Paul Nakasone, founding director of the Vanderbilt Institute of National Security, interviewed retired Army General Stanley McChrystal on character, leadership and service in the current political climate and how these themes relate to national security.
Around 650 students and faculty attended this first Fall 2025 lecture of the Vanderbilt Institute of National Security and Dialogue Vanderbilt’s Lecture Series on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. The event brought together community members — particularly undergraduates interested in national security, civil discourse and military leadership — from across the university to explore themes around building personal character and how to apply it in a larger campus setting.
The program began with opening remarks from junior Vittoria Riedling, member of the Institute of National Security student cohort — an Immersion Vanderbilt program for students pursuing projects in the national security field — and a member of Dialogue Vanderbilt’s student advisory board. She spoke about the significance of the intersection of The Vanderbilt Institute of National Security and Dialogue Vanderbilt for the lecture.
“By combining these conversations, we confront our nation’s most pressing issues and reflect on leadership and character required to address them,” Riedling said.
Following her remarks, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier emphasized the importance of character as it relates to civil discourse in a university setting.
“We need leaders who not only have sharp minds but a sharp sense of character,” Diermeier said. “[This] includ[es] the capacity to hear and bridge different viewpoints [for] a common purpose.”
McChrystal began his talk by summarizing his lifelong service-based career. He primarily reflected on his military and post-military life.
“What I tell everybody is: you can’t change the past. You can only affect the future,” McChrystal said. “That’s pretty simple magic, but it’s been just this extraordinary set of neat experiences, things I’ve learned, people I’ve met.”
Throughout the discussion, McChrystal stressed the importance of understanding and developing one’s personal character through discipline and conviction.
“At the end of the day, we get to decide what character is for ourselves, for our organizations and for our nations. That’s the great thing about it. Nobody controls that,” McChrystal said. “We have control over it. And if we don’t take control over it, somebody else defines it for us.”
McChrystal closed the panel by tying character to leadership practices and how this can be applied in everyday settings.
“Leadership is getting people and organizations to do things that they might not otherwise do, maybe to do at a higher standard, maybe to do difficult things,” McChrystal said. “Be the best operator you can be. Be the best follower possible. Be the leader that you’d like to have.”
Sophomore Janessa Shaikh, a member of the Institute of National Security’s Immersion cohort, said she enjoyed hearing about the ways McChrystal developed as a person during and after his military career.
“[What McChrystal said] was a really cool application of what we’ve been learning in our cohort,” Shaikh said. “I was getting this message that once you’re at such a high position [in the military], your identity can easily be tied to your work. [But] I feel like since he stepped away, his identity was really able to flourish.”
Junior Mark Wang said McChrystal’s insights offered interesting implications for the value of leadership more broadly and that character and leadership are the basis for many aspects of life.
“[McChrystal] has had a very storied career, tremendous impact, long dedication to work in the military. I feel like after having spent all that time in the military and being in all those different high-stake situations, the most important takeaway he wants more people [to have is] to be mindful of this idea of character [and] this idea of leadership,” Wang said.
Douglas Adams, executive director of the Institute of National Security, said the program represented a unique and special opportunity to explore leadership topics with two important leaders. He said that he sees their strong character in his own students.
“In making big decisions, [the generals] leaned on [their] character. To me, there isn’t a better message for a place [like] Vanderbilt, [which] is developing future leaders,” Adams said. “I see it in my students. I see it in every class. The thing that really resonates with me is that I couldn’t imagine a better talk for our community and for our students than this one.”
