Eugene Robinson of Orangeburg, S.C. Eugene Robinson, a

columnist for The Washington

Post and last year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, was born in 1955 in Orangeburg, S.C., where he graduated from Orangeburg Wilkinson High School. He earned his degree in journalism from the University of Michigan. He was the school’s first African–American student to be named co– editor–in– chief of the student newspaper, the award–winning

Michigan Daily.

In the late 1970s, Robinson

was a reporter for the San

Francisco Chronicle when he covered the Patty Hearst trial. Hearst’s paternal grandfather was William Randolph Hearst, aka Citizen Kane, media mogul and owner of

Moore School Dean Hildy Teegen congratulates one of her graduates. the San Francisco Examiner.

Lead counsel for the Hearst defense was celebrated Boston attorney F. Lee Bailey.

The San Francisco

Chronicle had a working agreement with its Hearst–

owned rival, the San Francisco

Examiner , where the

Chronicle had the morning run and the Examiner, the afternoon. Both papers shared the Sunday edition.

Today, only the San Francisco

Chronicle survives, and next to the Los Angeles Times, it has California’s largest circulation.

Dr. Ben Bernanke of Dillon, S.C. Robinson left the Chronicle

in 1980 for The Washington

Post to become its city hall reporter during the first administration of Mayor Marion Barry. In 1984, Robinson was promoted to city editor responsible for all the coverage in the District of Columbia. During the academic year of 1987–88, Robinson was on leave as a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University.

Based in Bueno Aires, Spanish–fluent Robinson was the Post’s South America correspondent from 1988 until 1992.

In the next two years, up to early 1994, Robinson was the Post’s London bureau chief. In Feb. 1994, Robinson came back to Washington as the paper’s foreign editor and was soon elected to the Council on Foreign Relations. In Jan. 1999, he was promoted to assistant managing editor, including the Style section.

The University Mace leads the faculty. His first book, Coal to

Cream: A Black Man’s Journey

Beyond Color to an Affirmation

of Race, was published in 1999.

On Jan. 1, 2005, Robinson’s appointment as associate editor and columnist for the Washington Post took effect.

He was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree by USC just before his commencement address.

Robinson’s commencement address was given at 3 p.m. Friday, May 7, and again at 3 p.m. Saturday, May 8.

He began by introducing himself as an Orangeburg native, someone who saw both high barriers and grand possibilities as a little kid in segregated restaurants, lunch counters, gas station rest rooms, public schools and flagship universities. Born in 1955, Robinson heard the stories of the beginnings of the civil rights struggles in the South, and 10 years later the Civil Rights Act followed the Voting Rights Act. Change was slow, too slow for the have–nots, but change was coming all the same, just in time.

When Robinson interviewed President Obama last year in the Oval Office, he saw a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King sitting on a sideboard facing the president’s desk, reminding the president and his visitors of the past half–century of social and moral accomplishment.

Robinson alerted the graduating students of the world’s extremist ideologies of all kinds, and warned “it will be hard to balance the imperatives of safety with those of freedom.”

He then said, “You have the intellectual tools and the moral compass to find that balance. Use them.”

Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee was born in 1953 in Augusta, Ga. He grew up in Dillon, where his father was the owner of the Jay Bee Drug Company, and his mother was a teacher.

Bernanke skipped the first grade, and in the sixth grade he won the spelling bee. In high school he taught himself calculus, which should suitably impress its inventor, another upstart, Sir Isaac Newton. Ten points shy of a perfect score, Bernanke made a 1590 on the SAT and went off to Harvard to major in economics. He returned in the summers to wait tables at Alan Shafer’s SOB, South of the Border. In 1979 he received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bernanke taught economics at Princeton, where he was head of the department, and at both New York University and MIT as a visiting professor.

From June 2005 until Jan. 2006, Bernanke was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors.

On Feb. 1, 2006, he began his appointment as the Federal Reserve System Chairman, and he was reappointed on Feb. 1, 2010.

In 2009 he was named

Time magazine’s Person of the Year. As Moore School Dean Hildy Teegen identified Bernanke sitting at the forefront of current events, he’s the most influential financial person on the planet.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate of business administration at commencement, Saturday morning, May 8, 2010.

Bernanke’s address to the USC graduating class of 2010 was titled “The Economics of Happiness.” And for the United States, the economics of happiness was essentially the mission statement in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, where he said the inalienable rights of Americans are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

By “happiness,” Bernanke was talking about a short–term state of mind that may depend on a person’s temperament. “Life satisfaction,” also a reflection of happiness, refers to a longer– term state of contentment and well–being, according to Bernanke. The relationship between the two is not always straightforward.

What’s truly valuable in life can include health, clean environment, price stability, and maximum employment, all combining for the “economics of happiness,” which is a separate academic field with departments and dissertations and all the rest. In the rich countries, including the USA, these things happen or are available because the economic system affords them. In the poor countries, they are scarce, but the scale of happiness isn’t too far different from what’s recorded in the rich countries.

Bernanke tried to illustrate an economics phenomenon concerning happiness: “The finding that people in rich countries don’t report much greater happiness than those in lower–income countries— even though, in any given country, the rich say they are happier than the poor do—is called the Easterlin paradox,” after its discoverer, economist Richard Easterlin. In other words, money doesn’t buy happiness.

What Bernanke tastefully overlooked was Donald Trump’s observation when he said, “People who believe money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop.”

Rich is a relative term, Bernanke pointed out. If money doesn’t buy happiness, then what factors do contribute to life satisfaction? Happy people tend to spend time with friends and family and put emphasis on social and community relationships. Humans are social, and happiness and life satisfaction are closely related to a network of friends, family, and community.

Bernanke wandered a little into governmental philosophy, a little on the libertarian side when he said, “And to help people feel in control of their own destinies, (government) policies should respect the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities to make their own decisions whenever possible, as research has confirmed the intuitive notion that individual freedoms contribute to life satisfaction.”