Bill Gates Sr. Shares Insights on Education, Philanthropy — and His Son

Following are excerpts from an interview The Chronicle conducted with Bill Gates Sr. just before the release of his new book, Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime.

Why did you decide to write this book?

It started off as a project simply to create a personal memoir for my family — in part because I have a bothersome absence of knowledge about my own predecessors. It wasn’t going very rapidly, so I asked Mary Ann Mackin [who had written speeches for him] to help me with it. She felt like there was more to it than just a family thing — that it would be a good idea to see if someone might like to publish it.

In it, you try to share ideas about how to lead a meaningful life.

I hesitate to say I was trying to influence how other people live their lives. I guess the idea is that we all owe something to everybody else. It’s a mutual situation: We’ll progress and things will get better to the extent we’re committed to the proposition that everybody in the world has a proper claim on some opportunity to be healthy and comfortable.

What is it like having your son at the foundation full time?

It’s not greatly different. The involvement of Bill and Melinda is more direct and somewhat more detailed in terms of the time they give. They have more opportunities to meet with the presidents [of the programs] and the staff. They’re better informed, and their views probably are more widely heard and appreciated than when they were here less often. Bill in particular is very focused on the things that we’re doing — he has a huge urge to understand what’s being done and whether it’s working.

How has your role at the foundation changed because Bill is there more often?

I really think not at all. We get a chance to talk about what’s going on here a little bit more. My time is largely devoted to the U.S. program — particularly education.

How successful has the foundation been with its education program?

We concluded that our emphasis initially in the public-education area — to bring about a reduction in the size of high schools around the country — may not have been the very best strategy. Having worked at that for a fair period of time, it began to appear to us that it wasn’t going to reproduce at a rate, if at all, in the numbers that would really change American education, and that in fact there may be other factors, other problems, in terms of the quality of public education that deserve more focus, particularly the quality of teaching.

How optimistic are you as the foundation dives into this new strategy?

In terms of the whole of public education, the word “modest” might be appropriate. But in terms of the change brought about by pioneering efforts, particularly the charter-school work, the change has been a lot more than modest — in many cases it’s been really dramatic. The most prominent example of that is the last place you might have expected it — Manhattan — where some aggressive, concerned people like Mayor Bloomberg brought about a change in the way the schools were run. There are several high schools there where the graduation rate — which was down in the 30-percent area — has moved up into the 70s and 80s as a result of the reform work that’s been done. If you could bring about that change across this country, it would be gigantic.

This country does respond, ultimately, to basic problems. We’ve really changed civil rights in this country, which has been no small matter. I don’t mean to suggest that the civil-rights problem has gone away, but we’re down to small remnants. And we’ll do that with public education. Slowly but surely people will appreciate that there is a problem, that it’s fundamental, and that we need to make fundamental changes.

What’s the role for foundations and philanthropists in a recession like this?

Its hugely perplexing. If you decide you’re going to keep the same dollar expenditure this year that you did last, you’re really invading principal in a serious way. If you go two or three years like that, you’ve reduced the size of the operation.

Should the foundation increase spending in the United States as the country grapples with the effects of the downturn?

The one place where the effects of the recession are particularly notable is on the work we’re doing in the Pacific Northwest — this is the place where we do regular goodcitizen kind of gifts. Those gifts are going to shift into different areas — including some especially large gifts to food lines and things of that kind. We’ve shifted funds away to a large extent from capital projects.

Do you try to instill an appreciation for philanthropy in your grandchildren?

No. First of all, they’re pretty young. The whole question of instilling — it seems to me it’s a question of what you do, as distinguished from what you say. If it turned out that Bill was amenable to or even aggressive about being philanthropic, I think it had a lot more to do with his having seen what his family and others did than anybody giving him a sermon on the topic.

You talk about Bill as a teenager grilling his mother, Mary, about her United Way work. Has he always been interested in charity?

It’s more a matter of his having a huge motivation to understand things. I think he has a natural tendency to skepticism. He has a natural inclination to question, even to challenge a bit. People who know Bill even casually recognize that’s a major characteristic of his manner of operation.