Bottom Line Ethics

My wife and I were walking up from the beach together, past a house that had a pickup truck whose bass speakers were sufficient to physically rattle the windows of our house across the street. I looked over at the truck, and an older man (and, by that, I mean younger than me) shouted at his daughter to turn the music down out of consideration for us. Her immediate reply to him before complying was, “They were young once!”

Indeed they were. Once they held hands and talked of a future together. He whispered in her ear and she giggled and pulled away, only to have him gently grab her arm and pull her back to him. He looked in those clear blue eyes and felt his heart fly away to places he never knew existed. He wooed her as a college student and married her right after. They spent restless nights sleeping in an unairconditioned house with a box fan whirring in a window and a baby in the next room. They spent a dozen years living in more than that many homes, stopping and starting a career in fits and spurts until a Ph.D. program spat out a professor equipped with an inquisitive mind, two more kids and that same blue-eyed girl. Those three kids grew to five, and the seasons flew by, hardly noticed. Life for them was a continuum, pulsing from one stage to another until all those kids were gone and the grandkids had long since begun arriving.

Only then did it begin to occur to them that they might be growing old. That they—that he—might be on the backside of his usefulness. He noticed that more of his questions were “why” and fewer of them were “how.” It was not that he just didn’t remember as much; he didn’t understand as much. Because as you get older, while still in the continuing desperate pursuit of those things you never comprehended, you realize that you are quickly being caught from behind by those things that you never knew to ask about, as well as those things you no longer understand. Those deep consternations reflect themselves not just in your specific discipline or expertise, but in music and art and culture and religion. They are accelerated by changes in technology, but they are not a result of it. All generations have faced this inevitable passage in their own ways.

I sit on the cusp of freedom and despair. My life today is the opportunity to finish strong, to fulfill many of my hopes and to see so many good things happen in the lives of those I love. It is the chance to pass the baton on to the next generation, which has already begun accelerating in the exchange lane. In fact, they are quite quickly matching my speed, which is necessary for a successful handoff.

But it is also a recognition that my contribution, my leg of the race, is reaching its end. I am still running hard, and I have to in order to keep up with them. But not for long.

There is a reason I am not running the anchor leg, and that is because I am not the fastest runner. But I have done my best on my leg. I am free to enjoy, in the not too distant future, the rest of the race from the infield. The despair comes in knowing that soon, all that will be left for me to do is cheer.

My Dad turns 99 this month. In his room hangs the picture of a confident 26-year-old, with his civilian arms wrapped around my Mom’s waist after having survived both the worst of the Pacific War and two years apart from her. The whole world lies before them—like us, a return to school, five kids, and a career of the mind. They were young once. Today, he wonders where she has gone.

The pickup truck just pulled back into the neighbor’s driveway, the speakers booming life, the future, possibilities. The guy on the porch across the street from that pickup truck watches, reflecting on what it is to have meaning and confidence without youth. He knows deep in his heart that he is one of the lucky ones, still stimulated by a meaningful job that includes the opportunity to teach, and to be influenced by, a remarkable group of college students who continue to make him feel young. And to still be carried away by those gorgeous blue eyes not just to unseen places, but to memories built together, full of whimsy and wonder.

They were young once. And, to be honest, perhaps more often than you think, they still are. The immeasurable gift of a lifetime together is hard to top, even by the highest highs of youth.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to go back and try.

“To be ethical in a profession, a person needs to be both competent and honest. It is unethical to act dishonestly, and that is particularly evident when it is for personal gain. But it is also unethical to project competence, or to pretend to know something professionally, when in fact you do not.”

** From the Editor: “How to Lose a Profession” is a sobering essay on the value of integrity and having moral courage when integrity is lacking. In the interest of integrity and morality, read the full article before you react. **

In recent days, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they were fining Big 4 accounting firm KPMG $50 million for systematically stealing the PCAOB inspection lists for the years 2015-2017 to know in advance which of their audits would be inspected. All but one of the partners or managing directors involved have entered guilty pleas or been convicted, so the announcement was no surprise. In fact, the $50 million penalty seems relatively modest in light of the charges.

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When I was growing up, I idolized ballplayers who scrapped and worked hard to do what the team needed. They were always “whatever it takes” guys; lay down a bunt, hit behind the runner, hit the ball in the air with a runner on third and less than two outs. They were not looking for the glory, but they were the glue that held a baseball team together.

