Kevin Jackson, PhD, earned his first nickname, Jazz Jackson, while playing piano in his Sarasota, Florida high school stage band. His second nickname, Socrates, arrived after he replied to a question from his law professor by positing a new question.

His got his most recent nickname, Dr. J, after he sat in on piano during a live performance with his son Brendan’s progressive rock band, Crisis Team.

Jackson is a man of many talents and identities, the most visible being his role as Professor of Law and Ethics in the Gabelli School of Business and author of Virtuosity in Business (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). A trained classical pianist and composer, with numerous original compositions to his name (listen below), Jackson the musician performs regularly, through his company Virtuoso Jazz Enterprises, at corporate functions and at venues in his hometown Princeton, New Jersey. He also does scoring and arranging for films and new media and creates interactive performances to encourage improvisational creativity among co-workers. In 2012, he performed at a Fordham Consortium function, improvising on piano and using PowerPoint to illustrate temporal similarities between rhythmic pulses in musical scores and stock chart fluctuations.

Nowadays, the professor is exploring new ways to blend his musicianship and his scholarly pursuits. But it was a circuitous, tumultuous route, beginning when he was a middle-schooler and his teenage brother, Jay, asked his parents: “Why don’t you give Kevin piano lessons for his birthday?”

“I had this lingering paranoia that it was too late to be starting an instrument, so I practiced doubly hard,” recalled Jackson, who last month performed with his brother Jay, a percussionist, mathematician, and computer scientist, at the Rochester Fringe Festival in

upstate New York. “I began studying at the Butler Conservatory in Sarasota.” Although he said it normally takes kids 10 years to complete the conservatory’s course, he was “so driven” by music that he went through the entire program in just one year, moving on to advanced study with Grey Perry, a master piano teacher.

Music was Jackson’s focus going into college, and he chose a rigorous jazz program at the University of North Texas (“Have you seen Whiplash?” he said. “It was that.”)

And then he took a philosophy class.

“I got so inspired,” he said, “It was a big world out there.” Just like that he changed his major.

“This is the joke on myself,” Jackson said. “I decided not to go into music because I would not find a career … and [then I]chose an even worse field—philosophy.”

Even though he found he loved the study of ethics, the nagging reality of a needing a paying profession kept interfering with his humanities pursuits. So he enrolled in law school at Florida State and studied law from a broad, humanistic viewpoint. Once he had his JD, he practiced law and went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Maryland. Eventually, he found a perfect fit teaching law and business ethics. He has been teaching the two ever since—first at Georgetown, then at Fordham.

“Throughout all of this, I could never give up music,” he said, proud to have passed that love on to his son Brendan and daughter, Wenlan, 13, already a virtuoso violinist at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

At last month’s Fringe Festival, Jackson and his brother Jay, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, performed original compositions in a comedic tribute to author Kurt Vonnegut. The brothers played their music, together with a troupe of dancers and computer-generated dolphin images, from a satirical stage set dubbed Riff Raft—an “eco-friendly sailing vessel composed of discarded wine corks.”

Music has power to bring people together, said Jackson, but he sees a particular value in musicianship for the business community—virtuosity. In this case, it consists of applying the discipline of musicianship to practicing business. And it’s an idea that goes back to ancient thinkers, he said.

“Plato thought that music shapes the soul. And there is a lot to that,” said Jackson. Virtuosity, he said, is a musician’s self-imposed discipline to master technique first and carry it forward to perfection. Many businesses could learn from this way of thinking, he said.

“So many businesses just treat law as something to either ignore or to do the bare minimum necessary to comply with,” he said. “But the musician’s mind thinks in terms of very high standards . . . seeking something so perfect, and so excellent.

“I want to encourage this way of thinking and to explore its implications,” he said. “[And] to imagine what if business could be more like music—a self-regulated enterprise, a collaborative, creative venture bringing people together in joy and celebration?”

— Janet Sassi

“Poverty and the Common Good: New Ways of Understanding Collective Responsibility,” a symposium held on April 2 at Fordham’s Westchester campus, brought together panelists from the fields of law, business, social work and theology.

Moderator Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, opened the evening with an observation that the church’s position on the subject of private property has evolved over time.

“While Catholic social teaching has always defended private property, it has not, surprisingly, seen private property in a communal fashion, as entailing social responsibilities,” he said. “It has come, eventually, to speak of the universal destination of goods, and a preferential option for the poor, and most frequently, about solidarity.”

Kevin Jackson, Ph.D., professor of business ethics, said when it comes to charitable giving by businesses, two opposing schools of thought have emerged.

One side says businessmen such as Bill Gates don’t do nearly enough to help the poor, relative to their own wealth. Others believe that Microsoft has done an enormous amount of good simply through its existence.

Also, when a company decides that it should give money to a needy cause, the “how” and the “who” are fraught with great questions, Jackson said.

“If you’ve ever been in the position to give to somebody in your family that is in need, how often has it been that the person will say, ‘Let’s just treat this as a loan.’ In other words, they don’t want it to be an outright gift; they’d like to pay you back later on,” he said. “I believe that’s because they want to preserve some element of their dignity. Making a loan is not as generous as making a gift. It means less sacrifice for the giver, but it preserves the dignity of the recipient.”

Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D., said there is a certain bit of irony in the fact that for all the talk about the current economic crisis, the word poverty is never uttered.

“It’s interesting to me that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and current policy rhetoric is striking for its studied avoidance of the word poverty or poor. Everybody is in the middle class,” she said.

“His strategy is well-intentioned. He wants to help the citizens in our country back into a feeling of the common good by saying, ‘We’re all suffering here. We’re all worried. Let’s cast a net so we can all get help, including the poor.’”

The danger in this approach is that people who consider themselves middle class may only think of people their own income bracket as those whom they should work to help, she said.

Speakers also included Amy Uelmen, director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work at Fordham Law School, and George Horton, director of social and community development for Archdiocese of New York Catholic Charities.

The symposium was sponsored by the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service, the Bertram M. Beck Institute of Religion and Poverty, Office of Mission and Ministry at Fordham and the Westchester campus Office of Campus Ministry.