Preparing Ethical Leaders in a Fragmented World

KEVIN MALONEY: Noah Bopp, welcome to Carnegie Council. Thank you so much for joining us today.

NOAH BOPP: Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here. I love coming to the Carnegie Council. It seems like an oasis of character, integrity, and intellectual rigor, and I have no idea whether I will be able to add to any of those qualities, but I am happy to be part of the extended family.

KEVIN MALONEY: I am sure you will, humility being a core virtue of those at Carnegie Council. I think you will fit right in.

I want to get a sense, as we always do on the Values & Interests podcast, of your personal value system and formation, what we call the “values CV,” and then get into the professional side, but I want to give my listeners first a sense of who you are and your moral formation, and we can go from there.

NOAH BOPP: I once was shooting baskets with a student, and she said: “Noah, I have you figured out. You ask questions and you tell anecdotes.” I was just, boom, pinned and wriggling on the wall. You are asking the questions today, so all I have for you are a bunch of anecdotes. Let me tell you a few here.

The first is an anecdote that my mother tells about me in a bathtub when I was three or four years old, sitting there playing with rubber duckies and all that, and all of a sudden, I look up and ask her, “How do I know you really love me?”

She gave me this great answer. She said, “You’re right. I’m telling you that I love you, but maybe I’m tricking you. Maybe it’s not true. You are going to have to figure that out yourself.

Apparently, I went back to playing with the rubber ducks and splashing around, and a few minutes later I looked up and said, “You do love me, don’t you?”

I tell that story for a few reasons: One is, I tend to be an optimist; I tend to be somebody who would rather love and lose than never love at all. Perhaps more importantly is because that was my mother instilling in me my teaching philosophy. I really want students to be able to figure it out themselves.

The next anecdote is about my grandfather. My grandfather came over on the boat from Scotland and moved to the New York area. Every once in a while, his family would be invited to his aunt’s house, and his aunt was a little more well-established. He would be sitting there eating dinner, and inevitably his mother or father would elbow him in the ribs and say, “Eat up; you’re at your auntie’s.” The idea was, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. Eat for a few meals tonight at your aunt’s house.

The first reason I love that story is that it tells me that when you have an opportunity you have to take it. Don’t think about it, don’t think about whether you deserve it. You are at your auntie’s. Eat your meal right now.

Second of all, he ended up being fairly successful, and later in life he would throw these parties for our graduations. We would go out to this Italian restaurant, and he would always make sure that we had enough: “Do you have enough? Do you want a Shirley Temple? Let’s order a pitcher of Shirley Temples.” What he was doing was “paying it forward” and having this tremendous joy in taking what his aunt had given him and passing it on the next generation, and I love that idea too.

He made it as an electrical engineer at Boeing working in the defense industry, and one of my favorite stories about him at Boeing is that midway through his career he hired the first Japanese man to work in the defense part of Boeing or that particular part of the defense industry. As you might imagine, after World War II hiring a Japanese man to work in the defense industry building missiles was a little questionable, but my grandfather always thought you should hire the best person for the job.

Every Christmas, Mr. Hashimoto and his family would show up at my grandfather’s door, and they would always give a little gift. They would never talk about the fact that my grandfather had done this, but that was what it was all about, just saying thank you. So, hiring the best person regardless of who that person is, is a core value of mine.

One more story. This one is about my paternal grandmother, Grandma Bopp. She raised my father, one of five kids on a dairy farm in Eastern Washington. In the 1950s the Bopp boys would often at night sneak out through a hole in the fence to hang out with their girlfriends or whatever, and one night one of my uncles was going out through the fence and my granddad was coming back the other way through the fence. He was coming from the house of the lady down the street. They were having an affair.

My grandmother, contrary to what most people would have done at that time, said, “I’m outta here,” and she took the remaining kids who had not gone on to college, moved to the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington, restarted her life, and became a teacher. That story of “I have a value here and you are not taking advantage of me” and then her career as a teacher both influenced me.

