Sandra Day O'Connor Reflects
on Lessons from Harry Rathbun
The 2009 Harry's Last Lecture will be given by former Secretary of State George Shultz at 7 p.m. Monday, May 11, in Stanford Memorial Church. Tickets to Shultz's talk, titled "The Power of Ought," are free and available at the Stanford Ticket Office on the first floor of Tresidder Memorial Union. A limited number of tickets will be available to the public. Shultz is the Business School's Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics, Emeritus.
January 2009
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Legendary Business School professor Harry Rathbun helped persuade a young student named Sandra Day to change her studies from economics to law. In April, after 30 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice O'Connor reflected on Rathbun's philosophy during a new lecture series named for him.
During his decades at Stanford, Rathbun became famous for his last lecture that drew such crowds it outgrew the classroom and eventually filled Memorial Auditorium each year. It began when he read a letter in the Stanford Daily from a student expressing fear of going out into a world he did not understand.
"My lecture that day was spontaneous," Rathbun would later recall. "It was an outpouring. I had to tell those kinds that the meaning of life was up to them, that no tacher, no school, and nobody else could hand it to them like a diploma."
The tradition of "Harry's Last Lecture on a Meaningful Life" is carried on today thorugh a $4.5 million endowment from the Palo Alto Foundation for a Global Community, run by Rathbun's son Richard. Rathbun died in 1988 at the age of 93.
O'Connor delivered the first lecture in the series in April, recalling: "When I came here I don't know that I had a very clear philosophy of life. My years here helped shape that. Harry Rathbun helped shape it. And the succeeding years have continued to do that. Am I finished with that process? Probably not. I hope not."
O'Connor echoed Rathbun's belief that "each of us has a religion whethere we know it or acknowledge it or not."