This article originally appeared on pages 18 and 19 of the No. 6 April 2025 edition of The Gettysburgian magazine
By Sophie Lange, Features Editor & Social Media Manager
In his undergraduate years, adjunct professor of public policy Charles Pede attended three colleges: Millersville State College, George Mason University and the University of Virginia. He had an ROTC scholarship and studied anthropology before going to law school, also at the University of Virginia. There, he earned his Juris Doctor after receiving an educational delay from the Army. After graduating, he began his career at the Judge Advocate General’s Court of the United States Army, which is the Army’s law firm that provides around 1,800 active duty lawyers worldwide.
Speaking on his career in law, Pede said, “The Army has so many different facets to the practice of law. It includes not just providing legal advice and creating meaningful relationships with your clients but trying to make a difference every day in the life of somebody accused of a crime, or a commander who’s trying to do the right thing with the money he’s been given to train his soldiers, or perhaps on the battlefield. How do I care for these prisoners of war or detainees who are unlawful combatants? It covers such a wide spectrum.”
Professor Charles Pede, now retired, previously served as a U.S. Army Lieutenant General. (Photo by William Pratt)
While working with the Judge Advocate General’s Court, Pede recognized the many educational opportunities, particularly those that allowed him to teach. In over 35 years in the Army, he regularly ran courses to educate senior leaders within the Army and taught as a part-time professor both within the United States and abroad.
“At the same time, and I think this is true for lawyers generally, but Army lawyers in particular, there are a lot of educational opportunities,” he explained. “I actually became a professor at our Army law school. It’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well, right next to the UVA law school. I taught there as a professor of criminal law… but I also found myself teaching in local community colleges, wherever I was stationed. I’d teach property law, business law and different kinds of law in communities.”
During this point in his career, Pede discovered his love for teaching, and when he retired from the Army in 2021, he decided he wanted to keep teaching into his retirement, which is when he began teaching at Gettysburg. His areas of academic focus include national security policy, military policy and criminal law.
When asked what he wanted others to better understand about these focuses, Pede said he wished people understood the Army better, especially the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.
“It’s the oldest, and in my mind, best law firm in the world, and certainly in the United States. We provide honest, principled counsel to commanders and soldiers who face difficult situations, and it’s important that people understand what lawyers do for our armed forces, and that’s to enforce and uphold the rule of law,” he explained.
To Pede, the rule of law is important because it provides order and purpose and protects the individuals living within a society. Lawyers, he said, are tasked with ensuring public trust in the rule of law and those who are responsible for it, such as judges, prosecutors and defense counsel. When those legal professionals can be trusted, it is because society as a whole holds them in respect due to their good conduct. He expressed that humility is a vital part of their role as custodians of the rule of law.
The main reason why Pede teaches is that he feels he can offer more than what the law says concretely, but he also has the capacity to apply practical experiences to the practices of law and public policy. He said that many people tend to know about policy in solely academic or theoretical terms, but the application and execution in the real world is not necessarily as well-understood. Because of his experiences as an Army lawyer and, ultimately, the Judge Advocate General of the Army, Pede is able to offer unique insights into the realities of the legal and public spheres.
“I feel an obligation to give back. The country has invested a lot in me over the years, and I think I owe this to the people I live and work around,” he said.
He expressed that the most memorable aspect of teaching has been seeing students become aware of the many different perspectives that they previously had not considered. It comes down to the moment when students discover the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
“Wisdom is converted knowledge. Knowledge is only useful if it converts to wisdom, and that only happens through experience,” Pede explained, “so when you combine knowledge and experience, you get wisdom. Wisdom is learned over time, over the course of life. That’s what students begin to learn as we start to think about what it is we’re trying to learn in class, and especially in public policy.”
This ties directly into the role of higher education in preparing students for the future, which, for Pede, is opening students’ minds to those new perspectives. He said that many of the students whom he encounters begin with a myopic point of view and fail to consider all the stakeholders. He often reminds his students that they will almost always leave out a stakeholder.
“We will inevitably… omit, forget, discount, ignore a potential stakeholder — somebody with equity, somebody who’s got skin in the game. It’s our job in public policy to ensure we haven’t neglected those people,” he said. “What I find is that at the beginning of a conversation, we bring our biases and our personal life experience, which is normal and natural to a discussion of public policy, and we have failed to consider others’ interests, others’ equities.”
However, he explained that teaching students to approach that conversation with the knowledge that a stakeholder will be left out is key to ensuring that they find the missing stakeholders. This is a mind-opening experience that he believes makes students better people because it forces them to shed their biases. To achieve this, Pede employs an open manner of engagement in which he deliberately makes use of the pause in a way that encourages students to educate themselves, especially through practical exercises.
According to Pede, these exercises “are the ideal methodology for students to learn with a professor accentuating the learning process. It magnifies the students’ own responsibility to learn the topic and then explore it through hands-on experience… I think the practical experience of it is just a profoundly more enriching learning experience, so I try to maximize that in my classes.”
When asked what advice he had for undergraduate students, Pede recommended that they not commit too early to a singular area of study. He said that the most important thing in an undergraduate education is student exposure to vast fields of study, and for students, the choice to take advantage of that opportunity to broaden their horizons. He also advocated for public service.
“Public service is a noble, worthwhile pursuit. There are endless opportunities to contribute and give back to our communities… and I believe everybody should commit to public service for at least a period of time in their life,” he said. “I think given the blessings we all enjoy in this country, we all owe it to our country and our fellow citizens to give back in some way. It doesn’t have to be forever, but just a little bit. But that’s kind of my priority: trying to encourage people to pursue public service.”
