Paul Jerome Isaac

FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Bill Gates, Fred Greene, Anson Piper, Jack MacFayden

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

WMS-WCFM
Williams Advocate
Garfield Republican Club

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Economic history
Williams College (on the CDE Visiting Committee)
P.E.F. Israel Endowment Funds (treasurer/executive committee)
A range of think tanks, public-policy groups, local community institutions in our area, and scholarship funds at a range of schools in disadvantaged areas

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

Life has gone well. Ben ‘07 is married, with a healthy toddler. Our third, Johanna, just married. Abby and Sam are pursuing their respective careers and personal lives constructively and with reasonable prospects. My wife, Karen, has had some health challenges in recent years. She works hard to keep them from being unduly restrictive of her and our activities.

I realized recently how circumstances change and succession is not always synonymous with continuity. It is a delight to see independent children building their lives. It can be dismaying when they have values or priorities different from mine.

Yet I have to step back and appreciate the vast chasms time creates. To evoke the vanishing SAT, 2022:1968 :: 1968:1914. I dimly recall how ancient and exotic the mores and burning issues of 1914 seemed to me as a freshman. Social, as opposed to technological, change hasn’t accelerated much; but 50+ years at a moderate pace alters a lot. I never believed change necessarily equates with progress, but I will have little influence on what is conserved. My descendants and today’s Williams students will have to work out the values they will enshrine.

Making a living and improving my broader family’s circumstances has inevitably been the focus of my career. While I have done well in that regard, I never reached a point where I could seriously entertain switching into a different demanding career I might have found gratifying.

Around the time of our 25th, I was helping to crash-land the wreck of the medium-sized brokerage house of which I was a partner. Thereafter, I became a principal of a hedge fund of funds firm that enjoyed a good run, sold control to a large bank (which promptly failed in the financial crisis of 2008-9) and which, too, had to be unwound as gracefully as possible. Subsequently, I have run an investment firm I extracted from that venture. While our historical track record has been good, I dramatically underestimated the excesses that US financial markets could reach over the past few years. I find myself rebuilding our track record to eventually hand off a business with attractive prospects to my partners and employees.

Consequently, my civic and charitable engagements remain those of a donor and moderately disengaged board member: sometimes fun, fulfilling, and not particularly creative. I arguably often stay in things too long: 15 years or so on the Williams Center for Development Economics Visiting Committee, 25 years on a corporate board, and over 30 years with a charitable fund where I am the treasurer and head of the nominating committee. Some, like my Winter Study course at Williams, I regret allowing to lapse. Having been fortunate that none of my mistakes or misfortunes in life produced serious, lasting adverse consequences, I regularly wonder whether I should have taken greater risks and thrust myself into more competitive arenas. Then I remember my paternal grandmother’s aphorism: “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t—as I would make the same mistakes, and then feel twice as stupid.”

Williams has been important to me: the genesis of a majority of my longest friendships, a significant formative venue, and a broadening experience. I remain ambivalent about the course of the college. For all my misgivings and frustrations with aspects of today’s Williams, I remain emotionally attached to the place and believe it merits a measure of support to advance with at least the same proportion of false starts and errors I have made.