On Monday at the Helen Bader Foundation, students, faculty and community members tried to put into words what Dr. John Palmer Smith has meant. As NLSA's advisor during its conception,
JPS went above and beyond the call of duty inspiring us all. I know many of you were unable to attend due to prior commitments, so please take a moment to read his remarks from that evening.
Thanks to those who came today and to all those, here today or not, who have worked so hard and well over the past decade and helped make the Helen Bader Institute for Nonprofit Management the success I believe it has clearly become.
There are many specific categories of those I should thank, including representatives of all the key stakeholder groups of the Helen Bader Institute. A partial list of these important stakeholders includes:
The past and present members of HBI’s Leadership Council,
HBI’s outstanding staff members: Shelly Schnupp, Lisa Peterson, and Barb Duffy,
Doug Ihrke and all the members of HBI’s distinguished and dedicated program faculty
Our outstanding students and alumni (about whom I will have a bit more to say shortly),
The large number of Milwaukee-area nonprofit leaders who stepped up in so many ways to help make HBI the success it has become,
And the many donors, both those outside as well as those inside the university, who have provided the financial and many other valuable forms of support that propelled the launch and growth of HBI over the past decade.
I feel compelled here to offer my special thanks to Dan Bader and to Robyn Maryl, here at the Helen Bader Foundation, and to Sarah Dean of the Faye McBeath Foundation and to Jane Moore of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, for their inspiring vision and steadfast support--both when things were going well and when there were special challenges to overcome.
I know there are many others who deserve thanks, but in the time I have left, I would like to turn my attention to some other “reflections.”
But first, just a few reassuring words for any of you who might have been worried about how I might adjust to “retirement.” For me, if not for everyone, retirement from full-time employment has already been a very good thing.
By the time I returned to Cleveland just before Christmas with final papers from my fall semester classes still to be graded, my friend and companion, Valerie Raines, who is with me here today, had compiled a spreadsheet filled with events and venues to “re-introduce” me to Cleveland.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, . . .” (Click on the poem to read it in larger font.)
I have followed an “accidental,” career path. I don’t mean “accidental” in the sense that it “just happened to me,” that I did not choose one road to follow instead of another when presented with a choice—in fact when presented with a whole series of such choices over the years. I mean that this career path was “accidental” in the sense that I could not have known at the beginning how it would turn out. In fact, it is difficult to know when it even began, when I first encountered “two roads” diverging. But here is the thing. After a very long way down that road, and having recently decided to choose an “exit ramp” that has already led to some fascinating new choices of roads to follow, I am very happy to report that this “accidental” career that I have pursued over the past 40 years or so has proven to be a very satisfying and gratifying one.
I have characterized the last 25 years of this career as being that of an “academic entrepreneur” and an educator—pre-ceded by 15 years as a nonprofit practitioner. As an “academic entrepreneur,” I have taken on both the opportunities and challenges of helping to establish, or further develop, nonprofit academic centers and programs in three different universities: in New York City, in Cleveland, and here in Milwaukee. As an “educator,” I have had the enormously gratifying opportunity of teaching graduate students—now more than 1,200 over the past 25 years, in those three and two other universities—people who care deeply about the missions of nonprofit organizations and who have demonstrated again and again their determination to improve their knowledge and skills as nonprofit managers and leaders and to increase the effectiveness of the nonprofit organizations they serve.
In retrospect, I might have chosen a more “traditional” career path than that of “academic entrepreneur”—you know, one of the simpler, more familiar career paths in the law, medicine, science, engineering, business or government. But no, with a broad array of interests and with one step leading to another, I wound up pursuing this career—not one of those others.