Those are a few anecdotes that have influenced who I am and what I believe in.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is so interesting. There is a lot of alignment there with my own personal experience on a surface level and also a bit deeper.

NOAH BOPP: We can have a beer afterward if you want.

KEVIN MALONEY: The Scottish ancestry story aligned in terms of my family being Scottish and Irish, and it spoke to me in terms of the man that my own grandfather was and being a World War II veteran. There was a very formative experience of me and my brother going to his apartment. We called him “Grumpa” because he was always grumpy. You knew he was always going to be there for you, but he was not going to give you a smile.

NOAH BOPP: Yes.

KEVIN MALONEY: You don’t appreciate that as a young person, but you really appreciate it in terms of what that inculcated into you as an adult. I remember sitting there with my brother, and you would go to Grumpa’s house and either watch the New York Giants or a John Wayne movie, and that was it. Then you would leave. The hardiness of the Irish-Scottish triangle of the world definitely cuts across experiences for a lot of people.

NOAH BOPP: My grandfather’s version of that is that he would always call us “varmints.” He would not let us put our hands on the walls. When I was an undergraduate at Oberlin, he would always send me Wall Street Journal op-eds to keep me on the straight and narrow.

KEVIN MALONEY: Just a little prod. I love that.

Let’s transition a bit in terms of this values formation. You transitioned into the professional side of your life and found yourself as a teacher, and then this thing happens. Maybe you can talk about that for the audience.

NOAH BOPP: I was a teacher on 9/11. That was probably the formative moment of my teaching career as a world history teacher. It was the second day of the school year, and the next day I had to stand in front of my students. As you might imagine, on that day they were scared, confused, angry, and making all kinds of assumptions. I realized, as I am sure you and many people did, that the world had changed fundamentally.

What did that mean for me as a teacher, and particularly a teacher called to those who are going to lead, regardless of their background? I always felt called to those kids. The central insight of the school is that in a post-9/11 world America needs leaders who are “ethically strong and internationally aware.” Here we go.

As a result of that, I took a job at a place called The Mountain School in Vermont because I had heard that the semester program model was a valuable one. I designed a summer program for Duke University for high school kids to pilot the curriculum. I came to New York City to get a degree in private school leadership so people would think I knew what I was doing, and then I moved down to Washington, DC. It took about three years for the financial aid kit to raise the money, build the board, convince families, convince schools, and learn all kinds of crazy things about zoning laws, taxes, and things like that.

The fall of 2009 was our first class, so we are just finishing our 17th year, and along the way we have opened satellite campuses in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in London in the United Kingdom, not too far away from King’s College London, where I understand you once studied.

KEVIN MALONEY: It was an interesting time. It is so interesting, the pivot or clairvoyance you had and this thing happening. What is the point of education? The point of education is to prepare students for the world. It is not some abstract thing. You saw the world changing, and you responded to that moment, the irony being that you went into this space of ethics, which in and of itself can be extremely abstract to the average person.

I want to hear how you built this ethical framework and aligned it with education. How do you think about applied ethics? How do you think about values principles, and how do you attempt to inculcate students with this as something they can actually use in their daily lives?

NOAH BOPP: First, I want to take issue with the idea that I was clairvoyant. This is an important point. I think in moments of crisis we need to go back to our core values and see where those core values lead. In some sense, what was I trying to do was go back to the core values I was talking about before, the people who mentored me throughout my life, and then figure out, well, what does this mean that I need to do?

In terms of how we teach ethics, I always start Book Seven of Plato’s Republic at the end of the Allegory of the Cave, when Plato has Socrates talk about the purpose of an education. I am paraphrasing, but only a little bit here. He says that education is not about putting sight into blind eyes. It is not about chopping off the top half of our heads and pouring in ethics leadership, international studies, and then punting everybody off the cliff and into the world. The effective educator assumes that the power to learn is already present in the soul of the learner and merely gives that learner places to look and questions to ask.

