Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Unlike the rest of the book, where the voices of the two authors mix as one, in this preface we each contribute separately. This allows us to give a sense of how we each came to this book from our own perspective, background , and biases. From Robert L. Payton I’ve been writing professionally—that is, for publication—for more than fifty years. The book that follows focuses on philanthropy, one of the persistent themes that I’ve explored in that writing. A second fact of my professional life is that I’ve been a practitioner as well as a student and teacher of philanthropy. In my old age I’ve reflected on “experience” in every aspect of my life; I put a high value on experience as a test of my ideas and values. What I write about philanthropy is tested against my own personal experience as a practitioner of philanthropy and in light of the experience of others: employers, colleagues, students, volunteers, and my wife, who practices what I preach and tells me when practice and preaching conflict. In addition to experience, my way of looking at philanthropy has been profoundly influenced by another fact of my professional life: I have spent several decades in colleges and universities, as administrator, editor, speechwriter , fund-raiser, teacher, and “scholar”—that is, lifelong student, not only of philanthropy but of many other things, with special interest in and emphasis on the humanities and liberal arts. Some years ago I discovered the idea of “the between,” where the gods reach down to touch humanity and humanity reaches upward to touch divinity. “The gods” is a metaphor for knowledge; “humanity” is a claim of special status in human affairs for the search for truth, that search being the best of what makes us human. Or so it seems to me. When I was younger there were periods when I thought a particular approach to knowledge was superior to others. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I once had that view of what were called the behavioral sciences. As a manager I studied management and organi- zational behavior until I concluded that too much of that science was shallow and manipulative. I found that I continually returned to my academic experience at the University of Chicago, where I was ostensibly a student of history but—in good Chicago fashion—explored ancient philosophy and eastern religion and the medieval universities and literature, and other things, with the help of my neighbor across the hall who was studying Orwell and the “tenminute hate,” and with the help of the neighbor who lived immediately below us who was studying educational administration, and with the other neighbor downstairs and across the hall who was still traumatized by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines and didn’t know what to study to cope with that. Most of us living in graduate student housing at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s were veterans of World War II. I’ve written elsewhere about my military experience. (That word experience again.) I mention it because I volunteered rather than wait to be drafted, I volunteered to go in the Army (rather than, say, the Coast Guard or the Signal Corps, which were thought to be safer), I volunteered for the infantry, and I volunteered to become a paratrooper. When I reached the Philippines I volunteered to join the Eleventh Airborne Division, which meant that I saw combat, albeit nothing to do more than write home about. When the war ended, I spent a year in “occupation duty” in Japan, seeing an “alien” culture up close for the first time. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was my military service that transformed my life by making me eligible for the GI Bill. As a beneficiary of the GI Bill (which, along with the civil rights movement, defined modern America), I was eligible for a college education. Almost all of us were first-generation college students, many of us (including me) having never thought of going to college at all until the government told us it would pay for it in appreciation of our military service (and as an investment in the nation’s economic future). We were eager, hard-working, enthusiastic students and several years older, on average, than the typical college generation . Between my military service and my academic experience at Chicago, I was editor of a...