Last weekend, Robert Smith, the commencement speaker at Morehouse College's graduation ceremony, announced a gift of major significance. Every member of the graduating class would have all of their student loans paid off. The average student debt, reported by Morehouse's president, is around $24,000, and the entire payout is estimated to be about 40 million dollars.
Smith is a billionaire - they estimate that his net worth is 4.47 billion dollars - so this massive, generous, and for many people life-changing act of charity shaves off a little under 1% of his current assets. That's still quite a bit. And this isn't the only act of philanthropy on Smith's part - he donated $50 million to Cornell University, his alma mater, a few years ago.
Paying off college loans en masse like this might be lumped into the same category as donating money directly to a college or university. In some cases, alumni donations go right into the institution's endowment. In others, they may be earmarked for a new building project, for a program, for enjoying a chair, or all sorts of other ends. One can argue that those sorts of uses are of general benefit to everyone within the educational institution that receives such largesse, and even to the wider communities which the institution is involved with.
This strikes me as something quite different. It certainly has a much more direct impact upon the lives of many young people. It brightens their futures, perhaps emboldens them about their prospects, removes anxiety over finances. It will likely steer some of them by the power of example toward smaller-scale acts or attitudes of generosity on their own part.
Ancient Greek virtue ethicists, like Aristotle, had a name for the type of large-scale, big picture generosity that Smith chose to engage in. They didn't call it "generosity" (or to use an older-fashioned term, "liberality"), eleutheria in Greek, because they recognized that scale mattered. They called it megaloprepeia, "magnificence". And this virtue played an important role in social or civic life.
Rich people were expected to pull their weight within their communities, not simply cordon themselves off securely, enjoy their wealth, and leave the affairs and needs of the city to the rest of the citizenry. To use Aristotle's own examples, one rich person might spend a portion of their wealth on equipping a ship for the city's naval forces. Another might underwrite the expenditures for an important cultural event, specifically paying for a chorus and staging for a dramatic production. Yet another might provide a common meal for the public. Funding a public building project would be another example.
It isn't enough - if you adopt a virtue ethics perspective - to just throw money around, of course. One vice opposed to the virtue of magnificence is that of vulgarity. Being a show-off, looking for admiration, making the act of public beneficence into a transaction for recognition, prestige, or power - all of that is vulgarity rather than generosity. Motive, and not just the money spent, matters.
There's more that I intend to write about Smith's act of largesse and the virtue of magnificence. I'll do later this week in my Medium site. For the time being, here's a few interesting pieces on Smith, his gift, and its recipients.
- Robert Smith Pledges To Pay Off Student Loans For Morehouse College's Class Of 2019 (NPR)
- Morehouse’s student loan forgiveness is an incredibly useful economics experiment (Vox)
- Who is Robert F. Smith? (Chicago Tribune)
- Robert Smith’s Gift to Morehouse College Left This Student Behind (Vice)
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