Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises.

Every day, across our state, we see grit and resilience.

It doesn't matter whether the challenge we face is large or small, whether it's a statewide disaster or a crisis just on our own block - Nebraskans face it with courage, goodwill, and the unwavering conviction that we are part of one community of neighbors and friends.

From the first-year students' fall orientation to the board's annual budget-approval meeting, everything a healthy college does requires a shared sense of mission.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

I think Medicaid harms people.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That's completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can't do that.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan's first term.

We must repeal Obamacare, but even more, we must replace the worldview that underlies and enabled it.

My grandma was a child of the Depression, and knew the tragedy of having her home outside Diller was destroyed by a tornado.

There were giant scale barriers to becoming a nuclear power, whereas launching a cyberattack requires only some coding capability, a laptop and an Internet connection.

The nature and scope of security threats in the cyber era are four-dimensional compared to the early nuclear age.

Since arriving in Washington in January 2015, I have pushed for a strategic framework that clearly articulates how we'll tackle threats in cyberspace.

Government never adapts quickly to new challenges, but our slow-footedness on cyber is unparalleled.

Courts do not make the law.

Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That's because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don't like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.