F&M Stories

Thank you, President Altmann and the Board of Trustees, for this honorary doctorate and the opportunity to address the 237th graduating class of Franklin & Marshall.

I am also grateful to share this honor with Dr. Madeline Anderson, who continues to live a life of purpose and trailblaze in her 96th year. Laura, your mother’s life is an inspiration.

A true testament to all the mothers here today. Happy Mother’s Day to all of you. 

And to you, Class of 2024, for the privilege of addressing you on this momentous occasion in your journey.

Your time at F&M has been bookended by uncertainty.

The onset of a global pandemic and tensions today on campuses.

Yet here you are – strong, resilient. 

On the cusp of the next leg in your journey.

A class more diverse than any other in this academic institution’s history.

You represent progress by your presence in this place and the achievement and contributions you have already made. 

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, I sat where you sit today. 

I must confess that I was a mediocre student at best at F&M. 

So mediocre that I was just tempted to bolt from the stage with this doctorate but I trust President Altmann that you have had access to my transcripts. 

And that this isn’t all some elaborate ruse meant to even the score on some of the shenanigans that I may or may not have been involved in the late ’90s on this very campus.

But I digress. 

My point is that you may be sitting here today unsure of the path ahead.

Rest assured. I had no idea what I would do next as I sat where you are – no job secured. No graduate program lined up.

I only knew that there was a young woman, named Christie Del Rey, a row away, that I wanted to spend that uncertain future with and that she believed in me much more than I believed in myself at that moment.

And that betting on her and the life that we could have remains the best outcome of my experience at F&M. Whenever I doubted myself, she pushed and pushes me forward, like when I thought I was hopelessly under qualified to apply for my first job at Doctors Without Borders.

I am grateful every day for our life together, Christie. I would not be standing here without your love and support.

Even before I entered F&M, I had understood from a young age that I was incredibly privileged.

My parents, Jeff and Karen, who are both here today, are celebrating their 50th anniversary since graduating F&M. 

They taught me about the responsibility of privilege through exposing me to new cultures and people through living in Japan and traveling throughout Asia and other parts of the world. 

My mother pursuing her ambitions in a male-dominated technology industry and showing a different — more inclusive  — way to lead. My father working for an all-Japanese firm and learning as much as he could of the language and culture along the way.

They wanted to help me be comfortable moving through different worlds. 

My worldview was also intensely influenced by my grandparents Seymour and Audrey Topping, lifelong journalists. Both scouring the planet to tell stories, seek truth, and bridge different worlds through words and pictures. 

And thanks to my professors here at F&M — Professor Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, Professor Carla Willard, and Professor Kerry Whiteside to name a few — I also understood at a deep intellectual level how systems were intentionally built in a way that would allow someone like me to flourish in our society and was designed to stand in the way of others. 

I understood that the color of my skin afforded me privileges both mundane and profound that were meant to be out of reach for my Black and Latino childhood friends.

So sitting where you are today, I did not know exactly what I wanted to do — only that I wanted to do something meaningful.

President Altmann charged me with sharing some of my journey from F&M, including all the challenges and achievements, setbacks and successes along the way.

It is a journey that took me to the top of my profession before I had turned 38, and radically altered my understanding of what is required to be a leader amidst the uncertainty of our world.

As you just heard in the film, the definition of leadership that feels the most inclusive to me is:

Leadership is taking risk for something you believe in. 

That’s a definition without a qualifier.

What do you believe in? What are you willing to risk for it?

 So, I want to share with you what I believe are three critical components of leadership:

• Healing
• Listening
• Questioning

 The order is important.

Healing

As a class, you are unbelievably impressive, resilient.

Some might argue — unbreakable.

You have all overcome something to reach this moment.

The truth is that you are unbreakable because you are already broken in some way. 

From the moment we enter this world, we start breaking.

Society tells us all the ways in which we shouldn’t accept that. 

And unfortunately, sometimes you need to be utterly shattered to find the path to healing.

I realized that with the unexpected passing of my father-in-law Bernard Del Rey, in June 2018.

