President Chopp:	Let me add my congratulations to the class of '62 for your 50th. It's wonderful to have you here, and I want to welcome everyone into this beautiful amphitheater on this gorgeous day. 
	It's a privilege and a real pleasure to introduce our collection speaker Paul Brest to you. Class of '62. Paul earned his bachelors degree in 1962, with a major in english literature, and minors in music and philosophy. As a student, he filled his life with music through his involvement with orchestra and chorus, the Hamburg Show, and to top it all off he started a Renaissance music group.
	He was also involved with the forum for free speech, an organization, which brought controversial speakers to campus. One of those speakers was Gus Hall. General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. After earning a JD at Harvard University, Paul served as Law Clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich, and a Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlin. He also practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson Mississippi litigating civil rights cases, before joining the Stanford Law School Faculty in 1969 where his research and teaching focused on constitutional law, and problem solving and decision making.
	Paul then served as Dean of Stanford Law School for 12 years, during which period he's credited with revitalizing the law school. Leaving it with a significantly increased endowment and a reinvigorated faculty. After more than 30 years at Stanford, in 2000 Paul became the President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A foundation dedicated to solving social and environmental problems in the United States and abroad. An important supporter of Swarthmore, the foundation has awarded several grants to the college. Among them one, which has supported the Professor of Engineering Lynne Molter's ongoing investigation of the factors that lead to lower retention rates among minority, first generation, and female students in the sciences. 
	Paul tells me that he will return to teaching this fall. Paul holds two honorary degrees, one from Northeastern Law School, and the second from Swarthmore. In 1991, on the occasion of his receding, the honorary Doctorate of Law here, President Frazier described Paul's career as, and I quote "Proof that an American lawyer in the late 20th century can still live greatly in the law". In his own remarks, Paul reflected that "There is a genuine reason for concern about the state of free inquiry in American colleges and university. There is equal concern about the sense of acceptance, and self esteem of students of color, women students, and gay and lesbian students on our campus". He urged students to help develop, protect, and support a vision of higher education where inquiry and acceptance can flourish. 
	Paul's is a Swarthmore family. His wife Iris graduated in 1961, and both of their children Hillary and Jeremy are Swarthmore graduates. We are proud that we can claim Paul and his family as members of the college family. Please join me in welcoming him back home to Swarthmore again.
Paul Brest :	I'm truly honored to have been invited to give this talk and to tell you the truth, if I had known that President Chopp was going to give the brilliant and wonderful, and candid talk she did this morning, I would have had second thoughts following that. 
	As a member of the Class of 1962 Reunion Committee, I not only made a gift myself and did a gift for me and on behalf of Iris, but also solicited a number of classmates for reunion gifts. This talk was inspired by one classmates response to this solicitation. Peter Unger was among the most brilliant members of the Class of 1962. Quite a statement given the competition, and he's had an important career as a philosopher at NYU. When I asked Peter for a class gift, he responded that the requested motivated him to look at the website of Givewell. An organization that rates charities. Rather than gift to Swarthmore, Peter was inclined to make a gift to whatever International charity Givewell.org recommended mostly highly. 
	This turned out to be the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets in countries prone to that debilitating disease. Peter's fundamental point is that relatively well off people should devote almost all of their wealth to saving the lives of the worlds poorest. Later I'll tell you about the outcome of that conversation, but first referring to the name of the website that Peter mentioned I want to ask whether giving to Swarthmore is giving well.
	This might seem an inappropriate question to explore with a group of loyal alumni on alumni weekend, but this is Swarthmore after all. Which taught us to ask tough questions from the very first day on campus. For me, the skeptical stance was characterized by Richard Brandt in Moral Philosophy, and Michael Skriven in Philosophy of Science. I'm sure that each of you can think of professors who got you thinking really hard. 
	The name Givewell is instructively ambiguous. It can refer to the objectives of your philanthropy, or to whether you're giving to an organization that is highly effective in pursuing its mission, whatever that may be. Let me begin with the objectives. 
	Peter Unger does not come to his position casually. His excellent book, Living High and Letting Die - Our Illusion of Innocence, published in 1996 by the Oxford University Press. Makes a strong case for the position also put forward by his Princeton colleague Peter Singer, who asserts that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life threatening. 
	Peter Singer's arguments proceeds from a short but vivid parable. He asked the reader to imagine that you come across a small child who's fallen into a pond, and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you're wearing an expensive pair of shoes that would be ruined if you do. In the thought experiment characterized by one approach to moral philosophy, Singer builds on your intuition about the morally correct behavior in this case, and analogizes the ruined shoes to depriving yourself of a luxury to save the life of a desperately poor person. 
	Peter Unger comes to the same conclusion though through a different argument. His book is as much about meta ethics as this particular issue, but it makes the same point. These philosophers are not only talking about the super rich, Singer estimates that an American household with an income of 50 thousand dollars spends around 30 thousand dollars annually on necessities, and that it should therefore donate 20 thousand dollars a year to help the worlds poor. The formula is simple, he writes. Whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities should be given away. 