But “whatever it takes” has taken on a new meaning in adulthood, most recently demonstrated by the recent college admissions scandal. Parents focused on maximizing opportunities for their children were willing to pay to game the admissions system in two ways—direct payments to coaches for their children to be classified as athletic admits when they were not competitive athletic recruits, and paying to cheat on standardized tests. The lack of controls at well-regarded schools, even Ivy League schools, meant that the “whatever” in “whatever it takes” was simply money funneled through Rick Singer. And the lack of control over testing centers by the College Board and the ACT, when their only product is an exam that is supposed to be a reliable measure, meant that the willingness to travel to take the exam at those testing centers was part of “whatever it takes.”

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As the ball floated helplessly through the air and nestled in the arms of LSU safety Grant Delpit, I watched with dismay as another chance for an Aggie football breakthrough disappeared like a puff of breath on a cold night. Delpit slid to a stop, and I turned to the aisle, unwilling to watch the inevitable kneel down that followed the Gatorade bath enjoyed by LSU coach Ed Orgeron. I’m sure the young defensive back was already rehearsing in his mind the answers he would give to a swarm of reporters about how it felt to seal a game that sent his team to a New Year’s Six Bowl.

But I was stopped in my tracks by the wholly unanticipated announcement: “The previous play is under further review.” An inadvertent touch of knee to ground nullified the interception, and an improbable 4^th-and-18 conversion, followed by a sideline catch and a “just in time” spike, left the Aggies hanging by the slenderest of threads, with one play, and one second, to go. No one could have imagined the bedlam that was to follow over the next hour and a half.

 This is our 13^th year as Aggie season ticket holders, and nothing could have prepared us for what we were about to experience. It reminded me of watching the end of the first Rocky movie, when both fighters were punching with everything they had and yet barely standing up. The overtimes that followed Quartney Davis’s touchdown on the last play of regulation consisted largely of a series of momentum swings, devolving into two offenses running roughshod over defenses depleted by the weight of nearly 200 plays. For the first time in 100 years, it looked like the 12^th Man might actually be needed on the field.

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As I began writing this on a Friday afternoon, Tesla’s stock was down almost 14 percent as a result of the Securities and Exchange Commission filing suit against Elon Musk for securities fraud, and seeking his removal as the company’s CEO. This follows Musk’s decision on August 7 to tweet, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” At the time, that represented roughly a 20-percent premium to the stock price. The SEC (and many others) believe that he rounded the price to $420 as a marijuana reference to impress his girlfriend. But the market’s immediate reaction during the rest of the day was a 6 percent increase in the share price. And, unfortunately for the Tesla CEO, he had arranged no such funding.

On a number of occasions recently people have asked about Elon Musk, “What was he thinking?” and sometimes even, “What was he smoking?” It is not just his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast apparently smoking a blunt, but his initial willingness to put his company at risk through refusing a relatively gentle SEC settlement offer. Instead, the SEC sought to ban him from serving as an officer or director of a public company, leading him to agree on Saturday to a $40 million penalty (half of it to be paid by him), removal as chairman for at least three years, and the addition of two independent directors to Tesla’s board.

Most agree that Elon Musk is an innovative genius. But smart people do stupid things for a variety of reasons. Psychologist Robert Sternberg identifies five fallacies of thinking that are often drivers of this decision-making: egocentrism, a false sense of omniscience, a false belief about one’s omnipotence, perceived invulnerability, and unrealistic optimism. Others have arguably checked all five boxes, like Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who mocked those opposing his choice to dramatically raise the prices of certain critical drugs. This included referring to members of Congress as “imbeciles” on Twitter after citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when he was called to testify before them. He was sentenced to seven years on fraud charges related to a hedge fund and forfeited over $7 million dollars.

Despite Elon Musk’s many successes, an argument can be made that he is characterized by all five of the fallacies as well. It is not uncommon that a CEO would have a streak of egocentrism, but a visit to his Twitter feed, especially as he engages with those who are shorting his stock, will give you a sense of self-preoccupation. He is extremely knowledgeable, but he could use some help from a veteran CEO or a more involved board to check his tendency to project himself as omniscient. At the very least, he could use someone who understands federal securities laws. His oblivious $420 tweet reflects a false sense of being powerful enough to do whatever he wants. Toking on YouTube is just one example of his sense of invulnerability. He has also been sued for making potentially libelous accusations, without apparent support, about a British diver who questioned the usefulness of Musk’s mini-sub to rescue Thai boys trapped in a cave. And while unrealistic optimism alone is hard to criticize, his consistently aggressive assumptions about both car production and operating cash flow have earned him broad criticism.

