First Lecture Video, Fall 2026

AUG 24, 2026

 

(Dean's remarks delivered on Aug. 24 to incoming students.)

Getting Your Story

“Tell me a story!”— In a nutshell, that’s how one of the greatest works of literature begins, about events supposed to have taken place more than 3,000 years ago, now rendered in IMAX in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The plea—tell me a story—binds children with their parents, friends huddled in a basement for a sleepover, and lovers in an embrace. The invitation—tell me a story—is the essence of every job interview, and maybe the topic of your first IRL conversation with your new, equally sweaty roommate after move-in: “What did you do this summer?” Tell me a story.

I want to hear yours. Here’s the short version of mine:

I ran off to Spain to get married and started a whole new life. Along the way, I was learning a new language, conociendo a mi nueva familia, trying unfamiliar foods, and experiencing new ways of organizing my time, including napping and bullfights. I also tried to do a lot of reading and thinking.

A really good story spends time with the details, especially the ones that are unusual—um, bullfights? Yes, really.

My point is—and this is the thing I want you to take away from your FIRST LECTURE of College—YOU’RE HERE TO GET A STORY.

Here’s why it matters.

Storytelling and the hunger for it are some of the signature features of our humanity. No human culture we know of is without stories, and none had to teach its children to want them. The plea—tell me a story—is a request for an action and it is ALWAYS an invitation into a relationship. When I say you’re here to GET A STORY I’m telling you two things: there’s something to do here, and doing it could be the basis for some of the most significant relationships of your life.

So, when you start getting your story you are connecting with the generations of storytellers that stretch through human history. You are joining your story with millions of stories. In short, to gloss a line from another ancient poet and his modern interpreter, you become what you are, the distinct human you are.

Become What You Are

Maybe “Become what you are” sounds hollow, like it could be on the front of an inspirational card or the title of a self-help book. And it might sound easy enough: after all, aren’t you already who you are?

Put that way, you are. But I said: “become WHAT you are.” The difference between WHO and WHAT is what makes your FIRST LECTURE more than another welcome speech.

WHO you are is something assumable. Think of your social media presence, your family connections, your affiliations, and friend groups.

WHAT you are is substantial. It speaks to what you’re capable of and your character, what you care about and how it shows in the actions you take and the plans you make.

WHO you are can be presented, packaged, even outsourced, if you wish.

WHAT you are is FORMED. And formation happens through EXPERIENCE. So, in this sense, you aren’t yet WHAT you are, because you still have formative opportunities. As a philosopher and as your dean, THAT’S what I want you to understand as your opportunity—THAT is what is waiting for you here at the University: Becoming WHAT you are.

With this distinction in mind, let’s go back to stories. Which do you prefer?—the kind that lasts for 24 hours on Instagram or the stories that are so powerful, so gripping that people are STILL telling them 3,000 years later?

People today do not keep telling Homer’s stories because he provides the best role models. (If any of you decide your story should resemble Odysseus’ in much detail, you’re going to find yourselves in front of the Honor Committee AND the UJC.) People keep telling Homer’s stories because they give us vivid, memorable depictions of the range of human experience and possibility:

what it means to be brave and reckless,

to ache with love,

to grieve,

to be lost and alone,

to find your way home.

Homer’s stories—as fantastical as they are—give us an encounter with our own humanity. In presenting us with the human, other-than-human, and the humane (and its opposite), Homer shows us some things about what human existence includes.

As we witness the rapid development of artificial intelligence, both what it is not and what it cannot replace are coming into sharper focus. 

The question what does it mean to be HUMAN has been central to the very things studied in the College since its founding more than 200 years ago. Right now, people who analyze the job market are suddenly touting “human skills” as what’s important on the uncertain horizon. “Human skills” seem to be the hottest thing going. Here’s how I want you to think about that.

The Most Human Human

A few months ago, a Forbes Magazine article led with the headline “Nobody Beats You At Being You.” The story features a LinkedIn course about how to flex into human skills. McKinsey predicts human skills will be the most valuable in the future economy. So: why not save your time and money and take that five-and-a-half-hour LinkedIn course instead of spending four years here? 

It’s a question I take very seriously, and the answer can’t just be that a degree from the University of Virginia is a more valuable credential than a certificate from LinkedIn.

As an educator, dean, and mother of children in college, I have to ask: if education is fundamentally about acquiring workplace skills and getting you on a pathway to a specific job, then what in the world are we all doing here?

In the economy of the future, who do you think is more employable?—the human who is the most AI-like or the human who is the most distinctively human? My money is on the most human human.

I’ve spent nearly forty years studying what it means to be human, and I can tell you this for sure: 

Being a human being—a human human—is not a skill. 

Odysseus, for all his moral lapses, has many skills, most memorably, if you saw the movie, bow-stringing and bow-shooting. But that alone isn’t what makes Odysseus WHAT he is. Homer introduces him with a word that sticks: polytropos, a man with “many turns.” In Emily Wilson’s translation, “complicated.” Human beings are complicated.

