At Brown, Condoleezza Rice discusses foreign policy, research universities and an accomplished career

She noted the need for compassion as the U.S. grapples with a set of complex global conflicts.

"I am a big believer that if you're the American Secretary of State, you walk into a room and you have the American military on one shoulder and you have the American economy on the other," she said. "But if you can have compassion as well, and say, 'This is the most powerful country on the face of the Earth. But it's also the most compassionate, and we care what happens to your people - that's extremely effective."

The role of universities and students in preserving democracy

As an educator who currently directs the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University, and served previously as Stanford's provost, Rice also discussed the role of universities - and students - in preserving American democracy.

During her conversation with Paxson and in an earlier meeting with Watson School students, she urged students not to shun public service, calling upon them to work from within the existing political system to make lasting change. A Birmingham, Alabama, native, Rice recalled the work of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP during the civil rights movement, when the organization worked to find precedent-setting cases to bring to federal courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court.

"They were actually using the institutions - [and] the Constitution - to say, 'We don't need America to be something else; we just need it to be what it says it is,'" Rice said. "I think sometimes when we think about hard problems in our country, we don't realize that we've got public action like the marches and the activism, but we've also got institutions and we've got a political system that, as Americans, we have to use to get change."

Rice also stressed the importance of providing federal funds to support research at that nation's universities. While industry plays an important role in scaling up technologies, she said, universities remain critical sources of innovation that will help the U.S. keep pace in AI and other developing technologies.

"You won't find anybody who's more capitalist than I am, but I don't want all of innovation to be in commercial entities," Rice said. "I still want to preserve in the university the ability of somebody to wake up and say, 'I wonder why that does that,' to get a federally funded research grant… and somewhere down the road, to do something incredible. I just hope we don't undermine our own considerable capacity."