	If one adopts the Singer/Unger position, there seems no place for full anthropic objectives other than saving the very poorest. In a scheme where everything's either a luxury or a necessity, teaching literature in the arts, an important part of the education that all of us received at Swarthmore, and for that matter devoting resources to athletics, would seem to be luxuries and therefore not permissible. This would be a bleak world indeed, and some philosophers who are essentially in the Singer and Unger camp have argued for a less radical position. For example, that enjoyment of the occasional luxury is permissible for personal development and self expression. 
	Peter Singer reluctantly accepts a less demanding standard for pragmatic reasons. Peter Unger, who's commitment to logic and candor remains unabated since we were classmates 50 years ago, is less compromising. Even if I were up to the task, this is not the place to take on these philosophical arguments, but I think one can make an argument for liberal arts education even under their position. After all, the knowledge required to understand the cause of malaria, and to develop insecticide treated bed nets, and hopefully eventually an anti-malaria vaccine came from well educated scientists. 
	It's not just science and technology that matter. Decisions about how to distribute bed nets and assure their proper use, about how to make development aid effective draw on knowledge of economics and other social science and business. Peter could not have made his argument in fact, but for an education in philosophy. Not something that most people would describe as a practical discipline.
	Literature and the Arts call for a different justification. That exposure to broad domains of knowledge and culture goes beyond the acquisition of knowledge to promote attributes and skills ranging from empathy to creativity and critical thinking. These beliefs lie at the core of a liberal education. They're the basis for distribution requirements, though my guess is that these have changed from one generation of swatties. Swatties by the way, is not a term that existed back in 1962, but anyway these have changed from one generation of swatties to another. More importantly, they justify the seemingly random bunch of courses that appear on most of our Swarthmore transcripts. For it's impossible to prescribe in advance with any precision what combination of experiences will produce productive, well informed, empathetic, and creative citizens of the world. 
	This brings me to the second needing of giving well. Assuming that you're giving to a particular cause. Whether preventing malaria or improving higher education, how can you ensure that your dollars are effectively spent. Givewell.org devotes it's resources to helping donors ask this question for a variety of charitable organizations, though not for institutions of higher education in the US. For one thing the desired outcome, for example reducing malaria must occur, moreover the organizations work must have contributed to that outcome. It's not enough to know that bed nets were distributed or even that they were used. A donor to the Against Malaria Foundation wants to know that they actually made a difference. 
	One of the great invasions to come into being in the past decade, also rightly accolade by Givewell.org is the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which seeks to answer these questions through randomized controlled trials of interventions in developing countries. Colleges and universities whether in Nairobi Kenya, or Swarthmore Pennsylvania present the same two questions. First, do students emerge with the knowledge and skills and attitudes that higher education is designed to promote? And if so, did the educational institution contribute to that outcome? 
	Answering the first question, first requires identifying the outcomes the college is trying to achieve. The Swarthmore website notes that faculty members are asked to identify what it is that students should know, or be able to do when they complete a course, program, or other educational activity, but I'm not sure that the college has taken the next step and far more difficult one of identifying what it hopes a student will take away from the entire four year experience. This is a daunting task given the heterogenous lives and careers of Swarthmore graduates, but there's at least one well regarded assessment tool, the collegiate learning assessment that identifies critical thinking, analytic reason, problem solving, and other higher ordered skills crucial to students future lives and offers a process for measuring them. 
	Then comes the especially difficult task of estimating the educational institutions contributions to student outcomes. At the very least when those test students at the beginning of their freshmen year, and then again before graduation. Even then assuming some improvement, the problem is determining whether students, especially students as talented as those admitted to Swarthmore would have improved anyway. After all, the test is supposed to assess the contribution to four years experience at Swarthmore, not to the prowess of the admissions office.
	It would be wonderful if Swarthmore took the lead in addressing these questions, it would have an impact far beyond it's own faculty and students, but even without any systematic assessments I imagine that everyone here has a strong intuition about what we took away from the college besides formal knowledge. While I learned a great deal from classes and seminars, I gained an almost equal amount from extra curricular activities, and just hanging out with my classmates. This included late night bull sessions with people like Peter Unger, and it's fitting that I should continue to learn from him 50 years later. 
	Because Swarthmore was our college, we don't approach either version of the Givewell question dispassionately. We're not choosing between supporting an Anti-Malaria organization and any old institution of higher education. Appropriately, we have a special loyalty to our Alma-Matter, perhaps even a special obligation to give the next generation of Swarthmore students the opportunities that we had. While this obligation does not trump the responsibility to help the worlds poorest, it certainly should have an important place in whatever we deem to be our discretionary giving. 
	So what happened with my solicitation of Peter to make a 50th reunion gift to the college? When Peter demurred, I made him a counter offer that I would match his gift to Swarthmore with a contribution to the Against Malaria Foundation, and Peter accepted. Well not entirely consistent with his principles, it was a good deal. I'm now of course on the Anti-Malaria Foundations mailing list, but the conversation was actually especially good for me and for Iris. It led us to recalibrate our own giving. Not to give less to Swarthmore, but to give more for the worlds most disadvantaged inhabitants. 
	I hope you're enjoying your reunions, I know I'm speaking in this wonderful place to the converted, but I do hope that recalling our own experience at Swarthmore, and how it helped shape your lives will inspire you to give even more to the college, and then that you will reach even deeper into your pockets to rescue the millions of small children in danger of drowning in Peter Singer's pond. 
	Thank you very much.