World - Bucknell University

Art Wojcik
Posse 1: From left to right, front row, Loretta Miller, Lyndon Thweatt, Nygel Knighton, Arjun Raman, Odinakachi Anyanwu,
Nancy Lee. Back row, May Naldo, Valeria Lopez, Nicole Williams, Emily Haley.
reports. “They’re not afraid to get involved. They’re selfstarters.
We have Loretta Miller, who manages the
women’s basketball team and who also won last year’s
‘Bucknell Idol’ competition. We have four students who
are going to be resident assistants this fall. We have
Emily Haley, who’s basically running Community
Harvest. We have Arjun Raman, who went on Bucknell
Brigade over spring break and had a summer internship
on Capitol Hill.” They’re some of the most active,
engaged students of the Class of 2009.
That kind of widespread involvement is precisely
what Thiede wants. “The expectations are high for these
kids, and we’ve been nothing but pleased with what
we’ve seen so far,” he says.
Bucknell has been so pleased, in fact, that it chose 11
D.C.-area students as D.C. Posse 2 scholars, and they just
started their first semester. Last spring, the administration
approved funding for a second Posse partnership,
which will draw students from Boston starting in fall
2007(Boston Posse 1).
The Posse 1 scholars dived headfirst into campus life
last year, but academics came first, and their grades were
typical of others in their class. Despite their achievements,
a few skeptics have implied that Posse is a handout
program that admits underqualified students on
the basis of color. For those people, President Mitchell
has a strong message: “Bucknell maintains its academic
standards for all students, and the Posse scholars are
no exception.”
A Leap of Faith It was a leap of faith for Posse
1 to leave Washington, trading access to family, friends,
the Metro, and ethnic culture for rural Pennsylvania.
“The students took an intellectual and lifestyle risk that
will result in dramatic change in their lives. It wasn’t
easy,” President Mitchell observes. With no previous
Posse scholars to follow, Bucknell’s D.C. Posse 1 members
relied heavily on each other during the initial transition.
12 BUCKNELL WORLD • September 2006
“Much of what other students
talk about here is hard for me
to understand, because I’ve
never experienced it,” Anyanwu
explains. “I didn’t have any white
classmates before I came to
Bucknell. So the fact that I had the
Posse to lean on for the first
few months, when it was kind of
difficult, made the difference.”
Thweatt, a high-school athlete
who joined Bucknell’s track team
after enrolling, was dismayed by
some students’ assumption that he
came here on a scholarship for
athletics rather than academics.
The Posse meetings, he says, provide
much-needed camaraderie.
“It’s constructive. We’ll pick each
other up and say, ‘Come on, keep going, keep it
moving. We’ve got to keep rolling on that.’”
Naldo helped convince a discouraged Posse
scholar to stay at Bucknell during that stressful first
semester. “The fact is, leaving is not going to change
anything,” she says. ”And being angry is not going
to change anything. We can’t change people’s
minds, but we can give them the opportunity to
look beyond how they’re thinking and try to see
things from a different perspective.”
As the only white student in Posse 1, Haley has
her own perspective. “It’s opened my eyes to being
the minority in every situation, and what it’s like
to look at the world through a whole other scope,”
she says. “It’s such a pivotal moment to realize what
the other kids have had to deal with. This is a
huge learning experience that I never could have
foreseen coming.”
President Mitchell is candid about the realities of
increasing diversity on campus. “Change is difficult,”
he says simply. “In an environment that has traditionally
been as homogeneous as Bucknell’s, change
becomes more difficult because many comfort zones
and expectations are challenged. The best advice I
can give students is to talk about it. This is a place of
learning, and cross-cultural conversations are a
great way to expand horizons.”
Posse scholars agree that a simple willingness to
talk to different types of people is the building block
for real change. When approached with an open
mind, the smallest daily interactions become teachable
moments. Thweatt encourages all students to
examine their views. “I’m fine with myself,” he says.
“The question is, are you fine with yourself?”
Students and administrators explored the topic
of identity last spring at “Posse Plus,” a weekend
retreat with a student-chosen theme of “Be You at
B.U.” Posse trainers helped the scholars facilitate