Kilgore Award Dinner
Remarks by President Bill Powers
Four Seasons Hotel
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Thank you, Admiral Inman. And thank you all for being here with me tonight.
I’m very honored to receive the Greater Austin Crime Commission’s Joe M. Kilgore Award. I’m honored because it bears the name of a great American and a great Texan, who I was blessed to know. Joe Kilgore was a model of the public servant. First, as a State representative, then as a U.S. Congressman. I’m proud he was a graduate of our Law School, a Regent of the UT System, president of the Texas Exes, and a UT Distinguished Alumnus. I’m honored to be associated with this remarkable leader who loved his alma mater and whose blood ran burnt orange.
I’m honored to have been nominated and chosen for this award by good friends like Bob Inman, and Bill Cunningham, and Roy Butler, and Ralph Wayne. They too have been strong leaders who have made Austin, and Texas, and UT better places.
And I’m honored to receive this award from such a wonderful group: the Greater Austin Crime Commission. Thank you for the outstanding job you do to support law enforcement and to raise public awareness about crime prevention programs in our city. This is important work. I’m particularly proud of your work with UT’s Longhorn Leaders program and our athletes who encourage seventh graders to stay in school and make good choices in their lives.
What an important cause: to help prevent crime and to help people – especially young people – make good choices in their lives. I’ve been a lawyer and a law teacher for 35 years. When I was in law school, I actually planned to go into criminal law, but then I got interested in tort law, and legal philosophy. My closest connections to crime prevention – other than as a citizen – have been in my current role as UT’s president, and when I was selected to lead the investigation of Enron. But whether it is students engaging in hazing or drinking, or white collar crime, or gang behavior, there are similarities: supporting good choices and punishing bad ones.
I am often asked what went wrong at Enron. Were the accounting rules too complex? Were there too many gray areas? Was there too much greed? Ultimately that wasn’t it. The problem was that there was not a culture of law-abiding behavior. It’s like the golfer who hits one in the woods and, when no one is looking, kicks it back on the fairway. People weren’t motivated to do the right thing when they thought no one was looking. As Aristotle taught about virtue, law-abiding behavior is a habit, and we have to practice it.
We punish criminals for many reasons. Surely we do it to deter others. Often we do it to remove dangerous people from society. But equally important, we do it to reinforce our values of civil behavior and to vindicate people who do make the right choices.
Nothing can be worse than making chumps of people who make those right choices. Young people who stay in school and out of gangs. Students who compete fairly on exams. Corporate leaders who pay their taxes and accurately state their books. After Enron, we saw lots of reforms, including Sarbanes-Oxley, new courses on ethics, and countless books. At the end of the day, nothing was as important for vindicating all the people who make good choices as the fact that lawbreakers went to jail.
In a democracy, there are goals all citizens must take special notice of, and work hard to achieve. And they are issues where the Greater Austin Crime Commission has taken the lead. As an Austinite, I want to thank you for your leadership.
And so I am very proud to be selected for this award by such an important organization. And to receive an award named for Joe Kilgore. And to be nominated and selected by such good friends.
Thank you.
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