What is ironic is that Tesla is likely finishing a record quarter in production, if not cash flow. They seem to potentially be turning the corner on some measures, even while they still have real challenges ahead. And eliminating the uncertainty with the SEC resulted in a predictable Monday morning bounce back in Tesla’s share price.

Of the five fallacies of thinking, all but egocentrism are really just bad calculations of reality, and sometimes it takes a cold bucket of water to make a person come to grips with reality. If you want to run a public company, an SEC suit to ban you from serving as an officer or director officially qualifies as a cold bucket of water.

For now, it seems to have been enough to bring Elon Musk to his senses. Only time will tell if it is enough to keep him there.

Credit: theverge.com, September 7, 2018

She will graduate in two days and move on to a successful career far from these bustling university halls. And yet here she is this morning, double checking final grades and inputting data for a research project we have worked on together. And she is doing this for minimum wage when she could literally be working for twice the money at her second job down the street at a local bank.

She recently told me she was the second busiest teller in the state for her bank holding company, and she is rewarded accordingly. Still, she focuses, making sure my students get their due, and that I have a chance to move my research forward once she is gone.

To say that Johnna Heller is my teaching assistant is to speak to me of the highest order of student imaginable. She has perhaps been busier than any TA in recent memory, and at the same time she has been finishing coursework and preparing for the CPA exam.

She holds her longsuffering boyfriend at bay while she plows through another set of questionnaires or does the first pass on a grading assignment for 106 students. He knows she will let him buy her dinner eventually and, since he is also studying for the CPA exam, he busies himself with the task at hand. Such is the price of dating excellence.

A legacy of excellence

I have had a number of remarkable TAs in my years as a professor who have made a real difference in moving my work forward and allowing me to more effectively do my real job, which is investing in people. This semester I had the privilege of seeing two of them in one day who have moved into significant roles of influence in their firms. One trained my son’s analytical mind to deal with data while he was still in high school, setting the table for his time in business school and his career as a consultant. Another made sure that son had a ticket to an Aggie Cotton Bowl, and still takes the time during many of her monthly visits to Connecticut with her firm to take the train to New York City and buy my daughter dinner. My flash drive is named for a third.

Now I am in an administrative role that forces me to delegate more to my TA than I have historically done. But I sensed from the first day that Johnna worked for me that this was a job that she really wanted to do. It makes me wonder, in a world where business school students seem more focused on success than growth, what lies ahead of her.

I remember a young man once who began working on a master’s degree when he was married, with two small children in tow. Without many alternatives, he sought out a TA job in his chosen field of accounting. Because all the accounting slots were filled, he was assigned a teaching responsibility in statistics, managing to stay about two days ahead of the students all semester long. But in those frantic days, he discovered something remarkable that he had not seen in his first few years of work—his work made a difference in students’ lives, and it made them better. Like Johnna, he didn’t make much money doing it. But that experience changed the course of his life. After public accounting and another visit to industry, he returned for his Ph.D., and the rest, as they say—is my life.

Thankful for a teacher

That professor I first worked for would not remember me now, nor the difference he made in my life, though he is still teaching today. His mentoring and friendship as I first tried my wings allowed me the confidence to chart a new course, one that has been meaningful to me in so many ways. And I have never really stopped to express my gratitude. So let this be my thank you to Dr. Gary Kelley at West Texas A&M University.

This week I will say goodbye to a person who cannot be measured by her wage or by her accomplishments. As with the other remarkable people who have gone before her, the life ahead of her is far removed from the cluttered office of an aging professor, with memos stuck in pincushion walls, and the dusty memories of a career measured in plaques and diplomas.

Her boyfriend—and the world—wait for the emergence of one significant life at the other end of that graduation stage. What lies ahead for her is a life of impact and meaning, one with purpose and direction. She is going to make a difference.

Next week I will turn from my computer to my doorway, half expecting her to be standing there silently, waiting to ask a clarifying question. The ghosts of those who went before her hover outside my door, apparent only to me in my quieter moments.

