3. Philanthropy in America is so ambitious that becoming involved in it means thinking about morality and freedom and justice. That's why it makes such an attractive subject for undergraduate education. After Philadelphia and before Columbus I went to Indianapolis for the announcement of the new Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. The Center is made possible by a grant of $4 million from the Lilly Endowment, and joins other new centers at City University here, at Duke, at Case-Western Reserve University, as well as the first of them all, John Simon's Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale. 

To study philanthropy means to study it warts and all. It is time to surface all the critiques of philanthropy that have developed over the centuries. To understand the case for something means to have confronted squarely the case against it. Such confrontation in philanthropy will also mean that its critics will have to elaborate their arguments and defend them. 

There are two opinions about why foundations and corporations aren't more generous in their support of the study of philanthropy. There is growing evidence that that is no longer the case, but I'll mention the opinions, anyway. The first is that it would be unseemly for grant makers to study themselves (as if grant making were the only important element in philanthropy worth studying). The second opinion is that grant makers, especially, don't want to find themselves criticized or second-guessed. Neither opinion should carry weight. 

I believe very strongly that we must study this tradition if we are going to improve it and pass it on. Serious study won't happen unless two other things happen: the first requirement is that scholars in many fields -- in law and medicine and public administration and business as well as in the humanities and social sciences -- must take the study of philanthropy seriously. That won't happen, of course, unless they have financial support to do so, and that is the second condition. 

The study of philanthropy is not simply an academic matter, of course. All of us in this room have been engaged as volunteers or professionals in grant making and fund raising. We think that our experience means that we know something about how the field works. The fact is that practitioners rarely examine their assumptions, just as scholars rarely have personal experience to bring to bear. That is why I hope to organize a Seminar on Philanthropy at the University of Virginia modeled on the seminar at Columbia. That model brings together practitioners from grant making and from nonprofit work, professionals and volunteers and scholars. Developing such a seminar is hard to do, and it was less successful while I was chairman of the seminar on philanthropy at Columbia than I wanted it to be. Despite that, the continuing seminar or some variation on it is the best model for continuing education in philanthropy that I've found yet, and it should be widely replicated. 

4. Next spring I will teach a course in philanthropy in the Program on Political and Social Thought at Virginia. I've had it in mind all the while I've been working on the book I've been trying to write. One of the illustrations I will use is the philanthropic response to the Ethiopian famine, which the Columbia Seminar spent a year-and-a-half talking about. The seminar set out to examine a series of topics like that, drawn from a variety of fields as diverse as the support of the arts and efforts to aid the homeless. My notion is that there is implicit in what we do a kind of science, a domain of knowledge and behavior, parallel to politics and economics, that might be called "philanthropics." It would be the study of the organization, methods, and principles of voluntary action for the public good. During the past few months I have spent much time on the telephone -- as well as waiting in Allegheny Commuter's cattle pen at Pittsburgh airport. Some of the phone conversations have been with the staff at Technoserve. I have served for some years on the board of Technoserve, but during the last couple of years I have been particularly interested in their efforts to tease out and communicate the lessons they have learned from twenty years of community development in Central America and Africa. Technoserve's experience has broad implications, because the lessons they have learned are important to international relief and development everywhere. Our son Joe, who worked ten years in Africa for Catholic Relief Services, would have read Technoserve's new publications with intense interest. He would, being the son of his father, have argued about them and disagreed with them and tried to formulate his own.

It is in the extreme circumstances of relief and development in the poor countries of the world, or in the plight of dropouts and others here in the poorest sections of our cities, that the basic values of charity and philanthropy are made most clear. Such values are often obscured in large, affluent, complex institutions like the great foundations and corporations and universities represented here. It is obvious that a Technoserve has much to learn from the Rockefeller foundations and the Exxons, as well as from the universities. It is not so obvious, but also true, that my colleagues in the foundations and in business, at Hofstra University and C.W. Post College, and at Indiana and Virginia, have much to learn from organizations like Technoserve.

 5. One of my first tasks at the Miller Center is to become involved with the study of science advising. The Center hopes to launch a national commission to advise future administrations about how to make science and technology a part of the thought-processes of the White House. My brief service as a member of the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences involved me with the Science Policy Association. Their breakfast meetings are the most elegant intellectual gatherings I have ever attended in New York -- the present gathering excepted, of course. They bring leading scientists and executives and university and government officials together to talk about important issues of public policy. Those meetings illustrate the final point I want to make this evening about how the philanthropic system works. 

These words seek to reaffirm some beliefs about philanthropy while suggesting at the same time that the discourse we are engaged in is exploratory. We don't know all the questions, much less the answers. Most of our decisions are made in the face of ignorance and uncertainty, and we are much more at the mercy of luck than we like to admit. 

That is not all bad. Luck is what brought me to Virginia, and to Exxon before that, and to those other stops along the way. Luck has had a lot to do with past opportunities, and luck has made possible the good life that I have been privileged to enjoy. It was luck to have been born into a great tradition of philanthropy and public service. It was luck to have been born in the right country. It is like to have met people like my three bearded friends Vartan Gregorian, Bob Gale, and Arnie Shore, and the rest of you.

 Vartan Gregorian is proud of his ethnic heritage, and profoundly informed about it. He is also one of the best Americans I know, sensitive, knowledgeable, deeply committed to democratic values. Bob Gale is one of the most effective people in American higher education, a secret that he doesn't want revealed. Arnie Shore, who succeeds me as head of Exxon Education Foundation, is already widely known and respected as one of the most helpful and considerate people in his field. He is smart, as Vartan and Bob are smart, but the admirable qualities of each of these men go well beyond their intelligence. They are people of imagination, enterprise, and character. From my perspective, the tradition is in good hands.

The principle of serial reciprocity says that children repay their parents by what they give their children. You and I owe our parents a lot. That means we also have a lot to pass on.

I suspect that Mr. Jefferson would be very pleased. Not altogether satisfied, but pleased.