On April 2, Georgia Tech hosted its inaugural event celebrating our Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership. The new Institute aims to be a place where people can exchange ideas freely, learn from one another, and find common ground. It will also serve as a hub for bringing together leaders from government, industry, academia and other sectors to tackle pressing challenges and pursue science- and data-driven solutions.

During a two-day symposium, University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue and I had the opportunity to share our visions for the new Institute before the keynote dialogue between Robert George and Cornel West, eminent scholars, longtime friends, and coauthors of "Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division."

My opening remarks follow:

Welcome to Georgia Tech, a place built on the conviction that human ingenuity, creativity, and the rigorous application of science can help us solve the hardest problems we face and improve the human condition. Our purpose is, at its core, not technical but civic in nature.

As a community that loves numbers, we should all appreciate the fact that we are holding this discussion almost exactly 250 years after a group of men, unhappy with the status quo of the day, gathered in a hot room in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence and attempt something never done before: a form of government based on the consent of the governed, that would treat every person the same and would guarantee everyone’s individual freedom.

About a century after these words were written, standing on a battlefield soaked with American blood, Abraham Lincoln reminded a shattered nation that the ideas in the Declaration were not a deed of title to be taken for granted but a proposition, a grand experiment that demanded of every generation “a new birth of freedom.”

Four years before Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, Frederick Douglas, a self-educated intellectual who had escaped slavery, was invited to speak by a civic group of ladies in Rochester, New York, to celebrate the Fourth of July. Perhaps to make a point, he spoke on the Fifth instead and delivered not a celebration but a reckoning.

Like the founding fathers, he too was unhappy with the status quo; in his case it was not a foreign king he had an issue with, but America’s own institution that he and many others had been the victims of. And yet, he didn’t reject the Declaration of Independence. Just the opposite. He described the document as the “ring-bolt to the chain of our nation’s destiny.” The ringbolt attaches the anchor chain to the hull. Remove it, the chain comes loose, and the ship is lost.

Douglass’ argument was clear: Either the words “all men are created equal” mean what they say to all people without exception or this republic is a fraud.

Talk about civic courage. Not cynicism, not the retreat into grievance. But the harder, more demanding act of engaging the founding promise seriously, of being furious when it is betrayed yet faithful to keep fighting for it anyway.

A century later, our very own Martin Luther King Jr., a young pastor from Atlanta, wrote one of the most important pieces of correspondence in our civic history from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was arrested for peacefully protesting in defense of the words in the Declaration of Independence. The letter was addressed to a group of clergymen who had urged him to slow down, to be patient and trust that change would come in its own time. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

An inescapable network of mutuality. I think Dr. King would have made a good systems engineer. We know networks around here. We know how conditions propagate across them. We know that a failure at one node may corrupt the integrity of the whole. If I may translate King into engineering lingo: justice is a network property. It does not hold in some places while collapsing in others. It must hold across the system.

Now hear those two ideas together. Douglass gives you the ringbolt: the fixed anchor, the non-negotiable promise that holds the republic to its course. King gives you the network: the web of mutual obligation through which that promise propagates to everyone.

And now, here we are.

We are gathered in 2026, at a university defined by engineering and innovation, to ask what happens to the American experiment when the infrastructure of public discourse is redesigned — by technology — not around the pursuit of truth, but around the optimization of user engagement, of clicks and likes?

What happens to our founding promise when algorithms learn, with extraordinary precision, exactly which ideas will make you feel most righteous, most threatened, most certain — and feed you those ideas, and only those ideas, every waking hour?

What happens to Douglass's ringbolt when the platforms meant to connect us are optimized to sort us — to separate us into isolated ideological silos where the anchor of a shared reality slowly corrodes?

What happens to King's network of mutuality when the actual networks we build make it profitable to deepen division and separation — when outrage travels faster than understanding?

What happens to our republic, when we have invented thinking machines, mechanical polymaths able to pull from our collective intelligence, and outsmart every one of us?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are policy problems. Leadership problems. They are engineering problems. And they are our problems — the problems of everyone in this room, whether you work in a lab, a classroom, a boardroom, or a city hall.

We don’t have the answers, but we know the surest path to finding answers: open dialogue. Honest argument. Genuine listening. Shared rules. Mutual dignity.

Not agreement … agreement is not the goal and was never the goal. The goal is a society robust enough to contain disagreement. To channel it. To let the friction of competing ideas produce, over time, something closer to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Technology is not the enemy of that goal. But technology deployed without civic intentionality can hollow out our values faster than any foreign adversary ever could. It can corrode the ringbolt. It can unravel the network. It can make Lincoln's proposition impossible to test, because we can no longer agree on what the evidence even looks like.

That is why civic leadership and technology must be discussed in the same breath. That is why this symposium matters and why the Institute we’re launching today matter.

Lincoln asked every generation to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The work is still unfinished. It is always unfinished. That is not a bummer. That is the point.

We need people committed to the work: to show up, to argue, to listen, and to hold both their convictions and their fellow citizens with equal seriousness.

That’s why we’re here. Let's get to work.