Greatness And The Heroic

So, what makes a person great? I have been thinking about this lately as we have been subjected to what makes Trump and his cabinet members are the very definition of the not great and fear inducing because of their incompetence and lack of vision. They make choices without any idea of consequences as they focus on their ill-informed decisions that can be found in the recent taking “a great economy and hitting it with a sledgehammer” (Janet Yellen’s words). It is easy to see what greatness is not as they make decision after decision that destroys the immediate future of many including a disproportionate of the working class and the Vets who signed up to defend America.

But greatness, in my opinion, contains the following: doing things that others can’t or won’t do such as Caitlin Clark; greatness according to Malcolm Gladwell is received when you have done 10,000 hours of practice; and risk that thinks about greatness that will be for those who have been in the arena and fought as hard as they could to reach a goal that is not for the faint of heart. I have three sons who fit this description which makes me proud of them every day although the quest for greatness can be hard on parents to watch the struggle. There are days that I wish that they would do something more traditional and safer like bystanders in the arena of risk and action.

This is on my mind because I see law firms bending to Trump as well as courts and certainly those in the Republican and Democratic Parties either capitulate or just can’t find courageous ground on which to stand and fight for America. Trump must have read Machiavelli’s The Prince where he wrote about the best way to govern is with fear and not respect. Trump now wants to “take over” Columbia University and a good many schools are caving to his threats to remove funding.

What we need now is someone to model greatness and I submit to you today we should look to John Fry as an example. I should tell you that I have not been a fan of Fry. I invited him to speak to EA for an important lecture. I could tell that his speech was given many times before with the content changed for a different educational institution. It was vintage boilerplate of what a school should be. I did not see him as an academic. I considered him to be a real estate guy. That was his role at Penn before he went on to F and M where he focused on building. After F and M, he became President of Drexel where his focus was building structures for expanding the campus. He inherited the crown jewel of Drexel which was a superb work/study program that connected graduates to meaningful jobs in Philadelphia and beyond. He left Drexel to go to Temple and left Drexel with an 88 million dollars deficit.

But today I read an article highlighting Fry’s message to Temple University which has 40% of the student body as first in their families to attend college. He surrounds himself with people in the know. His address at this inauguration contains high risk in today’s culture. His efforts over the years building real estate to help the academy translated to a bold vision of leading with values that have been ripped away from America.  Below you will find a commentary on his Inauguration Address as President of Temple by Larry Platt. Below that is a song that expresses a desire for a hero/leader. Think of it as you consider what Trump, and his followers are not.

Unafraid to lead in a time of

crisis

“This being Philly, there are doubts out there about what Fry’s up to. Progressives worry he’ll gentrify North Philly. The establishment frets that all his talk about DEI will put a target on the city’s back. But what we have here is a leader in a time of crisis unafraid to lead, one who reminds us that, in the words of surgeon and inventor Robert Jarvik, “Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.”

As Fry spoke, you detected no equivocation, and you realized just how rare that is nowadays. While others catastrophize, Fry plans. In that and many other ways, Fry is staying true to the roadmap laid out by a mutual hero of ours, former Yale University President and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti. (You might know Giamatti for having sired an award-winning actor; I came to him through baseball. Every opening day, I re-read his collection of writings, A Great and Glorious Game.)

Once, Fry pointed me to a line in Giamatti’s 1989 New York Times obituary: “My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.” Giamatti was an Ivy League professor of Renaissance literature who was a surprising choice to be Yale’s president at all of 39 years old in 1979; Fry is no academic, but he saw Giamatti take on Yale’s tradition of building “leaders” by proclaiming his university was really in the business of producing citizens, and he became enamored.

This rousing Giamatti defense of pluralism could just as easily have come from Fry’s speech last week:

Pluralism is not relativism. It does not mean the denial of absolutes or the absence of standards. Pluralism is not code for anything. It signals the recognition that people of different ethnic groups and races and adherents of various religious and political and personal beliefs have a right to coexist as equals under the law and have an obligation to forge the freedoms they enjoy into a coherent, civilized and vigilant whole … If pluralism as a concept denies anything, it denies the hegemony of the homogeneous, the rule by a single, overmastering sensibility which would exclude all those who are different from the general benefits of citizenship.

The general benefits of citizenship. Like Giamatti, great leaders stay focused on what’s possible to build, rather than just wallowing in the challenges of today. Perhaps that’s why Fry chose to conclude his speech by calling upon his 34-year-old daughter, Mia Fry, to read a poem, A House Called Tomorrow, by Alberto Rios, which includes the lines:

Look back only for as long as you must Then go forward into the history you will make”. (From the April 7th The Philadelphia Ciizen)

Clarification: An earlier version of this story failed to note when John Fry quoted a New York Times editorial

Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler