Holy Cross hosted Anthony Fauci, M.D., ’62, Hon. ’87 and his wife, bioethicist Christine Grady, for an on-campus residency, “Called to Heal, Called to Serve” in March 2025. During their time on campus, the couple spent time in classes speaking with students and faculty about their personal vocations and careers of public service.
The residency concluded with an hour-long panel discussion, moderated by Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, associate professor of religious studies and classics, along with President Vincent D. Rougeau and his wife, Robin Kornegay-Rougeau, M.D. The conversation was held in front of a capacity crowd at St. Joseph Memorial Chapel, the final event in a year of celebration around the chapel’s centennial. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Michelle Murray: Good evening everyone and thank you so much for being here. My name is Michelle Murray, and I have the privilege of serving the College of the Holy Cross as senior vice president for student development and mission.
And on behalf of all of my colleagues in the division of mission and ministry, we thank you for joining us for this final event, closing our yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of our beloved St. Joseph Memorial Chapel, actually on the solemnity of St. Joseph himself.
And tonight in honor of St. Joseph, we are delighted to be joined by four special guests for a conversation about discovering and following personal and professional vocations. Anthony Fauci, Christine Grady, President Vincent D. Rougeau and his wife, Robin Kornegay-Rougeau, M.D., are joined by Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, associate professor of religious studies and classics who will moderate tonight's conversation. Please join me in welcoming them.
Mahri Leonard-Fleckman: I'll just go ahead and jump right in. I'd like to begin by inviting each of you to reflect briefly on your professional vocations. So for example, how did you discern or know what felt right in terms of what you would pursue professionally? How did you know when it was time to pivot in your career? How did your college majors and your interests fuel your pursuits?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Thank you. Well, I'm a physician and a scientist. And when I ask myself the question you've asked, I think it goes back really to my childhood and my family background. My father was a pharmacist in Brooklyn, New York, and he had a pharmacy back in the 1940s and early '50s that was kind of the hub of community service. The era of industrial pharmacies had not yet arrived. And what he was for the community was a pharmacist who gives prescriptions, the neighborhood psychiatrist, marriage counselor, what have you. So from the time I was a child, I was brought up in an environment of service for others. Little did I know that my subsequent education in a Jesuit school in New York City, Regis High School, and subsequently here at Holy Cross, that that concept of service for others was totally underscored and amplified in me.
I had an affinity for wanting to be with people. I consider myself a people-person. And I was educated in a classics humanities background, both at Regis and here. As I jokingly told the students, I had a course, the label of which was bachelor of arts Greek, classics, philosophy/premed, which is almost oxymoronic in its description, but it fostered in me that feeling of the importance of humanity of people.
I also found out that I was very interested in science. So I put those things together in my mind: How can I pursue my like and my love of science with the idea of being involved with people, at the same time of service to others? And to me that just the natural conclusion for me at least, certainly not necessarily for everyone else, was to become a physician. And that's when I went into medicine.
I'm not going to go into all of the different pivots in my career because we'd be here for a long time, so I'll just say that when I mentioned this to the students today and yesterday, that the one thing that was very, very clear: When you talk about pivots, that although my initial goal was to be a practicing physician in New York City where I trained, my ultimate career took many, many pivots by things that were thrown in front of me, unbeknownst to me in predicting it. And I responded to that in a way that made my career anything but linear.
Leonard-Fleckman: Wow. Dr. Grady, how about you?
Christine Grady: So first of all, I want to thank you for that really warm welcome. That was really nice. And it's been wonderful to be here having not had a Holy Cross background.
But I think very similar to what Tony said, I grew up as a Catholic. I did go to Jesuit schools. I had ingrained in me the service for others idea from my parents and from my schools. And at the time that I was in college, the opportunities for somebody who wanted to do something like take care of other people and do science were more limited than they are now, so I became a nurse. And being a nurse was a wonderful profession. It inherently allows you to pivot because there are a lot of different kinds of opportunities you can have as a nurse. And I took advantage of all of them. I think seizing opportunities. Opportunities that seemed challenging to me that I could learn from, that I could contribute to, that was the way I tried to pivot.
