On May 6, 2000. T. Alan Russell was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Science from the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, a classical liberal arts university located in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Principal activities were a Friday evening speech to honor graduates followed by a reception and commencement exercises on Saturday morning. Comments by Dr. Ayau and the two speeches follow.
T. Alan Russell, Dr. Manuel F. Ayau Cordon, Rector Emeritus, Fernando Monterrosa, Rector
Dr. Manuel F. Ayau Cordon, Rector Emeritus, made the following comments proceeding the Honorary Doctorate award.
"The University Francisco Marroquin traditionally honors with the academic degree of Doctor in Social Sciences individuals who have contributed in an exceptional way to the clarification and diffusion of the principles which inspire this university, stated in the expression of its mission:
The teaching and diffusion of the ethical, legal, and economic principles of a society of free and responsible individuals.
Today, we feel honored in incorporating to our honorific cloister [faculty] Mr. T. Alan Russell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, of the educational foundation Liberty Fund, Inc. of Indianapolis, in size the second largest in the classical liberal movement, in the variety and quantity of its programs. Its educational activities, seminars, and colloquia take place all over the world, chiefly among intellectuals and university professors, and to a lesser extent among businessmen and jurists. Moreover, it has a large program of publishing excellent books.
Previously, Mr. T. Alan Russell had a distinguished professional career. Graduated in Business Administration in the University of Missouri, he started with the firm Arthur Andersen in the field of public service firms, mergers and acquisitions, and securities. Eight years afterwards, he was recruited by the founder of Liberty Fund, Mr. Pierre F. Goodrich, President and main stockholder of Indiana Telephone Corporation, to occupy the position of Controller and Vice President. Later, he became President of Illinois Cereal Mills, Inc., a cereal processor, from which he retired six years ago.
From that date, he became full-time Chief Executive of Liberty Fund, Inc. where he had participated as a member of the Board of Directors since 1980 by invitation of the founder.
Because of his vast experience in business life and his eagerness for studying, he combines practical and academic knowledge, a combination that coincides with the qualities we, at Francisco Marroquin, value in our own directors. He is, above all, a strict and faithful executor of the intentions of the founder of the institution he leads, an obligation which he never ceases to remind to us, his fellow members in the Board of Directors.
Several members of our cloister [faculty] frequently participate in the activities of Liberty Fund, a fact that, in turn, results in better training for our students, encouraging the academic relationships between academics from this University and from all over the world. This experience has given us the opportunity to know and admire the human and professional qualities of T. Alan Russell in the dynamic and efficacious work of defending liberty with responsibility.
In the community where he lives, he has distinguished himself by his civic contributions, having been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Hospital & Medical Foundation of Paris, Illinois, and a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church. Furthermore, he is a perfectionist. He has distinguished himself in the art of photography, is an accomplished carpenter, and a great "aficionado," with Christie his wife, of genealogical investigations.
As it is generally fitting to notable persons, T. Alan Russell is a simple man, direct and with a sense of humor. His leadership comes from his disposition and skill to delegate and to support good ideas, even those which are not his own. That attitude of permanent vigilance that I have already cited as a condition for the preservation of individual liberty requires of alert guardians and efficacious executives whom, like the person we honor today, contribute to build the roads on which the knowledge, ideas, and the most fruitful reflections about the liberty with responsibility of human beings must travel.
This, no more and no less, is the task that T. Alan Russell took up for himself having discharged it straightway and with a sense of duty, for what those of us who love liberty, give him thanks.
Welcome to our honorary cloister [faculty], Dr. T. Alan Russell."
SPEECH BY T. ALAN RUSSELL TO HONOR GRADUATES ON FRIDAY EVENING:
Buenas noches – I am honored to be here tonight with you distinguished graduates and your families. Tonight and tomorrow are very special occasions for me. I completed my college class work in the middle of the year and later was unable to attend my commencement exercises — something I have always regretted. So this is my first commencement exercise.
My being here began many years ago when I interviewed for a position with a man I will be telling you more about later. When I found out there had been 300 resumes and they had interviewed 11 other candidates, I asked him why he hired me, he said because there was "hope". I have never been sure what he meant by that, whether he was remarking on my potential or commenting on my past. I don’t know if this is what he hoped for me, but I am here in large measure as a consequence of that hope that led him to first hire me. I am a child of hope.
When one reaches a certain age, he must be forgiven if he thinks he has some wisdom to pass on to those who are younger than he is, particularly those who are beginning where he began thirty five years ago. He knows the young are restless, particularly people as young as you are, and that they want to get on with their lives, to test the waters for themselves. This is the moment they have been waiting for, and the rituals of graduation, including this brief speech, are holding them back. But he wants them to be patient just a little while longer and listen to see if he does indeed have anything to say to them. Experience, after all, is the mother of all knowledge, and a man who has lived his life well for as long as I have ought to have something to say that you might want to hear. He just might be able to tell you what it means to live a meaningful life. I want to tell you something of what I have learned by working for and maintaining the legacy of one remarkable man. But more about him later.
