GIVING IT AWAY

Consider Ken Milani’s 53-year tenure as an accounting professor one heck of a charitable contribution.

May 1964.

Ken Milani, a cost and budget supervisor happy in his work at Johnson & Johnson’s Chicago facility, is driving to his neighborhood bank in Cicero, Illinois, to deposit his paycheck. He turns on the radio and catches President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement address at the University of Michigan, remarks that would come to be known as the “Great Society” speech — LBJ’s vision for eradicating poverty in the United States of America.

The young man is inspired. And he hears a line — maybe “You can help build a society where the demands of morality and the needs of the spirit can be realized in the life of the Nation” — and that’s it.

He thinks about his wife, Joan Milani, a teacher. He thinks about how much he likes talking to that neighborhood kid taking an accounting class, the one who comes in to ask Ken questions while he twirls dough in his parents’ pizzeria on Chicago’s west side.

He says to himself, “I’m going to graduate school.”

Milani’s life is about to change, and over the next 60 years, the lives of countless thousands of people will be better off for it.

One way to measure the accountancy professor’s contributions in the 53 years he taught Federal Taxation, Cost Accounting and related classes at Notre Dame — from January 1972 to what he might call his premature retirement in December 2024 — is to do what accountants do. Look at the numbers.

When Milani started, accounting was one of the biggest majors at the University. One out of every seven students graduated with an accounting degree, he says, and one out of four of those took Milani’s tax class. He figures he’s taught somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 students and trained maybe 5,000 of those to prepare federal and state income tax returns for free through the volunteer Tax Assistance Program he co-founded with two MBA students during his first year at Notre Dame.

Some two dozen of those former volunteers have taken the TAP idea to other cities, magnifying its impact almost immeasurably. And since 2004, Milani has co-written and co-edited a weekly Sunday tax column in the South Bend Tribune that runs from December through April and gets picked up by USA Today.

Colleagues around Mendoza, and friends from every chapter of his life, would surely add that Milani has told at least one bad joke a day over those 53 years — and probably got started the day he learned to talk.

But, bah, numbers. Milani is not a numbers guy. Not if you mean nothing more than dollars and cents, units and rates, percentages and bottom lines. He’ll assure you he knows how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, but it’s hard to quantify heart and fairness and the good of human beings, and those are the things that matter to Ken Milani. In fact, says the legendary accounting prof who never took calculus, the only reason he pays numbers any attention is because they tell stories. And the stories are all about people.

“My dad was the easiest pick on the west side of Chicago,” Milani begins one such tale, remembering the pizzeria where he ran deliveries and kept the books at age 17, when he was still dreaming of playing catcher for the Chicago Cubs.

He sidesteps to a joke: “My mom was the bartender. My dad was the cook. And that’s exactly what they should have done, because when my mother cooked, we would pray after the meal.”

But he always has a point: Ken watched as men came in off the street hungry, with little money. “My dad would make [the guy] a beef sandwich. ‘I owe you, Al.’ ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And you see that happen often enough, you’re saying, OK, we’ve got something other people need. Whether it be time, talent or treasure, my dad would just give it away.”

Then there is Joan herself. Joan, who agreed to go to a dance with him at Bradley University in exchange for a look at his European problems notes. Joan, who encouraged him to start every class he taught at Notre Dame with a verse from Scripture and a prayer. Joan, who put her life on hold when a high school hockey injury left their son Adam (ND ’88) quadriplegic, and who earned a pastoral degree and became a hospital chaplain once Adam left for law school.

In Ken Milani’s world, people make sacrifices to take care of each other. Lately, he wants people to know, that’s been his 29-year-old granddaughter, Hannah, who was there 8-to-6 every day from last July through the end of January as he recovered from ailments that had put him in the hospital for a week and left him unable to drive or answer phone calls for a month. Hannah did everything she could for her granddad while taking care of her own child.

Milani knows how to take care of people, too, starting with his students. “People will tell you I’m a tough grader. OK. I give a lot of B-minuses,” he says, because he always assigned papers and paid attention to the writing.

