Success and Significance

The faculty, staff and trustees of Washington and Jefferson College burst into wild applause as the graduating class rounded the corner and made their way, clad in caps and gowns and ear-to-ear smiles, to their ceremony.

I stood next to the President of the College, Tori Haring-Smith, and watched as she greeted most of the 358 graduates by name. 25% were the first in their family to go to college. One kid stepped out of line to give President Haring-Smith a big hug. “He’s a championship tennis player,” she told me. He had one arm.

“This place is an institutionalization of the American dream,” Ron Pellegrini, class of 1959, said. He had to defer his admission to Washington and Jefferson and spend a year working in the coal mines because both of his parents had been laid off. When he finally got to campus he had to rush through in three years to save money. He has gone on to save lives, performing 15,000 open heart surgeries at the nearby University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. On the side, he is fundraising for a new science center at Washington and Jefferson.

American higher education is a magic escalator of opportunity, the heart of what this country is about. There is no greater honor than being invited to address the recent exponents of that dream – the graduates who are about to embark on the rest of their lives.

My message to the graduates of Washington and Jefferson was simple: Congratulations on your success, may it continue. I challenge you to think about what it means to be significant. Success is about your own achievements. Significance is about what you do for others.

I quoted from Pastoral by William Carlos Williams:

When I was younger
It was plain to me
I must make something of myself
Older now
I walk back streets
Admiring the houses
Of the very poor …

No one
Will believe this
Of vast import to the nation.

But Williams knew exactly how important it was to pay attention to the lives of the poor. He spent his career as a doctor attending to them, and crafting his observations into some of the most important poetry of the 20th century.

I also told the story of Muhammad Yunus. A Muslim from Bangladesh, Yunus came to the United States in the 1960s as a graduate student in Economics, and ultimately earned his PhD from Vanderbilt. He returned to Bangladesh in the early 1970s, and took up the position of Chair of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. It was a sign of great success at a very young age.

At that time, Bangladesh was in the midst of a terrible famine. Yunus watched as people came from the villages into the cities to starve to death. They chanted no slogans, they made no demands, they simply lay down on the sidewalks – old people looking like children, and children like old people – and waited for the last moments of life to pass into the first moments of death.

Yunus began to dread his own Economics lectures. After all, what good were complex economic theories about making the flow of resources more efficient when he was watching the most basic resource, food, miss its most important target, hunger.

Yunus decided that he was going to become a student all over again, and that the poor people of a nearby village, Jobra, were going to be his professors. He wanted to find out why they were starving to death. In the eyes of some of his peers, he was risking the success he had worked so hard for. But Yunus had more important things on his mind.

One of the poor people he interviewed was a woman named Sufiya, 21 years old with three beautiful, hungry children. Every day Sufiya paid an unscrupulous middleman twenty-two cents for bamboo. She spent all day weaving the raw bamboo into elegant bamboo stools, much desired by wealthy people in Bangladesh. She sold the bamboo stool back to the middleman for 24 cents. Her profit of two cents per day was just about enough to feed her family and keep a rickety roof over her head.

If Sufiya could sell the bamboo stools herself, her profit would have quadrupled. That additional money would have allowed her to buy more nutritious food, invest in better shelter, perhaps even have her children educated.

Sufiya was suffering for the absence of twenty-two cents – the cost of purchasing her own bamboo. She didn’t have that most basic of economic tools – access to capital.

Yunus did a survey of the village and discovered forty-two people in the same situation as Sufiya. Forty-two people trapped in a vicious, never-ending cycle of poverty for the lack of twenty-two cents per day.

He fished in his pocket, and for the now-famous sum of $27, he made a loan to forty-two that helped lift them out of poverty.

Something wouldn’t let Yunus sleep that night. He thought of all the villages like Jobra across Bangladesh, across South Asia, across the whole developing world. He thought of all the villagers like Sufiya – talented, hard-working people, suffering for the lack of small amounts of capital.

He thought of the institution whose mission it was to make loans to talented people to help them start businesses, and he wondered why banks were failing to invest in them.

And he had an idea. What if there was a bank which treated poor people like resources worthy of an investment, like producers with the capacity to create value. What if people like Sufiya in villages all over the world had access to capital?

The Grameen Bank now has over 7 million borrowers, and Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

That is making your success significant.

By Eboo Patel  |  May 18, 2008; 9:02 PM ET  | Category:  The Faith Divide Save & Share:                 
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