President's Blog: The Unleveled Playing Field (2236 hits)
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania July 16, 2012
It is blog time, and my attention seems fixated on the violence I see every day on the morning news. Like many others in the Commonwealth, I watch the morning local and national news shows while sipping my morning coffee, occasionally tweeting my plans for the day, or gathering words of wisdom from Twitterland.
Almost every morning, there are beautiful news people who momentarily interrupt their updates about Who's who, Hollywood, and "The Royals" to somberly inform us about some of our sisters and brothers who did not make it through the night. I know... " If it bleeds it leads." But what about the lost lives reported, and what about those many more lives that never make it to the "B-roll" footage morning shows used for optional "filler" stories? Usually, after we hear the accounts of lost lives and other mayhem in the world, the news seems to quickly revert to a lighter entertainment fare, and those lost lives, or the societal consequences, are rarely addressed.
Maybe I am more sensitive to the accounts of needless lives lost because I work with, and for, many young adults who also worry about their daily safety. It is not unusual for about a dozen students to ask to stay on campus during breaks because they fear for their safety if they were to go home. The majority of the students who arrive at Cheyney University have already survived, in many respects, and they come to the University to gain knowledge, exposure, and guidance to help them navigate the uncharted waters of future challenges in a competitive workforce.
Students who learn to persist and manage to navigate through the financial aid hurdles and college coursework usually exclaim that it is because of the excellent faculty and staff who care about them, their dreams, their lives, and their ultimate successes.
It is our goal at Cheyney University to broaden our influence, increase our capacity, and help guide these young people, so that they will not be one of the woefully brief 15-second news flashes about violence and arrests and circles of lives that will never be the same again. It is our goal to be one solution to save some of those lives––to add to the roll call of living, improving, and contributing survivors.
We view them as our noble and highly worthwhile contributions to the Commonwealth!
