…In everything you try.

Six weeks ago I started thinking seriously about my New Student Convocation speech, and how I might welcome first year students and transfers to Franklin & Marshall College.

I thought back to the year before, and how it seemed right at that time to play a mash-up from DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album of songs from Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album, symbolizing the way the young and older—students and professors—mash-up ideas, culture, sensibilities and experience to create intellectual meaning neither party could invent on our own. The message sought to urge students to meet their faculty, mind on mind, right away.

This year, as we celebrate our 225^th anniversary as a college, it seemed right to invite the new students to go meet their institution, right away. After all, we were founded at the birth of a new nation, before America had ratified our Constitution, thanks to a gift from Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. That’s a legacy that would expand anyone’s sense of the power of this place.

I decided to draw the students into our history by telling the story of one of our greatest and most representative alums, Major Dick Winters ’41, who passed away in early 2011.

Major Winters was a hero on June 6, 1944, or D-Day, and throughout the year-long American campaign in Europe to defeat the Nazi regime. Many will recognize him as the central heroic figure from the book and television mini-series Band of Brothers.

Dick arrived at F&M in 1937, the year of the College’s 150^th anniversary. He came from very modest means and worked his way through college while committing himself fully to catching up academically, which he did. I can’t help thinking that he was like most students we teach today—confident that education would be a ladder to economic opportunity, personal growth, and service to others.

Dick couldn’t have known the extraordinary ways he would climb that ladder of learning in the years right after college. Nor can our students know the uses to which they’ll put the education they create here.

But they can allow themselves to be inspired by those who came before them—those who made the College, like Benjamin Franklin, and those the College has helped to make over the centuries.

There’s a new monument bearing Dick Winters’ likeness on the sacred soil of Normandy. We can all learn from it. We can also learn from the mindset of Maj. Winters whenever he set out on a new task: Always do your best, in everything you try.

I think Benjamin Franklin and John Marshall would be proud.