From Cheney to Rice: the Education of Service
After I published a reflection on Vice President Dick Cheney’s passing, one of my former students—now at Brown University—sent me a note that stopped me cold.
“Your students’ perception of him,” he wrote, “is exactly what many people had with Secretary Rice. Many expected a war criminal but were surprised to find a humorous genius.”
My former student had just attended Condoleezza Rice’s Ogden Lecture at Brown. His words captured something I’ve seen again and again as an educator: when young people meet real public servants instead of their social-media caricatures, cynicism gives way to curiosity.
Like Cheney, Rice has long been flattened into a symbol, admired by some, despised by others, but rarely understood as a person shaped by conviction and duty. In today’s political echo chamber, such figures are treated as relics or villains. Yet when students actually hear them speak, they encounter something missing from modern public life: moral seriousness.
At Brown, Rice traced her improbable journey from segregated Birmingham to the State Department, describing how mentors, discipline, and faith shaped her path. “We have a conceit,” she told students, “that your mentors and your role models have to look like you… Sometimes you’ll be the first.”
In a climate obsessed with identity, that line felt almost revolutionary; a reminder that leadership is measured by responsibility, not racial representation.
Rice spoke of public service as stewardship, not self-expression. “If you’re the American Secretary of State,” she said, “you walk into a room with the American military on one shoulder and the economy on the other. But if you can have compassion as well … that’s extremely effective.” Realism balanced by empathy—authority tempered by humility—was her definition of statecraft.
She also warned against reducing politics to performance. “Public action like marches and activism are important,” she said, “but we’ve also got institutions and a political system that, as Americans, we have to use to get change.” Idealism, in other words, must be joined to responsibility.
That lesson is rare on campuses where passion often outruns prudence and moral certainty replaces deliberation. Many students treat politics as self-definition, a way to announce who they are rather than what they will do. Rice’s presence offered another model: the disciplined citizen who works through institutions to improve them.
My student described how classmates who had planned to boycott the lecture left inspired. “Ms. Rice surprised many with her charisma, her knowledge, and her care for the country,” he wrote. “Some of us walked out wanting to be Secretary of State—or at least to study international politics.”
He added that a classmate summed it up simply: “I didn’t agree with every point she made, but it was an important experience to hear her talk.”
Those are not partisan reactions; they are civic ones. They show what happens when universities foster engagement instead of insulation.
Years ago, I brought my own students to meet Dick Cheney. They arrived armed with clichés—“Cheney the warmonger,” “Cheney the puppet master.” Instead, they met a man of discipline and humor who answered their questions with calm precision. They left realizing that leadership demands not moral purity but moral weight: the courage to decide, to act, and to bear consequence.
Cheney and Rice could not be more different in background or temperament, yet they share what might be called a civic disposition: seriousness over spectacle, responsibility over applause. Both accepted that service means imperfect choices and criticism without self-pity. Both believed institutions, not personalities, hold a republic together. And both remind us that duty, not expression, is the foundation of trust.
For today’s young Americans, those examples are essential. The performative culture of outrage and instant judgment leaves little room for deliberation or grace. But as Rice showed at Brown—and as Cheney embodied throughout his career—civic renewal begins with the rediscovery of restraint. Democracy endures not through the loudest voices but through the steadiness of those willing to serve.
What struck me most was the maturity in his reflection. He wasn’t converted; he was enlarged and able to admire excellence across difference. That capacity, rare in our polarized age, is a civic virtue in itself.
If higher education still has a civic purpose, it is to form citizens capable of listening before judging, of admiring excellence across disagreement, of seeing service as noble rather than naïve. Cheney and Rice—so different, yet so alike in moral gravity—remind us that a republic depends on such citizens and on institutions willing to shape them.
When students leave an auditorium not inflamed but inspired—wanting, as one of mine once said, “to make things work, not just tear them down”—that is the education of service: the patient formation of citizens who build rather than tear down, serve rather than perform, and by doing so keep the republic alive.
