Colin Powell reminisces, motivates at Cal U.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks about leadership and diversity at the convocation center at California University of Pennsylvania Thursday. Powell’s speech was the keynote address for the National Diversity and Leadership Conference.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks about leadership and diversity at the convocation center at California University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, September 19. Powell’s speach was the keynote address for the National Diversity and Leadership Conference.
CALIFORNIA – Colin Powell can do pretty good impersonations of Ronald Reagan and a New York hot-dog seller.
But the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not dropping in at California University of Pennsylvania Thursday afternoon to launch a new, Rich Little-style career in stand-up comedy. The 76-year-old retired four-star general was the keynote speaker for the National Diversity and Leadership Conference at the campus Convocation Center, and, in between offering insights on motivation, team-building and the importance of education, he decried the polarization in Washington, D.C., and urged that lawmakers immune to compromise be given the boot at the ballot box.
“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Powell said, to no small amount of applause from the business suit-wearing conference attendees, along with students and faculty who sat in the arena’s stands. “We have to start pushing back and saying this is not acceptable.”
In the pitched political battles of the 1990s, Powell was seen as a statesman-like, middle-of-the-road figure who could have not only been the first general to sit in the Oval Office since Dwight Eisenhower, but also the nation’s first black president. Powell demurred from going after the biggest prize in American politics, but did publicly come out as a Republican in 2000, and became George W. Bush’s secretary of state the following year.
Since stepping down as the country’s chief diplomat at the end of Bush’s first term, Powell has declined to follow his party’s line, endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and criticizing GOP-led efforts in several states to institute voter ID laws. In his talk Thursday, he expressed gratitude for having been able to receive a free education at the City University of New York because state and city taxpayers covered the tuition of every student “and that should be the philosophy of every community,” Powell said.
Though he wouldn’t come out for or against the Affordable Care Act, he did remark that health care should be affordable and accessible “in a country as rich as ours.”
Breaking free of the lectern and using a headset to wander at the front of the stage, Powell worked in a few mentions of his latest book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” confessed to briefly feeling a glimmer of “intellectual emptiness” after stepping down as secretary of state and missing some of the trappings of the office. But over the last eight years, Powell has prospered on the speaking circuit and is a limited partner with a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Perhaps with his new immersion in the high technology world in mind, he said he believes something like E-Z Pass, the device many travelers use to quickly travel through highway toll booths, is one of the age’s greatest inventions, and that more of our day-to-day transactions will be carried out in a manner similiar to E-Z Pass.
“The world is changing,” Powell said. “And the kids in these schools are going to be the leaders of that change.”