Former Mississippi governor William Winter spoke to the members of the Millsaps chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma on April 15, 2003. (Beta Gamma Sigma is a national business honor society.) Below are Winter's remarks:

I am particularly honored to be invited to join you here on this campus today on the occasion of the recognition of the new members of Beta Gamma Sigma. This is really a significant event, for it is taking place at Millsaps College where for a long time so much of the intellectual leadership of our state has been developed. That leadership initially centered around the arts and sciences, and it was there that this school built its reputation for academic excellence.

But now this institution – founded by and named for one the state's most successful and notable businessmen – is adding to that reputation by the integration of a business curriculum with the sciences and humanities. As I understand, your Renaissance MBA program here represents a model for the country. I believe that Major Millsaps would be proud of that achievement.

That leads me then to talk about a subject that for a long time has had my special interest, and that is the absolutely essential role which business leaders must play in public and civic affairs and in the formulation of progressive and responsible public policy. Unfortunately not enough of that has been going on, and our society suffers as a result.

I shall never forget an experience which I had as a very young and perhaps overly idealistic and naive aspiring politician. I was a candidate for the legislature, and I was out seeking support. I thought a logical starting point might be at the office of the president of the largest bank in the community. I knew that gentleman as a young man some forty years his junior would know him. That is to say that he was a kind of gray eminence in my inexperienced eyes, but I knew he was supposed to be a center of influence if for no other reason than that he had a reputation as an informed and successful business leader.

On a bright summer morning early in the campaign I paid him a visit. I found him friendly and hospitable and after the usual amenities and small talk, I told him of my candidacy for the legislature and asked him for his support. His countenance suddenly became very serious. It was as if I had injected a forbidden subject into the conversation.

"Young man," he said, "I hate to see you messing up your career by getting into politics. I just never have anything to do with anything political."

I felt the wind going out of my sails. I momentarily doubted my decision to run. Thanking him for his time, I walked out of the bank. Across the street was a farmer selling peaches from his pick-up truck. I had gone to school with his son. He asked me how the campaign was going. A man of very modest means, he nevertheless volunteered his support. "Give me some of your cards," he said. "I'll pass them out for you out where I live."

The lesson here is clear. Who presumably had more at stake in what the legislature would do – a bank president or a poor old farmer? Yet the latter had a greater sense of the importance of being involved in public affairs.

Now admittedly that was a simpler time, but now that the stakes are higher and the issues are more complex, it appears more vital than ever that we have the maximum participation of our most knowledgeable and visionary men and women in the shaping of public policy and the conduct of public affairs. That leadership must be trained and inspired in schools like this.

And this participation must be motivated not by a quest for private advantage or personal profit but by a genuine desire to improve the quality of life for more of our fellow citizens. Because we have had more of this kind of business leadership in recent years, this is an infinitely better state than it was when I made that lonely call in my first political race over fifty years ago. We have achieved by almost every measure an enhanced level of opportunity for most of our people.

Motivated and inspired by ideas that in so many instances came from the intellectual forces of institutions like this one, we produced in the last third of the last century a generation of more creative and enlightened leaders than we had known before. We marshaled our unprecedented domestic resources to raise the level of education, create new economic opportunities and break down the barriers of racial segregation that had for so long denied fundamental rights to millions of our fellow human beings. We worked at restoring our land and forests and cleaning up our streams. It is obvious that we have come an incredibly long way. But as far as we have come, we still have so much more to do.

Our state is now very much a part of a new technological society that has seen incredible advances in science and mathematics capable of creating machines that outperform the human mind.

The grandsons and granddaughters of that old farmer selling peaches are now the computer programmers of this new age with technical skills undreamed of a few years ago. No one questions the amazing utility of these developments, as they make many of the daily tasks of living infinitely better. Through these miracles there now is available on our computer screens an array of information the like of which we have never known before. Much of the world's great literature can be called up with the flick of a button. But access and understanding are two different things. Know-how is not the same as wisdom.

Now we are called on to create out of this new information age, a cultural imperative that will preserve our common humanity. We can either let all this technology diminish our human-ness or we can employ it to enhance the ability of more of our people to lead more fulfilling lives.

The difference now and in the simpler world in which I grew up is that even though then there were so many people with limited skills and limited access to knowledge now we have so many more people with unlimited access to information who are struggling over how to apply that information in a truly meaningful way. Unless we learn how to arrive at wise and thoughtful solutions to the issues that confront us, we shall continue to struggle and to be haunted by fears and doubts about our future in a new and hostile world.

For the irony is that even though we have put behind us here in the South so much of what had been wrong and indefensible and have achieved this greatly increased level of material affluence and productivity that we once thought would automatically produce a good society, we are finding instead a disturbing lack of civil discourse and an increase of partisan rancor, a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, a predisposition to getting while the getting is good, and a continuing lack of trust between blacks and whites. And so in our self-centered preoccupation with our own private interests we tend to stop talking to each other and retreat literally and figuratively into little enclaves behind locked gates, living in suspicion and distrust of our neighbors and our neighbors living in ignorance of us.

This is where this college and this school of business must call into play the collected wisdom and inspiration of those who have done so much to change our state and region for the better, who have helped preserve its noblest qualities, and who, if we will only listen, will help us to avoid the nightmare that David Cohn once said was too often our common fate, "With heaven in sight, we insist on marching perversely into hell."

These fountainheads of wisdom cannot be reserved just for the bastions of the intellectual and kept locked up in some ivory tower. They must be made a part of the currency of the marketplace and the arena of public policy-making. That is why this school must be involved with citizens and business leaders across our region, mobilizing that spirit of community and good will that still exists in abundance but that so often gets overlooked and overwhelmed by the political hucksters and the fast buck fortune-seekers.

We must work to instill in more of our community leaders the vision and civic courage that will cause them to confront and deal with difficult public issues whether on race relations or urban sprawl or education or housing or health care before they spiral out of control. So many local people work in lonely and isolated situations without the benefit of wise and knowledgeable advisors. They need all the help they can get to protect them from the raw and uncompromising pressures of biased or uninformed public opinion.

I hope that this will be a continuing role of this school to help create a climate where public leaders will be better able to act on difficult and unpopular issues instead of feeling that they must pander to the most selfish and cynical of their constituents.

It is my opinion that there is not enough of this kind of work being done. It is a sad commentary on our so-called enlightened society when the inane and preposterous opinions expressed on talk radio and on some TV shows appear to have more acceptance among much of the body politic than thoughtful voices of reason. We must do more to make those reasonable voices heard.

All of us in this room today, whether we acknowledge it or not, are here because of the impact that great thinkers and teachers and public leaders have had on our lives. I know that is true in my own life. It was my good fortune to have been taught by some visionary and inspired teachers. They helped cause me to explore and embrace fresh ideas and new and better ways of doing things. That process of liberation must continue for all of us.

To provide the leadership and inspiration to do that must be the continuing commitment of this school. That will not be easy to do. In the face of so much change and so many tantalizing choices it gets harder and harder to know what the right course is. But the models are there, molded and shaped by the intellectual forces in colleges like this one. It must be in leadership centers like this that we find the ways to overcome the blunders and tragedies that so often marked our past. We must get more of our fellow citizens to join us in this quest.