When I served as a vice president, I recall vividly the meetings that my two fellow vice presidents and I held with the college’s president regarding our concerns about a fourth colleague. We outlined examples of missed deadlines, out-of-balance budgets, and policy infractions that we perceived were hobbling the ability of the college to move forward.
The president smiled and said that he would certainly take our comments under consideration.
This same conversation repeated itself over a period of eight months, and after each session I left more agitated, questioning the president’s ability to lead.
Then, the first week of May, the president called me into his office and told me that the vice president that we were concerned about would soon be announcing his resignation. I asked, “Why did you let this go on for so long?” He looked me squarely in the eye, gave that same smile, and said, “Sometimes something has to completely break before you can fix it.”
Yesterday--January 6, 2021--the fiber of our society completely broke.
Today, we must begin the process of fixing it.
For the past four years, in a climate marked by its intolerance, efforts both public and insidious in nature were accelerated to marginalize, discount, and even threaten our students and colleagues. Yesterday, in the halls of the Capitol, the rift in our nation was exposed in all its ugliness for the world to see, and the attitudes of many in our country will not dissipate at noon on January 20. Because of the cataclysmic social upheaval that we are experiencing, we must intensify our efforts to ensure that our students stay in school, that they receive the support that they need, that they complete their courses, and that they develop their own inner strength to move beyond our campus and toward their potential as leaders of and contributors to building a more just society.
As educators committed to our students, I ask that each of you continue every day and through every interaction with our students to contribute to the process of “fixing it” by maximizing the opportunities we have been given to make a difference in our students’ lives. Our students are truly our society’s future, and we must give them every tool possible to help them become the leaders that we need to regain and maintain the democratic ideals of our country. Together, we can fully realize our vision that, for every student, West will be “a gateway to success.”