An accountant and business owner on Staten Island, he taught me many life lessons about humility, devotion to family – but mostly about listening, deep, active listening. 

His loss was absolutely jarring for me. 

I would resign from Doctors Without Borders less than six months later.

I left a job that had given me so much purpose so as not to miss another wedding, performance, or game. 

And tried to heal from what had been 15 years of intense, grinding work.

I went from leaving at a moment’s notice to places like South Sudan or Lebanon, to suffering from debilitating anxiety and barely being able to muster the courage to leave my front porch.

I found my way back with the support of Christie, our family and friends. Learned to laugh again from our children, Anabella and Leo, and get lost again in simple pleasures. 

Anabella performing on stage. Leo endlessly running on every type of athletic field.

And also with the help of a therapist who had spent the preceding decade patching me up mentally to keep going until the final straw broke that June morning when my father-in-law suddenly passed.

Stopping.

It gave me the opportunity to process things.

The next job I took was with Wes Moore, now governor of Maryland, to head up advocacy at the Robin Hood foundation. It is giving me the chance to fight the systems that I know failed so many of my friends growing up. 

Through the healing process, I realized that breaking is living and that it is only through the breaking that we can start healing.

And it is through accepting our own fragility and confronting the need for healing that we find our purpose — or find it again.

I put healing first on the list because to lead, we have to care for ourselves — daily — before we are ready to care for others and to lead.

Listening

That brings me to the next point: listening.

We live in the loudest moment. There is no space to hear each other.

Seeing and hearing others doesn’t mean we have to accept the other side’s arguments or beliefs.

But there is power in listening and leading requires it.

I learned that in one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

In the early summer of 2016, a Doctors Without Borders colleague, Dr. John Lawrence, and I, drove down a long and winding road in the hills of Prescott, Arizona, heading to the home of Carl and Martha Mueller.

Their daughter, Kayla, whom I had never met in person, had been kidnapped in August of 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Syria.

She didn’t work for Doctors Without Borders and had appeared unexpectedly at our hospital. 

We had five of our staff who had also been kidnapped by the Islamic State and were held for a time with Kayla in Syria. 

The organization felt that it couldn’t negotiate on her behalf out of fear that we would be pulled into negotiating for the release of other hostages in future situations and that would put our staff at risk in countless other dangerous places.

In February 2015, Kayla was killed when a bomb struck the location where she was being held captive.

I was traveling to the Mueller home that summer day to try to answer their questions.

After exchanging pleasantries, Carl screamed at us, unleashing an unimaginable amount of pain that had been bottled up for so long. I couldn’t blame him.

Martha, in her quieter voice, deposed me with pointed questions. Their pastor, who had supported the family throughout the terrible ordeal, questioned our morality.

It was awful. 

So we sat and listened to their pain. We sat and listened.

Then, I asked if they could tell us more about Kayla. About whom she was in life.

We walked back to Kayla’s bedroom.

I sat on her bed. Martha showed me her journals. Photographs.

We drove to a playground that was being named after Kayla. I went on the swings with Martha. Listened to her talk about what that place would have meant to Kayla.

As the light began to dim, we returned to their home, and I said to Carl and Martha that we wanted to find a way to remember Kayla — to memorialize her spirit. 

And I gave them my cell number to call me at any time. 

Four months later, I received a call. It was Carl and Martha.

They wanted to donate almost every cent of the donations — $120,000 — they had received after Kayla’s passing to Doctors Without Borders to create an endowment in her memory.

I was speechless. I could barely breathe let alone respond to them.

How could these people who had lost so much move from such anger and pain to this act of generosity?

Martha said, “It is what Kayla would have wanted.”

Martha gave me a coin with Kayla’s picture on it. I carry it with me everywhere I go.

It is a reminder that healing starts with listening to ourselves and others.

Questioning

Yet, listening does not mean we aren’t left with difficult questions. 

You have been tested day in and day out by your professors at F&M to learn not only the answers to questions, but more importantly, what are the right questions?

I faced incredibly difficult questions early in the morning in October 2015 in a coffee shop in Tokyo when I received a call from one of my colleagues. 

