About 10 years ago, I climbed a staircase within a public building in China to be greeted by a Chinese official upon the opening of our office in Shanghai. I had been through similar drills in various parts of the world and thus the format didn’t surprise me. The tables and chairs were arranged in a U-shape. The official and I sat at the base of the U while our respective supporting casts were seated on the wings. A translator separated the official and me.
With the translator’s help, we exchanged very formal greetings and proceeded to discuss, again in a very formal way, our firm’s plans in China, our existing Beijing and Hong Kong offices and our footprint in all of Asia and throughout the world at large. We heard via the translator that the official wished us great success and thanked us for now doing business in Shanghai. Through the translator, I thanked the Chinese official for his hospitality and for the positive business environment in Shanghai. It was an interesting occasion and a reminder of how business is conducted on the other side of the world.
As we rose to depart, and with the translator nowhere to be seen, the Chinese official turned to me, extended his hand and said in English: “How do the Mountaineers look this season?” Huh? It turns out that my host had done graduate work in Morgantown some years before and had become an ardent Mountaineer football fan. He obviously had been briefed on my background. It wasn’t the first time that a Chinese official had feigned not knowing English for whatever perceived advantage it seemed to confer. But it was the first time that one of them broke with protocol to talk Mountaineer football. The Mountaineer Nation, as it turns out, is a global empire.
About 40 years before I climbed that staircase in Shanghai, I stepped on to the WVU campus as a newly minted freshman. With all that has happened in my life after I graduated, much of which was made possible by my WVU education, no period has been more exciting than the four years I spent in the WVU College of Arts and Sciences. Through the beneficence of the Eberly family, in 1993 the College came to be called the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and that’s how I’ll refer to it here.
I was a political science major. I’m sure that I had a minor but time has erased the memory of what it was. In fact, it didn’t matter because I floated through the Eberly College’s offerings and shamelessly exploited the wide-ranging class opportunities available to me. I was a kid in a candy shop. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was experiencing an immersion in liberal education. Was it a practical education? Not in any immediate sense. Did it equip me to succeed in life? You bet.
After WVU, I was fortunate to study at Yale Law School and at the University of Oxford. I left one with a Juris Doctor degree and the other with a Doctor of Philosophy degree. Both were socially and academically challenging experiences, but I believed myself to be up to those challenges because of the support and expectations of my family and of my Eberly College professors.
Eberly College professors, then and now, engage with their students. I came from a small high school in West Virginia and was born into an immigrant family. I could easily have fallen through the cracks at WVU. But the Eberly College faculty didn’t let that happen. Instead, they prepared me to compete in adventures of the mind and, more broadly, in life and to do so with the belief that, while I still had a lot to learn, I could enter the fray with confidence.
I hope that all children are blessed with the eternal gift of high expectations. This was certainly true in my family, replete with Greek immigrants who aspired to achieve great things in their adopted country. But as I look back, it is perhaps more surprising that my Eberly College professors had high expectations for me because I was a rough-cut stone when I first came to Morgantown. The wonderful thing is that they treated all of their students the same way.
Throughout my life, the knowledge of their high expectations has motivated me. I didn’t want to let them down, and I wanted to stretch to vindicate their confidence in me. My Eberly College professors had no interest in treating me like a snowflake so I didn’t act like one. They didn’t shelter me from provocative ideas – in fact, they bombarded me with them – and I learned not to bruise easily and to have the courage to expose the flaws in silly and sometimes dangerous thinking.
Twenty-five years ago, WVU asked me to deliver the keynote address at the dedication of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. It was a high point in my life. As I write these words today, that occasion is equidistant from my freshman year and the present. It’s a good time, therefore, to remind myself and all who read this essay to look forward to WVU’s annual Day of Giving in November as an occasion to acknowledge and to repay the role that the Eberly College’s mission has played in each of our lives.
Peter Kalis is the former chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates LLP, one of the world’s largest law firms. A graduate of WVU, where he majored in Political Science and served as student body president, Kalis is also a Rhodes Scholar. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from WVU in spring 2018.