May 7, 2011 Welcome to this farewell get together from the Johnson School. Two years ago I welcomed you at the Lab of O, commenting on the impressive range of backgrounds your class brought with you. I said I hoped the job market improved by the time you graduated. Apparently for you it has. All of you have jobs compared to 72 percent for the school as a whole.
My father was in the top 140 of the Forbes 400 when he died at the age of 84. His entrepreneurial success provided the funding for your Fellowships. Because of them you will reenter your new careers pretty much debt free, and will be joining the 375 Johnson School Park Fellows now out in the field. You may not know this, but our Triad Foundation also supports Park Fellowships at the graduate level at The University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Chapel Hill, so there are now over 750 Roy H. Park Fellows spread around the globe.
My father was the symbol of the success that can be achieved in a free economy, but if he were starting out today, I’m not sure these Fellowships could ever have existed. After he put himself through college in the middle of the Great Depression, he created his own opportunities, and his hard work and entrepreneurship in a free enterprise society allowed him to accumulate wealth.
Without the ability for an individual to accumulate wealth, there would be few private or family foundations, no venture capital funds, no entrepreneurship angels, and a diminished amount of money available for investment or for any charitable contributions at all. I hope, as you take your place in higher tax brackets through hard work and entrepreneurship, that your ability to accumulate wealth will still remain intact.
Steve Forbes, a friend of mine, whose father, Malcolm, was a friend of my father’s, published in Forbes magazine last year an anecdote passed along to him by the former head of Continental Telephone. It said, “Some years ago Herman Kahn told me of the rabbi who was present at the creation. After the sixth day, when the Lord was resting, he looked at his handiwork, and turned to the rabbi and asked, ‘Well, Rabbi, what do you think? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?’ The rabbi hesitated, frowned deeply, shook his head and clucked his tongue and finally said to the Lord, ‘Well, I’m optimistic.’ And the Lord, in surprise, said, ‘Well, if you’re optimistic, why are you frowning?’ And the rabbi said, ‘I’m frowning because I believe my optimism is unjustified.’” But my faith and the faith of the Johnson School in you is not unjustified, and it would seem the past two years have resulted in fresh and greater opportunities for all of you. As I said earlier, I hope it allows you to accumulate and keep your wealth. Because, as Winston Churchill said, “We make a living by what we get.... we make a life by what we give.” So don’t forget to give back to the school that made it all possible for you to be whatever you want to be.
Now let’s hear from each of you about the career paths you have chosen.
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