And then at one point in my career, I noticed that there were a lot of questions that I had that I wanted more knowledge to be able to answer, like: How do you balance individual priorities with public health? Or, how do you treat people at the end of their life? Or, how do you allocate resources appropriately? And so I went back to school and did a Ph.D. in philosophy. And then I've been a bioethicist for the last 25 years, and that's a wonderful profession also. They're just given me a lot of rewards.
Dr. Robin Kornegay-Rougeau: I would like to thank everyone who is here tonight supporting all of us here on the stage. I wasn't sure when I went into college what I wanted to do. So I worked in the business office. I thought about law school, I thought about medicine, and I really despised public speaking. So I knew that I did not want to be a lawyer. And the person in my investments office where I worked, the person who ran it at my college, stole a bunch of money. And it was quite a big scandal and I said, "I don't want to live with people who are not honest for the rest of my life." So I said, "I don't really want to be an investments officer."
And I had a surgery when I was 18 for scoliosis. I loved my orthopedic surgeons and I highly respected them. And so I decided I wanted to be a doctor. I was a pianist before I went to college. I was good with my hands. I thought, "Oh, well, maybe I can be an orthopedic surgeon." But because of my surgery, I couldn't really stand for long periods of time so I pivoted away from wanting to be an orthopedic surgeon.
I loved pediatrics. I wanted to take care of generations to come. And so I became a pediatrician, which I have loved. And I want to thank my pediatrician friends who all are here supporting me: Jan Sanders, Paula Belanger, my partner who's out here in the audience. And my surgeon is here, who I just saw, Dr. Jess Aidlen. So I'd have all these people stand up, but I don't know if that's loud. But, anyway, you should talk to them because they are great mentors and they have been great mentors to me.
So pivoting, I pivoted many times in my career. We've moved for my husband's job, what, three, four times? And I've pivoted to different practices each time. My most recent pivot has been to retire after I had a fourth back surgery. And we all have different paths that we take. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
President Vincent D. Rougeau: So I went to college thinking that I wanted to be a diplomat. I was an international relations major. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. And so I had this idea, this glamorous career at the state department traveling the world. I spent my junior year in France. I mean, it was working. And then I met some diplomats who were working in Europe when I was a student, and they were, like, "I don't know if you really want to do this." They gave me a reality check about the job, I guess, in a way, and I thought, "Well, I haven't really thought carefully about what I want to do per se."
I have thought a little bit about the kinds of things I like academically and intellectually. And I had inherited from my father and mother this strong understanding that when you go out into the world, you do have responsibilities to serve, to do things for others. And obviously that was part of our faith commitment, as well as their just parental training. And I thought I could do that as a diplomat. But that changed. It was my first pivot. So I decided to go to law school probably because my father was a lawyer and I hadn't really decided what I wanted to do, but I saw that he was able to do a lot of different things with a law degree.
So I went to law school, but the one thing I didn't really think about is, well, most people go to law school to become a lawyer in the traditional sense. And I didn't really think that much about what kind of lawyer I want to be, what it meant to be a lawyer, what practice was like. And so when I got my first job in law practice, I had a crisis because I really didn't like it. I mean, the environment I had selected in which to practice was not suited to me, and I had not really thought beyond that, so I had to figure it out. And that was hard. That was the first time in my life that I was really forced to confront a certain kind of personal failure that I had not really thought through, this choice in a way that allowed me to be successful at what I decided to do. But it was an important growth moment and a real major moment for me to find something else, which ended up being becoming a professor.
And so that pivot, that pivot came because people who cared about me and knew how miserable I was, started asking me questions and offering me ideas about what I could do. And I had never really thought about being professor ever. But as I listened to other people tell me what the job was about and I then took a chance on doing some interviews, I landed in my first academic job and knew that something fundamental in my life had changed because I felt at home in my professional sense for the first time in a way that I had never felt before. So that sort of was the journey. I'm sure we'll get into some more details about what comes after that.
Leonard-Fleckman: Great, thank you. So now that we've kind of got that out of the way, I'd like to open up the space a little bit and bring in the personal vocations. And here is where rather than call on one or the other of you. I'd like to invite you to talk together about where marriage enters into all of this. What was your journey like? What were your journeys like as couples, especially as professional couples? And how have your marriages and your professional lives supported, impacted, challenged each other?
