Ministerial Alliance of Champaign-Urbana and Vicinity - speech made during UIUC event

Ministerial Alliance of Champaign-Urbana and Vicinity - speech made during UIUC event

Activism

Ministerial Alliance of Champaign-Urbana and Vicinity

Thank you for inviting me here to speak with you today and to share this afternoon in fellowship.
I am humbled to be surrounded by so many people of compassion and faith. Your impact on this community is beyond impressive. What you are doing in Champaign County, day in and day out, in your churches and on our streets, is no less than God’s work.
My great passion is education but I admit I am also guided by my faith. I have not found a way to separate my faith as a Jew from my day-to-day activities as Chancellor of a public university. For I find that instead of my faith narrowing my viewpoint, it actually broadens my perspective. I have found it never hurts to weigh decisions with your heart as well as with your mind. Compassion and cognition: not a bad combination.
But I am preaching…and, this pun is intended, I am preaching to the choir. Maybe even to the converted. The admirable work you do is ultimately about social justice. I support your mission statement that says, in part, that you want to “promote the welfare of all citizens of said community, moral, social as well as spiritual condition, to evaluate and address problems and situations as they affect our community and ministry…” With that in mind, I come here today to talk about perhaps my greatest passion as Chancellor and one that also is a social justice concern: Access. Equal access for all to the American Dream.
I think we can all agree that the path to that American Dream passes through education at every level, from K through 12, right into college. Let me read you a quote by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side.
“Providing every child in America with a good education is both a moral imperative and an economic imperative. It's also a matter of social justice. It is the civil rights issue of our generation—the one and only way to overcome the differences of wealth, background, and race that divide us and deny us our future.”
Here at Illinois we also believe in providing all our citizens an equal chance at not only a good education, but the very best education possible, and an equal chance at that American Dream.
Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who knew something about dreams and equality, once said, “The American dream reminds us…that every man is an heir of the legacy of dignity and worth.” But access to the American Dream is not only a social justice issue, an issue of dignity, worth, and fairness. It is also a race issue.
There are two things I am focusing on: First, how do we find those African American students who have the intellect and the ambition to attend this college, but lack the funds? How do we make it possible for them to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? Secondly, how do we make African American students feel comfortable and secure on our campus and in the community? After all, you cannot succeed if you feel alienated, cautious, or threatened.
And let’s not kid ourselves: As you know perhaps better than anyone, the distance down I-57 from the West and South Sides of Chicago is not just three hours. It may be 140 miles but for many students of color coming down here is like being dropped in the middle of the Gobi Desert.
And it takes courage, courage to leave your neighborhood, your mother, father, and friends, your barbershop and your library, your corner store and favorite cafe, your church or your mosque. Yes, it takes courage to leave all the things you hold near and dear behind, and suddenly be in an area surrounded by small towns and strange fields of corn, and, most importantly, by people who do not necessarily look like you or understand you or want to understand you. That takes courage. And it is our jobs to make that transition as comfortable as possible. Because if students of color are not comfortable it affects our entire community. As we have seen time and time again the university is not an island. What we do, what our students, faculty and staff do, has a ripple effect throughout Champaign Urbana.
So let me address those two points and tell you what we are doing. On the first point: how do we find those African American students who have the brains and the ambition to attend college, but lack the funds? How do we make it possible to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign?
This May we will graduate our first class of Illinois Promise students. These are some 100 bright, motivated Illinois students who have shown that with financial support they can achieve their goals. The four-year-old Illinois Promise Program is a merit- and need-based financial aid program.
A recent survey of a majority of the 2009 I Promise graduating class was equally delightful. Personally, it was validation that this program that I started with a couple of phone calls to donors—much to the chagrin of our development staff—was a smashing success. Almost all of the IP scholars will graduate on time; fifty percent have been on the Dean’s List; 15 percent are members of an Academic Honor Society; 25 percent have been recipients of other academic or service awards; 22 percent are going on to get their master’s; 10 percent will pursue a doctorate. This is the happy result of giving a young man or woman a chance to achieve their own success.
Let me back up for a minute. Last year we launched a $100 million scholarship drive that, with a spend-out campus match, will be the equivalent of $200 million. This scholarship endowment will be used to increase access for both lower income families, and for middle income families, who increasingly find it harder to afford a college education for their sons and daughters.
Obviously, we cannot educate everyone at the University of Illinois but we can and we will expand our search for talented, motivated young people.
Programs such as Illinois Promise and the Chez Scholars are crucial to ensuring access to the Illinois experience and to the American Dream. In many instances students in these programs are the first members of their families to attend college. And, as a first-generation college graduate, I understand their journey and I share their passion for education.
I am so very proud of these programs because I now know that we can break the cycle of poverty and low expectations that is endemic in parts of this country. I am also proud because these graduates will go on to inspire other first generation students who will now have role models and mentors in their own communities.
As one Illinois Promise student wrote me, and this is a young woman who will graduate with a degree in elementary education this May: “I will soon be in a position to make a difference. The most difference that I will make will be by ’paying it forward.’ This will be through actions that will allow me to demonstrate my understanding of being selfless. As an educator I plan to make a difference one child at a time. I hope to not only help them achieve to their highest potential, but to help them find their inner strengths that will get them through their weakness moments.”
Now for my second concern: How do we make African American students and all students of color feel more comfortable and secure on our campus and in the community?
The roots to this question did not evolve recently. The evolution was painful. It took the courageous actions of the Project 500 movement—part of the most important social change in this nation’s history, the Civil Rights Movement--to really bring public attention to the fact that we were not doing a good job at recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color; nor were we offering a campus that was particularly inclusive, welcoming, or equal. Again, this was and remains a social justice issue.
This was a time in the 1960s when, to quote Joy Williamson, African Americans on our campus and in our community experienced, “discrimination, racism, protest, and resilience.” A time when many people of color felt “intensely lonely” on our campus, and when this university did not do the right thing. When students, faculty, and community members were hostile to their presence.
We have made great strides since then but we have not arrived to where we need to be yet.
The Urbana campus leads the Big Ten in percent of African Americans, Latina/o, and American Indian undergraduate students—13.9 percent to be accurate, a 22 percent increase in the last ten years. But data do not tell the whole story.
The Urbana campus leads the Big Ten in percent of tenured and tenure-track African Americans, Latina/o, and American Indian faculty—8.9 percent to be accurate, a 53 percent increase in the last ten years. We are proud of those numbers. But data do not necessarily equal a level of comfort for all students. We know that our successes can be traced back forty years ago to the activism of the Project 500 group but also to the work that we have done recently. We are making progress.
At the same time we are not sweeping problems under the rug or running from flash points of conflict. We are an institution made up of people not buildings and, as such, we will do and say things that are hurtful.
As a university we have the responsibility to push and define new boundaries, especially for our students. We cannot run from this obligation. Nor can we run from controversy. Indeed, there is no place to run to anymore. That is why I launched the One Campus Initiative in 2007. This is not a PR campaign. I truly want this campus to be the place where we confront our differences in the spirit of civility and openness. I believe that we can have that crucial conversation that begins with one simple question: I want to know how you see the world?
That openness as I just said bears the responsibility of not turning away from controversy, in fact, even turning toward it when appropriate.

