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The Year of Germany at Chatham University
Convocation Address, September 6, 2007
By: David A. Murdoch, Esq., Partner, K&L Gates
Honorary Consul for the Federal Republic of Germany in Pittsburgh |
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Good afternoon President Barrazone, Trustees of Chatham University, new and returning students, and guests. Thank you for that warm introduction. As Honorary Consul for the Federal Republic of Germany here in Pittsburgh, I am delighted to join with you in this opening Convocation. I welcome this opportunity to share with you my deep and abiding belief in the value of international and intercultural education and experience. I am especially pleased to extend to each of you personally the greetings of the German government. Your selection of Germany as a country worthy of study during this coming academic year is greatly to be commended. You will find the task challenging, stimulating and rewarding. I am pleased to play a small part in your experience.
Perhaps you are already asking how it is that an American born in the Pittsburgh area could be appointed Honorary Consul for Germany and also be the person bringing you the warm greetings of the German government. You might also be wondering why I would have anything relevant to say to undergraduates and graduate students at a University like Chatham. Finally, you will no doubt question the challenges I will leave with you to take on the study of Germany and international affairs. Would it be worth it? Should I do it? In a study of Germany, what can I possibly learn that is of any importance to my life? If you leave this Convocation with those questions on your lips, I will have succeeded.
Let me answer your first question, particularly if you have never heard about Honorary Consuls for foreign governments in America. Almost a dozen countries have honorary consuls in Pittsburgh. Each of these representatives is a United States citizen or a green card holder of the country they represent and has been approved by the U.S. State Department to serve in this capacity. Each of us maintains an office in accordance with U.S. State Department regulations. Most of us have little or limited power and authority in connection with the issuance of passports and visas, which is the work of the professional diplomats of the countries we represent. My most important duties relate to the fostering of good relationships between Germans and Americans in our area and helping German citizens who have difficulties while they are in America.
I was born here in the Pittsburgh area in Braddock and raised in Wilkinsburg just east of Chatham University. Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, I knew Chatham as the Pennsylvania College for Women or PCW. The changes for women since that time mean, in a nutshell, that you can ponder, and expect to achieve, great success in many fields, including international relations. The glass ceilings of that time have thankfully been broken forever in America.
I traveled to Germany in 1957 for the first time as a fifteen-year old. I returned in the summer of 1961, after my freshman year as a scholarship and work-study student at Harvard College. I participated in an exchange program known as the Experiment in International Living. I lived with a German family in Mannheim and traveled to Berlin shortly after the famous Berlin Wall was erected in August of that year. In college, I majored in Modern European History and began my own personal journey in the study of Germany. When I finished Harvard Law School in 1967, I was eligible to be drafted, but the U.S. Army, recognizing the skills I had developed in German and the education I had received about Europe, sent me to Germany as a First Lieutenant in the summer of 1968. I stayed in Germany with the United States Army for almost three years. I returned to Pittsburgh in March 1971, where I have been in private practice with a law firm, now known as K&L Gates that has the privilege of serving as counsel for Chatham. My law firm has also had several partners serve on your Board of Trustees over the years, so our relationship with you is, indeed, like family.
Those first experiences with Germany greatly affected my whole perspective of the world, America and myself. I grew from a local Pittsburgh boy with limited horizons to become, eventually, a global citizen with viewpoints significantly different from my peers. What I am hoping for each of the students here today is that you, also, will expand your horizons and viewpoints so that you will look back on this day and say, “I remember when I decided I wanted to become a “global citizen.” I am not suggesting one bit that you give up America or your home country or what it stands for when it exhibits what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” I am only saying you can become a knowledgeable, active participant in the world’s affairs if you really stretch beyond local horizons.
In the 1990s, I resurrected my original interests in Germany that had been somewhat dormant while my wife and I raised our three children. For the past 17 years, through business, nonprofit organizations, and in academic circles, I have found it especially enriching, to bring my early experiences with Germany and Europe to bear in my personal and professional life. As a result of my involvement with three nonprofit organizations, -- World Learning, formerly known as the US Experiment in International Living, the American Council on Germany, and the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, -- I renewed many interests and established new relationships that brought me to the attention of the German government. This activity ultimately resulted in my appointment as Honorary Consul for Germany. In these capacities, I have been able to strengthen my personal understanding of international affairs and to experience enormously rewarding intercultural encounters. Just as the glass ceilings of the 1950s have been broken forever, my limited horizons as a young boy born in Braddock and growing up in Wilkinsburg have been shattered. New opportunities have abounded through my commitment to international education and experience.
I am telling you these stories about my life not out of pride or self-absorption but in an effort to be relevant to what you as students are doing here at Chatham. You are building a foundation for a lifetime of experience and education. If you have not traveled outside Pennsylvania yet, now is the time to think about doing so. If you have not traveled abroad or studied a foreign country, now is the time to start thinking about doing so. That’s what Chatham’s Global Focus programs are about: Start with the Year of Germany.