In truth, as I wrote these words, she appeared in my doorway one last time, for the best conversation we have ever had. It is one that I will remember for a while, and it made me reflect on who I really am inside, and who I want to be. It also made me love my wife and children more.

Around Aggieland, this is a week of rejoicing and laughter. And I will readily join in with the students and their families as they celebrate.

But there’s a certain melancholy for me, as well. Because, this week, I will be saying goodbye to my TA.

Two seemingly unrelated stories in the news, one in the entertainment industry and one in the world of sports, have me thinking about how difficult it can be to summon the moral courage to do what everyone agrees, in retrospect, should be easy to do. The numerous charges of sexual misconduct against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein have dominated the headlines, particularly since entertainment and news are a bit hard to separate nowadays. And this week, former Baylor and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon revealed how he was able to pass drug tests while he was a college student and remain eligible to play.

Harvey Weinstein

While the scope and importance of these two stories may be fundamentally different, what they have in common is this—enablers are always necessary for someone to escape justice over a prolonged period of time. Weinstein was allegedly enabled by a long line of subordinates and friends, some of whom were likely on his payroll for that very purpose. Gordon claims that an assistant coach provided him with cleansing drinks and taught him how to drink them so that his system would be free of evidence he had been taking drugs whenever he was tested.

Many people would rather spend their lives around successful people than people of integrity. This is true not just because some of these people are dishonest, but because successful people can offer them things that people of integrity may not be capable of providing. These folks want to project that they are successful and that their success is merit based. This was true of numerous people engaged in the Galleon Group insider trading scheme headed by Raj Rajara

tnam, projecting skill in trading when they were really masters of getting people to divulge information illegally. Volkswagen engineers followed the orders from above to design defeat devices for their vehicles that would shut down emission controls and maximize gas mileage, except when the vehicles were being tested by emissions control experts. …Read more

I love Blue Bell ice cream. When we lived out of state for a number of years, I remember it being a legitimate choice to consider having it shipped to us in dry ice rather than settling for Blue Bunny, or some other inferior northern brand. On one visit home to Texas, driving between Austin and Houston, we stopped at a barbecue place in Brenham. We asked if they could make us milk shakes out of Blue Bell. Barbecue places don’t make milk shakes. But on that day, for a displaced Texas family, that one did. And it was the highlight of our trip.

I also love baseball and Texas A&M, and you cannot think of the two of those together without thinking of our beautiful Blue Bell Park. The Kruse family has been a great friend to this university, and Blue Bell CEO Howard Kruse even spoke to my son personally when he was considering his college choices.

But today, in real time, Blue Bell is grappling with one of the biggest crises in its long history. The presence of listeria in food is not a new thing, and it is one of the risks a food creating and food handling business develops systems to guard against. Obviously, at some level, those systems have not been effective enough at Blue Bell, and that is true in multiple locations. And when people are harmed, any corporation can expect its motives to be questioned and probed.

But corporations do not have motives; people do. The people who run Blue Bell have built up tremendous goodwill over the years through the way they have run their business. Still, as news stories develop over weeks and months, light will be shone on the best and the worst of habits in the company, because that is what makes interesting news. The evidence that seems to point to slow moving calculations of effects will be criticized. Aggressive assumption of duties will be lauded.

Blue Bell’s overriding duty in this situation is to prevent harm from coming to people through the company’s products. That is why the decision to recall all Blue Bell products has been generally praised. It is a defensive decision, one that is designed to prevent harm at any cost. But this is not what companies like Blue Bell are normally designed to do.

Companies that produce ice cream are designed to maximize pleasure, not minimize harm. And companies that are designed to maximize pleasure run on calculations. Some companies are more utilitarian, calculating the greatest good for the greatest number, and these are often viewed as socially responsible. A stadium or theater venue that holds certain numbers of seats at a low price, or those that give back to their communities, fall into this category. Others only calculate the benefit for the company and its shareholders, generally with the goal to maximize profits. Even if they are involved in charitable giving, it is only as a means to protect the bottom line. But whether they are utilitarian or egoistic, virtually all companies that maximize pleasure run on calculations.

