Thank you.

I'm Jon Alger, president of James Madison University and it's my great pleasure to welcome

you to this fifth event of the Madison Vision Series.

Through the Madison Vision Fund we are proud to sponsor the Madison Vision Series and want

to thank the series cosponsor, the office of Madison Institutes in Outreach and Engagement

as well as all the supporters of the fund who have made this series possible.

Our bold new vision statement talks about becoming the national model of the engaged

university, engaged with ideas, and the world.

This model of engagement has several facets in our strategic plan including engaged learning,

community engagement and civic engagement.

As a member of the James Madison University Board of Visitors, today's speaker has played

an important role in the development of our strategic plan and in articulating the importance

of these interrelated forms of engagement.

It has a been a joy and a privilege to work with Carly Fiorina, a nationally renowned

strategic thinker and supporter of higher education as we breathe life into this vision

and strategic plan.

Carly has brought a national perspective, a thoughtful and constructive critical thinking

skills and a positive spirit to our discussions over the past year.

So, who is Carly Fiorina?

Probably most of you know that she's one of the world's leading business executives.

The former CEO of Hewlett Packard, a high tech giant.

Many of you may also know that she has run for the US Senate, that she's in high demand

on the national television talk show circuit and is a cancer survivor.

A few of you might even know that she briefly attended law school.

As a recovering lawyer myself I will refrain from telling any lawyer jokes, but Carly I'll

leave that to you, if you'd like.

But, did you know that Carly launched her career from the foundation of a bachelor's

degree from Stanford in medieval history and philosophy.

Students, take heart, and take notice.

Carly is a poster woman for the modern value and relevance of a liberal arts education.

She exemplifies lifelong learning and her journey has not followed some cookie cutter

model from a textbook.

She has blazed her own path with hard work, determination, a resilient spirit and a can-do

attitude.

Among many other things Carly has been a role model for engaging women in leadership, and

also for creative philanthropy that addresses urgent needs in the 21st Century.

Carly currently chairs Good 360, the world's largest product philanthropy organization

which helps companies donate excess merchandise to charities.

She has also established Carly Fiorina Enterprises to focus on powerful levers for unlocking

human potential, which include championing entrepreneurship and innovation and building

leaders and organizational capacity.

She's using her skills and experience to live out the JMU motto that calls for all of us

to Be the Change we want to see in the world.

Carly's presentation today, Foundations of Ethical Reasoning, builds on recent calls

to action for American universities to return their focus to undergraduate education.

The title should sound familiar as it echo's our own new signature initiative here, the

Madison Collaborative, Ethical Reasoning in Action.

We believe that the Madison Collaborative and our own strategic plan provide a powerful

set of answers to the questions that many people are currently raising today as they

call upon higher education to focus more on actual student learning outcomes and on preparing

students to face real world problems and challenges.

We're excited that Carly agreed to serve on JMU's Board of Visitors and are especially

pleased that she has been willing to come to campus this week to share some of her own

personal story, her perspectives and her passion.

Please join me in welcoming Carly Fiorina to the stage today.

[applause]

Carly Fiorina: Well, good afternoon.

I am delighted to be with you this afternoon and I must say that I'm honored as well to

serve as a member of the Board of Visitors and so excited by the leadership that Dr.

Alger is bringing to this wonderful university.

I appreciate so much that very gracious introduction and whenever I'm given an introduction like

that I always reflect on the fact that it sort of sounds so smooth.

You know, well she had a degree in medieval history and then she became a CEO and the

truth is no success story is without its setbacks; no one who has had triumphs has also avoided

tragedies.

I've had triumphs and tragedies, which I'll talk about successes and setbacks, but of

course no one's life is as smooth as a gracious introduction would imply.

Nor was mine.

I grew up a middle child and as a middle child I was, I would say, probably kind of a dutiful

daughter.

I always felt somehow less everything, less intelligent, less gifted, less popular, less.

And I remember when I was about eight years old my mother gave me a plaque at church and

the plaque said: "What you are, is God's gift to you; what you make of yourself is your

gift to God."

And it became sort of a challenge for me, growing up.

What are my gifts; what should I make of myself?

But the truth is I really had no idea.

I went off to Stanford as Dr. Alger said and because my parents were putting three kids

through college at the same time and Stanford was a pretty expensive place to go to school,

I had to work while I was going to school and so, thanks to my mother, who when I was

in junior high insisted that I take typing lessons, I know those of you who are students

here don't even know what I'm talking about probably, but we did in fact used to type

on things called typewriters and so I put myself through school, help my parents put

me through school by typing during college.

I was what was called a Kelly Girl.

Now the term Kelly Girl is politically incorrect these days; now I think they're called Kelly

Temporary Personnel, but back then we were Kelly Girls.

We were young women who would go into offices temporarily and type.

And one of my very first jobs while I was a sophomore at Stanford was to type coincidentally

bills of lading in the shipping department of Hewlett Packard.

And I date myself because I remember very well as a very young woman who had no idea

what I was going to do with my life, I remember interacting with my fellow workers, all women

and at the time the big technology breakthrough -- now I'm really going to date myself -- the

big technology breakthrough was the IBM Selectric typewriter.