Odysseus is not a role model, and he’s not a collection of skills. He’s got STORY, a lot of it. It’s his twists and turns that make it nearly impossible to take our eyes off him, to let go of his story, his many stories.

So, if “human skills” can’t be collected or badged, then what are they and how do you get them?

Education is Formation: From Human Capacities to Capabilities

Although I’ve taken some jabs at the consulting firms this morning, I do think they’re onto something. This summer, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that by the time you graduate in 2030, the entry-level roles most touched by AI will be seven times more likely to require “human skills” it associates with senior-level capabilities: leadership, creativity, judgment, and a sophisticated level of interpersonal and intercultural understanding.

CAPABILITIES: hold that word, because capabilities differ from skills.

Skills are specific functions that can be practiced and refined to be reliably performed; they’re not about the whole person. A tennis player can have the skill of a great serve, but if that’s her only skill, she’s not going to win much. What makes her a great player is how her skills are deployed and integrated: reading an opponent and an opportunity in an instant, discerning which skill is needed when, all with good judgment. That doesn’t come from drilling alone. It arises through experience that forms body and mind together. And, as we see when we use generative AI, at least some skills can be separated from people altogether.

CAPABILITIES are different: they arise from WHAT a person is and what they’re able to do. They result when the human capacities—to think, feel, and imagine, for example—are refined into judgment, discernment, and ethical imagination. 

Capabilities are formed.

Now, translate that back to becoming what you are: your time here on Grounds is for the formation of your distinctively human capabilities. 

A liberal arts education is designed to do precisely this: forming persons capable of self-authorship and communities capable of self-governance.

If you think of education as formation, that changes everything. It means we’re more interested in your concrete growth than in producing outputs. It means we care about the process more than the credential, because it is the process that takes capacities and forms them into real capabilities. 

Skills are very good to have, make no mistake, but capabilities are durable, because what they are and what they allow you to do ARE you. 

And the stakes are high: if formation happens, if you GET YOUR STORY, it is life-defining, not job training. This is real agency, not artificial agency. 

AGENCY matters, and YOU have every possible reason to want it: not just for your first workplace but for your life space.

If I have succeeded in recruiting you into BEING A HUMAN HUMAN and GETTING YOUR STORY, then you’re surely right to ask, “ok, how do I do it?” The answer isn’t simply to take a bunch of humanities classes, although those would be good for you, too. There isn’t a HUMAN major.

Becoming a Human Human Through the Commonplace Book

Faculty in the College have designed a curriculum for formation, not just the production of outputs. As First Years, nearly all of you are taking courses called “The Engagements”. The Engagements are organized around BIG QUESTIONS that human beings ask. All of them are variations on the one we’ve already met in Homer: what does it mean to be human? Their purpose is to draw you into asking those questions, sparking your curiosity, not prompting for answers or producing competent outputs. The Engagements are about your formation as you’re walking in the door.

Their purpose is inviting you into a community of questioners. Your membership in the Academical Village includes taking up Jefferson’s invitation to follow truth wherever it might lead. Following truth is something you do on your own, and it is something you do with others: sometimes in classrooms, sometimes in conversations under the stars on the stairs of the Rotunda.

People long ago found a way of marking those paths of following truth—storying, if you will—through a process of collection and rumination known as commonplacing. Commonplacing involves writing down ideas, insights, and observations in something called a COMMONPLACE BOOK. For more than two thousand years people have been gathering what they read and think so that they can work it into something that sustains them. It isn’t just a notebook or a journal. A notebook stores; a commonplace book forms.

Here’s mine. Remember all that reading and thinking from my summer story? This is where it went. Before I got on the plane to Spain, I was aware that I was beginning a journey that could be measured by more than the SkyMiles I’d collect. 

I was joining my life with another’s. I was entering a new community. I was being formed. 

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my commonplace book, but I wanted to observe that formation—through what I was reading, thinking, writing, eating, and discussing. 

My commonplace book is filled with drawings of statues, my reading of menus, lots of details I was learning about saints, their lives, and why they matter to people today, plus cards of people I met, receipts for museums where I found a connection to my new community. It is part scrapbook, part guidebook, part diary, part hopes and dreams—without a screen, in ink on paper for just me—AND in communion with the world. 

And we’ve produced a commonplace book for you. It is waiting for you at the bookstore. Once it is in your hands, it is yours alone. And now we’re giving you your first thing to put in it: the bookmark waiting at your seat. I’ll tell you how to use it in just a minute.

I want to point out what your commonplace book is NOT: it is not an output. Nobody will collect it, grade it, or validate it—there’s no badge for it. Use it to collect ideas, try them on, or figure out they’re not yours. Begin to see what you are and HOW you are becoming it.

