When Johns Hopkins President Steven Muller and Nanjing University President Kuang Yaming founded the HNC in 1986, many thought they were aiming at the impossible. Two leading universities from two countries with a complicated relationship, sharing a campus, a library, and a dining hall - and asking students from both sides to learn the other's language well enough to think in it. Nearly 4,000 alumni from 40+ countries later, the results speak for themselves.

‍
In my remarks during the school's convocation, l focused on the human dimension - what it actually felt like to show up in China at a moment of historic transformation, to bet on dialogue when others were skeptical, and why that bet still matters, perhaps even more urgently today.