Clifton Wharton: ‘A Roxbury Man’

Howard Manly

Clifton Wharton is a curious man. Long before Harvard, long before all the corporate boards and foreign countries and Fortune 500 companies, there was Roxbury.

It was a different place, a different time really, back in the late 1930s when Wharton lived on Walnut Avenue. For starters, the neighborhood was mixed racially and economically. But race and class had little to do with the profound sense of community — and excellence — instilled in Roxbury residents.

“We had different family values,” Wharton said during an interview, “and those values were focused on education. Everyone thought that education was important and that is what everyone talked about. All of us knew, regardless of where we lived or went to school, that we were expected to achieve.”

Over the years, that value has been lost, a discouraging trend that Wharton can only shake his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what has happened,” Wharton said, “to imagine that some in the minority community would actually denigrate excelling academically.”

That is anathema to Wharton, even in today’s climate of anti-intellectualism. A former chairman and Chief executive officer of TIAA-CREF, at the time the nation’s 18th largest corporation with $268 billion in assets and the world’s largest pension fund, Wharton was in Boston the other day to deliver a keynote address at the annual meeting of The Partnership, Inc., a group dedicated to enhancing diversity within Boston corporations.

During the speech Wharton, 79, talked about some of the lessons that he has learned during his impressive career. But most of those lessons, he said, were learned in Roxbury and, specifically, the Boston Latin School.

“At Latin,” Wharton said, “It was about performance. We had to be better than the next guy. Not just as good, but better. If you didn’t make it, at least you tried.”

It helps if one is curious, or, as Wharton likes to say, “on a constant quest for learning and self-improvement.”

His started early on. His father was a career diplomat, and while Wharton was conceived in Liberia—his father’s first official posting — he was born in Boston. The Whartons were always on the go, eventually stopping for a while on the Canary Islands, off the coast of Spain, for six years. A young Cliff Wharton spoke fluent Spanish and was something of an oddity walking around the neighborhood in Roxbury.

Wharton laughs about it now. “One of my friends recently told me that he thought that I was from Mars,’ Wharton said. “Another one said that I was strange, but he and his friends still liked me.”

Curiosity does have its drawbacks. Wharton has been writing his autobiography for the last several years and has accumulated an archive that includes 300 book file boxes and 58 file drawers. He said the process has been yet another learning experience for him because he finally understands some of his behavior.

“I can remember when I became the chancellor of the New York schools, I went and visited all 64 campuses,” he recalled. “I also remember becoming a member of a corporate board and spending a week in every department on every floor of each of the corporation’s three buildings in New York City. It only occurred to me recently why I would do such a thing.”

As Wharton tells the story, his behavior can be traced back to his childhood. Whenever his family traveled, it was usually by ocean liner, and before Wharton would settle in to his room, he would walk over virtually every square inch of the ship. “I guess I just wanted to know everything that I possibly could before I got started,” he said.

Wharton is a curious man. He came back to Boston Latin a few years ago and delivered a speech on the lessons that he learned while there. “This lesson,” he said, “was that innate ability is randomly distributed in society, irrespective of race or ethnicity or income. Boys who were Irish, Jewish, Italian, black — the whole gamut of diversity that marked the student body in our day — could and did, excel in any of our subjects. Thanks to the high quality of elementary schools throughout the city, our admission made no difference where we lived or our station in life. From this I learned the importance of striving for excellence and of equity — and the profound complementary of the two.

Wharton has had an extraordinary career. He graduated from Boston Latin in 1943, and was accepted at Harvard at the age of 16. He graduated from there in 1947 with a B.A. in history. He because the first black to be admitted to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, receiving a M.A. in international affairs in 1948.

Wharton went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Wharton spent the next 22 years working in economic development in Latin America and Southeast Asia for the Rockefeller family philanthropic interests.

In 1970, Wharton became the first black to head a predominantly white university. His tenure at Michigan State University was fraught with student unrests and other social issues plaguing the nation as a whole. Wharton left Michigan in 1978 to lead the State University of New York System, the largest university system in the United States. After about nine years, Wharton left to become the first black to lead a Fortune 500 corporation.

His time at TIAA-CREF caught national attention. During his seven years, the company’s assets doubled and his leadership provided new products, options, and services. A recent profile in USA Today characterized his tenure as “a remarkable piece of work” and a “a spectacular performance.”

Wharton has served six presidents in various capacities, sat on scores of corporate boards and has received 61 honorary degrees, including one from his alma mater, Harvard.

The inscription on his 1992 Honorary Doctor of Laws citation reads: “One of the commanding leaders of our time, yours is the great talent to transform organizations into communities of purpose working devotedly together to serve the common good of all people from all backgrounds.”

Wharton takes his commitment seriously but with an air of grace and affability that belie his intellectual curiosity. He is, after all, a Roxbury man.

He said as much during a recent speech at the Black Issues in Higher Education Gala in Washington, D.C.

“Whenever I see a person who has failed in life and become a drain or a destructive influence on our society, I also see the enormous waste in human capital,” Wharton said. “For me any individual who has been allowed to fail for want of educational opportunity represents a disgraceful waste of talent that might have helped to make this world a better place…. If anything is truly in the national interest, it is education. Any nation that ignores the significance of investing in human capital will pay a terrible price…”