You may remember the performance of “N-W-C: The Race Play.” Some members of our community did not like the in-your-face style of the three performers, the intentional way the actors perpetuated stereotypes, the use of words usually used to hurt and degrade. Even incite. Some felt excluded from the decision to bring these three young men to the university. There were protests and counter events. Some people in the community advised others to stay away from the play.
There was genuine hurt, too. I will say that I was aware of it. But we had an obligation to dissect that hurt and to try to understand. That’s what a healthy community does.
We had to have the debate that answered whether this performance was a cleverly disguised attempt at minstrelsy or was it an attempt to continue an important if very painful ongoing dialogue about race and inclusion on this campus? Author and commentator, and now our faculty member, Jabari Asim took that question on, asserting that art should provoke the kind of conversation we were having. That very conversation I believe brought us closer together as a campus and as a community. Perhaps it’s a conversation without end. That’s OK because what comes out of dialogue, even painful dialogue, is a greater understanding of the human condition. I also believe that the conversation brings us closer to social justice…for all.
In closing, I want to again thank you for your tireless work on behalf of this community. And I want to ask your help to continue to build the necessary bridges to bring all groups together. Help me create an atmosphere of harmony. I am listening. To all of you. Thank you.

May 2, 2009

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http://illinois.edu/lb/article/20/26932/page=1/list=list