I’d like to share an excerpt from a letter sent by a Princeton alumnus, Nick Davis, Class of 1960, in response to his alma mater’s endless requests for money. He suggests that Princeton may have lost its way.

My last child, Elizabeth, is a varsity coxswain on the Notre Dame crew, class of 2012 (an Olympic year, in my dreams). At a recent football game in South Bend, I asked a green-hatted Fighting Irishman what the motto said in the Notre Dame crest. “Vita, Dulcedo, Spes,” he replied, translating it as “Life, Sweetness, Hope.”
I reflected on Princeton’s twin mottos; “Vet. 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, were prominent in Princeton thought or vision?
If 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over recent decades, but perhaps has lost touch with its common founding creeds of service to others, which have been replaced by a stressful pushing of the envelope and driving of students and graduates to greater and greater economic advantage often perhaps of questionable value to the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. Those firms 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 forty-seven 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for the attitude of “Life, Sweetness, and Hope,” rather than lost Biblical standards of service which appear only on outdated university mottos.