Further advice comes from the ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca, one of the earliest practitioners of commonplacing: use it like honey-making. A bee gathers nectar and carries it back to the hive, but that isn’t where it ends. To become honey, the nectar must be worked over and changed. Gathering is a first step, not the last.

Thomas Jefferson himself kept multiple commonplace books, beginning at about your age and continuing beyond when he was president. They shaped how he thought about the law, the republic, and education—including what he founded right here. Oh, and Jefferson was also reading Homer—copying out passages of the Odyssey in English and in the original Greek, passages about mortality, fate, and how a human being carries both.

So here is what I’m asking you to do with your book: I want you to gather nectar. Mine includes menus and the writings of saints. Yours will be different: the first sentence you read that makes you stop and read it again; the thing your roommate says at one in the morning that you're still turning over at two; the problem that stumped you for a week, plus whatever was different in you on the day it finally didn't. Add it to your book and put the date on it; then return to it. Copy the best line over in your own hand. Then REALLY think about why it grabbed you—add that reflection, too. 

If you use your book, you’ll find material for YOUR STORY there. 

Gather, return to it—make honey rather than slop.

Two Commitments

This week, we ask you to make two commitments. Last night you made the first. When you signed the Honor Pledge, you joined a community of trust and promised to guard it—and you were invited because we believe you are capable of it. That is self-governance: the discipline of a community that collectively holds itself to something it cherishes.

This morning I want you to make the second, a pledge to yourself. The bookmark in your hands is for your commonplace book, and it is the place to make this commitment: that you’ll capture the moments when you discover a new capability developing—that you will Become what you are. This is self-authorship: the discipline of a person who holds herself to something when nobody is looking. A community that can govern itself is made of people who are learning to govern themselves. You signed the first part last night. The second part begins today.

You’ll come back to this book in your Engagements, with your advisor, and as you begin asking not just what do I want to do with my life but what kind of life do I want to live. And at the end of the term, you’ll open it and see, in your own hand, the distance between what you were in August and what you are becoming.

So: pick up your bookmark. Jot down a reminder that you got it here and why. Consider your bookmark as a downpayment on your first entry. I started my own book without knowing what I was doing, while beginning my new life. It was and remains messy—as it should be.

And by the way, right next to your bookmark is a model of a receipt for being first in line at Bodo’s, a UVA tradition—and bagels are waiting for you at the tables at the back, because today we’re going to break bread together, a common place for storying.

I’ll close with one last thing about Homer. The full title of the Homer statue behind you on the lower part of the Lawn is Blind Homer with His Student Guide. Take a look at who’s holding the lyre, the instrument of song. Not the poet: the student. Stories survive not as monuments, but as hand-offs. Homer's stories can still be ours because, in every generation after him someone older made the hand-off to someone your age. This morning the hand-off is to you. The bookmark in your hands is for your own instrument, and the next story it carries is yours. Every time you pass Homer think about getting your story.

THAT is my invitation and my great wish for you. The most human humans are those rendered WHAT they are through education as formation—what’s beginning here, together, today:

BECOME...what...you are. Become WHAT you are. 

Thank you, welcome...and wahoowa! 

THE FIRST LECTURE: A READING LIST

The works quoted, glossed, and gestured at in the First Lecture, for readers who want to go to the sources.

  • Christian, Brian. The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. Doubleday, 2011. 
    • Tells the story of the author’s participation in a competition for “the most human human”: an award once given, in an annual Turing test competition, to the person judges most confidently identified as human.
  • Duncan, Rodger Dean. “Nobody Beats You at Being You: LinkedIn’s Bet on Humans over AI.” Forbes, 12 May 2026.
  • Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton, 2018.
    • The translation behind polytropos as “complicated.”
  • Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book. Edited by David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, Princeton UP, 2019.
  • Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book. Edited by Douglas L. Wilson, Princeton UP, 1989.
    • Begun at about the age of entering first-years; among its entries, passages of The Odyssey copied out in English and in Greek.
  • Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to William Roscoe, 27 Dec. 1820. Founders Online, National Archives.
    • “Here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
  • Krivkovich, Alexis, and Anu Madgavkar. “Human Skills Will Matter More Than Ever in the Age of AI.” McKinsey Global Institute, 6 Jan. 2026.
  • Miller, John F. “Musing on Ezekiel’s Homer at UVA.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 31, no. 2, fall 2023, pp. 1–15.
    • A University of Virginia Classics professor’s history of “Blind Homer with His Student Guide,” the statue on the lower Lawn at the University.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1989.
    • The modern interpreter of Pindar’s line.
  • Pindar. Olympian Odes. Pythian Odes. Edited and translated by William H. Race, Harvard UP, 1997.
    • For the full line, “Become such as you are, having learned what that is,” see Pythian II, line 72.
  • PwC. 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer. PwC, 2026.
  • Seneca. Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius. Translated by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, U of Chicago P, 2015.
    • Letter 84: gather as the bee gathers, then make the nectar into honey.