Rob Hale Jr.’s surprise gift to the graduates of Quincy College pales in comparison to Robert Smith’s headline-making bequest at the 2019 Morehouse commencement. Smith, the billionaire founder of Vista Equity Partners, told all 396 seniors graduating from the historically Black men’s college in Atlanta that he would pay their remaining student debt out of his own pocket. The gift totaled $34 million. (Smith is the richest Black person in the U.S., with a fortune Forbes estimates at $6 billion.)

Hale’s $1,000 cash gift to each of the 270 grads present at Quincy’s May 22 ceremony came to a more modest sum. Still the students were thrilled—and startled.

“I was completely shocked when he said he was going to give us a gift,” says Beatriz Martins, 23, who graduated with a two-year business degree from Quincy, a public school where 46% of the 5,600 students are of color.  She was even more shocked that she was getting cash. “I thought it would be a handshake or a pat on the back,” she says. “I didn’t think it was going to be such a heartwarming and extraordinary gift.”

Founded in 1958, Quincy is a two-year public school where most students major in computer science or business. Some 500 graduated this year but only a little more than half attended commencement, where attendees observed Covid protocols including masking and social distancing. Each grad was allowed two guests.

Annual tuition is $7,000 and no students live on campus. Quincy’s focus, according to President Richard DeCristofaro, is “inclusiveness, diversity, economic opportunity and community involvement.”

It was in that spirit that Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch asked Rob Hale, Jr., the founder and CEO of Quincy-based business telecom company Granite Telecommunications, if he would speak at this year’s celebration. Hale, 54, isn’t an alum (he graduated from Connecticut College) and he’s originally from Northampton, Massachusetts, not Quincy, a working class community 10 miles south of Boston. He says he’s had a boom and bust career, building a $1.4 billion fortune at his first telecom company, Network Plus, only to lose it all in the 2000 dot com crash. Since he cofounded Granite in 2002, it has thrived.  Forbes estimates his net worth at more than $2 billion.

As he prospered, he became increasingly philanthropic. In 2018 and 2019, the Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked him and wife Karen Hale among the nation’s top 50 givers. The couple has donated hundreds of millions to hospitals including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a facility that became especially meaningful to Hale after he lost his father to pancreatic cancer.

Hales touched on three themes in his commence speech: Don’t fear failure, follow your own path and give more than you get. Because giving has brought them so much joy, he and his wife came up with the idea that they could demonstrate giving, live, at the commencement, and structure their gift in such a way that the students would experience the thrill of giving themselves. He presented each grad with two envelopes of $500 in cash. One was for them to keep and the other, they were told to give to someone who needed the money. “We thought it would be great if we could walk the walk and not just talk the talk,” says Hale.

Transporting all that cash to Quincy College was more challenging than Hale expected. He says he called two local bank presidents who informed him that it was impossible to rent an armored truck. Instead he hired a construction van staffed by security guards. “They had on bulletproof vests and they carried weapons,” he says. “When they got out of the van with the money bags, it looked cool.”

While Hale enjoyed the theater of his surprise gesture, he says his intent was to inspire the Quincy grads to embrace philanthropy: “Hopefully giving is something they do for their entire life.”