Schmidt offered these as his final two bromides, and they were deeply intertwined. He had discovered, to his own surprise, that the greatest irony of his academic life was that he had made more of a difference at CUNY — the City University of New York, where he served as an unpaid trustee — than at Yale or Columbia, where he had been president and dean respectively. Under his volunteer chairmanship, CUNY's full-time faculty grew from 5,500 to 7,100, enrollment rose from 200,000 to 270,000, and annual giving exploded from $37 million to over $250 million. The qualitative gains were even greater. For Schmidt, this was proof that the most rewarding work is not always the most compensated, and that true wisdom lies in the humility to recognize how much you still don't know — a lesson he drew from Marilynne Robinson's book 'When I Was a Child I Read Books.'