Grady: I can start. I have to say this year we will have been married 40 years, which is a pretty good amount of time. And when I first met Tony, not only his Sicilian good looks and his Brooklyn swagger, but his intellect and the way he cared ... I met him in a hospital, so the way he cared for the patients really struck me. So that was the first glimmer of, "I think I like this guy."
We have had a really interesting marriage. We have three wonderful children, three daughters. We have had career paths that have sort of run in parallel to each other. We never were doing the exact same thing, but we were always somehow connected enough that things that we were doing at work, we could talk to each other at home. And that was, for me, a really wonderful part of our marriage because I could talk about things that I was interested in at work, and he understood what I was talking about. And vice versa, I think.
And I think we gave each other both a listening board, but also advice about how to handle certain things that were coming up in the work that we were doing, which was challenging at many times. I think in the last five years, it's been amazing to watch him work as hard as he did. He's been working hard from the minute I met him, but the last five years … five years ago in 2020 and '21, he worked 20 hours a day. I mean, so much so that I had to remind him to drink water and to lie down once in a while, that kind of thing.
And so it's been really interesting to see both the kind of wonderful appreciation that people have of him from you guys, for example, but also the vitriol that's been part of our lives in the last couple of years. So we've had quite a ride in our marriage.
Dr. Fauci: Well, ditto to everything that Christine said, but one of the important aspects of our relationship is that Christine is not afraid to challenge me in a very gentle non-confrontative way, but nonetheless challenge me on some of my thoughts and some of the things that I might be interested in doing.
It's a phenomenal gift, I think, to have somebody who doesn't just yes you, but actually has the courage to know that she can tell me when I'm going a little bit off. It's usually when I'm getting too excited about something and she'll be a calming influence on me.
But she mentioned the last five years, I don't think — and I don't think, I know — I could not possibly have gone through what I went through, and I'm still going through, over the last five years, when in an extraordinary aberration of social conduct in the world that I and my fellow public health people and scientists are being viciously attacked. Conspiracy theories, outright lies about you every single day that get amplified on certain networks to remain unmentioned, to have somebody who really will understand what you're going through and give you comfort, but also to give you encouragement to not let things like that bother you. So she's kind of like a gentle screen for the nonsense. People often ask me, "You're really resilient. How could you put up with this craziness that's going on?" And one of the most important reasons is Christine Grady. And I think that really is very important.
Rougeau: So I would agree about not having someone who's a yes person. That's important. It keeps you humble. But I would say one of the things that attracted me to Robin was I was sort of in awe of what she had already accomplished when we met. I mean, she had gone to Yale for undergrad and Yale for medical school, and then she was at University of Chicago, she was chief resident. It wasn't so much where she did it. It was just the fact that she had done this thing against so many odds being a Black woman in these fields where Black women were very rare and succeeding. I mean, becoming the chief resident at University of Chicago, but still just having this enormous sense of fun and this enormous sense of a certain kind of happy disposition.
And the other thing that really I was in awe was, like, she was really interested and good at things that I was not. I mean, I was not a math and science person, and she excelled at those things. And so we didn't come into a relationship necessarily sharing the same strengths, but we did come into it having a strong appreciation for the joy of learning and intellectual engagement and learning from each other, and actually building off of one another. For instance, I like public speaking, she hates it. But that balance in a relationship where you sort of humanize one another because you know the things they really don't like to do and you can help them move into the space when they need to, and they can trust you because they recognize that that's something that you're good at and that you're only trying to help them really excel. It's a partnership.
That's, to me, moving through all of the professional and changes — having children, the ups and downs of any life, any marriage — knowing that you have this partner, always, this person who has your back, who is your champion at the end of the day, is your truth teller at the end of the day, is your safe place, is your safe word.