Blue Bell is one of these, and the initial response to the evidence of listeria was guarded; it was targeted to head off the harm without unnecessarily disrupting operations. It was the rational response of a pleasure maximizing entity. But there was a point where Blue Bell’s role changed, since they were effectively put in a position where they were the only party that effectively could prevent harm. The question at that point is, “Will the corporation shift its point of view and assume its overriding duty to prevent harm to consumers?” More precisely, will the people who run the company assume that overriding duty and bear the costs that go with it?

When companies make decisions like Blue Bell did, people will still say that companies are calculators, and that they pull their product to avoid lawsuits. While this is potentially true, it is hardly a criticism to say that people are rational. When the calculation aligns with the overriding duty, the decision is an easy one.

Had it reached that point at Blue Bell? No one can say for sure. But since there is obviously no motive to harm consumers, and management progressed rather quickly from a broad partial recall to a total recall, the decision looks to be one of willingly assuming that overriding duty rather than risking further harm to consumers. Blue Bell changed its role from pleasure maximizer to harm minimizer.

There are other duties that Blue Bell needs to fulfill in order to prevent future harm, and their press releases indicate that they are aware of those. I would imagine that systems put in place in the next six months will be markedly different than the ones that have been there for decades. Until these are completed, the public will be wary.

But doing this well will allow Blue Bell to return to doing what it does best—maximizing pleasure. And that includes providing milk shakes for all those Texans who wander home and remember why it is they love this place.

Barry Minkow is a classic rags-to-riches American story. Or maybe it’s more like a rags to riches to orange jumpsuit to crime fighter to clerical collar to fraudulent short-seller to multimillion dollar church embezzlement story. He is currently serving a sentence for insider trading related to false accusations against homebuilder Lennar Corp. that drove its stock down while he shorted it. But he also pled guilty last week to embezzling $3,000,000 from the church he pastored, San Diego Community Bible Church. Even now, after all I have known about Minkow through the years, his chutzpah floors me. He was able to convince the court that he committed the Lennar fraud to fund his addiction to Oxycontin, potentially shortening his sentence because of his participation in a drug treatment program. If I was a guard, I would be checking his cell every thirty minutes.

About the time Minkow was pulling off his first major scam by taking the company he started as a teenager, ZZZZBest, public, I was busy in a Ph.D. program learning the ins and outs of accounting ethics and fraud. His very public fall, and the subsequent video interview he gave in prison to Joe Wells, helped to jump start Wells’s Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the CFE designation. His folksy discussion of how easy it was to fool people, particularly auditors, brought home the need for serious attention to forensic accounting. He was the face of fraud for CPAs, giving a dry science a red-blooded American mythical character. And he was able to build on that reputation after he was released from prison by helping search out numerous frauds and founding the Fraud Discovery Institute. He also rebuilt his personal reputation by serving first as a pastor of evangelism in one church, and then as the senior pastor in the San Diego church.

And he wrote books. Oh, did he write books. Ever the self-promoter, Minkow was involved in numerous book projects that all told essentially the same story of his rise and fall. I found a number of copies of one of his books in a second-hand bookstore and gave several away to my graduate students to read. Of course, he was always the hero in the books, whether he was the bad guy pointing out how incompetent financial professionals were, or the repentant criminal mending his ways. Throw a little gospel in there and you broaden your audience. In fact, before the Lennar conviction, Minkow was the star in a motion picture about his own life that was about to be released. The movie co-starred James Caan, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), and Talia Shire (Rocky Balboa’s wife). It is quite possible that he used church funds to support the Fraud Discovery Institute and church members to fund the movie.

I have to admit, even though I teach professional skepticism, I fell for some of his shtick after he got out of prison the first time. He spoke broadly, but I never invited him to class, in part because of the cost, and in part because of a nagging feeling about him. There are reasons for people to tell their failure stories, and I have found that my students are able to identify with what many of them have gone through. One speaker I had last spring gave what was clearly the most influential talk of the semester by sharing her story and accepting responsibility for her choices. But Minkow has always had a different feel to him; none of the others I have come across has been as obviously self-interested as he is.

Yet even now, after he has done untold damage to the two groups I most closely identify with, CPAs and Christians, I find it hard to be angry with him. I am not sure why that is true, because it seems like I ought to be very resentful. He has besmirched the names of many trusting people. He also loves to talk about himself, which must be extraordinarily irritating to those who have known him well.