For me, the fundamental part of teaching ethics is, where do we want students to look? Where can we direct their eyesight? To me, it is at the critical problems that are facing our world, and then what are the questions we want to ask?

They are the classic questions people have asked across cultures and through the centuries: “Who am I? What is my relationship to others? What ought my relationship to others be? How do I find meaning in my life? How do we all live together?” These are the classic questions, so that is the core.

What I would layer on top of that is that it has always been a key part of The School for Ethics and Global Leadership to convene different points of view and to have what we call “growth discourse,” which we can get into later on, but when I first started the school I did not think that was going to be such a calling card. I thought this was a classic part of education, that you are nonpartisan and you convene different points of view, but increasingly as decades have gone by that has been something that I have found is more and more rare in education and more and more central to what we do.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think there is a tension here in a good way, and I assume you might experience this a bit as well, in terms of avoiding the trap of moral relativism when interrogating different value systems. There is this balancing act. Maybe you can react to that and how you think about that challenge.

NOAH BOPP: Whenever a kid talks about moral relativism, I just get the heebie-jeebies. I always want kids to make their own decisions, and I always understand that what I am doing is planting seeds. They are on a journey and they believe this thing right now and may believe something different later on.

This may be a little philosophy-major wonky here, but I think about Hegel and the notion of geist. I know that the world spirit, the idea that we are evolving this moral ethical consciousness, evolves through discourse. I know he did not quite say this, but it has been interpreted as the thesis, the antithesis, and then the synthesis, and then that becomes a new thesis with a new antithesis and synthesis, and we move down the river.

What I would like students to get to is not, there is a right and wrong that we can know right now or there is never a right and wrong and we can never know, so just pull out a gun and shoot the guy on the street, but instead, we can get closer to truth through good-faith conversation. That is the best that I can do. There is very little point for my school or for my existence if moral relativism turns out to be true.

KEVIN MALONEY: You mentioned good faith at the end of your answer. Again, this is a huge thing we think about here in terms of the people we invite into the circle, whether it be an expert or somebody on a panel. Pluralism requires a diversity of ideas, but the ethics side also requires engaging in good faith.

Right now we are seeing a lot of bad faith in the public sphere. Maybe you can talk about how you are thinking about approaching this good-faith versus bad-faith conundrum in public life right now from an education perspective.

NOAH BOPP: For us, I think the answer is, if you are interested in having a conversation in good faith, come into our family, come into our community, and be part of our cohort. That does not mean that you are only going to be exposed to people who are arguing in good faith. It also does not mean that we have some definition or some litmus test to decide whether a guest we are bringing in is arguing in good faith.

Let me give you an example. On our South Africa campus, we met this semester with a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party as a member of the South African Parliament. This is the communist Black nationalist party on the far left of the South African political system. Is she operating in good faith? I don’t know, but she is part of the conversation, and she was willing to speak with our students.

Then we brought in the spokesperson for AfriForum. AfriForum represents the descendants of the Dutch Afrikaners. They are the ones who started the process that led to Donald Trump removing all foreign aid from South Africa because of his concerns about white genocide and land reform in South Africa. Both of those people came and spoke with our students.

I have to say I don’t know that either of them would last too much in a New York City prep school auditorium, but at The School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL) we want to convene those different points of view, and if we decide, “Oh, those are not really good-faith arguments; those are arguments tinged with racism,” for example, then let’s have that kind of conversation, but inside our family we do want to be teaching kids how to have conversations in good faith, and we don’t necessarily want to be making assumptions about what our guest speaker’s faith is. Are there limits to that? Yes, there are, and I am happy to go into that too.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this goes to one of the big ethical framework questions for us, which is educational versus prescriptive: How far do you want to take the person to the water’s edge before they drink themselves? This is a tough one. It is a very different calculus I think in terms of people who might be established in their careers or have gone through the campaigns and policy circles versus somebody who is sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years old. There are different duties and responsibilities as a convener or an educator attached to those based on the audience you are engaging with.

