomplishments in the rear view mirror and all the wonderful things you are going to do moving forward, and it is truly the case that you brought to this institution your own skills, and the education that you’ve gotten here at NoVa is going to enable you to do great things.

To Dr. Templin and all the members of the board, I really appreciate the invitation, and the chance to come and be with you for a few minutes tonight. It is a happy occasion.

Overcoming Adversity  

Whenever I give a graduation speech, and I manage to give a few these days, I always think about the first graduation speech that I gave as a statewide office holder. I had been elected lieutenant governor in November 2001, come into office in January 2002.

In April of 2002 I was in my office in Richmond right on Capitol Square and I got a call from a friend of mine who was the Superintendent for Chesterfield School System and he said to me, “Tim, I got bad news for you and I wonder if you could help me out. We’ve got a student by the name of Miber Battle who was at Matoaca High School in Chesterfield. She’s about two months short of graduation but she’s in the hospital up at MCV with terminal cancer and we want to do a graduation service for her sometime in the next day or two, and we wonder if you’ll come up and be with her.”

They had had to actually really maneuver the State Department of Education to print the diploma two months before the end of the year - you know some bureaucracies never change, but this bureaucracy did respond.

I said yes and I went up the hill one day with this diploma and went into a hospital room that was decorated with balloons and ribbons around this young student who had suffered a horrible, horrible battle with cancer.

It was a sad occasion and a wonderful occasion. People gathering in the room and everybody knew we were there to do a graduation in April and that that was not the norm. She was not expected to live very long, but people were there also with this great sense of celebration because everybody has to go through some things to get that degree, but this young lady had gone though an awful lot.

Her family and her teachers and the nurses were there and friends, and we gathered around and I gave a little speech. It made me feel just fantastic to say “Miber Battle, I am pleased to make you the first high school graduate of the class of 2006 in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” When I said those words and saw her face and saw this great expression of pride on her face, it just meant so much to me.

I felt like as I looked at her face I saw how proud she was to have overcome not just her illness, but I think I also saw in her eyes pride about overcoming the tough teacher, the course that was hard, the late nights trying to work on a project, and getting advice from parents and friends. A lot of emotions went across her face and I felt them, too.

It sometimes strikes me at this time of year [that] we hand out a lot of diplomas and in fact I see a pretty big stack of diplomas on the table right behind me. And sometimes because we are handing out hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of diplomas at the same time every year, we can forget what one diploma means to each person [who] gets it.

Because I can imagine as I stand here before you tonight that not all of you have had to fight through illness to get here, although I bet, in fact I am sure, that some of you have. Many of you have had to fight through tough economic times to get here, where you didn’t know that you would have the money to pay for the next book or tuition payment.

You’ve had to fight through tough times in [your] family or other things taking your attention away from focusing on school and getting your degree. You’ve had to face tough teachers and tough circumstances.  And so with every diploma that we hand out, that’s why I love thinking about my diploma story with Miber Battle.

Every last diploma that we hand out represents a story of achievement, of overcoming adversity and success. And that’s why I am so very proud to be with you tonight, to be able to stand with you and be with you in this room on a night that will be extremely memorable for all of you. [It] is one of the great pleasures of being governor.

So let me just start by saying to all of you who’ve overcome all you’ve overcome and succeeded in some wonderful ways, on behalf of the Commonwealth, I am pleased to congratulate you for all that you’ve done.

Now I have said that it’s a pleasure to stand with you on one of the most memorable evenings of your life, but I don’t have any illusions that my speech will be the memorable part of this memorable evening of your life.  In fact, I’ve graduated three times - from high school and from college and from law school - and I don’t remember a single thing that any of my graduation speakers ever said.  I was the graduation speaker at my [own] high school graduation and I don’t remember what I said. But it is a memorable night for all you so let me just offer just a couple of thoughts and then we’ll proceed to the real fun part of the evening as you get your degrees.

Virginia then and now 

Here’s what I have been thinking about the last couple of weeks:  I have been doing some things that are very memorable for me because it’s a memorable time in the history of this Commonwealth and you are graduating at a momentous period.

We just celebrated last Sunday the 400th Anniversary of the Settlement of Jamestown Island. Four hundred years of modern Virginia, four hundred years of America. As part of the celebration we had Queen Elizabeth come to the Executive Mansion. I was able to tour her through the Capitol. We had the President come last Sunday to Jamestown Island.

This is a period where we are celebrating this amazing anniversary, and it’s a good time to step back and look kind of at where we’ve been and where we’re going. The last time Queen Elizabeth came to Virginia, or the first time she came to Virginia was in 1957 when we were celebrating the 350th Anniversary of Jamestown. She was 31 years old. She is now back at age 81, having reigned over England for that period of time, to help us commemorate 400 years.

Raise your hand in this room if you were born in 1957 or before, raise your hand. Huge numbers - and I guess I’m getting older up here, so maybe not as many as I might of thought. Huge numbers in this room were alive in 1957 when we celebrated the 350th anniversary and are alive today.

Let me tell you where Virginia was in 1957. Let me tell you where Virginia was. If it had been 1957, first none of you, none you would have been here. There wasn’t a Northern Virginia Community College in 1957. There wasn’t a George Mason University in 1957, so you wouldn’t have been here. There wasn’t a community college system in 1957. In 1957 in Virginia the percentage of kids or anybody that went to higher education was half the national average. There were very few schools.  

If you had gone to one of those schools, you still wouldn’t have been there if your skin color hadn’t been white, and in all likelihood you would have had far fewer opportunities to go there if you were a woman. That’s where we were in 1957 during the lifetime of so many people in this room.

In 1957, Virginia was near the bottom of the nation in the percentage of our youngsters who actually went to school in K-12. For school-aged kids actually attending school, we were at the bottom of the pack in 1957.

And not surprisingly, with an education system that served very few people, our economy was not in good shape in 1957. In 1957 per capita income in Virginia was about 20 percent less than the national average. We were 36th in the nation in per capita income -meaning that as far as economic opportunities went, if you had been able to go to college, and had been able to graduate, the opportunities out there for you were not what they would have been elsewhere. In fact, a lot of Virginians in that generation left Virginia because the opportunities were not strong.

How Virginia has moved forward 

So how about 2007? Within the period of that lifetime, within the period between Queen Elizabeth’s two visits, where are we? In education we’re not now half the national average in college attendance, we’re significantly greater than the national average in college attendance.

There is a community college network that was started in the 1960’s and Northern Virginia Community College is like the bellwether and Exhibit A for the power of the community college system to transform this Commonwealth. We have networks of community colleges now that serve every community in Virginia, we have more four year institutions of higher learning, and those institutions are open to African-Americans students, and students from other countries, and women students.

We’ve come that far.

Our K-12 educational system now is not back of the pack; consistently in AP scores and SAT scores and opportunities for students, our K-12 system is near the front of the nation.

And not surprisingly 50 years later, our economy is strong. We’re not 36th in the nation anymore in per capita income. This year Virginia is 9th in the nation in per capita income, and those opportunities are out there for you in a way they wouldn’t of been had we been here 50 years before.

In fact there is no state in the 50 states that has made as big a jump from back of the pack to front of the pack since 1957 as Virginia, and that is something to be very, very proud of.

Earlier this year Education Week magazine did a survey, and they asked this question, “Where in America will a child born today have the greatest chance of life success?” They ranked each of the 50 states and they ranked Virginia as number one, and I am here to tell you that in no one’s wildest dreams in 1957 would Virginia have been number one in that category.

So a good question is, “What explains that jump?” How do we go from back of the pack to front of the pack? And if we learn that, what are we going to do to keep at the front of the pack for the next 50 years?

Let me just talk about that for a second. I think we’ve done two things in Virginia in the last 50 years and if we do those two things with some slight differences for the next 50 years we’re gonna stay near the front of the pack.  Here’s what we’ve done.

First, we’ve broken down the barriers between us. That legally mandated segregation of the races, and denial of opportunities for women were holding us back. There is no way a city, a university, a state, a nation, a continent can be all that it can be if it limits people and the opportunities, if it divides people against one another, and that’s where we were as a Commonwealth in 1957.

Lord knows we’ve got a long way to go to fully act on that Jeffersonian principle that all are created equal and everyone has equal opportunity, but we’ve come a long way in the last 50 years. And that’s the first thing we had to do in order to go from the back of the pack to front of the pack. We had to break down the barriers between ourselves in this Commonwealth and we have come a long way in that regard.

The second thing we’ve done is this: We have realized just how powerful education is as an investment and decided that that’s going to be the primary focus of our policy in state government.

