Million-dollar donation to Babcock funds ‘responsible business’ programming
Wake Forest University Babcock Graduate School of Management alumnus Thomas Dingledine has donated $1 million to the school to establish the “Fund for Responsible Business.”

The endowed gift will help faculty members create class content and learning opportunities for students in the areas of ethical, social and environmental responsibility.

Dingledine also pledged $175,000 over the next five years to assist the school with current operations. He hopes the gifts will play a role in elevating awareness about how to conduct business in a way that recognizes the greater good.

“We need to instill in future leaders that it’s good business to give back,” Dingledine said. “My wish is for this value to be integrated into the fiber of the curriculum.” (Story.)

I’m honestly not sure what this means. I know what it means if I use language like this, but the sad fact is that where public companies are concerned, we have decided as a culture that the only guiding priciple for business governance is “shareholder value,” and even that has come to be interpreted in the shortest terms possible. This quarter, not next year, and damned sure not five or ten years down the road.

In that environment, the only way you can rationalize social responsibility is by arguing that socially irresponsible practice is likely to hurt the company when it comes under fire from the public, the press, or legislators and regulators. So even if you do the right thing, you’re hardly doing it for noble reasons.

If that’s not bad enough, most privately held companies of any size are run more or less the same way. Every once in awhile you run across a CEO who realizes he can live on several million and doesn’t have screw his employees to the wall any harder to get by, but when you see stories on these people, notice how they’re depicted as novelties and you’ll learn a great deal about America, circa 2k6.

de Tocqueville talked, in Democracy in America, about “self-interest, rightly understood.” It’s a somewhat complex concept, and perhaps I interpret it too simply, but you can read and judge for yourself.

I do not think, on the whole, that there is more selfishness among us than in America; the onlydifference is that there it is enlightened, here it is not. Each American knows when to sacrificesome of his private interests to save the rest; we want to save everything, and often we lose it all.Everybody I see about me seems bent on teaching his contemporaries, by precept and example,that what is useful is never wrong Will nobody undertake to make them understand how what isright may be useful?

Basically, you worked in your own interest, but that labor was tempered by a larger context that kept you from trampling others needlessly in your rush to the top.

We still have self-interest, but we’ve damned well taken care of that “rightly understood” part, haven’t we? So I’m hopeful that this grant to the biz school of my alma mater will lead somewhere productive, and that the upshot will be fewer Skillings, Lays, Nacchios, Rigas and Ebbers.

Time will tell, I guess.