A Big Vision for Leading into the Future

Dr. David Batstone (PhD, GTU 1989) is an author, activist, entrepreneur, and academic. He is the Professor Emeritus of the School of Management at the University of San Francisco and was selected as the GTU 2022 Alum of the Year.

GTU: Congratulations on being named the 2022 GTU Alum of the year! What does this honor mean to you at this time, amidst all that is unfolding in our nation and world, as well as in your own career?

David Batstone: When I was doing my PhD at the Graduate Theological Union, the thing that I learned was how to apply the tools of how we write, how we understand history and the future. I use all of that every day!

People may ask, “How do you use a PhD in theology to build a battery company?” Or, “...to save Silicon Valley tech companies?” But I found it extremely useful. If your goal is to change the world, you need a big philosophy, a big vision, that you often don’t get if you’re just locked into the day-to-day mechanics of building a company.

I don’t know if every theological school in the country would choose someone like me to be their alum of the year. They might choose someone who is a leading theologian, or who is much more within the sector of religion. The fact that even moving beyond academia, or even beyond my Not for Sale work of fighting trafficking, this is the recognition that it’s also the things I’m doing in the business world that is making an impact consistent with the value and ethos of the Graduate Theological Union.

GTU: Liberation and transformation are core themes in your work. What spurred your interest in these areas?

DB: I say I’m the only Liberation Theologian in America who is a venture capitalist. I started to work in human rights in Latin America. I kind of followed my heart and followed my passion, and so I started working in human rights even before I started at the Graduate Theological Union.

There was a transformation happening in Latin America among the poor communities. They called it Liberation Theology, but it really was looking at the authorities—like the Bible and the Church—that for years had told them their place in the world was to be poor, and that was God’s will. Suddenly they started to read the Scriptures and the Church and the priests started encouraging them that God really wanted their liberation, their empowerment, and their freedom. It was really a powerful thing!

What was really fascinating that happened at that time is that I had set up a human rights organization to live with people who received death threats from military governments. Some of my GTU colleagues went down with me and we would live with people who the military had targeted for assassination. It was an incredible time! We said, “If you kill a Honduran, a Guatemalan, an El Salvadorian, you’re also going to kill a US citizen.” It was a way of leveraging the value of a human life. We were non-armed bodyguards, as it were. What happened is that we got signaled, I was targeted along with some of my colleagues, and they wouldn’t let us in the country for being “subversive.” So, we started an economic development agency as a cover for our human rights. We started doing “financial investing,” and I pretended to be an investor, and some of my theological friends pretended to be agronomists. What happened is we became what we pretended to be. I ended up being very good at investing money and figuring out how to employ it in the most useful ways to bring about a bigger return. That’s how I became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. That’s where my business career started. Liberation Theology was spoken by a Peruvian theologian who is one of the founders of that movement, Gustavo Gutierrez. He said all theology is best done at sundown [not a direct quote]. It was at that stage that I started thinking about, I was so embedded and engaged in this activity in Latin America. I said, “You know I grew up as a person of faith, I grew up in the Church. But this is really making me think differently about my faith, and how I think about theology.” And what I learned is, when you move your feet, that is you shift your ground, now you have new questions that you ask of your philosophy about life, about the way you read the Scripture. You’re asking new questions. And new things come back because you never asked those questions before.

To do a PhD at the GTU, I was looking for answers to questions I had never asked before.

The other people who were very influential on me at that time were a GTU Professor by the name of Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001) [American Presbyterian minister, theologian, and activist, who taught at Stanford, Union Theological Seminary, and the Pacific School of Religion]. He was at PSR, and he was more of a North American