Summary of Hans F. Sennholz, “A Farewell” (1997)

The file is a contributed chapter in a larger retrospective FEE volume, with running heads placing it in Reflection and Remembrance and the section “Charting the Course.” The available contributor unit is Hans F. Sennholz’s May 1997 farewell essay, written at the end of his presidency of the Foundation for Economic Education. Its scope is institutional: it recounts his transition from academic theorist to chief executive, analyzes how a charitable think tank survives, reports reforms in publishing and outreach, and offers a succession agenda.

Sennholz’s central thesis is that the cause of liberty depends on ideas embodied in disciplined institutions. He begins from gratitude to The Freeman and to FEE, but quickly turns the farewell into a study of management. The libertarian educator, he argues, cannot live by doctrine alone; he must also attend to revenue, cost, donors, staff, products, and technological change.

The CEO is expected to wear two rather different hats: that of a scholar enjoying the world of ideas and communing with writers, editors, and teachers, and that of a businessman who must keep his company alive financially.

This double vocation structures the chapter. Sennholz contrasts the college professor’s relative independence with the “exacting task” of running an enterprise, then adapts market reasoning to philanthropy. A working foundation must please donors, but it is healthiest when it also earns income through services people value.

A working foundation must compete with other charitable organizations not only for the donor dollar but also the customer dollar.

The memoir’s personal center is Mary Sennholz, whose experience on Leonard Read’s early staff made her both institutional memory and moral navigator. Her counsel transforms administrative endurance into a question of honor, binding Sennholz to the helm during FEE’s financial and organizational strain.

"Honor can only be purchased by your deeds. You cannot quit with honor."

The middle of the chapter is a compact institutional report. Sennholz describes taking over amid a shrinking donor base, leadership turnover, relocation debates, and competition from newer political think tanks. Against that background, his account of rejuvenation emphasizes publishing, efficiency, and distribution: seventy-nine books added in five years, expanded book marketing, computerization, staff reduction, and a larger, more varied Freeman. The magazine remains the central vehicle of FEE’s philosophy.

Since it came to FEE in 1955, The Freeman has been the primary mouthpiece of the FEE philosophy.

Sennholz’s conceptual move is to present FEE’s mission as educational rather than partisan and therefore globally portable. The chapter links IPD distribution, foreign subscribers, translated newspaper columns, and Freeman Societies into a single vision of dispersed intellectual transmission after the fall of Soviet communism.

FEE principles apply to all nations, races, creeds, and classes.

The essay also records institutional symbolism: the Golden Jubilee with Margaret Thatcher, Wall Street Journal attention, and a commemorative gold coin all become ways to publicize FEE’s anti-inflationary and pro-freedom message. Yet Sennholz does not treat celebration as an endpoint. His future program stresses partnerships with colleges, advanced degrees, teacher support lines, software, CD-ROM publication, and school-library dissemination. The key obstacle, in his view, is credentialing: academic degrees function as licenses, and liberty-minded teachers often lack access to classrooms.

The closing argument returns from programs to stewardship. FEE’s fate, Sennholz insists, will depend on trustees and managers who preserve its mission while discovering new media for it. The farewell is therefore less a retirement speech than a handoff: a defense of freedom as a “just and noble cause” requiring prudence, enterprise, and fidelity.

We cannot wish for what we know not. But we do know that freedom is a just and noble cause. May the Foundation forever be faithful to its cause.