"It was bad to see a multi-ethnic society tear itself apart," said William Ryerson '60, the American consul general in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, in his Sept. 3 campus presentation, "From Cornell to the World: Lessons From a Cornellian in U.S. Foreign Relations."

Ryerson also served as the first U.S. ambassador to Albania in the early 1990s and held Foreign Service positions in Barbados and Eastern Europe, where he encountered ethnic conflict, lived under the shadow of communist police states and aided Americans in difficult situations.

In Poland, he said friends and employees were routinely questioned by the secret police for suspected connections to Americans, and his own residence was bugged. In Albania, he witnessed atrocities carried out by the oppressive regime of Ramiz Alia. In one case, he said, two brothers were beaten and dragged behind a truck and wrapped in razor wire until they died as punishment for trying to escape the country.

At Cornell, after encountering academic difficulties in his engineering major, Ryerson decided that he needed "to do what I wanted to do and not what I thought I ought to do." He switched his major to history and never looked back.

Ryerson said his greatest passion is learning languages, a skill he honed in the foreign service; he estimated that he has spent at least two years of his 34-year career learning Polish, Albanian and Serbo-Croatian in intense six-hour daily sessions (in addition to the German he already knew).

"You never know when a language is going to be useful," said Ryerson of his consular duties in Poland. "It's good to know some of the language even if you use an interpreter."

The U.S. Foreign Service is a merit-based organization, he said, but ambassadors are appointed by the president. "If you are joining because you just want to be an ambassador, then you are in the wrong line of work," he said, noting that it takes dedication to succeed in the field.

The talk was sponsored by the Seal and Serpent Society, the Mario Einadi Center for International Studies, the Latino Studies Program and the government department.

Pelle Rudstam '10 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.