NOAH BOPP: Absolutely. They are younger, they are more impressionable, and we have a greater responsibility to prepare them for those moments, and there are some speakers where we would say, “Nah, I don’t think so.”

I don’t know if it is useful, but just in terms of preparing them for those moments we start with what we call “critical thinking week” and we introduce our critical thinking model, see, think, act, reflect (STAR). I won’t go into all of that right now, but the most important part of it is to make sure that you are seeing a situation, a text, or another human being, as fully as you can before you reach judgment, before you jump to a conclusion.

As part of that week, we also talk about our statement on campus discourse. We prize something called “growth discourse.” That is our little hashtag term. It is adjacent to but a little different from “civil discourse.” Sometimes growth discourse, discourse that helps you grow, is not civil, because we are working it out or we are worried, and sometimes the goal is not civility. Sometimes the goal should be something greater than, “Can’t we all just get along? Don’t be too mean to that other person.” The goal is growth.

Here are the three principles of that:

1. Begin with belonging. The only person who does not belong at SEGL is the person who says, “You don’t belong here, and people like you don’t belong here,” and quite frankly that can be a litmus test to some degree for the people we invite in to meet our students.

2. Balance intent and impact. At the beginning of my career if we did diversity education and professional development, a rock-solid tenet assumed positive intent. George Floyd is murdered, and all of a sudden everybody is over on “Impact is the most important thing; how did your words make me feel?” In reality, both of those things matter, and you have to hold them up equally. You want to avoid echo chambers. When we go and speak with people who are similar to us, we are doing that to figure out how we reengage rather than to gain reinforcement to disengage.

3. “Follow the STAR.” I just talked about that. In particular, make sure you are seeing a situation as fully as you can before you jump to a conclusion about that person. So we are preparing them for those moments and not just throwing them to the wolves.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think a lot about applied ethics as a framework to make a decision in an imperfect world, but it also provides you with the armor to know that the goal is not a perfect outcome. We think a lot about that here, and our president, Joel Rosenthal, wrote a few years ago about what “ethics reenvisioned” means to him. I think it is the end of that responsibility chain that often gets cut off in terms of the decision and the action that is taken, but there is not a quick fix or an endorphin hit. Part of the ethical responsibility is to own the consequences, seen and unforeseen, of that choice and keep on rolling in good faith.

I think so often in this ecosystem right now, it is like, “What is this going to get me today and how can I wash my hands of it?” But life ain’t like that.

NOAH BOPP: No, it’s not. We do a case study on the Rwandan genocide every semester. There is an interview with Roméo Dallaire that the students watch, and in it he says, “I was the commander and 800,000 people died, and I cannot take any solace in words like, ‘I did my best.’ A commander cannot use that as a reference. He either succeeds or he fails, and then he stands accountable.” I can quote this documentary like it’s The Big Lebowski or something like that.

I live by those words as the head of the organization—or try to—and I want our students to live by that as well. Your choices have consequences, and you cannot wash your hands of that. As a leader you have to stand accountable for that as well. I wanted to pick up on that piece of what you just said.

KEVIN MALONEY: Maybe because we are at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, we can look through the international lens a bit. I know we talked about the school and its global reach and convening power, but you have this line: It is ethically strong and internationally aware.

It is a moment for geopolitics. There is a lot of stress in the world and there is a lot of geopolitical fracturing. What is your conception of what “internationally aware” means? How has that changed over the years, and how do you think about it in the current moment?

NOAH BOPP: I am going to launch into another story, and hopefully we will get there in the end.

For the first 20 years of my teaching career, I assigned the same reading for the first night of homework. It was the April 2001 cover story in The Atlantic. We happen to be exactly twenty-five years from that as we are sitting here right now. It was a David Brooks piece called “The Organization Kid.” He went back to Princeton to figure out what are tomorrow’s leaders like today, and of course, tomorrow’s leaders in 2001 were the Millennials.

What he finds—no offense; I don’t know exactly how old you are—

KEVIN MALONEY: I have said it on the record. I am 37 and I was born in 1989.

