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Dr. William R. Brody, president of The Johns Hopkins University, delivered the following keynote address:

Mr. Dixon has just told you what I tell our freshmen when they first arrive at Johns Hopkins. Some of the most important learning you will do in college will be the learning that takes place outside the classroom. The things you learn on your own are often the most meaningful and important later on. You probably are already finding this to be true in your own lives. It will certainly be very true in your college careers.

This morning I have some good news I’d like to share. Just as the principles of scholarship the Headmaster described are skills that will serve you well for a lifetime, I want to tell you that the learning never stops. After high school, after college, you will still be learning new things and engaging with new ideas. And it’s tremendously exciting to do so.

Let me tell you something I have learned since becoming the president of Johns Hopkins University. This has to do with learning how to know what is truly important in life. It’s something I learned first hand from two people who served on the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees, which is the governing body of the university.

The first Johns Hopkins trustee I’d like to tell you about is Sandy Greenberg, who is the chairman and CEO of TEI Industries in Washington.

In his youth, Sandy was a very good student, but he came from a poor family. And so he went to Columbia University on a scholarship, and there he met his roommate, who also was receiving financial aid.

Now while he was a sophomore at Columbia University, Sandy contracted an eye disease that eventually proved to be glaucoma. But the trouble was, it wasn’t detected early enough, and as a result he became legally blind, while still a student at Columbia. I ask you all to imagine for a moment having been sighted all your life, and then all of a sudden being faced, in a very competitive school, with losing so much sight you could no longer read. This is what happened to our trustee, Sandy Greenberg.

But something else happened to Sandy that may surprise you. Sandy said that when he lost his sight, his roommate began to read his textbooks to him, every night.

I ask all of you here this morning to imagine yourself in that position. If your roommate had a serious disability, would you take the time to read textbooks to him every night, knowing the more time you spend reading textbooks to your roommate, perhaps the less well you might do with your other activities? That’s not as easy a question as it first appears.

But luckily for Sandy, our trustee, his roommate did make the time to read to him. And as a result, Sandy went on to graduate with honors. He got a Fulbright Scholarship, and he went off to study at Oxford. He was still quite poor, but he said he had managed to save about four hundred dollars as he went along.

His roommate, meanwhile, also went on to graduate school. One day, while at Oxford, Sandy got a call from him. And his former roommate said, ‘Sandy I’m really unhappy. I really don’t like being in graduate school, and I don’t want to do this.’

So Sandy asked, ‘Well what do you want to do?’

And his roommate told him, ‘Sandy, I really love to sing. I have a high school friend who plays the guitar. And we would really like to try our hand in the music business. But we need to make a promo record, and in order to do that I need several hundred dollars.’

So Sandy Greenberg told me he took all his life savings and sent it to his roommate. He told me, you know, what else could I do? He made my life, I needed to help make his life.

Sandy’s story is a story of the power of doing well by doing good. Each of us, in our own lives, is faced with challenges, with roadblocks, with problems that we don’t anticipate or expect. How we deal with adversity is influenced, to no small extent, by how we deal with others along the way. What we get depends a lot on what we give, as Sandy Greenberg discovered. And so from one of our trustees I have learned this wonderful story of doing well, by doing good.

Of course, you probably are wanting to know who Sandy’s roommate was. I think you’ve heard of him. Sandy’s roommate was a fellow by the name of Art Garfunkel, and he teamed up with another musician by the name of Paul Simon. That $400 helped them cut a record that eventually became “The Sounds of Silence.” Two years ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of going to Sandy’s daughter’s wedding, and it was Art Garfunkel who sang as Sandy walked his daughter down the aisle.

There is a second person I want to tell you about, a man named Sol Linowitz, who was a Johns Hopkins University Trustee for many years. Sol died in 2005, and at the time of his death his life and achievements received extensive coverage in all the major newspapers. You see, Sol Linowitz was one of the founders of Xerox Corporation. We all know about Xerox, because we all make copies. Sol was the lawyer who negotiated the rights to get the patent on the first Xerox machine. Eventually, he became chairman of Xerox and built it into a multi-million dollar corporation, and made a lot of money.

At age 52 he retired, and moved to Washington at the request of then-president Lyndon Johnson. Sol went on to serve every president from Lyndon Johnson through Bill Clinton. He negotiated the transfer of the Panama Canal; he was the ambassador of the Organization of American States; he was Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the Middle East, and negotiated the first Middle East peace accord with Menacham Begin and Anwar Sadat. He gave an entire life, after his business career, of dedicated service.

Some years ago, Sol told me this story.

One day, his daughter came to him because she was having some problems, and she asked him what he thought about his life. He said to her, ‘In all frankness, I can’t tell you if what I’m doing has done any good, whether my being founder and chairman of companies, starting an industry, negotiating a Middle East accord, or if any of these things will have a lasting impact.’ He said there is just no way of knowing.

But then he told his daughter something else. He said, ‘For my entire lifetime, every day I try to do at least two things for somebody, or some people. It may be going to visit somebody in a hospital, writing a note, making a phone call, touching base with someone. That’s the way I know I have meaning to my life. Because in some ways the big things we do may or may not have lasting impact. But the small things that we do are extraordinarily important.

Imagine being the counselor to presidents, and the man who helped negotiate a lasting peace between two ancient enemies, Egypt and Israel, yet still finding meaning in your life by the small acts of everyday kindness you have done. I believe there’s a moral to these stories.

One day, decades from now, I hope you will get to be my age. I realize for most of you that seems really old – but it doesn’t seem so old to me anymore. A funny thing begins to happen when you arrive here though. You will find yourself beginning to ask, did my life make a difference?

That’s the day of personal reckoning. And I think the only way to face it is to consider, every day of your life: How can I do something for somebody else? How can I give back to others? It may be teaching, it may be becoming a doctor, you may be successful in business–no matter what your career path, there will always be the opportunity to give back. The chance will present itself to be giving of your time, giving of your money--but mostly, to be giving of yourselves, of your own heart and soul.

My hope today, as you celebrate your academic achievements and the value of true scholarship, is you will always keep your eyes open for those opportunities to give back. My advice is to embrace them as your best, sure way, of doing well.

I congratulate you all on becoming members of the Cum Laude Society.

Thank you.