Kent M. Keith

Kent M. Keith is an American writer and leader in higher education, born in 1949 in Brooklyn. His life and work have been tied to public service, education, law, and leadership across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Raised in Nebraska, California, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Hawaii, he graduated from secondary school in Hawaii before entering Harvard College to study government.

Keith’s education ranged widely. After Harvard, he read philosophy and politics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He later received a J.D. degree from the Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and earned an Ed.D. from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. That mix of government, philosophy, politics, law, and education helps explain the subjects that would run through his books: personal meaning, ethical leadership, institutions, faith, and service.

His early career began in law as an attorney with Cades Schutte Fleming & Wright. He then served as Director of the State of Hawaii Department of Planning and Economic Development. In higher education, he was President of Chaminade University from 1989 to 1995, later became Senior Vice President for the YMCA of Honolulu, and in 2015 became president of Pacific Rim Christian University in Honolulu. He also led organizations devoted to servant leadership, serving from 2007 to 2012 as CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership in the United States and from 2012 to 2015 as CEO of the Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership in Asia, based in Singapore.

Keith is most closely associated with The Paradoxical Commandments, a poem he wrote while he was an undergraduate. The poem has often circulated in slightly altered form. In 1997, he learned that “The Paradoxical Commandments” had hung on the wall of Mother Teresa’s children’s home in Calcutta, India. Two decades after writing the original poem, he wrote a book expanding on its themes, published as The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World and later as Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World.

His publications also include early books on student councils, such as The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council and The Silent Majority: The Problem of Apathy and the Student Council, as well as works on ocean resource development, Hawaii’s future, university administration, faith, and servant leadership. Later titles include Do It Anyway, The Case for Servant Leadership, Morality and Morale, and The Christian Leader at Work. Across these works, Keith returned to a steady concern: how people and institutions can act with purpose even when outcomes are uncertain or difficult.

For readers of quotations, Keith’s appeal comes from the plain force of that concern. His words grew out of study, public service, education, and leadership, but they are aimed at ordinary choices: whether to serve, whether to keep going, whether to do the right thing anyway. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, with his wife, Elizabeth Keith, and their three children.