But his career has paralleled mine, and it is like having the thread of a single life that is hopelessly intertwined with my own story. I was warned in graduate school about pursuing accounting ethics as my research emphasis because it would marginalize me in my field of accounting. But when I looked around at the choices I had for investing my intellect and my research skills, the only one that I could see holding my attention for decades was accounting ethics.

And that, indeed, has held true for me. I have dabbled in several other areas of research, even overinvesting myself in one or two of them in the hopes of being seen as more mainstream. But only accounting ethics has consistently awakened my passion for research, and it does so because of the complexity of the stories involved. Accounting ethics is at the nexus of rational markets and human failure, and studying it has invariably led to rich stories that are easy to make into parables. I suppose that I have a liberal arts flavor to what I teach that is largely unavailable to many of my business school colleagues.

Sometimes these stories play out as Greek tragedy and sometimes as farce, but the truth is that my life would be incomplete without the Barry Minkows of the world. While my faith always makes me hope for redemption in people’s lives, Minkow has already lived the cat’s proverbial nine lives. I have not seen the movie, but I am guessing it is both interesting and a lie. Its investors were only one more group of suckers Barry Minkow left in his wake. They should have known that it was a film that would never be completed. Because with a Barry Minkow movie, you can never really write an ending.

I often write about establishing and maintaining values, but I rarely speak about passing on values. Last weekend afforded me a remarkable opportunity to observe what values have been passed on to my children, and made me reconsider who I need to be today. My wife and I gathered with our five children to attend a University of Nebraska home football game, something we had not done since I was an assistant professor there 20 years ago.

The trip allowed me to wrestle with what it is to be content, to look regret in the eye and stare it down. But mostly, it made me thankful for what I had then, and for what I have now. And it helped me to focus on three things I hope will guide me in the last third of my life.

Remember the Past

Our trip to Lincoln included a tour of old sights, including homes, schools and restaurants that were important to us. We were able to renew faithful friendships that have endured through the years and have significant conversations with people important to us. We laughed at old memories as a family, some that were triggered just by driving by a location. We searched in the half-light of dusk to find a brick on campus dedicated to my mother shortly after she died. I wrestled far less with regrets and mistakes than I might have expected, perhaps because there was such joy in what we were doing together as a family, and in part because I am so happy doing what I do today.

Embrace the Present

I soaked up every moment of 36 hours I spent with people, drinking long and deeply of relationships. Everywhere we went, from our first night’s dinner with old friends to the last gathering of 25 of us for pizza after the football game, was rich with laughter and remembrances. We were even witnesses to a Hail Mary miracle touchdown on the game’s last play that secured victory for the home team and set off bedlam in the stadium. The word serendipity came to mind.

Anticipate the Future

My wife and I became empty nesters less than three months ago after 35 years of children at home, and we are still navigating what it means for it to be just the two of us. Recent health challenges in our family have reminded us of the brevity of life and of how important it is to live each day fully. But while we cannot insure a life free of pain, we can live with anticipation that the ways that we have invested our lives over the last three-and-a-half decades will bear fruit in beautiful ways. I couldn’t help but think that was true as I stared at my precious 3-year-old granddaughter who was on the trip, and thought of her brother and two cousins. I have lived to see – and enjoy – my children’s children.

But I said this column was about passing on values, and these are the values I observed in my children. First, people are more important than things. The kids sacrificed financially in significant ways to be there, and there was not a note of regret that this might have been as expensive a trip as they had taken on a per-hour basis. Second, listening is more important than telling. I looked around the room at Valentino’s Pizza’s party room and saw all my children engaged in deep conversation, just as their mom was. (Obviously I wasn’t, since I was looking around the room.) I think they realized that some of these conversations were ones they might not have the opportunity to enjoy again.

And, importantly, remembering where you come from matters. My children have attended five different universities, and they have each developed their own allegiances, just as I have. But there was a time when we all wore the same color on Saturdays, when we were together in every sense. Our two youngest, one of whom was born in Lincoln and one just after we left, were able to experience for a few hours something of what that unity felt like. Nebraska didn’t give us our faith or our core values, but our older children will say it is where we became, fully, a family. And this trip was a tip of our cap to that place, to that time and to those people.

There is no place I would rather be today than Aggieland, but last weekend I was reminded that there was a different place that helped shape my children into who they are today. In remembering, I found myself overflowing with gratitude.