Parody
Parody Walter B. Hewlett donates $400 million to Stanford University. —News item Annals of Compassion For most of his life Walter Hewlett tried to avoid going to downtown Palo Alto. It wasn’t...
...Hewlett himself is not asking for awards (though he hinted that changing the name of the school to Hewlett University would be looked upon favorably...
...For the university, Hewlett’s gift meant a whole new generation of dataports...
...It wasn’t the crime he feared so much...
...Hewlett walked over and looked at the computer...
...Hewlett saw him waiting for the file transfer to be completed...
...Then one day it all became too much...
...Hewlett decided on the spot he would give away $400 million for the betterment of humanity...
...It was those poor Stanford kids, crammed into townhouses with insufficiently jetted jacuzzis, lacking a decent heliport to help them get to Vail, condemned to lives of grinding poverty at Bank of America and Skadden, Arps...
...It occurred to Hewlett that all around the globe there must be children living without T1 lines...
...He turned a corner and there was a Stanford student downloading some recruiting information from McKinsey...
...Sure, around Christmas he might send a few charitable dollars to the Yahoo...
...What kind of future would a child have in this world with a 56k modem...
...Stanford had received only $580 million in donations in the year 2000...
...He once ran across a software executive who had to buy his Lexus pre-owned...
...Mostly he is happy to know that through his generosity, some young spoiled rich kids will get just a little bit richer, and maybe someday they too will donate hundreds of millions of dollars to the university that educates their neighbors’ offspring...
...retirement fund, as a way of helping out those less fortunate than himself...
...But he tried to push the whole ugly reality out of his mind...
...He was visiting an old friend in his science lab in the grungiest, dirtiest part of Palo Alto, called “campus”—just behind the Neiman Marcus in the shopping pavilion...
...The question was who on earth needed the $400 million most, and the answer was obvious: Stanford University...
...Hewlett insulated himself...
...It had barely edged out Harvard as the top buckraking school in the world...
...When business took him into that part of northern California, he’d look out through his tinted car windows and he’d see teeming masses of engineers and MBAs, some of whom didn’t even have titanium laptops, some of whom were still using Palm Pilot Vs, or even earlier models...
...All around Palo Alto, mortgage lenders wept with joy...
...He had to act...
...This is really going to revive the $5 million condo market,” one exclaimed...
...A 56k modem...
...He just didn’t like being around all the poverty and all the squalor...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 33