At the time I was finishing up my graduate studies in the early 1980s, the related fields of nonprofit and philanthropic studies and nonprofit management and leadership education had scarcely begun and none of the few people who by then had begun to explore their possibilities could see clearly where those roads might lead. I certainly could not. In fact, these fields of “nonprofit-focused” research and education have matured into full-fledged academic disciplines over the past 30 years. But there was no assurance in the early 1980s that these roads would lead to anything at all of great value. In fact, these fields of research and education “writ large” are now quite robust, even though, paradoxically, individual nonprofit scholars and university-based, nonprofit academic centers and programs still face significant challenges within their academic disciplines and institutional structures to gain and maintain credibility for what they now do so frequently and so well.
In many ways, this paradox merely reflects the paradox of the larger nonprofit sector. By almost every credible measure (the total number of nonprofit organizations, their total annual revenues and expenses, their total assets, and their growing influence in almost every realm of our social, economic, and political lives), the nonprofit sector as a whole has experienced incredible rates of growth in the United States and around the world over the past century--especially the last half century. In fact, nonprofit scholar Lester Salamon has described this phenomenon as a “global associational revolution.” However, this rapid and sustained growth of the nonprofit sector as a whole has always been, and continues to be, coupled with the continuing fragility of individual nonprofit organizations. At any given time, any given nonprofit organization may or may not be able to respond adequately to both the many opportunities and the challenges they constantly confront. This is true with respect to the fluctuations—both up and down--in the market demand for their mission-related and non-mission-related goods and services. It is also true with regard to the changes in government policy, funding levels, and funding mechanisms they frequently confront. And it is true with respect to frequent changes in the interests, priorities, and capacity of their philanthropic supporters. Or, perhaps (despite the best efforts of Pat Wyzbinski and BoardStar), these individual nonprofit organizations may simply be unable to repair a serious deficiency in the performance by their board of directors. Or they may be unable to survive their next executive leadership transition.
Nevertheless, I believe there is much reason for long-term optimism, both with respect to the nonprofit sector as a whole and with respect to the fields of nonprofit-focused education and research. Despite the undoubted difficulties for many nonprofit organizations caused by the hopefully soon to be late, “Great Recession,” I am very optimistic that the long-term growth in the vitality and importance of the nonprofit sector will soon be restored.
What is the basis for my optimism? Well, we don’t have time for the full story that I lay out in class with my graduate students, but a short and very over-simplified version of “three failures” theory—one of the leading economic theories of why nonprofit organizations exist in the first place and why they play the roles they do—suggests the following:
The first of the “three failures” in this theory is that “markets fail.” Specifically, “market failure” predicts that for-profit business enterprises—will in the future as they have in the past--sometimes “fail” to provide the full range of goods and services that at least some people need or want. The second of the three failures in this theory predicts that governments will in the future as they have in the past sometimes, “fail” to correct for these market failures through the adoption of public policies and regulatory regimes. Even when governments are able to adopt policies that may partially correct for market failures, taxpayer resistance may limit government’s ability to raise the revenues necessary to fully implement these policies.
In these all-too-frequent instances of market and government failures, the theory predicts that nonprofit organizations will continue to arise in the future, as they have in the past, to provide the goods and services that at least some people want or need. Now, as we know, nonprofit organizations may also sometimes fail to provide services to everyone who needs or wants such services—the third failure in three failures theory. But these “nonprofit failures,” which arise from “philanthropic insufficiency” and a variety of other causes, have not and, in my view, will not prevent nonprofit organizations from continuing to arise to pursue their nonprofit missions in the first place. And very often—as we have seen with the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector in America over the past 100 years—nonprofit organizations are quite successful in the pursuit of their missions because they have significant competitive advantages over for-profit business enterprises and government entities in providing the goods and services that at least some people want and need and cannot obtain because of market and government failures.
This ‘three failures” theory is not the only good explanation of why the nonprofit sector has grown so rapidly in America and around the world over the last 100 years, nor is it the only reason for my optimism that the nonprofit sector will survive the “Great Recession,” as it has survived many other economic downturns, and will resume its long-term growth.