There's something over the years, and now for us, we've been married 32 years, it's just a part of you. I mean, you're one in a very fundamental way, while still being distinct individuals in the ways I was describing. So I think it's in a way, from the beginning of us, opposites, kind of attracted. But now there's this gelling that keeps us both really, really strong.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: President Rougeau is very kind. But I, as I said, wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon and sometimes their bedside manner is not the best. And I would say that my bedside manner and my relationship manner needed some tweaking. And that has happened through therapy, through love and going to the Word and us being a team in our spirituality, in our love of family, love of God, love of community. And I'm grateful.
Grady: Can I add one thing? I just want to add, I think for those of you who are wondering how you do both a professional and a personal life, I don't know how many students are out there, but they make each other possible. I think having a strong partnership, as you described, allows you to go to work and really put your heart and mind into it. And coming home to a partner allows you to leave work at work sometimes and really get comfort at home. I love the safe place, safe word, all that. It's all of that.
Leonard-Fleckman: Wonderful. I mean, you've talked about balancing each other out. You've talked about making sure that you aren't with a yes person. You've talked about difficulties, even public vitriol right now. So to push on that a little bit more, how do you find purpose together as a couple right now? How do you seek to live authentic lives? How do you keep each other honest? What do you do for fun?
Rougeau: Well, I think mean in the interest of keeping it real a little bit, raising three children, we have three children as well, who are here. Thank you boys for coming. Young men — they're not boys anymore, but you're always boys to us in a very loving way.
But you're raising a family, and you have these jobs. I mean, it's not easy. I mean, it was a juggle that required lots of creative thinking on the fly. "Oh, guess what, honey? I'm pregnant again. And that means in a few months I'm going to have to take four months out of maternity leave and I'm not going to be working." When you're a physician in a private practice: No work, no money. So you pivot, you figure out, "OK, well, what can we get rid of now? Are we going to get some help here? She'll be back at work in four months, but in the meantime..." I mean, it was this constant sort of engagement with real-life problems.
But at the end of the day, in this glorious project of raising a family, and you do all that and then one day, it's not over, but you've moved to a new stage. And, suddenly, you're together. So I think part of this is remembering why: Remembering why you love each other, why you're together, why you chose each other. And that's when the children are doing their things and you're sort of witnessing their lives a little bit at a distance, you're creating new opportunities to do things together, to travel together, to work together, to explore hobbies together.
We've been exploring art together a lot. We're taking Spanish lessons together because those are things we knew we've always loved to do, and we didn't have time before, but now we do, I mean, in a certain kind of way. So recognizing that it's a journey all the time. And when things are kind of difficult and you feel a lot of stress, thinking of these things as passages and stages and not, like, "This is never going to get better. This is always going to be hard." It's not. You move through these things and you get certain joys from them and you get certain joys after them. So I think it's just always keeping your mind focused on the big picture of a life together that has many different aspects and facets.
Dr. Fauci: Well, one of the things that answers a bit of your question is in addition to the relationship — married, having children, lovers — is the thing that I've found most: It goes beyond enjoyable as most comforting in all is the friendship in a relationship. So Christine is my best friend. And in many respects, I learn a lot from her. She's better at so many things that I'm at. She's very creative and takes chances, and I'm very conservative. I go to the same restaurant every time. She always says, "Let's go someplace else." I go down the same path when we run together. She says, "No. Why don't we try this path?" So she opens up a bunch of vistas for me. And there are those aspects of the relationship that really make it something very special. We've run a few marathons together and we practiced every day and go from 6 miles a day to 7 to 10 to 15 to really work up—
Grady: Before children.
Dr. Fauci: Yeah, to practice for the marathon. And we ran the marathons together, the New York Marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington. And we would run the 26.1 miles together. And only a good friend like Christine, when we get one-tenth of a mile from the finish line, she would tap me on the shoulder and say, "I love you dearly, but see you later," and she would go. It's the truth. She did that twice.
Grady: Got to have some wins. I think I would love to just build on what you said because there are certainly moments, days, weeks, that are hard. Work has rewards to it, but it's also work. And there are lots of things that challenging that all of us face in the work that we do. And some work is more challenging than others, I will say that. And then to come home and trying to raise children when there was no energy left and there was no space for anything.
