“My academic life at Santa Clara University is simple to explain: empowering generations of developing minds to be critical thinkers and lead with conscience and compassion. This is what we do at Santa Clara University, no matter the program or department. We challenge students to think with the heart. And when you instruct at a single University for as long as I have, the footprint is humbling.

“Starting in my junior year, I participated in Miller Center’s award-winning, nine-month Global Social Benefit Fellowship. The Fellowship provides a comprehensive program of mentored, field-based study and action research with social enterprises that have participated in Miller Center’s Global Social Benefit Institute accelerator programs. I was exposed to a worldwide network of social entrepreneurs resolute in addressing energy poverty and climate change.

“Forty-seven years. For 47 years, students have passed through my doors. Some have gone on to lead the world’s most successful corporations. Others founding enterprises of their own. A select few return home to Santa Clara University to mentor students, as they had been. Students they see themselves in.

“One of my favorite Santa Clara University stories is that of the birth of what is now known as Miller Center’s Global Social Benefit Institute. A classic Silicon Valley entrepreneurship story. When Patrick Guerra [’73, MBA ’76, P ’02] and I founded the Institute in 1997, we did not have any funding. Quite frankly, we did not have any social entrepreneurs. We put together a program curriculum and arranged for the arrival of participants from Rome. Patrick even put his expenses on personal credit cards. It was very grassroots. Eighteen years later, a former student of mine would endow nearly $25 million to ensure the future of the Center. Jeff Miller and his wife, Karen.

“When alumni of the University remain passionately involved in their alma mater for years after graduation, you know the institution is doing something right. I would like to think that part of that something is our professors. People genuinely committed to nurturing the world’s foremost ethical leaders.”