As my 50th reunion approaches, I notice my mailbox filling with communications from a college at which I spent four rather tumultuous years half a century ago. Often I mistake the communications for retail catalogues, since both colorfully seek my treasure for attractive but questionable uses. There is a definite common thread to these reunion messages: “You are getting old, it is time to give back some of your blessings from whence they came!” and “Oh, by the way, please include some notes for your class secretary” as a polite afterthought.

I actually have been “back to the best old place of all” more than a few times in recent decades. Personally, I feel as much in touch with Princeton as if it were in, say, Florence, Italy, or Montreal, Quebec. The buildings are mostly the same. The people are mostly quite different. The good friends I knew and the few teachers I loved are mostly dead. The clubs echo of past deeds, proud or impious, but they are cold, bleak reminders of long ago and, as we all know, the clubs have been at regular risk for their “inappropriateness” in our new century and the world in which we live.

In the half-century since I graduated I have raised nine children, six of whom I fathered.   All six are presently successful and well-educated, but none of them was accepted by Princeton, although any could have been a fourth-generation graduate. Therefore, at this time of year, it is not only Princeton whose hand is out for more funding. And, as well, my giving and my upcoming reunion decision are more forward-looking than retrospective.  

My last child, Elizabeth, born in my 52nd year, is a varsity coxswain on the Notre Dame crew, Class of 2012 (an Olympic year, in my dreams). At a recent footbalI game in South Bend, I asked a green-hatted Fighting Irishman what the motto said in the Notre Dame crest (my Latin may be faulty here): “Vita, Dulcedo, Spes,” he replied, which he translated as “Life, Sweetness, Hope.”

I reflected on Princeton’s twin mottos: “Vet et Nov Testamentum” in the crest for “Old and New Testaments” and “Dei Sub Numine Viget” under the crest, which means “Under God’s Name She Goes.”   I thought, when was the last time the Old and New Testaments, or God’s name, was prominent in Princeton’s thought or vision?

It occurred to me how the Ivy League has prospered mightily over recent decades, but perhaps has lost touch with its common founding creeds of service to others, which have been replaced by a stressful pushing of the envelope and driving of students and graduates to greater and greater economic advantage, often of perhaps questionable value to the global economic environment and arguably at the expense of student/graduate spirituality.  

I flew back to Minneapolis from the football game with a Notre Dame trustee who loudly complained that his university produces too many soup-kitchen managers and not enough governors, senators or Supreme Court justices. I observed to him that the recent near-collapse of the Western world’s economic system happened on the watch of Wall Street's “best and brightest,” many of whom were tops in their Ivy classes and could not wait to start with Citi, Bear, AIG, Lehman, Merrill, and other firms that skewed compensation beyond all reality while quite betraying other people’s money as they pocketed obscene bonuses and created financial vehicles like CDOs, SIVs, and so on, which even now are nearly impossible to value and continue to endanger world financial markets.

Despite my 47 years on Wall Street and managing client assets in my own firm, I vote for the soup-kitchen managers personally, and for the attitude of “Life, Sweetness, and Hope,” rather than lost Biblical standards of service that appear only on outdated university mottos.  

So, will I be “going back to Old Nassau” this 50th year? Will I be taking this special opportunity to give $1 million to our Class of 1960 fund? No, I will be giving where the future is, where service to others pervades the mentality, service to others less upwardly mobile and fortunate than ourselves, perhaps. But maybe these are the ramblings of an old, out-of-touch graduate of a university experience now long gone and vanished, in a place totally changed from the University I once attended.

Nick Davis ’60