Later tonight there is going to be an award presented to a state senator, a dear friend, Chuck Colgan, who is here tonight and who is the most senior member of the Senate of Virginia. He knows a lot of these events that I am talking about. He has been a passionate supporter for investing in education, just like so many other legislators.

Chuck Caputo is here tonight. Just like college presidents, just like Chambers of Commerce, we realized in Virginia that we didn’t want to be at the bottom of the pack when it came to education. We want to be at the front, and we have wisely invested.

The best investment [we] ever made was the creation of the community college system. Governor Albertus Harrison and then Governor Mills Godwin and then subsequent governors really built up this network of community colleges and it has been so very powerful. We’ve done great things in our four-year institutions, great things in K-12, but the community college investment was the single most important investment educationally to takes us to near the front.

Did you know that right now your president, Bob Templin, is being consulted by the largest democracy in the world, the government of India, on how to create a community college system? Because Virginia has done it from scratch in 40 years and it has transformed our state. And that’s the first thing that has helped us be successful. The first thing was breaking down the barriers, the second thing was investing in education.

So how can we keep it strong going forward? We can keep it strong by doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same thing. Breaking down barriers.

We still have some barriers to break down among ourselves in Virginia. Sometimes regions have kind of disputes and we need to always reach out that hand in fellowship and brotherhood, and work better across racial lines and party lines and regional lines.

But I am going to submit for the next 50 years the barriers that we have to break down are barriers between Virginia and the rest of the world. It’s between our nation and other nations. Those are the barriers that we have to break down because success now is about global talent and global opportunity.

So many of the economic development announcements that I do now are foreign companies wanting to come in to the United States, and so many small businesses that never would have done business overseas, even 10 years ago, now find that they’re marketing all over the globe.

And so whether it’s how we recruit talent, what our immigration policies are, what our policies for admitting students to our colleges are, what our trade relationships are, we’ve got to break down barriers between Virginia and the rest of the world and that’s the first thing that we can do in order to be successful going forward.

And Virginia is in a wonderful place, as evidenced by the fact that this institution has at least 25 percent of its student body, folks who were born in other countries who have come here for opportunity. That’s a good thing because that’s the way the world looks, and we’re going to have to do more of that going forward if we want to be successful. 

The second thing is […] we have to keep investing in education. We have to do it in smart ways, in strategic ways, we have to recognize…

You know when I was a kid, community colleges weren’t called community colleges. They were called junior colleges.  It was a kind of stepping stone notion that Jesse mentioned. But they changed the name to community colleges because anymore the students who go to community colleges aren’t all juniors. People go to college over the course of their entire life to get training and new skills over the course of their entire life. And that’s the way it’s going to be in the future.

And so going forward we continue to have to wrestle with and make wise investments to keep our education system strong. If we do both of those things, break down barriers with the world and keep investing in education, Virginia will not fall back. We will stay at the front of the pack.

One last thing and then I’ll conclude. It’s funny as we’ve talked about the globalization of the world. I am sure some of you have read books like The World is Flat, and things like that, and there’s almost a sense that this global marketplace and this global world we are in is something new and something different, you know something really unusual.

But I am here to tell you it’s not. Because what was Jamestown about? Jamestown Island was settled by venture capitalists from England who came to this country, not seeking religious freedom, not to do a new map of the world. They came here trying to turn a dollar and make a profit. It was a global trade initiative.

And so from the very first days of Virginia until today, we’ve been about global trade. And if the Powhatan Indians hadn’t been welcoming to new Americans when they arrived in 1607, this story might have been a very different story. We need to keep that in mind. And so let me just say to you graduates one last thing about Jamestown.

You might think standing here tonight, you know, what’s the relevance of Jamestown? There’s no more new worlds for us to discover. And it’s true; I doubt that any of you out here will find new bits of unmapped territory or new geography that hasn’t been explored before.

But I am here to tell you that 400 years after Jamestown, there are still new worlds of research and knowledge, there are still new worlds of economic opportunity and innovation and entrepreneurship, there are still new worlds of fellowship and reconciliation and brotherhood among people.

There are still new worlds for you to discover, just as those 104 [settlers] 400 years ago had new worlds to discover, there are new worlds to discover today,  and with the training and background you got here at Northern Virginia Community College, there is nobody better qualified to do it than you.

Congratulations and thanks so much.  

# # # #