Opportunities She Couldn’t Have Imagined

When Lynn Sharp Paine ’71 attended high school in Florida, very few of her classmates traveled outside the state for college—if they went to college at all. Paine wanted to break the mold, but her family’s limited resources narrowed her prospects. She applied to Smith at the suggestion of a family friend and was surprised and thrilled to receive a full financial aid package.

“It changed everything for me,” she says. “Everything that happened to me after Smith I can trace back to Smith in some way.”

Now a Baker Foundation Professor and John G. McLean Professor Emerita of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Paine is an author and expert on leadership and corporate governance, teaching M.B.A. students how to navigate boards of directors while making ethical and economically sound business decisions.

In tracing her academic career back to Smith, Paine has made an ethical commitment of her own: to contribute to financial aid so current and future Smith students can forge their own paths. “Smith’s generosity to me inspired me to give back so that others have the same opportunity I did,” she explains.

An Intellectual Awakening

Growing up, times were tight in Paine’s household. “My family had very little money,” she says. “My dad had been pretty absent for most of my upbringing, so we were reliant on my mother, who was raising three kids and working as a bookkeeper at the local high school.”

Paine was a high achiever, and she threw herself into schoolwork and extracurriculars. She was Florida’s baton twirling champion, ranked fourth in the nation when she was 16. “The training was very demanding, just as it is with dance or any sport,” she says.

When Paine applied to Smith, she did so sight unseen. “We didn’t have enough money to visit any colleges,” she recalls. And she tried not to get her hopes up, knowing that “financial aid was essential for me to go to Smith.”

Smith awarded her the aid she needed, and soon she was adjusting to the New England weather and culture. Her roommate’s parents took her to the garment district in Boston to buy her a proper winter coat. “I felt like I was behind all the other girls, many of whom had gone to prep schools in New England,” she says. “They seemed acculturated to life at Smith, but I was in culture shock.”

Yet Paine soared on campus, soaking up knowledge as she earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy with a minor in art history. She also participated in Smith’s summer program in Amsterdam to study Dutch art—an experience she drew from later to write a case study for a Harvard Business School course.

“Learning new things has always given me energy, going back to when I was 2 years old and my grandmother, who was a schoolteacher in Kentucky, took me to school with her,” she says. Her college experience both fed and fueled that desire for learning. “At Smith, I had a real intellectual awakening.”

Making Connections

Paine made several connections at Smith that influenced the trajectory of her life. Her philosophy professor, Murray Kiteley, introduced her to Oxford professor Richard Hare, who was one of the leading moral philosophers of the day. “This introduction enabled me to attend Oxford to earn my doctorate in philosophy,” she says.

“How did I finance that with no money? Back to Smith again. Smith trustee Julia Andrus Moon ’37 put me in touch with the Leopold Schepp Foundation, which gave me a scholarship toward my doctoral studies at Oxford.”

Paine credits her Smith connections for another pivotal international experience as well. A nomination from the college led her to the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, where she spent a year as a Luce Scholar. (She later served as a member of the Henry Luce Foundation’s Luce Scholar Selection Panel.)

These connections were intellectual as well as personal and financial. In fact, her early work in philosophy and ethics underpins her entire career—including her years practicing law after earning a degree from Harvard Law School. As a lawyer with the Boston firm Hill & Barlow, Paine applied a moral philosophical lens to the cases she analyzed. “I became interested in how corporations were making decisions that struck me as lacking in basic human decency and common sense,” she says.

A high-profile legal case in the early 1980s sharpened Paine’s focus on corporate governance. The suit against the Johns-Manville Corporation, once the largest producer of asbestos products in the United States, revealed that executives from the 1930s on had hidden the cancer risks of asbestos exposure from the company’s employees.

“This case got me wondering why some business leaders go astray,” she says. “What are the human dynamics? How could very decent, conscientious people make a decision that was clearly disastrous for their employees, not to mention for the company and its shareholders?”

Business School Crusader

As a professor at Harvard Business School decades later, Paine continued to pursue these questions. Melding her ethics background with her law experience, she co-founded the Leadership and Corporate Accountability course, which is now a requirement for M.B.A. students.

“The core idea of that course is that as a leader of a corporation, every decision you make should meet three tests: Is it economically, ethically, and legally sound? The course is filled with dilemmas about how to align those three criteria.”

She currently teaches a course called Corporate Governance and Boards of Directors, guiding aspiring CEOs and entrepreneurs on how to form and collaborate with boards.

“It’s a crusade for me, because business schools have traditionally not taught much about corporate governance,” she says. “Many students don’t realize that if they’re going to be a CEO, they get hired and fired by a board, so they’d better understand how to work with its members if they want to be successful.”

“Corporations are large and powerful entities that control a huge portion of the world’s resources,” she continues. “Boards of directors determine how resources get allocated. Those decisions affect the lives of people all around the world every day, and it’s tremendously important that students understand this” so they can influence those decisions positively and effectively.

Giving for Today and the Future

Paine is currently on another crusade: She’s a generous donor to Smith’s Generation to Generation financial aid initiative. “I look at what students have to pay for college today, and my family would have never been able to do that,” she says. “I give so that other young people who are in similar circumstances will have the opportunity to go to Smith and to build on that experience” in a way that is true to them. She’s confident her gifts to financial aid will allow Smithies to “expand their life possibilities”—just as she did.