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Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, will be the principal speaker at Lafayette’s 171st Commencement Saturday, May 20, and will receive an honorary degree.
Commencement will be held at 2:30 p.m. on the Quad. The academic procession will begin at 2:15 p.m. A Baccalaureate service will be held at 10:30 a.m. the same day, also on the Quad, featuring a talk by Robert I. Weiner, the College’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Professor of History and Jewish chaplain. In case of rain, the ceremonies will be held in Allan P. Kirby Sports Center. If there is a change in the location of the ceremonies based on weather, the information will be available by calling (610) 330-5809.
Lafayette president Dan Weiss said, “I am very pleased that Debbie Bial will address our graduates and parents at commencement. By advancing diversity as a core value she is having a transformative impact on American higher education, and therefore on our nation and the world.
“We are all challenged in this era of polarization within our society to remember the central importance of education to the proper functioning of a democracy and the training of an enlightened citizenry and to reaffirm the benefits of intellectual pluralism, social tolerance, and open debate,” Weiss continued. “With remarkable vision, energy, and compassion Debbie is helping bring about greater social and intellectual pluralism on American campuses. This is diversity in the broadest sense, which enriches the educational possibilities for us all.”
The Posse Foundation identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams called “posses.” Following an intensive eight-month recruitment and pre-college training program the teams enroll at top-tier colleges and universities nationwide to pursue their academics and help promote cross-cultural communication. In addition to New York, where Posse is headquartered, there are sites in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
Lafayette’s participation in the Posse program with New York students is supported by the Judith C. White Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Jeffrey Kovner ’66, which has established a $250,000 endowment to promote and enhance diversity at Lafayette. The foundation also is giving $10,000 in each of the next three years to fund a leadership retreat weekend for Posse students. The contributions are a challenge grant for which Lafayette is raising additional donations to reach at least $1.2 million.
“Posse is rooted in the belief that a small, but carefully selected, group of young leaders can not only act as a social and academic support system for one another, but can act as a catalyst for positive change on a university campus — helping to build bridges between communities and encourage dialogue in the classroom and the dormitory,” Bial said. The idea came to her when she was running youth leadership programs in New York City public high schools in 1989, two years after completing her undergraduate work at Brandeis University.
“I was working with a lot of great young students. I knew their potential, but they were dropping out of college,” she said. “Then one student told me, ‘I never would have dropped out if I had had my posse with me,’ and I realized that sending a cohort of students to school together made sense.”
Since then Posse has placed more than 1,500 students into colleges and universities. The students have received more than $140 million in scholarships from these schools and have graduated at a rate of 90 percent.
Through an alliance with Posse Lafayette has enrolled 45 New York City high school students in the last four years. Ten members of the first posse are scheduled to receive their diplomas at the May commencement. The classes of 2007, 2008, and 2009 have posses of 11, 11, and 12 students, respectively. The posses personify ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, and the students, with their variety of academic and cocurricular pursuits and extracurricular activities, enhance campus diversity broadly. These student leaders have succeeded academically and none has dropped out. This fall the incoming class of 2010 will include a posse from Washington, D.C., in addition to one from New York, making Lafayette just the fifth college or university to enroll posses from more than one city.
Posse students are also enrolled at Babson College, Bowdoin College, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr College, Bucknell University, Carleton College, Centre College, Claremont McKenna College, Colby College, Denison University, DePauw University, Dickinson College, Franklin and Marshall College, Grinnell College, Hamilton College, University of Illinois, Middlebury College, Pomona College, Trinity College, Union College, Vanderbilt University, Wheaton College, and University of Wisconsin.
Bial completed a doctorate in education at Harvard University, which was undertaken with a $1.9 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Through her dissertation research she created a new college admissions tool called the Bial Dale College Adaptability Index which assesses non-cognitive traits that may predict persistence and ability to adapt to and contribute to new environments.
Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, received a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. She was the principal speaker at the 171st Commencement and also received an honorary degree from the College.