I’m giving you fair warning: I’m about to ruin the end of one of the stories in this magazine.
OK, so it’s not like walking into “The Sixth Sense” knowing that Bruce Willis is dead. Still, I don’t normally like to use this space to rehash what you’ll find elsewhere in the magazine. But this little nugget is so good, I couldn’t resist.
The Donor Report on the other side of this issue includes an article about real estate developer Roy Johns Jr., whose foundation donates $10,000 every year to RMU for an endowed scholarship. One of that scholarship’s recent recipients, junior marketing major Tom Waterfield, says he hopes one day to follow in Johns’ philanthropic footsteps, and give money so that the next generation can have a shot at success.
“I think the best way to thank him (Johns) would be to succeed. That’s definitely part of my motivation to succeed: to help pay back everyone who has helped me,” Tom says.
In two sentences, Tom sums up everything that we are trying to do at Robert Morris University. We are in the business of changing lives: Namely, changing the lives of our students so that they can use their success to change the lives of others. After all, we can rarely pay back in kind the people who have helped us get where we are. Take our parents, for example. We might take care of them in their old age. If we are fortunate, maybe we’ll have the money to lavish them with nice things – perhaps a house or a car. But does that come close to repaying all that they did for us? No, and they don’t expect it to. We pay them back by doing for our children what our parents did for us.
Similarly, as the president of a university, I see evidence every day of people who pay back the people who helped them by making sure help is there for others. At this spring’s scholarship luncheon, Richard Harshman ’78, a member of our board of trustees, recounted how he wouldn’t have been able to afford to finish his degree were it not for an additional $1,000 in financial aid RMU gave him before his senior year. Rich, now the chief financial officer at Allegheny Technologies, is the first alumnus to donate $1 million to RMU. That includes a scholarship fund in honor of his parents, to whom he credits much of his success.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to give back besides money, as our students demonstrate every year by volunteering thousands of hours of community service. Some choose to make community service their life’s work, as you will see when you read the article on page 12 about alumni Eileen Groetzinger Wilhelm ‘85, John Denny ’85, and Dan Horgan ‘02. I’d tell you more about them, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the end.