Let me speak of my youngest daughter Deborah, who just turned 25, as the example closest to your situation. By the time she completed high school she had traveled to Austria with her aunt’s family, to China with her biology class, and to Belize with the Experiment in International Living. As an undergraduate she took a summer course at Cambridge University in England. In graduate school at Tulane, she studied international public health before entering the United States Peace Corps. She has been working for two years as a volunteer at a non-governmental organization that addresses pneumonia and HIV-AIDS in an all-black township in South Africa. She began her journey in high school with an interest in the brain development of young children and linked that interest to international education and experience. She is making a difference in the world, just as you can use your education and experience during these years to prepare a foundation for a career linked to an interest in other countries, the world, and international affairs.
Now you know how I have interwoven my personal and professional interests with a deep and abiding love for things international. You also know how my daughter Deborah is laying her foundation for the future by linking interests in education and health with things international. So let me offer you three challenges for this coming year at Chatham.
My first challenge is that you commit yourself to link your strongest interest, whatever it may be, to things international. If you are a scientist or a mathematician, then don’t limit your horizon to the local or even just the American. Look globally and see what other scientists or mathematicians are doing in your field. Albert Einstein left Germany to expand his interests in America. In today’s world, unlike Einstein, you can do the reverse;--visit Germany to compare your scientific and mathematic interests to those being developed there. If you are interested in health, education, or service professions, look elsewhere in the world for what people are doing to expand the horizons of knowledge. You won’t be bogged down by political debate on stem-cell research at Charite Hospital in Berlin. If you are interested in law, finance or politics, don’t limit your horizons to getting your JD or MBA in America. Link it to the international and try an internship at the World Bank or the IMF in DC or with a law firm or accounting firm in London or Frankfurt. Despite what you may believe, you have time. If you think you cannot afford to “go international,” go onto the web and check your interest in other countries. Your research tools on the internet far exceed anything I could do, or the women of PCW could do in the 1950s. Just make it a habit to add the international component to every analysis.
My second challenge is that you decide to aspire to be a global citizen. Say to yourself, “I am going to become a global citizen.” What is that? And how do I go about transforming myself into global citizenship? In order for you to achieve this type of citizenship, let me suggest three objectives: (1) you decide to make a difference in the world by dealing with difference; (2) you are determined to enhance your own skills in intercultural sensitivity and understanding; and (3) you commit to improving your intercultural competency and capacity.
To make a difference in the world you need to determine your own views first, and then ascertain the perspectives of others from different cultures or countries, by “walking in their moccasins,” and finally, you re-evaluate your initial views in light of your experience with “the Other.”
Enhancing intercultural sensitivity and understanding, as well as improving intercultural competency and capacity, may be objectives you can really achieve at Chatham. You can subject yourself, through active participation in classes and intercultural events to the rigorous discipline of learning about another culture. You can master information about that culture through reading, meeting with experts, watching sub-titled movies, gazing at medieval, modern and post-modern art, attending musical events, activating website searches and developing enlightened research techniques.
My third challenge is that you adopt Germany during this coming year as the icing on your international cake. By comparing what is happening and has happened in Germany with what is occurring and has occurred here in the United States, you will gain marvelous new insights into your own culture and your individual growth and development. Let me pose some big questions to get you started. Is German democracy more conducive to political freedom, economic development and social justice than the American system? Has Germany done better with its immigration issues, such as bringing in workers from Italy, Poland and Turkey, then the United States has done with illegal migrant workers in our Great Southwest? Should the American Constitution be amended to add a provision, like the German constitution, requiring legislative approval before soldiers can serve in foreign countries? Does America have anything to learn from German history in the field of international affairs? What do Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King have in common? What went terribly wrong in German culture and society to bring about the Holocaust? Are there lessons in that experience for America? Why has Germany had a female Chancellor before the U.S. has had a female president? I hope you find these questions “startling” and worth assessing because they are phrased in a way that may help you to think “outside the box.”
I have found my education, experience and life-values greatly enhanced by living, in effect, in two cultures, German and American. While retaining my most basic and fundamental beliefs and values as an American, I now have a capacity to test my American perspectives and to balance them better with a more worldly view. With countless events in the coming academic year, Chatham is providing the opportunity for you to consider Germany as the Bavarian chocolate icing on your international cake.
Ich bedanke mich für Ihr Anwesenheit hier heute, und für die Einladung eine kleine Rede zu halten. Willkommen nach Chatham für Ihr neues Universität’s Jahr. Ich wünsche Ihnen alles Gute für das kommende akademische Jahr und viel Erfolg als Frauen die bereit sind, es mit der Welt aufzunehmen (as women who are ready to take on the world).
Thank you for having me here today. Welcome to this new academic year at Chatham University and to your further efforts in becoming bona fide global citizens and “world-ready women.” Good luck and God bless.
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