Creating Your Own Social Portfolio

Leonard Kopelman, AS '62, JD '65

by Leonard Kopelman, 25-Year Honorand

I want to thank Dean Shinagel and you, the graduates, for giving me the opportunity to teach at the Harvard Extension School these past 25 years.

The subject matter I teach at the Extension School is accounting. In accounting, we look backward to the last quarter or last year-end. If we go forward--pro forma--it is based on projections from last year's numbers. What I teach on Monday evenings is the language of the business world. It has nothing to do with one's personal forward-looking world. With one exception, which I will talk about later, we cannot carry over any of the useful mechanics or rules of accounting to achieve a fruitful personal life outside of the office.

Let us listen to the voice of a great poet when he said:

Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant,
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

This poem, "The Hardship of Accounting," was written by Robert Frost and is a warning, in my opinion, to bifurcate your life into two slices--one devoted to your livelihood and the other dedicated to your personal life.

When I first learned that I would be a 25-year honorand, I started looking back and thinking about what has happened in the world during the 25-year period that I have been teaching at the Extension School. I thought of the following:

• from one Soviet Union there springs to life 15 independent republics,
• from 15 independent nations of Europe, there is formed a single market--the EU,
• the Berlin Wall has fallen and two countries are again united,
• the Shah of Iran has fallen and a theocracy develops,
• Nelson Mandela is not only out of jail, but became president of South Africa,
• Hong Kong has been quietly returned to China,
• we are connected by the World Wide Web and the Internet. The personal computer is appearing in our offices and many of our homes, and,
• the cell phone appears in our cars and is embedded in our belt or purse. Rather than concentrate on the past, how do we see the world today? The world today has approximately six billion people:
• 57 percent are Asian, 21 percent European, 14 percent from North and South America, and eight percent from Africa,
• 51 percent are female, 49 percent male,
• 80 percent live in sub-standard housing,
• 70 percent cannot read,
• half suffer from malnutrition,
• 75 percent have never made a phone call,
• less than one percent is on the Internet,
• half the entire world's wealth is in the hands of six percent of the people, and,
• only one percent has a college education.

Worldwide problems include the protection of the environment and global warming; the problem of the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; the problems of AIDs, drugs, famine, and poverty. Technology has made political and economic isolation nearly impossible. If you have any faith in education and you are in the elite group of one percent of the world with a college education, what responsibilities do you have toward the problems of the world?

With all of our education, we have ended up with:

• higher incomes, but lower morals,
• our lives becoming longer in quantity, but shorter in
  quality,
• bigger and fancier houses, but smaller families and more broken homes,
• worries about our financial portfolio, but neglect of our social portfolio.

As you continue to look through the Extension School catalogue, you will see that it has kept up with the times, and you will note courses now in e-marketing and doing business in the internet economy. However, I believe you will have to add another ingredient. The Harvard Extension School can teach you the humanities, social studies, natural sciences, and business administration, but the one thing it can't teach you--and you will have to do on your own--is to develop your own social portfolio. It requires quiet time to develop in your own inner space. You should use your imagination to focus on how to make your life more fulfilled. What are your social goals and what is your plan to achieve them? What is your social portfolio? As part of that social portfolio, you need to ask yourselves: How can I deal effectively with the world's problems as I see them? You probably will say: "how can I be of help in the global warming issue or in other major issues?"

Dean Shinagel has strong feelings about the problem of global warming, and he used the Internet to pass on his concerns to his large roster of friends and faculty and asked us to do the same. The Internet is a very powerful tool. Already we read about the hate groups that now can find each other. Why not caring groups? It seems to me that we ought to be able to find through the Internet caring individuals who can band together in our global village to improve the world so that 25 years from now the 25-year honorand will see the number of world problems reduced substantially; that within the next 25 years we have not only added years to our lives, but we have added a better quality of life to those years and that we have achieved higher moral values along with our higher incomes.

For those of you who do not have faith in the Internet to help solve worldwide problems and feel powerless to make a difference, you can start with a sure winner. Put your imagination to work locally. Apply the one principal from accounting that does work--namely, zero-based budgeting. Zero-based budgeting is a concept that instructs us to take a brand new look at our systems every so often rather than tinker with what we have. Start from scratch and justify everything.

How about applying zero-based budgeting to precollege education, the school systems of our own cities and towns. In other words, ask yourself at what age should secondary education begin, how many years should it be, and what should be its curriculum to develop a child into a man or woman who can survive happily in our new information age? Certainly many changes have taken place in our society over the past several years because in many instances both parents work or the custodial parent works outside the home. Do we need enrichment programs to bring balance to our children's lives? Do we need more science education or language training? I can't answer these questions, but you need to ask them and think about them. Don't rely on the experts because they have not done such an excellent job in the recent past. You have to instruct them from your knowledge. Let's see where we were and where we are now in secondary school education.

In early America, we were an agricultural nation. By the 1800s we entered the industrial age, and 25 years ago we entered a whole new era--the information age. Different resources were needed for a successful agricultural nation--namely, land and labor. To be successful in the industrial age, we needed to add capital and raw materials. America thrived with an abundance of land, people, raw materials, and investment.

