Leading with OptimismPresident Jayathi Murthy on the power of hope and finding it in OSU’s students.

As a university president, does optimism play a part in your work? The future belongs to the hopeful — the future belongs to the optimists — because they’re the only ones who can think and plan and make things happen. I don’t think you can ever inspire anybody unless you bring hope and energy. And so, there is no successful leader who is not an optimist.

When faced with challenging times, is there something from your past that you draw on to help you stay motivated? I come from a family of pessimists. I’m joking, of course, but not entirely. The reason was that growing up in India at that time, a lot wasn’t in your control. The U.S. is a country of optimists, a country of open frontiers. Not so everywhere, and not so particularly in societies where that forward arc of progress is not always evident. The people I grew up with, the adults I grew up with, were constantly planning for things to go bust. You had to secure yourself against the possibility of things falling apart because they could. The way they dealt with everyday setbacks and uncertainties was with a certain kind of dark humor. I, too, deal with a lot of everyday stuff through humor. Without, it would just become too much.

It does seem essentially optimistic to go to a different country. I agree. I think if you didn’t have hope and you didn’t have ambition, there would be no reason to take such a huge risk. Of course, I was young and didn’t understand some of the risks, which was also helpful. But for me, optimism really came when I arrived in this country and suddenly realized, oh my gosh, there’s a different way of thinking. I’ve always been a dreamer and wanted to do things, and suddenly I found a place that had that kind of orientation. That’s what optimism brings — this control over your future.

It’s interesting just how many people in our community are tackling problems that might seem unsolvable. I was just thinking the other day that doers have to be optimists. Why would you be looking for solutions if you weren’t? Our community’s orientation is toward workable, translatable solutions. If you weren’t an optimist, none of that would be possible. All problem solvers have to be optimists.

We’re headed into a contentious election season. What role do you think OSU has in fostering democracy? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, particularly with respect to the Israel-Hamas war protests that have been going on. Our university is full of passionate and idealistic young people, and that is a good thing. They want OSU to make statements in support of the things they believe in. I get that, too. But we’ve declined to do that, and for very good reasons. Universities have a very particular role that no other institution has in our society. We want the collision of ideas, we want uncomfortable conversations — and from these collisions, for new ideas and approaches to emerge. If you don’t allow that to happen, then I think the university isn’t fulfilling its mission. 

As a land-grant university, we are a big mixture of urban and rural, and that brings together very different political viewpoints, cultural values and histories — all valid because they come out of the lived experiences of human beings. It’s a particularly rich mixture of ideas, and it is ripe for productive collisions. If those can be managed carefully, if we allow ourselves to speak and to listen, then what can come out of it can be truly valuable. That’s the thing that we’re trying to preserve.

I think what our alumni should know is that we enter into these debates, into this time of contention, with a framing that reaffirms our principles as a university. We’ve been thinking deeply in terms of how we should respond to huge world events, huge events happening in our own country. We must reaffirm our most fundamental principles, which are to be a beacon of free speech, academic freedom and free expression, and to leave the arena of debate open so that everyone can speak and be heard.

What makes you hopeful? It’s commencement season now, and if there’s anything that makes me hopeful, it’s got to be commencement. I mean, just the idea that a young person comes into this institution at 18 years old and then leaves knowing things, having achieved adulthood, achieved competency, achieved maturity. They go out into the world and become creative builders of the future. If there’s no hope in that, then there’s no hope anywhere. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.