Thom Massey emphasizes
principles over profits
In a frenzied environment
that lures students to start-ups promising quick cash,
Thom Massey, the resident fellow of an undergraduate
focus house that emphasizes "entrepreneurial spirit
and ideals," tries to inject some perspective and
balance.
Massey, who also is an
assistant dean of student affairs and assistant director
of the Graduate Life Office, spoke about life as a
resident fellow as well as his African American heritage
May 3 in the "What Matters to Me and Why"
series at Memorial Church.
Living inside Naranja
--not, he emphasized, in a cottage like most other
resident fellows --Massey said he hears "the creaks
and cracks" of comings and goings and witnesses such
undergraduate antics as water fights. Many of the dorm's
residents have decided to live there because they plan to
pursue careers in business --or, in these Internet
economy-driven days, they already may have begun an
enterprise with nothing more than a laptop in their room.
"It seems to me that
one of the things entrepreneurs have to learn more about
is how to be ethical and how to be inclusive," said
Massey, 53, who has worked at Stanford in various
capacities since 1971 and is an alumnus of the Class of
1969. "They need to know that profit may not be the
best motive. It is for me not the only motive."
Massey, who played
football and track as a Stanford undergraduate, said
businesspeople too often think in nothing but sports
metaphors as they pursue profits.
He plans to engage the
students at Naranja next year in a frequent dialogue on
business ethics. "I want to have a constant dialogue
about this with my students next year," he said.
With today's startups built from nothing "but a
couple of computers," it's easy for their founders
to ignore their surrounding communities, he added.
"What matters to me
is to be humble in whatever I do," he said in
opening his talk. He said he doesn't believe in royalty
and is particularly offended by the term "patrician.
I believe in the common person."
Massey discussed his
participation in two recent spring break trips with a
group of faculty, staff and students. Led by linguistics
Professor John Rickford, director of the Program in
African and Afro-American Studies, both helped Massey
delve deeper into his roots and heritage.
The first was in 1999 to
the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, not far
from Atlanta and where Massey's mother's family comes
from.
Slaves were brought to the
region from Africa specifically because of their
expertise in planting rice fields. The region's
remoteness has meant that some residents still speak
vestiges of Gullah, an English-based creole that
comprises vocabulary and grammatical elements of various
African languages.
Visiting the area, he
said, "made me feel a part" of that community.
"I was able to get a better understanding of my own
culture, and get an intellectual bearing on my culture
and race. And I realized how powerful culture can be, to
be able to last that long and sustain such trials and
tribulations."
As a result of the visit,
he said, "I feel a little closer to knowing who I
am."
This past spring, a
similar group traveled to Jamaica. It was hardly your
average college spring break, however, as the group
explored areas most tourists ignore and studied language
that, Massey said, varied from "patois to the
Queen's English."
The group was struck by
the extremes of wealth and poverty in Jamaica. "I
saw a country trying to help itself, but with a long way
to go," Massey said. "But the trip solidified
my feeling that we need more African American
intellectualism --that we need to think comparatively and
that there is a place for cultural studies."
Historically, he said, not enough value has been placed
on cultural studies such as African American studies.
"To improve our understanding of each other, we need
to take the study of culture seriously and take it to
another intellectual level --so that we're not just
studying slavery, for example," he said.
Finally, Massey touched on
"cultural mutualism," which he said went beyond
getting to know one another's cultures to "feeling
obligated to one another. . . . It's not enough [for
people of different cultures] to just be in the same room
--they need to get to know each other," he
said.
"So what matters to
me is that different cultures be honored." SR
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