The one thing I can say for me, of course, my children are all grown now, and I even have a grandchild, which is pretty special — we have a grandchild. But there was something about having children for me that was so gratifying that it was worth it. Some of those hard moments were worth it because the joy that I got from watching them grow and learn and become people and the learning that I still find, I learn from them all the time. And that's such a wonderful part of our lives, to learn from our kids and enjoy being with them. It's very special.
Leonard-Fleckman: But did you feel like that on the younger side of things? Every moment? I mean, it sounds so beautiful. Could you—
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: Well, I can say there were many moments that I just loved being with our young people. My eldest son is a musician, and so he is a rock star, OK? I get to go to rock concerts. And as a 60-year-old woman, I could go with all the, I don't know, 20-year-olds and 25-year-olds and jump up and down. It was just fantastic.
And then when my middle son, I don't know where he is, but... Oh, there he is. Yes. Yes. I have a picture of us dancing together in our neighbor's backyard, which I so cherish. And I remember the moments of, it was his best friend's Bar Mitzvah, and so they had a wonderful band in the backyard. And I just remember these moments that are just amazing.
Our youngest son, I was the, I don't know, the head of the theater company, parent group. This is while being a pediatrician at the same time and having my whole practice. I was the PTO, chairman or whatever of the theater group and watching him on stage playing Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables.” Oh, no. Oh, anyway, yes, I'm getting it wrong. But watching him on stage. Yes, exactly. It was amazing.
But, yeah, so there are all these wonderful moments that you just cherish as you watch them grow and contribute to the rest of society, which in our current day is so important to guide all of you young people here in the audience to be able to discern what you would like to do with your lives and hopefully add to the family of God.
Rougeau: Well, I would also say one of the reasons that we were able to succeed as parents in as much as we could was that we always knew that we couldn't do it by ourselves.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: Right. We had lots of help.
Rougeau: We—
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: My mother-in-law, Shirley Small-Rougeau, who's sitting there. Stand up, Mom. Yes.
Rougeau: So we had individual help from family. We created communities with friends to share... You are at your home and your next-door neighbor has to run out. You're there. You take their kids and they take yours. You build relationships with people that you trust. Your children benefit, I think, from the opportunity to have other adults in their lives that they can love and trust as part of this community you create for them.
And in the context of thinking about community and thinking about faith, how you live into community as part of the experience of building a family and raising children, teaching them about the different ways that people can be parts of their lives, the different things that others can bring to them and that they can bring to others.
So this notion, I think, often in this society in particular, that everyone has to do everything by themselves is a very dangerous notion. It is not possible to do what, I don't think, to do what we have done, managing professional careers, raising a family, if we had just thought that we were just going to do everything on our own. And I think recognizing that it's OK to ask for help, to seek help, to think of ways to build out your community of support is one key to moving these stages successfully and happily.
Grady: Absolutely.
Leonard-Fleckman: So you're talking about community and the importance of faith, of raising good people. So I have a question that might be more of an individual question for each of you, but perhaps not. And that is thinking more about what or who has helped form your character in life and what virtues and habits matter to you most at this point? What are you working on cultivating now even?
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: I'm working on forgiveness and charity to others that I can accomplish without hurting my body. And I would say who has helped? Who are my heroes did you ask for?
Leonard-Fleckman: Yeah.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: Yeah, yeah. Heroes, I would say my parents. I had wonderful partners, who were all great leaders in our groups. And then I would say in college, Fred ... yeah, that's going back a bit far.
Grady: I would say one of the people that I think influenced me the most and who I admire was my mother. She was the kind of person who was incredibly competent but understated. And she could do anything. I mean, she could do anything if she had the opportunity to do it.
She influenced a lot of people's lives without ever talking about it. Or, I mean, I met somebody as an adult when my mother was a teacher at one point in her life, and she said — this woman who was telling me the story — when she was in sixth grade, her parents were having a very difficult time and after school it was hard for her to go home because there was so much stress in the home. And so my mother would come to her every day and say, "Would you like to stay after school and help me and do your homework here?" And she said she knows that my mother did that just because she knew she needed a safe place to be after school. But I never knew that. I never knew those things about what my mother did. So she was a very special person.