Taxation was his signature class, that topic most singularly capable of instilling fear or boredom (or both simultaneously) in virtually everyone. Not Ken Milani. “Womb to the tomb,” he says. Your life changes when you have a baby, when you adopt, when your wife dies, when you have a home. It all has tax implications, “and that’s what keeps me interested.”

Milani knows as well as anyone that compassion isn’t everything, and most Notre Dame students walk in the door with plenty of it, anyway. He remembers Father Ted Hesburgh, then the University’s president, telling him and other newly hired faculty that their job was to add competence. Nowadays, students arrive with computer skills Milani can only imagine, but they lack street savvy that best informs analysis. And that, he says, is exactly what they’ll need to prove their value in the era of artificial intelligence. AI will always provide the numbers, which makes it perfect for accounting. But it hasn’t had its nose punched. It hasn’t got “the bruises that come from being out there in the real world,” he says.

There’s no better place to start acquiring such experience than the Tax Assistance Program, run in conjunction with Saint Mary’s College. Milani was the faculty coordinator for 39 years and remains involved. It started with a handful of student volunteers doing maybe 120 returns for low-income South Bend residents at a school on the city’s west side. Milani battled over the years to get TAP students academic credit. Starting each January, students have to take the IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance training and pass two rigorous exams to be ready to go by February.

Of everything he’s done, TAP is what he is best known for, and it appears on page 20 of his 20-page résumé.

“That’s only because I had to put the research writing and teaching awards in there first,” he interjects.

He didn’t have a vision for it beyond his father’s vision for beef sandwiches. “I just knew that I had a skill that other people could use but couldn’t afford.”

He knew others had those skills, too. At the end of each semester, students reported that they liked that real-world experience. They didn’t so much like telling people they still owed the government money, but the course changed many minds about the circumstances of the working poor. “They’re not ne’er-do-wells,” Milani says they would write. “They’re not lazy.”

He’ll never forget the blind woman with three kids for whom he helped secure a $3,000 refund.

She asked him, “Are you God?”

TAP alumni tell similar stories, like the one who got a free cab ride from the airport because he had helped the driver prepare his return. He knows five couples who got married after volunteering in the program. Then there are those 20-plus cities that have such organizations today because, as Milani’s friend and Mendoza colleague Chris Stevens (ND ’72) says, “Ken Milani has always been the type of person who’s willing to do the right thing and make things happen.”

The biggest of those TAP offshoots is Ladder Up in Chicago, founded in 1994 by Bob Burke (BBA ’94). Over those 30 years, Ladder Up has helped some 750,000 clients receive more than $1.4 billion in income tax refunds. The typical client is a single mother earning $19,000 a year.

Six years in, consultants encouraged Burke to take the next step: Reliable tax returns could help his clients fill out applications for federal financial aid for education that could benefit them and their children. Over time, offerings expanded — tax representation, financial literacy and English-language classes, job training, you name it — making Ladder Up a full suite of professional services for the working poor. People don’t come because it’s free, he says. “They come because they need help.”

Ken “humanized what we did in terms of taxes,” Burke adds. “And if anything, you’re the one that really gets the most out of it.”

Helping people. Milani will never forget how his oldest son, Mike (ND ’86), helped his brother Adam in St. Edward’s Hall at Notre Dame. How supportive people were after Adam’s accident. How the difficulties of air travel forced Adam to drive back and forth with Ken as a passenger and navigator to law school at Duke and to Adam’s teaching job in Macon, Georgia, and how that car time made them friends. What it was like caring for Joan after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Or how people reached out when Adam died, or again, in that terrible turn from 2019 into 2020 when his daughter Maria and his wife both died — and he suffered a stroke.

These days, when Ken hears someone has suffered the death of a child or a spouse, he sends a note or pulls them aside, gives them a book and invites them to coffee to talk it over. That, too, was Joan’s idea. Before it was his ministry, it was hers.

“I do a lot of listening, and they tell me stuff...they’re afraid to tell other people,” he says.

Surely LBJ was on to something. Every speaker should be so prophetic. The demands of morality and the needs of the spirit? They’re being realized in the life of Ken Milani.