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How would you improve South Carolina?

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What if you could do anything imaginable to improve South Carolina, and money was no object? What would you do?

For Hayne Hipp of Greenville and Pawleys Island, the idea to improve his native state is just that: ideas. He’s invested heavily in the idea that if people study ideas, and listen to each other’s ideas, good things will happen.

Sounds like something we needed to prevent the Civil War, but in today’s world, does this make sense? South Carolina has so many concrete needs — from day care centers to college endowments. What good is an investment in the mushy goal of selfless, principled leadership? How do you even measure success? “It’s hard,” Hipp said. “There’s no final exam. It’s a lifelong commitment.”

But it’s an idea that can be proven to work right here in southern Beaufort County.

Hipp’s lifelong commitment to society began early, long before he got his first job helping build Hilton Head Island’s first golf course in the summer of 1960. He was born a son of Francis Hipp, a hall-of-fame Greenville business and civic leader who had taken over his family’s relatively small insurance company and turned it into the giant Liberty Life Insurance. He expanded into broadcasting, and the firm grew more with Hayne Hipp as chief executive from 1979 until 2006. That’s when the sale of its broadcasting holdings for almost $1 billion closed the family’s involvement in one of the state’s leading businesses. Along the way, Liberty Life Insurance helped finance the oceanfront William Hilton Inn on South Forest Beach Drive in 1959. That gave young Charles Fraser, the dreaming developer who had audacious ideas but a struggling Sea Pines Co., a place to wine and dine the folks who would buy property and turn Hilton Head into a household name.

The Hipps built one of the first houses in Sea Pines, and it was landscaped by Robert Marvin of Walterboro. No one knew it at the time, but each of these ingredients would someday be reflected in Hayne Hipp’s decision to improve his state by founding the Liberty Fellowship in conjunction with the Aspen Institute in Colorado and Wofford College in Spartanburg.

Timeless issues In each of the past five years, a class of 20 Liberty Fellows has been selected to reflect “a wide range of thought, a diversity of perspectives, a strong intellectual capability and curiosity, and a commitment to work unselfishly and collaboratively,” Hipp said.

They are South Carolinians between the ages of 25 and 45 — corporate and nonprofit leaders, lawyers, judges, planners, doctors, entrepreneurs.

Over a period of two years, a class gathers four times for a total of 23 days — including a full week at the Aspen Institute. It takes at least 25 hours of reading to prepare for each seminar.

“They read Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech from the Birmingham jail, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, business cases, cases on current issues, science fiction, poetry,” Hipp said. “In each text, there’s a lesson in leadership. It’s Socratic — a roundtable discussion. Sessions are private. What is said there, stays there.”

Fellowship executive director Jennie Johnson said, “We focus on issues, as opposed to history. The issues in the older works are not dissimilar to issues we face in South Carolina and all over the world. Some problems have been wrestled with since before Christ, like what is justice.”

Hipp said, “As they have their discussions and do their readings, they begin to focus in on how we can work together — not getting hung up on small details, politically or socially, but how we can work together to make things happen here.”

Each fellow — who doesn’t pay a dime to participate — gets a mentor, and commits to a community leadership project.

Former Sea Pines president Phil Lader — who subsequently became a college president, White House aide, ambassador and international business leader — is on the Liberty Fellowship board of directors. “Liberty Fellows has had an impressive, substantive start,” he told me via e-mail while on business in Moscow. “Not only are some of our state’s most promising young and emerging leaders having the opportunity to think broadly and challenge each other’s thinking on historical and social issues, but the continuing mentorship element makes available to the fellows the perspective of older leaders of South Carolina organizations whose experience may be helpful. Florence’s Trip DuBard, for example, has established, as his principal service project through the Liberty Fellows program, a community foundation for that region of the state.”

Bigger than S.C. Fellows from our community include Allen Ward, Robert Trask, Jim Stritzinger, Bea Wray, Jane Frederick and Dr. Faith L. Polkey.

Ward, president of the Ward Edwards design firm in Bluffton, said, “I did not get a lot of this stuff in engineering school, but I found it to be transformative rather than informative. It’s real encouraging to see how many talented people are out there committed to a better future — people who see a community as something to be enhanced, not something to be exploited.”

Trask, president and CEO of Atlantic Community Bank, said, “There’s a real responsibility associated with it — that Hayne not waste his money on me, or a better way to put it, that I not waste this opportunity.” Stritzinger said the new relationships extend well beyond the seminars. He recently hiked 30 miles on the Appalachian Trail with Hipp. For his community project, Stritzinger introduced robotics competitions in local high schools.

Wofford College president Benjamin B. Dunlap is a Liberty Fellowship board member who was involved from the beginning. He’s known as a Renaissance man, and says he’s seen this model of leadership training work since he was introduced to the Aspen Institute 24 years ago.

“The Liberty Fellowship is the only domestic partnership with the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and as a native South Carolinian I’m proud of that,” he said. “We have a seat at that table. We are part of something much, much bigger than South Carolina, though we are focused on South Carolina.”

The state now has 100 Liberty Fellows floating around, and in five more years it will be 200. “Their power to leverage change is enormous,” Dunlap said, “and it will have an exponential impact over time.”

The bottom line Those concepts seem more concrete when I think of the late Robert Marvin, the Lowcountry landscape architect who worked so many years ago at the Hipp home in Sea Pines. Marvin was transformed by ideas at an Aspen International Design Conference in the 1960s. From there he became a soulmate, designer and even tractor driver with Charles Fraser as they preached the value of beauty — both to the bank account and to life. Marvin’s designs and concepts helped define the now-famous Hilton Head look.

It was at the Aspen idea-fest that Marvin heard from world-renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger “that man’s success and happiness are affected as much by his emotional response to his environment as by his physical comfort in it.” Menninger urged living spaces that consider the emotional needs of people, and Marvin loved the idea.

Marvin would later put it this way in an essay he called “Landscape Architecture Is Not Just Planting Azaleas”: “Today’s home environment should be designed to create an atmosphere in which each individual can develop to be as full a human being as God intended him to be.”

Between the time that Hayne Hipp sweated through his summer job on our first golf course and the time he founded the Liberty Fellowship, oceanfront property values where Marvin and Fraser planted their ideas rose by 75,000 percent.

The smart money still is on the “thin air” of ideas.

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