What is the primary component of this new economic period, the high tech era? It is intellectual capital--brains. Yet business still thinks of people as costs not investments, business thinks of training as a cost and not as an investment, but yet business treats new equipment as investment.

We developed a school system suited to our industrial model; our secondary schools operate like factories taking raw material in at age 5 and, putting them through the same process, rolling them out (graduating them) as finished products 12 years later.

How do we rearrange our educational institutions to develop intellectual capital? Certainly the bureaucrats who run the institutions on limited funds focus on cost cutting and reorganizing and occasionally tinkering with old ideas rather than promoting new ones.

In the Brookline Public School System, which is supposed to be an exemplary school system nationwide, they do not teach a foreign language until the fifth grade. This is what they have been doing for the past 25 years or so. Is that consistent with what is happening in our global village? Clearly, with the recent wave of immigration, there are a large number of children who have learned a second language prior to age 10 and are now fluent, and I mean fluent, in two languages as they begin school. Who do you think is better off, the foreign-born child who comes to this country as a toddler and by the time he or she is in the fifth grade is fluent in two languages, or the child who enters the fifth grade and struggles with a foreign language at the expense of science education or other options? I suspect the bureaucrat's answer is going to be: "which language should we teach and how do we find competent teachers in that language?" They will always put up stumbling blocks to keep the status quo because, you must remember, public secondary school is nothing other than a governmental organization.

We now have many children going to school tired from a night of TV, some hungry, some pregnant, some with knives, and some with guns. They may come from a house, but not a home. Teachers need to concentrate on maintaining control rather than teaching subject matter.

Should we look to business to solve our problems? The business of business is business. Therefore, you can't rely on business to change it. Government is even slower than business to respond. You, the educated public, can make a difference, especially in our schools because they are local and will respond to local pressure.

Being a lawyer, I would like to touch briefly on the law. Reflect back on the O J trial, the Michael Kennedy trial in Florida, the failure of the FBI in the McVeigh case, and so on. Lawyers can even hire dress consultants for their defendants. In the Chicago 7 trial there were actually eight defendants, but the eighth had a dress consultant who told him to wear a light gray suit. The jury agreed with the dress consultant and said that the man in the light gray suit was not "a man in charge." The other seven wore dark blue or black suits. The eighth defendant was acquitted. Are you satisfied with our court system?

With all our technology, why not use a lie detector hook-up on criminal defendants and civil plaintiffs and defendants? Today, if you are a resident voter in Massachusetts, you will more than likely be called upon to serve on a jury. In many courts, you will be called to the courthouse and be shown a movie about the jury system and how it works and then off to the jury box you will go if you are chosen. Why not have a short movie on how lie detectors work and their possible failures? In other words, the value of the credibility of lie detectors. Hook a lie detector to every criminal defendant, civil plaintiff, and civil defendant with a screen behind them and then let the questions roll. The fear of being caught lying in court might go a long way to settling many cases. Now the doubters will say that people will learn how to answer falsely under oath with a lie detector test, but those who say that have no faith that science can perfect the system. A juror's role is to test the credibility of a witness. Can a lie detector help?

Secondly, it has been said that justice delayed is justice denied. Let's look at our own local judicial system. You have an automobile accident and, maybe, it is witnessed, but by the time it gets to court several years later, your memory is somewhat blurred or, if you see a "good lawyer," you may have a revisionist theory of what happened. Good luck to you in trying to find, let alone getting your witnesses to appear in court.

Why don't we learn from the Chinese on how they handle these legal issues? They have a system of ombudsmen who are respected individuals in a given three-to-five block area who handle these matters expeditiously--immediately after the accident. For instance, if an accident occurs, you would find in your booklet who the ombudsman is for your area, get that person to view the scene, speak to the witnesses who would be detained for a very short period of time, look at the points of contact, talk to the parties, and make the decision right there on the spot--no courts, no lawyers, no wait, no cost. They even extend this to more than automobile and bicycle accidents. Under our US Constitution, anybody who has a claim of $20 or more has a right to a jury trial. I need not tell you how long you can keep a case going--justice delayed is justice denied.

Our primary education system and our court system are woefully out of date in dealing with today's society and its problems. There has been little change in the past 25 years in our legal and secondary school systems. Yet we have clearly shifted gears from the industrial to the high-tech information age.

We, as graduates from our college or from the Harvard Extension School, have the tools to think about and analyze the issues I talked on briefly. Secondary school education and courts are just a mere couple of the myriad problems that need to be reexamined. The one lesson that we can learn from accounting is the lesson of zero-based budgeting and to look outside our country to what others are doing and within our country to try to achieve the best social institutions we can.

What I now tell you to do is to create your own social portfolio, put your education to use for your community. Having an education is a social responsibility, which you should aptly discharge. Dante in comparing Ulysses with St. Thomas Aquinas implored us to seek education not as an end in itself, but for the use it can give us to brighten our lives.

In ending, let me say that we have the outstanding institution of the Harvard Extension School where we can fill in our gaps, get current, and prove that there is no terminal degree in education and lifelong learning.

As I think about the next 25 years, I am reminded of Mark Twain's statement:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the ones you did, so throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails: explore, dream, discover.