A Billionaire Gave $1,000 to UMass Dartmouth Graduates. Some Missed Out.

A billionaire gave $1,000 to University of Massachusetts Dartmouth graduates in May. The catch? You had to be there.

Graduation day dawned on May 16 at the Franklin, Mass., home of Emma Yell and her partner, James Ristaino, but the rain was so heavy that it was hard to tell.

They had both hoped to cross the stage that day and receive their University of Massachusetts Dartmouth degrees after years of combining coursework with care for their now-8-year-old daughter, Elena.

The weather, however, was a problem. The rain-or-shine, no-cover ceremony meant that Elena, who uses tracheotomy and feeding tubes, would be exposed to the elements. The couple were not going to show up without her, and being there was just too risky.

Graduation went on without the family, and it came with a fabulous surprise for the seniors who were there: Rob Hale, a local telecom billionaire, turned up with over $1 million in duffel bags and handed $1,000 each to graduates as they got their degrees. They were to keep $500 for themselves and give $500 to help a person or an organization that needed it more than they did.

Because Ms. Yell and Mr. Ristaino weren’t there, they — like others among the 20 percent of the graduating class, which totaled 1,200 people, who missed the ceremony — did not get the money.

“You’ve got to show up,” Mr. Hale told People magazine when the tale of the rich man doling out $100 bills drew an enormous amount of media attention.

Like many people who heard the Hale tale, I didn’t know about the absent graduates. I had just wanted to learn what the ones who were present that day had done with the money. In October, the university sent an email on my behalf to every one of them, and people responded with the loveliest stories.

One nursing student gave her $500 to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in honor of a family friend in treatment there who was probably going to die. A budding engineer handed the money over to her high school so the teachers who got her to college could put it to work with other teenagers. A third graduate, whose parents had moved to the United States from Cape Verde, used the money to help a Cape Verdean family rebuild a destroyed home.

But I got just as many notes from people like Ms. Yell. One graduate said she had missed the ceremony because her postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome flared up. Another had older parents, who could not have handled the weather, and did not want to leave them at home.

Paige Santos, another UMass Dartmouth graduate, has cerebral palsy and uses an electric scooter that would not have done well in the monsoon conditions. She said she would have given her $500 to the Special Olympics, where she once competed as a javelin thrower.

In this season of giving, what are we to make of a billionaire with a soft spot for striving graduates who draws a hard line on being present for the pomp and circumstance, no matter the circumstances? I couldn’t make sense of it, so I went to his office in Quincy, Mass., to ask.

Mr. Hale’s inspiration to give and keep giving first hit him at a high school Easter Seals hoop-athon. He raised over $1,500 making layups on a basketball court within a specified period of time. “I felt a kind of internal glow,” he told me when I asked him about that experience.

After college, he volunteered as a Big Brother to a boy who would later be in his wedding party. And as Mr. Hale built a high-flying start-up, saw it fall into bankruptcy and built a new one — Granite Telecommunications — he and his wife kept giving.

In 2022, the couple gave away $1 million each week. And this year, they donated $26.2 million to a variety of groups as part of Mr. Hale’s successful quest to finish the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon.

Set against this record, the decision to exclude people who couldn’t go to a graduation ceremony felt like an administrative oversight. So I took a few minutes to read Mr. Hale their emails aloud.

“Part of life is showing up,” he said in response, echoing what he told People magazine. “The message I want to be delivered for those who don’t attend by choice is, ‘Hey, this is a celebration of four years of hard work, and you’ve got to show up.’”

Surely another part of life, however, is having compassion for people who can’t show up on a particular day in specific conditions — but showed up repeatedly for four years or more to earn their diploma. It didn’t seem like anyone had ever looked Mr. Hale in the eye and put it that way.

“If there were medical circumstances, we can certainly make accommodations,” he said.

Ten days later, he changed his mind.

“Even though he is certainly sorry for the folks who could not make it, for any reason, there were still over 1,000 graduates that were there with him in the pouring rain for the commencement,” Katie Sheridan, his executive assistant, said via email. “He would like to stick with the original sentiment that you had to be there in order to receive the envelopes.”

Ryan C. Merrill, a UMass Dartmouth spokesman, said via email that under an agreement the school had signed, the $1,000 was only for students participating in the May 16 ceremony.

“With that said, the university remains committed to Mr. Hale’s vision for his philanthropic distribution, should that ever change,” Mr. Merrill wrote.

Ms. Yell, who had hoped that Mr. Hale would make an exception so she and her partner could support organizations that help children with special needs, said she was disappointed all over again.

“I just want people like me — or us — to be seen,” she said. “I feel constantly isolated in every way, and the graduation ceremony was just like the cherry on top of everything.”

But you had to be there, right? Sentiment, and all that. Otherwise, you don’t get seen by Mr. Hale, who told the crowd that “if you give a little bit more in your life, your life will be better for it.” Of your own heart, he added.

The Hales’ UMass Dartmouth gifts surpassed $1 million, and the cash in the unclaimed envelopes went into an endowed scholarship fund in the couple’s names. And they are not done. Mr. Hale told me that he and his wife were planning a similar giveaway at a school he would not name in order to preserve the element of surprise.

What’s that school to do about people who will not be able to go to its graduation in person?

UMass Dartmouth has an applied ethics minor, and I took this entire situation to one of its instructors, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, a professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies.

“One of the things that philosophers discuss is that if you are a recipient of a gift, it comes with responsibilities,” she said.

This is crucial. The Hales should do what they want with their money. They earned it.

But nothing is stopping any institution from requiring donors to honor everyone or honor no one at all. A university probably wouldn’t draw attention from People magazine for turning the Hales’ money away, but it would make an excellent case study for its applied ethics department.

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