All of us in the West are in varying degrees custodians of a legacy of liberty. We have only to see a movie like Private Ryan or to hear President Reagan’s commemorative speech to the reunion of those who climbed the cliffs at Normandy Beach to know how deep our debt is to those who have heroically protected and been true to that legacy. Our obligation is a moral one, when we realize how much we enjoy what was earned and defended by others. Like Private Ryan, we have questions to ask in regard to that legacy" "Have I been a good man? Have I lived a good life?" If we are responsible heirs, we will preserve and pass on what has been given to us, adding to it as best we can, acknowledging always that it is our responsibility. Remember the words of Don Quijote to Sancho Panza: "Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts Heaven has bestowed upon man. No treasures the earth contains or the sea conceals can be compared to it. For liberty, as for honour, one can rightfully risk one's life."
The legacy comes not just from those who have fought for us in wars, of course. We at Liberty Fund are in the process of creating an Intellectual Portraits series in which we videotape interviews with people who have been influential servants in the cause of liberty. They have in their own ways been heroes to whom we owe much for the maintenance and nurturing of our liberty. During a time when liberty was threatened on many fronts and in many different ways, they have kept alive in our intellectual, political, religious, and social heritage a knowledge of what it means to live as a free people. We are video taping them because we know that we have, as well as a heritage of heroic action, a heritage of great books and institutions that survey and articulate in imaginative and philosophical ways the meaning of liberty. We want to preserve insofar as we can what these people thought and who these people were in the cause of liberty. Among those important individuals is Rector Emeritus Dr. Manuel F. Ayau, a man I have admired since the early 1970's.
We do this in compliance with the wishes of the founder of Liberty Fund, Pierre F. Goodrich. Pierre was very personable and demanding but was also fair in his dealings with those who worked for him.
To understand Pierre Goodrich, you have to realize that above all things he wanted to live as a free and responsible man among other free and responsible men. Liberty and responsibility were for him the essential elements of our humanity and the dignity we can claim as human beings. They were for him two sides of the same coin. Without liberty there can be no responsibility and without responsibility, liberty can have no dignity. This liberty and responsibility he knew were the basis of true friendship, and this true friendship was the basis of a good society, a society in which men are bound together by mutual amity, not fear, a society where power is limited to the maintenance of the conditions of freedom. He was a business man who loved the idea of free markets because he knew that in the free interactions of the market men could find mutually beneficial ways of interacting, of being friends while seeming to compete. He knew that government interventions into the workings of the market inevitably meant one person or group of persons finding the power to take advantage of another person or group of persons.
He lived in a time when the ideals of liberty he had learned to cherish were in jeopardy, both from forces abroad and from often well-meaning but soft headed and ignorant people in his homeland. Power, he knew, was the danger. He was forever quoting Lord Acton— "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely". He knew that there were some who want power for the pleasure it gives them in dominating other men. Those who love power this way are corrupt from the very beginning and are the most easily identified enemies of freedom. They are proud, invidious creatures who derive pleasure from their supposed superiority to others. The exercise of power thrills them for it affirms their own prideful sense of themselves. Only those who are cowardly and those who empathetically aspire to the same power they have will not resist them. History gives us many examples of such men, and classical republicanism celebrates their overthrow. It was against them that the rescuers of Private Ryan and the men who scaled the cliffs at Normandy fought. Opposition to that kind of lust for power is what the Cold War was largely about. Its presence in the world is why men need armies and police, why they must have laws that define and protect human liberties.
But Pierre Goodrich recognized another face of power, for there is another kind of man—a man with a vision, a man who knows how things ought to be and would be if only he and men like him had the power. Such men are harder to castigate, for they seem to be high minded in their ambitions. They feel for the suffering and they resent injustice. Because they think they could undo such things, the lure of power is great for them. They want to do good things, to be servants of the people, so the rhetoric runs. They want the power to do good, and it always corrupts them, even the noblest in the beginning if not checked. These people, most notably, do not like the liberty of the market, for it relieves people of their power and leaves them free to develop relationships based on mutual benefits rather than the exploitation of others. They say they want to do good, but what they really want is the power to do good, to define the relationships between men in ways that correspond to their sense of how things should be. The market lets people find ways to do things for themselves, to achieve the dignity of being responsible for themselves.
It was this kind of potential tyranny that Pierre Goodrich feared, the tyranny of the well-intending, of the self-deceived who in turn become deceivers of other men. They were self-deceived, he believed, because they did not reckon with the fallibility of men. Such idealists assume a perfection for themselves that men simply do not have. No matter how noble the vision, no matter how high its aspiration, its implementation is through the means of fallible men. They succeed in the world because they play on the fears we all have of the unknown, on our desire for some kind of absolute security from the trials of the world. They try to build a world on mutual dependence, not realizing that mutual dependence depends first on mutual respect, and that mutual respect requires the conditions of liberty and responsibility.