Questions that would make me doubt my devotion to my own country.

A Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, had been bombed. Dozens of my Afghan colleagues and patients had been killed and injured. 

It was an American plane that had dropped the bombs. 

I would spend more than a year with my colleagues negotiating with senior military leaders in the U.S. government about questions like, who is afforded protection in the middle of a war.

Exactly a year after the bombing, the Pentagon released the “Statement of Principles” memo, reaffirming its commitment to the laws of wars. It was a critical milestone to prevent a future attack on a hospital. 

A year later, I was called back to the Pentagon to meet with the secretary of defense.

As I stepped into the room, I saw a face that I had not seen in at least 15 years.

Marine Lt. Colonel John Cherry.

My Pi Lambda Phi brother. My rugby teammate.

After graduation, he went into the marines, became a JAG lawyer, and completed deployments in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

He looked like the same young man I had gone to war with — before we both really knew what war looked like — on the fields at Baker Campus. 

It turns out that John was serving as Deputy Legal Counsel for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He had been leading the Pentagon lawyers, behind the scenes, negotiating the drafting of the “Statement of Principles.”

Unbeknownst to me, someone that I revered and admired and had dedicated his adult life to defending that same country, was on the other side of that moral and ethical struggle that I had been wrestling with.

It was a reminder that we will find people — sometimes those that we love and admire — on the other side of the most profound questions in our lives. And struggling with those questions is also part of leadership.

Leading

Healing, listening, and questioning is what prepares us to lead. 

Why is leadership so important? Leadership or the absence of it has defined some of the most seminal and challenging events that I have witnessed.

I saw both its presence and absence most shockingly and inspiringly in the response to the West African Ebola epidemic in the summer of 2014.

Doctors and nurses were forced to turn patients away in Liberia and other countries, and governments were cutting off the affected countries.

That Labor Day, after having celebrated our son Leo’s 6th birthday, I joined our international president Dr. Joanne Liu at our office in Manhattan. She had recently returned from West Africa.

We were preparing for her to deliver a speech before an emergency session of the United Nations the next day.

As we debated what to say, Joanne started receiving calls from UN leaders and top diplomats.

All were calling concerned about what she would say — would she lay any blame and to whom. 

I couldn’t reconcile why these people, who had accumulated so much power and authority, weren’t ready to use it.

So, we wrote the words to end her speech, “The clock is ticking and Ebola is winning. The time for meetings and planning is over.  It is now time to act.”

Within days the Obama administration and other governments would mobilize additional resources into the region.

The outbreak would take thousands of lives but also represent some of the best kind of leadership — Liberians risking everything to help each other. People coming from around the world to help them. 

Often, we are waiting for leaders. Waiting for them to tell us what to do.

Leaders are often put on pedestals, magazine covers — Tik Toks.

But movements for change are made through anonymous acts of leadership.

Leadership is personal. Don’t let anyone but yourself define it for you.

For me, leadership at one time was going into some of the most dangerous places. At another time, it was finally stepping off that front porch.

As I sat where you are today 25 years ago, I had no idea what the journey held for me. The challenges I would face. The joys and the losses.

But it was a journey that led me to where I am today — with a renewed sense of purpose with the knowledge that leadership doesn’t require losing oneself for the mission.

Quite the opposite, it requires finding ourselves.

Class of 2024

Now, Class of 2024, just imagine what you can accomplish if some former frat brother who struggled to make it through Professor Dicklitch-Nelson’s intro to comparative politics class can get through all of that and be up here right now.

Leading every day, in small and big ways, prepares us to lead at the most difficult moments in our lives.

A pandemic stole your last graduation and the earliest days of your college experience.

Your presence here today is a subversive act.

You persevered. You are fighters. You are leaders.

This world needs all your unbridled and untapped potential.

So, heal, listen, question, and most of all lead.

There is nothing you can’t accomplish.

Congratulations on your graduation from F&M.

I look forward to following you into tomorrow.

Jason Cone '99. Image Credit: Deb Grove