Old Dogs, New Tricks?

“Seducing boys is easy,” the girl across the conference table said, and all the students laughed. But I felt distinctly out of place as the only older person in the room, probably 70 years older than these self-assured Harvard undergraduates on the Environmental Action Committee. What did they think about this old dodo who had suddenly appeared at their meeting?

They weren’t talking about sex. They were talking about collecting signatures on petitions to get the university’s president to set a date for achieving climate neutrality. The girls had put on short dresses and high heels, defying the 30-degree temperature on Valentine’s Day, and distributed chocolate kisses and “We Need A Date!” fliers to the boys and professors crossing the campus. Already, on the first day of their drive they collected more than a thousand signatures.

“Smart,” I thought, they’ve injected fun into student activism. I wondered if we couldn’t do the same thing to put extra zing into HILR and link it into the college’s mission of training young people for world leadership. I’d been looking for an opportunity like this since HILR groups started serious examinations of the aging process in 2005, especially in combating the bromide that we were all on a steady decline into the boneyard.

But it took nearly a year to navigate through the byzantine bureaucracy to get to the table with the kids. While some administrators liked the general idea of interaction between the oldest and youngest generations, others seemed to feel it would be more trouble than it was worth. Their skepticism appeared to be valid when some of my colleagues offered to advise students worried about paying their college debts, only to find out that the student leaders were flying off to Omaha to have lunch with Warren Buffet!

Since I had negotiated with the Soviets at the United Nations and the Chinese Communists and North Koreans at Panmunjom, Korea, I was not easily deterred. I looked for a back channel, as we often do in diplomacy, to get around road blocks. I finally found one in the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, the university’s overall environmental program. I walked into the old powerhouse where Green Campus was headquartered and talked with the assistant director and the student liaison officer, and persuaded them that HILR would be a new frontier for their greening activities and that we could also open up access to other parts of the Division of Continuing Education—the Extension School and the Summer School.

Since I had gone to Stanford, which didn’t seem to cut much ice in Cambridge, I also took steps to get Harvard insiders involved. This was a strategy I’d used extensively in both diplomacy and international business: finding local partners or advisors who knew the culture, the language, and the pathways of countries where I wanted to succeed. In Harvard country, this meant enlisting former administrators who wined and dined with the people at the controls. So I asked Martha (Marty) Leape, former director of the Office of Career Services, to co-chair the HILR Green Committee.

We started introducing new tricks into HILR with a week-long Green Fair featuring jazz, balloons and interactive resource stations on home conservation, transportation efficiency, and appliance/computer efficiency. Then Marty showed pictures of our fair at a Resource Efficiency Program meeting, which involves student-captains conducting ecological education in Harvard residence houses. Bingo! One of the leaders of the students Environmental Action Committee, Karen McKinnon, asked for our help in recruiting political leaders for their Green Democracy dialogue on January 31, 2008. This nation-wide event was designed to generate student power to speed environmental change. We helped Karen get our state representative and state senator to speak at an overflow meeting in Adams House. Both political leaders stressed that student and university support was vital to their efforts to overcome cultural and business opposition to environmental change. So we went to where the students were, and it paid off!

Then the students asked us to help with the petitions to Harvard President Drew Faust for climate neutrality—zero greenhouse gas emissions. They believed that getting the support of adults, and especially Harvard alumni, would add weight to their efforts. We quickly collected 276 signatures on petitions supporting the students from HILR members, including 55 alumni, or 66 percent of those enrolled in the first half of the spring semester. Spring Greeney, the aptly named student leader of environmental action, emailed me that our interest and support was “inspiring” and helped the students feel that their hard work was worthwhile. Now I felt that we old dogs really had something to contribute.

At our HILR director’s request, we took our show to the annual conference of the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging in Washington, DC in late March. “Save the Planet and Save Money,” our poster read; “Learn How Harvard University Has Organized Students, Faculty and Retirees to Achieve Sustainability and Save the Environment.”

At our workshop, the assistant director of the Green Campus Initiative described the success in virtually capping Harvard’s greenhouse gas emissions after a steep rise since 1990. I told the administrators in government agencies and private organizations in the audience about the way we had developed links with the students—bridging three generations, which I thought was pretty romantic. And I pointed out that there were promising opportunities for such collaboration since there were more than 100 institutes of lifelong learning in US colleges and universities.

One man in our workshop asked detailed questions about the strategy of intergenerational linkage and took copious notes as if he were preparing a manual on the subject. I said there were two main guidelines: First, find out what the students were passionately involved in (environment was a good bet because there were environmental action committees on almost every campus). Then, determine what value you can add to their efforts, such as mobilizing alumni support for bold and courageous student action. And be humble about it. Remember, we created the mess the country is in!

But a woman suggested that the students were simply humoring us—making nice to their grandparents. I acknowledged that we initially had qualms about student attitudes, but we had become convinced that the students were completely sincere, and described the interaction in attending their meetings and bringing their leaders over to talk about their petition drive to a large audience at our Friday morning meeting. We had found that they wanted our advice and followed it on sensitive issues such as not appearing to threaten the administration with reduction of alumni contributions.

The woman administrator still seemed dubious, and I wondered if some professionals in the aging business didn’t appreciate what older and wiser people could contribute to a disintegrating American society. So I said there was a neglected body of experience and wisdom that needed to be reintegrated into the main stream of American life, somewhat along the lines of what we were trying to accomplish at Harvard. I pointed out that everybody I had worked with in the US State Department could have told President Bush that invading and occupying Iraq to make it a democracy was a fool’s errand.