NOAH BOPP: What he finds is that they are overscheduled, amiable, resume-building social climbers who lack a moral compass, obviously present company excluded.

The next day in class I would lean back in my chair and say: “You guys are all organization kids,” and inevitably they would fight me on it.

I would say, “All right. Well, if you are not an organization kid, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go back to your home school, find an issue that you care about, organize your friends, and go on strike until the administration at your school gives you what you think is important.”

Inevitably they would cringe and say, “Why would we do that? That would be mean. We would get in trouble. What about college?” And, most tellingly, “We can’t think of anything that important.”

I would throw my hands up and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, another generation of organization kids,” and that would become one of the most important images for our students and graduates to wrestle with: “Am I an organization kid? What do I do if I don’t want to be an organization kid?”

I can’t assign that anymore because this is a different generation. This is a generation that will walk out of class. They will go on strike. They will pitch a tent on the quad. In many ways, this is the generation that I have been waiting for my entire career.

The trouble is that we have given them a terrible map. I call this generation the generation of “moral orienteers,” to pay a little bit of homage to David Brooks, not organization kids but orienteer kids. This is a generation that has a moral compass. They are trying to do the right thing. Sometimes they make terrible, terrible mistakes, but they are trying to do the right thing. They are trying to orient themselves morally.

What do I mean when I say we have given them a terrible map? You and I, when we look at a map of civic institutions in this world, we see, “Oh, that’s a tree over there. There’s a river. There’s a mountain.”

Gen Z sees that the tree has been chopped down, the river has dried up, and the mountain is an exploding volcano. They don’t have the civic institutions, the democratic institutions, to orient themselves, so is it any wonder that with these strong feelings and these moral compasses they sometimes end up pointing themselves in the wrong direction?

In terms of what it means to be ethically strong and internationally aware these days, I think it is really important first to honor that feeling that they have, that thought they have that we ought to care about these issues, and second to try to be and build the institutions that they see crumbling or crumbled all around them.

Like Carnegie Council and hopefully like The School for Ethics and Global Leadership, we have this opportunity to be the landmark by which this current generation orients their moral compass. To me that is the most important thing about how everything has evolved.

KEVIN MALONEY: Whether it is an institution, a parent, or teacher, having something that has moral gravitas and can act as a north star is incredibly important. We talked about it earlier today at Carnegie Council in terms of, what does it mean to be in public life now? What are the duties that are inherent in doing that now that everybody has a megaphone and now that the CEOs of Silicon Valley are writing manifestos about civilizationalism versus X, Y, and Z?

It is up for grabs right now in terms of what it means to be in the public space, what it means to be civically engaged. I believe strongly that we are going through a re-definitional process both domestically and internationally. That is a huge challenge, but it is also a massive opportunity. It ain’t 1998 anymore.

NOAH BOPP: Absolutely. I believe the same thing. Again, I am going to pretend I am—I was, but pretend I am a good one—philosophy major and say that it is like Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes. What does he do at the beginning of that? He says, “I’m going to cut down all of my assumptions and assume a worst-case scenario and figure out what I can build up from there.” You probably know this, but he assumes there is an evil demon deceiving him and making him think that he exists and that you exist and that the world is this and all that.

Then he says, “All right. Well, if there is an evil demon deceiving me, then I must exist to be deceived.” That is where he goes, I am, I exist, or “I think, therefore I am,” and then he builds toward other people, toward God, and all that, and maybe that exercise is flawed, but I think we have a similar opportunity right now to say, “Let’s cut down all of the assumptions we have about what young people are coming to my door with and build from the ground up.”

Here is an example: “Why should I do my own work? There is a ChatGPT or Claude or whatever it is that I can just type a few prompts into and it will write something that is better than 90 percent of what I am able to do right now. Why shouldn’t I do that?” That is a scary question.