I know, really.

Again, for you students, this is a lesson in ancient history but the IBM Selectric typewriter

had this little ball with all the letters on it and when you typed it would spin around

and it was just a breakthrough and so we would watch, literally, I remember sitting at our

desks and watching the ball going around and 'round, wow was that an amazing innovation!

There was another innovation that was really important back then because if you typed bills

of lading you had eight copies with mimeograph paper in between.

Sounds like I'm speaking in hieroglyphics but if you were a secretary typing eight bills

of lading with mimeograph paper in between you really needed that little bottle of what

was called White Out, which corrected all your mistakes.

Okay, so here I am at Stanford and I decide to take a class, it was a graduate seminar,

in medieval philosophy.

I don't really know why I decided to do it other than I liked a challenge and perhaps,

as is true for most of you, it was a really, really good professor and I had taken a course

from him in sort of introduction to medieval history and he encouraged me to take this

graduate seminar and in the seminar we had to read a work of medieval philosophy every

week.

And for any of you who've ever read medieval philosophy it's not light reading.

Maimonides, Aquinas and they were kind of verbose guys, you know?

These were hundreds and hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages; every week we had to read

one of those works.

And we had to turn into our professor a two page summary of that work.

So you had to read it, I had to understand it and then I had to think about out of all

those pages what two pages should I write?

And the process for me was I would write twenty pages and then I would get it down to ten

pages and down to five pages and finally I got it down to two pages.

What I learned in the course of studying medieval history and philosophy, I was fascinated by

the fact that you could see the human race learn.

One generation after another.

I began with introduction to philosophy with the Greek Aristotle, Plato.

I became so fascinated by Aristotle and Plato that I decided to take classical Greek so

that I could read them in their original language.

None of this, by the way, was going to help me get a job.

I actually wasn't thinking about that at the time.

But I learned that the things that people rediscovered in the Renaissance, in the 14th

and 15th Century had been learned earlier; had been built upon by the great foundations

of reason and logic and ethics that began with Aristotle and Plato.

I learned that as people could learn one generation to the next, that millennia over millennia

people could build upon the knowledge that had come before them.

I also learned that people could forget.

And that when people forgot their foundations, they were lost in darkness.

That's what the Middle Ages was, a period of forgetting.

And becoming lost.

And, of course the Renaissance was a period where people rediscovered.

That perspective, that perspective that taught me as a young woman, you know all the questions

that I have in my life, what's right, what's wrong, why are we here.

I'm not the only one who has those questions.

People hundreds of years ago had those questions and it wasn't easy to answer those questions,

that's why they wrote pages and pages of philosophy trying to answer those questions.

Perspective is about placing yourself in context.

Knowing that while each of us have unique gifts, that all of us share a common experience.

And that process of going through thousands of pages to twenty pages to ten pages to five

to two, I was learning judgment, because what is judgment?

Judgment is deciding what's important and what's not.

Judgment is deciding, you know there's lots of information but this piece is really important,

that piece not so much so.

Of course I didn't know any of that at the time.

I just thought it was a really fascinating class.

And because I was a determined young woman, because I remembered that plaque, I worked

hard at all my classes.

Well now I graduate.

I graduate in the middle of a recession; I'm a young woman with a degree in medieval history

and philosophy and so frankly speaking I was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

No one was going to hire me.

And so I did, with apologies to any lawyers in the room, I did what a lot of people at

that time with liberal arts degrees did, I went off to law school.

That's what my dad wanted.

He was a law professor who ultimately became a federal judge.

I went off to law school.

I discovered I hated it.

I hated it.

And I worried through that first semester of law school because I hated it so much but

because I also thought I can't quit; I'm not a quitter and my mother and father are proud

of me that I'm in law school.

But ultimately at the end of three months I made what was for me at that time the most

difficult decision of my young life.

I decided to quit.

And it was a difficult decision for me because I knew I was disappointing people.

It was a difficult decision for me because I wasn't a quitter.

Mostly it was a difficult decision for me because I had no idea what I was going to

do with my life.

And in fact, I went home, I sat down with my mother and father and I said, "Mom, Dad,

I'm quitting.

I hate it."

My father said what all of us as children dread hearing from our parents, "Carly, I'm

very disappointed in you."

My mother said, "What are you going to do?"

The answer I don't know.

But I did know this: I knew somehow even at 23 years old, I knew that if I didn't love

it I couldn't be good at it.

And I didn't want to spend my life at it.

So now I had to go to work.

So what did I know how to do?

I knew how to type.

So I go to the want ads.

I answer the first want ad that I see that is calling for someone with my skills.

A little nine person company needed a receptionist and the receptionist needed to type and file

and answer the phones.

They offered me the job thank goodness and I took it.

In one of those you know interesting ironies of life, the building that I had my first

full time job in is one block from the headquarters of Hewlett Packard.

I sat in that little building with those nine people, this was a commercial real estate

brokerage company, and I typed and I filed and I answered the phones.

I didn't think about my future.

The only thing I thought about was "I'm going to do the best job I can."

After about six months two men came to my desk and they said, "You know, we've been