The real danger they pose is that in time the power they exercise turns into the power of the more thuggish kind I just described. Their Utopian vision tends to make them feel justified in imposing it on society, whether society wants it or not. They feel that the superiority of their vision authorizes them to use power as it suits their ends. If they do not become thugs themselves, they find that they need thugs to accomplish their ends, and they introduce the thugs into the order as necessary instruments of change. The trouble with thugs is that they are not satisfied to be merely tools; they want power for themselves, and once they have it, they will not hand it over readily.
What I am describing, of course, has been the unhappy history of much of our world. Time after time we have seen the well meaning reformer become the despot. Led to that by the self-deception that fails to take into account the imperfection of man.
Traditionally we have looked to the educational system and the social institutions of our society to sustain our knowledge of such truths. We have looked to the authority of tradition itself, tradition as it is the collective wisdom of a people’s experience made substantial in the way people feel about their world and their place in it. But the Enlightenment has changed all that, and some people look not so much to tradition as to the power of the human intellect to design things anew. Not historical awareness as it embodies at once the sum of man’s idealistic vision of liberty and responsibility and his knowledge of man’s imperfectability, but Utopian vision has become for many the basis on which we attempt to organize society.
Because he was deeply aware of this modern tendency to substitute Utopianism for historical understanding, Pierre Goodrich complemented his "libertarian" belief in the value of markets with support for what has been called the "Great Books" tradition. Like the American founding father James Madison he knew that learning and liberty are mutually dependent on each other, that the one feeds and sustains the other. Madison wrote: "What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for mutual and sure support."
So it was that Pierre Goodrich created Liberty Fund, Inc.: "… to use this Fund to the end that some hopeful contribution may be made to the preservation, restoration, and development of individual liberty through investigation, research, and educational activity." He knew, too, that the scope of higher education had to be increased. Traditional education institutions are all too often instruments of the State and operate in ways that tend to perpetuate statism. If my recollection is correct, Pierre Goodrich encouraged Dr. Ayau when he started this university. At Liberty Fund events you will often hear one of our representatives state that the Mission of the Fund is "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals." That should sound familiar to you as the mission of "Universidad Francisco Marroquín is to teach and disseminate the ethical, legal and economic principles of a society of free and responsible persons."
The line between some of our Ivy League universities and the federal government, for example, is very thinly drawn. Also, traditional institutions tend to limit their influence to the college age student, ignoring the fact that it is the working adult, the entrepreneur, who carries the burden of maintaining a society of free and responsible human beings. Pierre Goodrich would have all men be as he was, a man whose learning never ceased, a man who attempted to generate a conversation about liberty with all whom he met. He believed in a life time of learning. He created Liberty Fund as an activity that draws the best mature minds to it to engage in this life time of learning through reading the books it publishes and attending the colloquia it supports. I see some of those participants here tonight. Now we have a presence on the World Wide Web –- www.Libertyfund.org — where you will find an introduction to the Goodrich Seminar Room in the Wabash College library. There you will find an outline of books that he would have constitute your reading in your defense of the legacy of liberty.
And he left me the legacy as the Chairman of the Liberty Fund to carry on that belief by coming here today to invite you to become a regular visitor to our site and to share with us the joy of —
Making some hopeful contribution "to the preservation, restoration, and development of individual liberty through investigation, research, and educational activity."
You may have graduated, but your education is not over yet.
COMMENCEMENT SPEECH ON SATURDAY MORNING:
Good morning to the Board of Trustees, Board of Directors, faculty, and graduating seniors. I am pleased and honored to be here with you graduates today and your families. Without your families you wouldn’t be here and neither would I. We are either the last class to receive degrees in the old millennium or the first class in the new millennium, depending on whose argument you listen to. What is important is that we are here today.
For the last thirty five years I have been a business man. Most of you will be entering the business world in some fashion. The mission of Universidad Francisco Marroquín is to teach and disseminate the ethical, legal and economic principles of a society of free and responsible persons. It is my belief that the business man or woman has the responsibility to see that our society stays free and that we act in responsible ways.
Since all of you have had a class or two in economics, I am sure you discussed Adam Smith’s "invisible hand". Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is among the 100 books of the Millennium that you will find in the Mises Library. As you go out into the business world, let me refresh your memory by quoting Smith: "and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."
As a business woman or man, you should learn to maximize your comparative advantage, your competitive advantage and pursue your own self interest. Self interest is not selfishness — it requires a strict observance of the law and the highest standard of moral integrity and responsibility. Self interest is where the buyer and the seller both come out ahead on the transaction. The business man who is selfish will loose his customers. It is my experience that personal development can only be done by building on the foundation of knowledge you have learned about the ethical, legal and economic principles of a society of free and responsible persons here at Francisco Marroquin. Remember the words of Don Quixote who is also a part of the 100 books of the Millennium featured at the Mises Library: "the end object of learning .... I am speaking of the humanities, whose aim is to maintain impartial justice, to give every man his rights, to make good laws, and to see that they are kept."
Education is a life long pursuit. You will need to balance this with your family life and with your work life. By continuing to apply yourself as you have demonstrated in meeting the requirements for the degree you are receiving today, you will be richly rewarded. Congratulations.