One thing we can do is get into this arms race with kids and just stop them from doing that, or we can say, “No, no. We have to teach why having an original idea is valuable. Here is the best that I can do. If I say to you, ‘I love you so much that I had ChatGPT write a love poem for you,’ what are you going to do? You are probably going to smack me in the face.” You may smack me in the face anyway because we are in the middle of a podcast, but you would probably say, “I’m not buying that.” Why? Because it was not you. It was not your gift to me.

Helping kids transfer that to when we share ourselves, in some way what we are doing is demonstrating our love for the world and other people. Maybe it’s cheesy, but that is what I mean, try to figure out if we just get rid of all of our assumptions, what can we build? It is terrifying, but, for those of us who are optimistic, and people at Carnegie Council I think are fundamentally optimistic—

KEVIN MALONEY: Pragmatically idealistic.

NOAH BOPP: Love it. Whatever you want to use, but you are in it. So let’s build. We have this opportunity.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to close with something I think that will be relevant for the audience of Carnegie Council, and this is a problem I run into a lot right now in the nonprofit governance space. You go to a meeting about climate or multilateralism or fill in the blank. I will be the youngest person in the room, which is not good, and then you will go to these amazing events that are catered for the next generation or young people and get all this energy, but the room is not split with 20 people who have worked at the United Nations, and there are fewer and fewer spaces where you get this crossover in good faith.

I think there is a variety of reasons for that, such as an inability to want to actually be challenged. Go down the list. But you are directly educating these young people who care about the international lens. With multilateralism deteriorating, with institutions that we have trusted deteriorating, could you give your playbook, the knowledge you are getting from them, on how to deal with people who have different values, how to build cooperation, thinking about this bottom-up approach to all of my listeners who are in the public sphere doing work right now, some of the lessons you could share?

NOAH BOPP: The first thing I would say is that there are institutions working to bridge those gaps. I know Carnegie is working on it, I’m working on it, as is the head of the board at something called the Onero Institute, which is based at George Washington University in Washington DC, started by two SEGL graduates, and their goal is to link young foreign policy professionals with those in older generations. That is happening.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is amazing.

NOAH BOPP: Let me give you a story. This is from our South Africa campus. We have this young woman, her name is Alessia. She is starting here in New York at NYU. Alessia is Jewish, and she was studying in Johannesburg in the fall of 2023. This is the same month, the same semester, as the October 7 attacks.

Our Johannesburg campus is located on the campus of the African Leadership Academy, which is this amazing institution for the best and brightest kids across the African continent. A lot of those kids don’t like Israel very much, and Alessia overheard one of those students—and I am not suggesting this is representative of all of the ALA kids at all—in the heat of that time saying, “If I saw an Israeli person, I would kill him.”

Alessia, rather bold but also maybe hopeful, walked up and said, “Do you really think that? What if it were a kid?”

Her classmate doubled down and said, “Even if it were a kid.”

This was also a time when a lot of the ALA kids were putting posters up all over campus, in particular saying, “What’s happening right now in Gaza is a genocide.” One of the posters that Alessia saw was a portrait of Netanyahu morphing into Hitler.

You can imagine, to an Israeli person or to a Jewish person, it is a pretty bad thing to say that the leader of the Jewish state is the same as Hitler, particularly when she had the experience of overhearing this kid say, “If I saw an Israeli, I would kill him.”

She decided to take the poster down. She took the poster down. It was in the main student gathering place. She left for a little bit to go to class or whatever it was, then she came back and saw an African Leadership Academy girl absolutely inconsolable and in tears. A number her classmates were gathered around her, comforting her, and Alessia knew what was going on. That girl was the one who put up the poster, and she could not fathom why anyone would take down something that I believe in in my core, in my soul, etc.

What do you do? Alessia walked over to her and said, “Are the one who put the poster up?” The girl said yes. Then Alessia said, “I’m the one who took it down.”

They had this very difficult conversation there in the middle of the student union in which Alessia was trying to use the skills that she had learned, and this other kid was trying to use the skills that she had learned. It was not a perfect conversation, but in the middle of that conversation they just found themselves giving each other a hug. They did not realize what was happening; they just gave each other a hug.

