“I had to spend a lot of time thinking about what I would say to you,” Arch continued. “Then just last week, I came across an article in the newspaper that really got my attention. The title of the piece was ‘Why Men Fail.’ According to this piece, nationwide, over the last ten years, we’ve seen a sharp decline in male academic performance at every level. Statistically, fewer men are graduating from college than women, and even fewer are going on to complete graduate programs. There are a lot of single moms in America, but they are staying single by choice, because the fathers of their children aren’t providers. So the women are taking care of themselves. When I first started working in finance, my mentor told me that his best employees were single moms, not guys like me. I got the message. This message really got me thinking about the importance of what you’ve experienced here at Yeatman. It’s trained you to hold on to something most people have lost.”

Arch let that note linger. A dramatic hush fell over the assembly.

“While we must meet the challenges of a changing world with fresh ideas and perspectives, there’s a sense here in Nashville, and especially at Yeatman, that some of the old stuff is worth holding on to. It’s this stuff—these ideals—that are the foundation your life will be built upon.”

He went on like that for a while, paying homage to Yeatman, celebrating the graduating class as exceptions to the trends he’d just described. He then shifted into his own narrative: the privilege in which he’d grown up, followed by the wrenching ordeal of his father’s illness and deterioration and the devastating blow of his death. The courage he’d learned both from the way his father had faced sickness and death and from his mother’s stoic determination to nurture and shelter her children while nursing her husband and, after his death, her stoic resolve to shepherd the family through their collective grief. The strength of character and generosity he’d learned from his uncle Jim, and the parallels between the path Arch’s mother had walked and the one Jim now followed himself as a widower and father of a young daughter. The grace and wisdom Arch had learned with Vanessa by his side, brilliant and driven and more accomplished than most of her male peers.

All of it was crafted to signal the formation of his own ambitions, his will to power, as it were, couched in the impression of a labor of love—as an exhibition of noblesse oblige.