I am also optimistic because I see no overall lessening of the motivations that have led many people to become engaged in the nonprofit sector--to volunteer, to provide financial support, or to pursue their professional careers in nonprofit organizations—and to do these things precisely because they are so committed to the missions these organizations were founded to pursue. And if they can’t find a nonprofit organization with the mission they care about, they will establish a new nonprofit organization that does.
In large part, this component of my optimism is fueled by my experience of working with such people for a very long time now. This has been particularly evident to me in the graduate courses in nonprofit management and leadership that I have been privileged to teach over the past 25 years. I can’t tell you how many times I have simply been astounded at the level of commitment these people bring to the missions of nonprofit organizations—as well as by their determination to increase the knowledge and skills they believe they will need to ensure that those missions will be accomplished. I can assure you that there has been no lessening of these motivations and levels of commitment over the past 25 years. They were every bit as much in evidence in the 40 graduate students I taught here at UW-Milwaukee last fall semester as they have been among the now more than 1,200 graduate students I have been privileged to teach at any earlier time during the past 25 years..
This reference to the graduate students I have worked with prompts me to say a bit more about my optimism regarding the future of the still relatively new fields of nonprofit-focused education and research.
Remember, these fields did not exist in America, or anywhere else, just 35 short years ago. In 1975, there were literally no university-based nonprofit academic centers conducting or supporting scholarly research in nonprofit and philanthropic studies. And there were no graduate or undergraduate educational programs that offered a curriculum of courses designed to prepare people to pursue careers as nonprofit managers and leaders. Today, there are more than 500 universities in the United States and many others around the world where serious nonprofit and philanthropic research is being done by scholars from an ever-growing array of academic disciplines. And many more universities now are offering at least some “nonprofit-focused” coursework in nonprofit management and leadership and closely-related fields. Since the early 1980’s, as these educational programs have spread rapidly throughout the United States and beyond, steadily increasing numbers of students have enrolled in these programs and now are pursuing careers in nonprofit sector organizations. There are no good data tracking the growth in the numbers of such students and alumni, but my own rough estimate is that more than 100,000 students have enrolled in these educational programs since the first of them were founded in the early 1980s.
Yes, this remarkable growth in the fields of nonprofit-focused education and research has no doubt also been slowed to some extent by the “Great Recession.” Both state government budget deficits and the changing priorities and reduced philanthropic capacity of the extramural supporters of these initiatives in both public and private universities have at least temporarily reduced the flow of financial and other resources needed to sustain that growth. However, if my earlier-expressed optimism regarding the resumption of growth in the larger nonprofit sector is justified, then I have little doubt that nonprofit-focused research and education will continue to play a crucial role in addressing the management and leadership needs of nonprofit sector organizations, or that the financial and intellectual resources that will be needed to support the growth of these nonprofit academic centers and programs will, somehow, be found.
I want to close these “reflections” with a few, more explicit references to this familiar poem—“The Road Not Taken,” by the great American poet, Robert Frost. Two of the true highlights of my undergraduate years at Dartmouth College were readings of this and others of his poems by Robert Frost himself, not long before he died in 1963. In his youth, Robert Frost had attended Dartmouth College for one year, but then dropped out, without any obvious ill effects on his future career as a poet. But he lived for much of the latter part of his life in Vermont, not far from Dartmouth, and he often returned to campus to read his poetry. As with many things that have “accidentally”--even “fortuitously”--occurred in my life and career, I was fortunate to be there on two of those occasions.
There are two main interpretations of this poem.
A.The conventional interpretation—the one that most people associate with this poem—focuses on the last three lines of the final stanza:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
So widespread is this “conventional” interpretation that many people—myself recently included--mis-remember the title of the poem as “The Road Less Traveled By” instead of “The Road Not Taken.”
This interpretation claims that in choosing the “road less traveled by,” the speaker in the poem is celebrating, if not also promoting, individualism and non-conformity. As literary critic Linda Sue Grimes has noted:
“The poem has been and continues to be used as an inspirational poem, one that to the undiscerning eye seems to be encouraging self-reliance, not following where others have led.”
