‘I remain an eternal optimist’: What Tim Walz told Nebraska college graduates in 2014

Doors keep opening for Tim Walz.

When Walz, the Minnesota governor and Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, returned in 2014 to the tiny Nebraska college where he graduated to give the commencement address, it could have easily been assumed he would stay in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was serving his sixth term representing Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District.

“I remain an eternal optimist. In the line of work I’m in, I have to. With approval ratings between head lice and North Korea, I have to remain optimistic,” he told the Chadron State College graduating class after receiving the school’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

That optimism has served him well. On Aug. 6, Vice President Kamala Harris picked the former Nebraska farm kid as her running mate.

And if Nebraskans weren’t familiar with Walz before, they are now.

Harris introduced him at a rally in Philadelphia as “the proud product of a middle-class family in Nebraska.” 

At the rally, Walz said that he learned to value a commitment to working together, seeing past differences, and being willing to help others while growing up in Nebraska.

“I know a little something about that commitment to people. I was born in West Point, Nebraska. I lived in Butte, a small town of 400 where community was a way of life,” Walz said. “Growing up, I spent the summers working on the family farm. My mom and dad taught us: Show generosity towards your neighbors and work for a common good.”

After graduating from high school in a class of just 25 students in 1982, he served as a member of the Nebraska Army National Guard. He used the G.I. Bill to enroll at Chadron State and graduated in 1989 with a degree in education.

After college, he was offered an opportunity to teach high school in Nebraska, but also had a chance to travel to China to teach for a year under Harvard University’s WorldTeach program.

“I had been given a really good job offer — good pay and retirement and benefits. It was safe, it was secure, it was conventional. And I also had another opportunity presented to me. I could pack up, leave everything behind, fly off to the other side of the world and be part of the first group of American high school teachers teaching in a Chinese high school,” Walz said in his 2014 address.

He said a Chadron State professor took him aside and asked if he had decided which option to take: “I said, ‘I’m torn about it,’ and he said, ‘Living in this moment, as you stand here now and think about it, which path do you think is the one that’s right for you?’”

He left for a year in China, teaching English to high school students there.

When he returned, he and his future wife, Gwen, taught high school in Alliance, Nebraska, where he also coached the local high school football team, until 1996, when they moved to her native Minnesota.

They both continued to teach high school there, and Walz also coached high school football, helping lead the Mankato West High School team from a winless record to the school’s first state championship in 1999.

In 2005, he was convinced to run for Congress and won in the Republican-dominated district. He was reelected five more times before being elected governor of Minnesota in 2018. He won reelection in 2022.

As governor, he built a legacy that included championing abortion rights, helping guarantee free meals to public school students, and signing legislation that made public college tuition-free for students from Minnesota families who earn less than $80,000 a year.

Then Harris called, opening another door — something Walz seemed to foretell in that 2014 speech when he spoke about deciding to go to China.

“At that moment, I said, ‘I’m going to choose that unconventional door. I’m going to go,’” Walz said. “And that door didn’t just lead to China. It led to a lifetime of doors that continue to present themselves in choices that can be made.”