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National media spotlight the College and President Daniel Weiss in two articles this week.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy (“Nonprofit Group Prepares Students to Handle Demands of Life on Campus,” Nov. 29) focuses on the Posse Foundation and Lafayette’s successful affiliation with the program.
A story on Yahoo Hotjobs, “Job Success with a Liberal Arts Degree,” highlights the career value of a liberal-arts education.
The Posse Foundation identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from public high schools to form multicultural teams called posses. These teams are then prepared through an intensive training program for enrollment at top-tier colleges and universities nationwide to pursue their academic careers and to help promote cross-cultural communication on campus.
Lafayette’s successful affiliation with Posse has been featured on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and in The New York Times.
An excerpt from the Chronicle article follows:
Dan Weiss, president of Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., says that Posse scholars are student leaders on his campus, which has recruited groups from the New York chapter for five years and has also begun recruiting students from Posse’s Washington chapter.
Says Mr. Weiss: “Everywhere you look on our campus, at the kinds of activities where I’m meeting students or attending events, more often than not Posse students are involved. So they have a disproportionate contribution to the quality of the environment here, and that’s probably true at all the colleges and universities where they attend.”
And although the students bond during the eight-month precollegiate sessions they participate in before arriving on campus, Mr. Weiss is quick to add a caveat: “The great subtlety of Posse is that by creating that kind of a community, they have the comfort and the confidence to reach out beyond it. And that’s not intuitive; you’d think, OK, these people are going to hang out with each other all the time. But they don’t lean on each other as a clique. They lean on each other as a foundation and then they go out and do all kinds of things.”
“Each new posse that comes to campus,” says Mr. Weiss, “they’re not just 10 more kids who are going to do well. They’re 10 kids who are going to light the place up.”
“The fundamental values of a liberal education — strength in critical thinking, knowledge of the world, greater self-awareness, the cultivation of ethics, and the skills and desire to continue learning — are the qualities that will help students succeed both personally and professionally in their lives,” says Weiss in the Yahoo article.
The story also includes the perspectives of attorney Wynne Whitman ’86.
“Despite earning an MBA in corporate finance and LLM in tax, [Whitman] frequently taps into her undergraduate education in which she double-majored in economics and art history,” it says. “Wynne notes having a well-versed background parlays into the art of conversation at various functions such as corporate fundraisers.”
“Whitman puts it plain and simple: ‘A liberal arts education opens your mind to different aspects of life and society and how they weave together.'”