Charles (Chip) Laingen
Class of ’83 (B.A., international relations), ’93 (public affairs)
I stood in front of Coffman Union, snowball in hand. It was late 1980, and a crowd of agitated onlookers was gathering at a pro-Ayatollah Khomeini demonstration. When Iranian students began chanting anti-U.S. slogans, the snowballs began to fly.
Photo by Leo Kim
With self-restraint rooted more in intellect than feeling, I held onto mine. I like to believe that another student from a generation earlier helped me make that sage decision. That student was my father, L. Bruce Laingen, a 1949 CLA alum and the senior diplomat held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran from November 1979 to January 1981.
As a freshman in the Navy ROTC program, I thought I needed a degree in aerospace engineering to become an aviator. After a miserable first year in the Institute of Technology, a lieutenant informed me that the Navy took pilots from all fields, “even from liberal arts.” Inspired by that news and by events in Iran, I switched my major to international relations.
My first year and a half at the U was more about the hostage crisis than about academics, which were sometimes a distraction, sometimes an escape. Through my history and political theory classes, however, I found a connection to my own upbringing, as well as a calling. Though there was an inordinate focus on the failures of global relationships, a strange sense of logic emerged from it—that failure was a part of lessons learned, of warnings to heed for the future. I began to feel better about where the world was headed, and eventually realized that tragic events like the Iran hostage crisis are to be endured, studied, and learned from.
I like to believe that my father’s strong character and unfailing optimism, established by his Minnesota farm roots, were reinforced during his time in CLA—and that I have benefited from his lifelong example as a patient diplomat and an even more patient father. I feel blessed to have continued his legacy at the U.
Laingen, a retired Navy commander, is communications director of Minnesota Wire & Cable Co. and director of the Defense Alliance of Minnesota. He was a U.S. Navy Moreau Scholar in the Ph.D. program at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
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