A goal this course has been to encourage critical thinking skills about the agenda ahead. And one of the wonderful things we hear from our students is they feel empowered when they consider the enormity of the challenges, by understanding that if you break the problems down you can actually tackle them one at a time. And that was very much what we set out to do when we designed this course. Well, one of the wonderful things about teaching on, on live TV is that we never know what the speakers are going to do in terms of interacting with the students. And I felt very good about both the quality a, and the diversity of the speakers. I think some of the students were unnerved by how attractive some of the speakers were in articulating points of view they disagreed with. Which is exactly what I would have hoped for and frankly couldn't design for. In that sense it exceeded our expectation. To see liberals struggle with an articulate conservative. To see conservatives challenged by a passionate progressive. I want these students to get out of their comfort zone. I want them to consider alternative points of view. And I do not want them to adopt mine. I want to just encourage those critical thinking skills. In that sense it, it exceeded expectations. I think behind the scenes it's hard for folks to appreciate how many different moving parts there are in one semester length course, of which there are thousands here at the University of Virginia. I think the issue that resonated most with my students was the impact of technology on policy. And it's a little bit counter-intuitive, because they're very comfortable with the technology. Much more so than I am or many members of my generation. Whether it's the devices we use in the classroom for real-time polling like Top Hat, or CoLab for downloading student papers for us all to read. Or the technology we use to convey this classroom material to others. So they're very comfortable with the technology. What they have not thought a great deal about is how much the accelerating pace of change will challenge public policy. And so when we got into an issue like drones, you could see jaws dropping. Because they realized, for example, that not only does the President of the United States have to exercise the authority on a minute by minute basis to attack and possible kill American citizens using drones in the war on terror. But they started to think about the impact that the changed battlefield has on the drone operator. There was an arresting moment in one of our earlier classes where an Iraq war vet said, hey, it's not just the man or woman carrying an M16 that has post-traumatic stress disorder. It's the guy who operates the drone at Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, and then knocks off and goes to McDonald's for lunch. But he can't get out of his head the image of the wedding party that was just hit with a drone strike because of bad intelligence suggesting that this was really a gathering of al-Qaeda operatives. They started to think, before my eyes, about the implications of technologies. The morality of end-of-life technologies and ethical choices we'll have to make. The challenges of privacy and big government. We had some very visceral discussions in our sections about okay, great, you want to fight the war on terror and you want to be more secure, but I don't like getting strip searched every time I go through the airport just because I'm a native of Nigeria and I happen to be Muslim. I'm an American citizen, and that should not be a routine procedure I'm subjected to. Those types of exchanges, without arguing for one point of view or the other, got them out of their comfort zone. And many of them had to do with technology. One source of dialogue throughout the semester which we, we ended on in our last class was really a challenge to Professor Warburg and that is, why are you so bloody optimistic? I tried to address that in some of my remarks, but it's something that I talk a lot about in office hours with kids. It's not a posture. I'm genuinely optimistic. And it's not a posture on their part that they're genuinely skeptical. They've seen institutions fail. This is true of students overseas. Whether you're in Moscow, or Beijing, or Beirut, they've seen major public institutions failure, fail to deliver what the public wants. I found my optimism actually grew over this semester. It's a long and tiring process. I felt that the students sense of empowerment gave them more optimism. Perhaps one of the students said it best after our last class when he said, I used to think these problems were all overwhelming. But now I see if you break them down one at a time, listen to smart men and women who've studied them, that maybe not the perfect solution is available, but there's certainly a lot of options available. And it's that fundamental sense of empowerment that I think justifies a sense of optimism in our common future.