I think in modeling her ... Well, so the other group of people who have influenced me and taught me a lot in the world are some of the patients I've taken care of because I have met many patients who in their dark hours of vulnerability and adversity are incredibly courageous, resilient, funny, and give back a lot that you're supposedly taking care of them, they take care of us, too. And it's really a wonderful gift that I've been able to experience in my life.
Dr. Fauci: Yeah, I think probably what I mentioned in the answer to your first question, Mahri, was my parents and their inherent feeling about contributing to society and taking care of people.
My father in the small little pharmacy in the middle of the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. But the continuity of that as I got into what I mentioned before, the fundamental principles of integrity and service that was very, very much in tune with my original instincts as a child. And that was both in high school and in college, at Regis High School with the Jesuits and my four years here at Holy Cross. That is something that has, I think, formed who I am.
You're asking, like, now what am I doing? We were talking about pivots in life early on. So I originally wanted to be a practicing physician in New York City. That was my major desire. That was the reason I went to medical school. By happenstance of taking a fellowship in immunology and infectious diseases at the NIH, I got enamored by the concept of research where you can do something that would have the amplifying effect of influencing many more people than you could see as an individual patient. You could make an observation that's applicable to many.
Then when HIV came along, that was another pivot that made me get deeply involved in this terrible, tragic, devastating disease that was decimating, mostly the gay community. And that gets me to one thing that Christine said, what we learned from those brave young men who were suffering with a mysterious disease and showed such great resiliency, which made me have the next pivot of becoming director of the institute so I could have a broader impact on global health, which allowed me to get involved in many other things, including the privilege of being able to advise seven presidents.
But getting to what your question is, what about now at my stage in life, when I stepped down from the NIH, I was asking myself: What do I have left in the years that I have left? I don't really want to do yet again another experiment or write yet again another paper. So I thought the thing that would be most gratifying for me was to use the benefit of my own experience and what I've been through to hopefully inspire some young people to either get involved in medicine or science or even just public service in general. And that was the reason why I took the position at Georgetown and one of the reasons why I was so enthusiastic about coming up here for two days to interact with the students who were actually me 60 some odd years ago.
Rougeau: I mean, for me, I certainly have to give a tremendous amount of credit to my mother and my father for modeling values for me that I carry with me all the time. And I can never really express my full gratitude to all of the things they did to give me what I have today in terms of a foundation.
I've talked about that before in this community a little bit in different contexts. So I want to use this opportunity to actually also mention my paternal grandparents because... So I had this enormous gift of having both of my grandparents on my father's side until I was 50 years old. They were married for 72 years. And they obviously married young, but they only had one child. They only had my father. And so they were sort of a feature in my life and in my siblings’ lives throughout all of these stages — our childhood, college, got married, when we had our children. They provided this certain sense of almost constancy and ballast that rooted us to something in the past in a way that I can't even fully explain.
They were modest, simple people, but very hardworking, devoted to their faith, devoted to their church, devoted to their family and their community. And in the world that was constantly crazy in so many different ways, they were like this rock of remembering what's truly important, and they were living it all the time. It wasn't always perfect, but it was, I think, their expression of love for us always was. There was never any doubt that these people would be there for me under any circumstances that might present. And they'd asked nothing really of us. Just to be available, to be loved, to be there for us.
And they modeled something to me that I think is so important for all of us. The concept of just loving another human being, the concept of witnessing a life of just true meaning by being there for people, by embracing them when they fall, by just saying, "I'm here," is a gift that I could never ever really fully comprehend how important it's been to me. But whenever I think of them, I can say, "Wow, what they gave me, they have no idea." And I hope that the one thing I can do with my life is to pass that on and to make sure that my children feel it. My mother and father feel it, everyone who I know in my family, because it's the foundation for so much of my life.
Leonard-Fleckman: That's a great... President Rougeau, thank you for that. I think it's a great segue to just asking each of you, perhaps individually and as a couple: What do you want your legacy to be?