Alessia said, “We did not become best friends after that. There is no end of the movie, but when we saw each other in the halls we would acknowledge each other or say hello, and there was this respect that we had for each other’s positions.”

I can give you a lot of theoretical stuff, but it is those kinds of moments where we are using what educators give us and using our essential goodness—another thing I believe in that we have not gotten to—to bridge those divides that give me hope for the world and hopefully provide an example for those of us who are just shouting at each other on social media.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think inhumanity thrives with digital distance. If you maximize the number of opportunities where people can be together, you naturally get this organic thing that happens. It is not perfect, but a lot of times people are so siloed that there is no percentage where that could happen, so whether it is here or what you are doing, I think this is incredibly important if we want a future that is more pluralistic and we think is inherently both an ends and a means that we want to be striving toward.

It is certainly a challenging moment, but I think there are sparks where you can try to create scenarios to optimize those types of situations. Again, our president, Joel, wrote a piece a few months ago basically on moral “exhaustion.” He said that you have to imagine Sisyphus enjoying rolling the rock up the hill and that that is the job and life to an extent.

One of the big things we are fighting here and trying to wrap our minds around, and I am sure this is a big part of working with younger people, is this moral defeatism and the creeping nihilism that comes into that as well.

NOAH BOPP: Absolutely. I know we are coming to a close, but this is what I would say: Young people are looking for reasons to hope, so when you come across a young person, rather than just lamenting that they are on TikTok or looking at a screen—all those sorts of things, by the say, are gifts that we, the older generations, have given them; that is not something they decided on—try to find a reason to give them some hope. The best way to do that is through mentorship, whether that is just in a moment, a quick conversation, or whether it is over time. They absolutely crave it.

If we can do that, bridge that intergenerational divide and infuse the next generation with hope, we can counteract that nihilism, and, who knows, maybe Sisyphus is going to get that boulder to the top of the hill.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to close with a question I always try to ask educators. Again it is something we think about a lot here. There is so much historical wisdom buried in the shelves of Carnegie Council from a philosophical perspective. If you are thinking about the things you want to be assigning right now from the past where you think, hold this timeless wisdom that might be extremely relevant for the geopolitical moment you are in right now, if you were going to tell this to my audience, if you could go out and pick up one book, read one article, or watch one movie, what would it be?

NOAH BOPP: The two works that our students quote from the most in their final credos, their major capstone project at the end, “Given everything I have learned as a result of this semester, here is where I stand, and the ethical issues that matter most to me and here is how I am going to live my life as a result,” are an Audre Lorde piece, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” and there is a line in there where she talks about her daughter saying sometimes it feels like there is a fist inside your throat punching up from the inside saying, “You have to speak up.”

That is an inspiring way for students to hear from this woman who was marginalized in many different ways. “Your silence will not protect you” is another Audre Lorde quote. That piece is really transformational for our students.

The other is from Henry V. All of our London and Washington DC students read Shakespeare’s Henry V. It is an amazing leadership manual, and you do not have to agree with everything Henry does, but he is a young leader who gets insulted by his archenemy in front of his court, who has a reputation of being a party boy, and has to step into power and deal with that reputation. He has childhood friends who betray him and are involved in a plot to kill him. What is he going to do with them? He has a best friend who steals a little crucifix from a church in France: What do I do with my best friend who violated one of my core principles here for my soldiers?

His soldiers are tired and diseased, and he is laying siege to Calais. Does he make a speech threatening horrible things, basically bluffing, in order to save his men? I can go on and on. Of course it ends with, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” which every SEGL student memorizes as part of their time.

So, Audre Lorde, William Shakespeare, both of them wisdom of the ages.

KEVIN MALONEY: The tradeoffs around moral and political leadership are centerstage right now, so I am happy you have not assigned Macbeth in that way, but with that, thank you so much for coming to Carnegie Council. I appreciate it.

NOAH BOPP: You got it. This was really fun.