I checked this woman’s skepticism with Spring Greeney at the students’ Earth Day celebration and was reassured when she replied: “You don’t know how much your and Marty’s attendance at our meetings means to us. It’s very important to us to see you there.”

By July 2008 the students had collected over 4,000 signatures on their petitions to make Harvard climate neutral and had participated in President Faust’s Greenhouse Gas Task Force to examine the issue. Their constructive activism paid off when Faust announced a short-term goal of reducing emissions by 30 percent below Harvard’s 2006 baseline by 2016, and instituted a comprehensive program to achieve maximum reductions over the longer term. I have no doubt that the students made a critical difference in Harvard’s decision.

We supported the students in their initiative to get Al Gore to launch the sustainability drive with a mammoth rally on October 22, flooding the space between the Memorial Church and Widener Library with thousands of people. Further strengthening our ties with the rest of the university, we joined the new Harvard Climate Collaborative, a central communications network between student representatives from each school and top administrators to stimulate and measure progress on achieving the university’s environmental goals.

And we took the initiative to organize an eco-team for the Division of Continuing Education (DCE), representing all the stakeholders— administrators, faculty, students, and facilities managers—in the three schools. Then we persuaded our dean to enroll DCE in the annual environmental competition with other departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), which had already achieved substantial reductions in energy use and recycling rates. In our first year of competition with 15 more experienced FAS departments we placed second. So the old dogs are learning new tricks!

Working with the wonderful students is exhilarating. Now, sitting around the table with them, throwing out ideas about a demonstration windmill in Harvard Yard, I feel like I’m back in my student days at Stanford talking about world government. It has also been very curative because I was a wreck when I moved to Cambridge from New York twelve years ago. My marriage had broken up on the rocks of a drug-addicted stepson and my international consulting business had dissolved.

My son in the Harvard Business School and my daughter in the Malden school system said Cambridge was “just like Greenwich Village” but I didn’t know anybody and I was uneasy about adjusting to an academic community after fast-track careers in diplomacy and business. “Get the Harvard Gazette and see what’s going on around the campus,” Chris said, “you’ll find something.” I saw that Stanley Hoffman, a Harvard professor I had met at a Council on Foreign Relations dinner in New York, was speaking about the European Union at 51 Brattle St. The room was filled with old people, but Hoffman was wonderful, gliding from the beginning of the nation-state system to the previous day’s meeting of the Council of Ministers in Brussels: 348 years in 40 minutes, smooth as silk. Then the old people really surprised me with the sophistication of their questions: “What about European defense integration and modernization?” “What about a common currency—you think the French are really going to give up the franc?”

“What is this outfit?” I asked someone.

I filled out an application for HILR and was interviewed by members of the Admissions Committee. I told them about my experience as a US diplomat at the Panmunjom political negotiations in 1954, which began with the Chinese and the North Korean ministers pushing little flags of their nations across the crease in the felt-topped conference table to frame us for their photographers in emblems of states which the US refused to recognize (even then!). So I got a United Nations flag, because we were the UN Command in Korea, and we pushed our flag back against the enemy flags—like children in a sandbox. Not an auspicious start of negotiations that stalemated on the issues about a Korean peace treaty, like the continued presence of American forces, which have persisted for more than half a century.

I guess the admissions people found the Panmunjom story interesting because I got admitted into HILR. That provided the base for my regeneration. I began leading courses on foreign policy and discovered that people were attracted to what I had to say, which was coming full circle since I had trained in graduate school to become a college professor.

An editor of these HILR essays has asked what motivates me in regenerations. I think part of my resiliency is genetic: my father strove strongly to improve himself, from a farm boy in Petersburg, Virginia to the presidency of a high-end home furnishings company in Baltimore, then got wiped out by the Great Depression and dropped dead in his prized rose garden when I was 11.

Another part is obviously environmental: Stanford provided the stimulation and nurturing that changed me from a lost little boy into a pretty good diplomat. I was also fortunate to find surrogate fathers who gave me a boost at critical points, such as a former State Department official who came to Stanford and wrote a recommendation to Secretary Dean Acheson.

Above all, my children and five grandchildren in the Boston area have given me a great deal of love and appreciation. Experiencing the development of these wonderful kids from middle schools in Needham and Boxford to five different colleges is a constant reaffirmation that my life has been worthwhile and the future is in very good hands.

I believe that adversity is a normal feature of life, and that one has to take risks to achieve a better understanding of oneself and others. If my father had not lost his money and died and if my mother had been more supportive of her two children, I might well have followed the course of least resistance—marrying the girl around the corner in Baltimore and going into my father’s or her father’s business. When I have gone back to visit my boyhood friends, I feel they have been frozen in time.

Risk-taking enables me to detect and seize opportunities. Like my father, I took jobs the market offered, such as the presidency of a high-technology company’s international operations and the vice chairmanship of a pioneering American trading company that sold Napa Valley wine to the French and Silicon Valley computers to the Japanese.

I’ve also been asked if there is an internal shift that accompanies my transformations. Damn right; it’s scary to fly to the next trapeze without a safety net; it shifts your organs. You lose the persona—diplomat, business executive—and the edge that sustained you in the previous trade. And, worst of all, you lose the supporting networks of friends, colleagues, neighbors, and sometimes, family.

I believe that the lesson from my experiences is that academic institutions like HILR are vital centers of regeneration for people at all stages of life and have much to contribute to the future of the country and the world.

Next