Dr. Fauci: So I get asked that a fair amount. And I really do sincerely feel that... I mean, I feel proud of some of the things that I've done in my 55-year, 56-year professional career, but I feel sincerely that my legacy will be determined by others' evaluation, and I don't profess that this is what I want my legacy to be. But there is something that I do want people to appreciate, if you want to call it a legacy, that right from the very first time I entered my professional career as a physician and as a scientist and as a public health official, I gave it everything I had. You can judge what the results are yourself, and that's somebody to do after I'm gone. But the one thing everybody should know, as I often say, I left it all out on the court. I didn't hold anything back, and that's what I would hope my legacy would be.
Grady: How do you follow that? I hope I left it all on the court, too, but I guess the one thing I do wish, there's a quote by somebody that I cannot quote, but I think it's Maya Angelou who said something like, "You can do things for people, but it's how you make them feel that matters" or something like that. I hope that the people that I've interacted with — and I've had the privilege of interacting with a lot of people in a lot of places and a lot of over many years, very closely patients, students, colleagues, friends — I hope I make them feel good. That's what I hope they remember me as.
Rougeau: I guess I hope that I have been able, through my presence in whatever I've done and whatever capacity I've been, acting either as a faculty member or as a leader, that I've been able to make a difference, that I've left something of myself with people that demonstrates that I do care, but also that leaves them with the impression that I've offered myself in a way that shows integrity, that shows commitment, that shows a sense of understanding and meaning that my presence in this space, whatever that space was, transmitted something of deep value that will cause people to remember that and that I touched their world or touch their lives in a way that mattered. And that I can leave for my children, hopefully memory of someone who tried his best to make change in the world based on a set of values that I hope matter to them as well and that they can carry forward in the things that they do.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: I hope that I leave that the legacy, that service to others really is a service to God and, therefore, to everyone, and that people will remember me as a person of providing love to all in everything I did, whether it was being a pianist and the music I made, or as a pediatrician and the patients that I saved, the funerals I went to, that people felt loved and cared for, and that they could carry that forward in their own lives.
Leonard-Fleckman: So I think you all have talked in some different ways about spirituality. Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau, you just talked specifically about God and faith. And Dr. Fauci, you've talked about service to others. I think you all have talked about that in some way. And of course here we are in St. Joseph Chapel, the 100th anniversary. I'd like to invite any of you if you'd like to say something more about how religious or spiritual values have shaped you as a person, perhaps especially Jesuit values and education.
Grady: I feel like the Jesuit values were instilled in me even without me knowing it, if you know what I mean. I think service for others, for sure. Caring about the whole person, worrying about the common good, caring about integrity. Those are things that I think have been part of what I've tried to do in my life, and I learned them in a number of different ways. And I hope that I've exhibited them in the way that I've lived my life. I don't think it was always conscious. I think sometimes it was just that's the way it was. And so I love those values.
Dr. Fauci: I think you used the word Jesuit values, which I have had the fortune, the way many of us in this arena have, of having multiple years of watching the display of Jesuit values every single day that you go into school, whether it's going to a high school on Madison Avenue in 85th Street in New York, or coming from your dorm and going into a class here on The Hill. Jesuit values have been absolutely integral to how I look at my profession and who I am. The whole idea service to others, and as Chris said, the entire person. But also the idea of integrity and commitment and teamwork and caring for others is just such an important part of everything that I've tried to do.
When I would talk about my education to my friends who were not educated in the Jesuit tradition, and I would talk about it, they used to jokingly refer to the Jesuit in me. So maybe I'm a closet Jesuit and I don't even know it, but I think it's actually had a major impact on me.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: Well, I wasn't raised in the Jesuit tradition, so I agree with everything that Dr. Grady and Dr. Fauci have said. My first knowledge and really transformation through the Jesuit education came through my trip with Boston College following the steps of St. Ignatius of Loyola. And as I said, that was transformational, and understanding true mission to our world was a great dynamo.
Rougeau: So I mean, I had a strong Catholic upbringing, but not Catholic schooling. And my father, John, had gone to a Jesuit college, but my real encounter with the Jesuits came as an adult, as in my first job. I mean an intellectual encounter. And I actually credit my engagement with Jesuit values, Jesuit pedagogy, Jesuit... the Catholic intellectual tradition. I credit the Jesuits for that because in a sense, I connect them to the explosion of an adult faith in me because it allowed me to marry the person I was as an intellectual, as a professor, as this curious kid who wanted to be a diplomat with a tradition of intellectual inquiry, of external engagement with the world, with being a person for others. And it sort of completed me.
