As Jack Benny once said, "I don't deserve this honor, but then I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either." 

This gathering is representative of the field of philanthropy in its diversity of goals, its complexity of organization, and its wealth of talent. It should also be a reminder that we do not move from one side of the desk to the other when we go from making grants to applying for them. The symbolic piece of furniture should not be a desk but a table with many sides, with most of us occupying different chairs at different times. There are places at the table for business and government as well as for the third sector; places for volunteers and trustees and professionals and other paid employees; places for public agencies, for for-profit and for nonprofit corporations --and for the expanding number of organizations that are a mixture of all three. 

I have looked over the list of those who accepted the invitation to be here tonight. Some of us have eaten at every place at the table; all of us have even waited on the table at one time or another. We share a great many experiences as part of our involvement with voluntary action for the public good. 

The institutions and organizations represented here include some that I have been most closely associated with. There is nothing particularly special about my list that would make it better than anyone else's here. This audience includes more than 35 grant making organizations and a slightly smaller number of nonprofit organizations (and that is unusual). It reflects education and philanthropy, of course, but also minorities, medicine and health, human rights and dropout prevention, relief and development, scholarship in the humanities and research in science, religion and the arts and law. In the past few weeks I have participated in gatherings of similar diversity and influence in Columbus, Ohio, Charlottesville, Virginia, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. (In the process I've also learned that US Air has set out to become the Long Island Railroad of the airline industry.) 

I also looked at what part of the philanthropic tradition each of you represents and then held up my own list of involvements alongside that. Collectively, I asked myself, what have we been up to? 

The reason I ask that question, as some of you know, is because I have in recent years been preoccupied with the receding future. (As someone younger than I am once said, "the future is much like the present, only longer.") Although ours is the first generation in the history of the world whose greatest anxiety is living too long, my interest is focused on the future of those who are now children and young people. I approach the subject in very personal terms. I often look at the future not in abstract and disinterested terms but in terms of our son David and his friend Carleen; in terms of our grandson Joey and his mother Heidi; and in terms of the memory of our sons Joe and Matt. These people personify for me both the great promise and the great vulnerability of life, its exciting prospects and its real risks. 

In returning to academic life, I have also become directly involved with the education of other young people. Now I will also begin to measure the future in terms of the needs of students such as those in the undergraduate honors program in Political and Social Thought. Those are the kinds of people' I hope, who will later come to the Miller Center of Public Affairs as scholars and public servants to participate in the study of the presidency. 

Now that I have joined Mr. Jefferson's university, I turn to him more often than before for advice and for moral as well as political insight. One of the wonderful things about living in Charlottesville is the sense of history everywhere: government and presidents and leadership and public philosophy beautify the intellectual landscape as the dogwood adorns the natural one. The other day, as Polly and I were on our way to a gathering on campus, I noticed this quotation on the base of a statue of Jefferson: 

I am closing the last scene of my life by fashioning an establishment for the instruction of those who come after us. I hope that its influence on their virtue, freedom, fame, and happiness will be salutary and permanent. 

Most of us are not involved as Jefferson was in the founding of new institutions, but instead in efforts to sustain them and improve them. Even so, most of us have also been involved in the creation of new organizations and new causes, as well as in reforming old organizations and renewing old causes. Each of the people here represents a cluster of them. In that sense, each of us acts as agent for a set of social values and priorities, a point of view, a way of deciding and acting in the world. We're all quite busy at it, and we are all conscious that we don't always succeed. But most of us probably agree -- albeit somewhat ruefully -- with what Bernard Shaw once wrote: "A life spent making mistakes is more useful than a life spent doing nothing." 

If we force ourselves to think of what we're doing in terms of its influence on the virtue, freedom, fame, and happiness of those who come after us, what is it that we would want to say to them? Jefferson and others made it possible for us to live in a free and open and democratic society, and I argue that that is the core of what we should be trying to preserve. I also believe that the philanthropic tradition -- voluntary action for the public good -- is essential to our survival as a free and open and democratic society. Only if those values survive, I believe, will the children and young people of the future have the same opportunity that we have had to shape their lives, to accept and modify and enrich and pass on the values they think most worth preserving. 

That slogan sounds good, of course, but giving substance to it is very difficult. With Harold Macmillan I believe that one of the central purposes of an education is to know when someone is talking rot -- even when that someone is oneself. Whenever I try to wax eloquent, my conscience sends back a faintly skeptical echo, forcing me to hold the fuzzy images closer to the heat of reality to see whether they sharpen or simply melt away. If it is possible to wax eloquent it is also possible to wane eloquent. And so what I want to do is to talk about the future in terms of some of the specific things I have been working on and trying to write about, to see whether I'm headed in the right direction. Mine is a transition from one set of roles to another, with much overlap. (If you think of changing career in terms of the metaphor of embarking on a voyage, I'm still on the dock.) I'm trying to identify what is relevant from my past that might be relevant to my future. I'll mention five things.