Now I believe that it is possible that the career choices that I made—particularly those that resulted in my becoming an “academic entrepreneur” in “nonprofit-focused” education and research--could be described as being “unusual” even if they could not fully be considered as heroic acts of “individualism and self-reliance.”
B.However, Grimes and other literary critics point to a second, less wide-spread and more “ironic,” interpretation of “The Road Not Taken,” noting that Robert Frost himself said of the poem “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.”
These critics say that a more careful reading of the poem supports the view that the poem does not moralize about choice, it simply says that choice is inevitable, but you never know what your choice will mean until you have lived it.
Support for this view comes from an understanding of the time frame of the poem—specifically the point of time at which the speaker of the poem is, in fact, speaking—and from understanding that two words in the final stanza—the word “difference” and the word “sigh” can each have two possible meanings.
Note that the speaker of the poem is speaking after he has made the choice to take one of the two diverging roads, but apparently not long afterwards, as can be seen in the first two lines of the final stanza:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:”
Understanding that the speaker of the poem is referring to a point of time “ages and ages hence” means that he cannot know how his choice of one road instead of the other will affect his future because he has not yet completed the journey.
Those who interpret the poem in the conventional way understand the meaning of the word “difference” in the final line of the stanza to be a positive difference. But until he has completed the journey, it is not possible for the speaker of the poem to know whether his choice of the road “less traveled” will result in a “difference” that is positive or not.
Similarly, there are two possible meanings to the word “sigh” in the final stanza. There can be a “sigh of relief” (that the road chosen turned out to be a good one) or a “sigh of regret” that “the road not taken” would somehow have proven to have been a better choice.
Again, the speaker of the poem himself does not even know the nature of that sigh, because that sigh, and his evaluation of the difference his choice will make, are still in the future.
So what should I make of this more “ironic” interpretation of Frost’s beloved, but “tricky” poem? How should I think about my career choices now? Should I feel somehow less satisfied because the choice of the road I have traveled was not so much an act of individualism and self-reliance as it was simply an “accidental” choice that would affect my own future, and the futures of many others, in ways that I could not predict at the time I chose it?
Well no, it shouldn’t because unlike the speaker of the poem, I can now report to you from the future, having mostly completed the journey along the road I chose from the “two that diverged in a yellow wood.” I can report to you, as I said at the beginning or these remarks, that the career I “accidentally” wound up pursuing has turned out to be an enormously satisfying one, that the “sigh” with which I am telling you the story of my journey is a “sigh of relief”--not a “sigh of regret for “the road not taken.” And I can report to you that the “difference” that the choice of the road has made--for me, and I hope for many others that I encountered along this road--has been a very positive difference. And that is more than I could have hoped for as:
“. . . long I looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear.”
My colleague and friend, the nonprofit historian and scholar, David Hammack, taught me that all history is “revisionist”--written as it is through the perspectives of particular historians. Somewhat paradoxically, he also reminds us that each of us thinks we know history best when we are active participants in it—even though, with a longer view, historians may produce an account of what actually happened, and what it all means, that is better nuanced and less biased than our own views. So you don’t have to accept my versions of the history of the larger nonprofit sector and of nonprofit-focused education and research—or my optimism about their futures. And you don’t have to accept my interpretation of my own career journey. These accounts are, after all, based on--and no doubt biased by--my own personal engagement in, and modest efforts to shape those histories and futures. Instead of taking my word for it, you can instead wait around for another few decades to see if my view of my life and career as an active participant in the nonprofit sector--and in nonprofit education and research” is upheld by future historians or not. And if, perchance, I am still around when those histories are written, I will be curious to read them as well.
My heartfelt thanks to all of you, and to the many others not here today, who have over the years shared this road with me.
“And that has made all the difference.”