It allowed me to take that childhood faith that was ingrained in us in a certain, sometimes rote but important way, and then expand it into the adult person that could carry that faith forward in different roles, different experiences in my life, of the life of being a parent, the life of being a faculty member, the life of being a good neighbor and a good friend. And so from that moment, this journey with the Jesuits, for me, has been a kind of accompaniment that has helped complete my life in a spiritual sense and allowed me to constantly grow and change and to engage the world without losing that spiritual grounding because it's just been for me that peace I can always go back to. I can look for something new, for something different, and it's excited me and fed me in so many ways.
So that spiritual piece of who I am as a person, of my vocation, I think has carried me through lots of difficult times in my work, has allowed me to appreciate what I do in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise and has also allowed me to bring something back to my personal life that I will value forever.
Leonard-Fleckman: Well, the evening is rapidly coming to a close. So one more question for you all. Short question: What's a piece of advice that you'd give for students today?
Grady: I'll go first. I would like to go first. For students that I've already seen today, forgive me if this is repetitive. I think a couple things. Find things that you like to do, that you're good at, and where you can make a good contribution to the world. Go for them with everything you've got. Don't be too frustrated by the setbacks because there will be setbacks. Take good care of yourself. Reach out to your friends and your support systems. Somebody said before, seeking help is a sign of strength. Life is great, and there's so many things to take advantage of. Don't get stuck. Just keep finding the things that give you joy, give you reward, give you satisfaction that you're making a contribution.
Dr. Fauci: Somewhat similar to that, I would tell students to find what your passion is and pursue it passionately. Because when you're passionate about what you're doing, not only is it enjoyable, but it is usually very productive and very successful. And as we've discussed this evening, understand that there will be pivots in your career. Don't stress over that. Embrace them because they may put you on a pathway that's even more fulfilling and more gratifying than what you thought your linear path would be. And finally, going back to my own early years, don't stress so much. Relax.
Dr. Kornegay-Rougeau: Yes, prayer, meditation. Take some time for discernment. And when I say discernment, I mean if you need to go on a silent retreat, just spend time with yourself within your own brain, without your phones, without listening to all the other noise that's going on in the world to really find what you would like to do.
Rougeau: Yeah, I would reiterate the idea that your pathway forward through life is not a straight line. And the idea that you can plan it, forget about it. We go into our education, into this experience you're having now as an undergraduate, with some ideas. And those are great things. They might produce the things that you love to do. But just be a sponge and absorb because you don't know what will happen in your future that might change the entire direction of your life. It could be, and it often is, a person.
So I guess my big piece of advice is be open to being touched by others in a way that might actually enlighten you to something in yourself that you never knew. Because I know for me, some of the most incredible opportunities I've had have had come when I've allowed other people to reflect me back to myself because they've cared and they're interested and I've listened and I've taken a pivot or made a change that has changed my life in a wonderful way.
What you're getting now in your education, you will carry with you for the rest of your life. That can never be taken from you. So make sure that you'd get the best of what's on offer so that when that moment comes, when someone touches you and says, "I have an opportunity I'd like to share with you. Would you like to take it on?" you'll know. You'll know what you really care about and whether or not it's the right thing for you to do.
Leonard-Fleckman: Thank you all so much. May I have a round of applause for our distinguished guests?
Rev. Keith Maczkiewicz, S.J.: Tonight's special event ends the Fauci Grady Residency, and how blessed our campus has been by the presence of Dr. Tony Fauci and Dr. Christine Grady these last days. As a token of our thanks and as a gift to commemorate this momentous occasion, Dr. Murray will present a limited-edition print of the chapel to each of our panelists.
Dr. Fauci: Thank you.
Fr. Maczkiewicz: Please note that a recording of tonight's rich conversation will be made available, a link to which the College will post in the coming days. As they exit the space, may we have one more round of applause for our panelists and moderator?
