CAAIE Award
Frank C. Worrell Speech: June 8th, 2011
Good afternoon, Chancellor and Mrs. Birgeneau, Vice-Chancellor Basri, Acting
Vice Provost Stacy, friends, colleagues, students, members of my family,
Those of you who have known me for a long time are probably aware of the discomfort that I feel at being the center of a storm of adulation. My siblings and I grew up hearing axioms, maxims, and other pithy sayings from my mother who seemed to have one that applied to every situation. One of these which I heard often was, “self-praise, no recommendation.” Given that others are giving the praise today, I am sure that she would approve, although she would also remind me that pride cometh before a fall, and that it’s not what they say about you in your presence, but what they say about you when you are not around that matters. Another of mom’s frequent admonitions was, “Ingratitude is worse than witchcraft.” Thus, before proceeding further, let me say thank you to the award committee for selecting me as this year’s winner of the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence—given mom’s voice in my ear, I will not say that it was an inspired choice. I would also be remiss if I did not thank Professor Rhona Weinstein, mentor, colleague, and friend, who nominated me for this singular honor, and the many others, who wrote letters of support, including Nina Gabelko, Gail Kaufman, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and David Pearson. I have looked at the names of the previous winners of this award and, although I am not convinced that I should be in their company, I know that I am now among a select few.
My research interest spans the gamut from the academically at-risk to the academically talented, and it might seem more appropriate in the context of an award for building an equitable and diverse learning environment to discuss the academically at-risk. However, I am drawing on the talent development side of my research agenda for this address, because the focus of the award is on promoting excellence and it is important to state time and again that excellence and equity are not mutually exclusive, as many would have us believe (although no one in this room, I suspect).
Last August, I had the privilege of giving the Esther Katz Rosen Lection on Gifted Children and Adolescents at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The title of my address was, “Giftedness: Endowment, Context, Timing, Development, or Performance—Does it Matter.” In this address, I discussed the role of ability, resources, serendipity, teaching and mentoring, practice, and hard work in the production of outstanding talent, and I concluded that all of these elements matter, a position that some here may disagree with, but we will have to save that debate for another time. I am already aware that at least one of my nephews will tell me in the not too distant future that I spoke too long.
Today, I want to focus on the development of talent and, more specifically, those who encourage others to develop their talents. Amanda Bradley wrote a poem over three decades ago entitled, “Follow Your Dream.”
Follow your dream.
Take one step at a time
Don’t settle for less,
Just continue to climb.
Follow your dream.
If you stumble, don’t stop and lose sight of your goal
Press on to the top.
For only on top can we see the whole view,
Can we see what we’ve done and what we can do;
Can we then have the vision to seek something new,
Press on.
Follow your dream.
-Follow Your Dream, Amanda Bradley
In this age, where we talk about the “me” and the “entitlement” generations. In this age, where there is more political will to ensure that individuals who have more money that they can spend in 10 lifetimes get to make and keep even more money than there is political will to alleviate poverty or to provide universal health care to the citizens of the richest country in and self-declared leader of the free world. In this age and state, where we are willing to slash the budgets for elementary, secondary, and tertiary education, while increasing spending on prisons and law enforcement. In this age in which a teacher, no matter how effective, will have lifetime earnings that will be less than the annual salary of some athletes or movie stars. In this age, it has become way too easy to forget that our accomplishments, no matter how singular, took place because there were others who supported us in following our dreams, guided us, picked us up when we stumbled or fell, helped us to keep sight of the goal, had our back, to use the vernacular.
Long before the software program of the same name, teachers, coaches, mentors, those who support others in developing their talents, were the original dream weavers. And dream weavers are much more important to those who have fewer dreams, those whose life circumstances have not resulted in a panoply of future options. The student who comes to Berkeley from a family where everyone for several generations has been to college comes to Berkeley with a different sense of what a university is than the student who is the first in her family to complete high school. The child who studies Ancient Egypt in the Academic Talent Development program the year after the family visited the pyramids comes to the subject with a different perspective than the child who has never left the East Bay.
I am here today, in part, due to many of the things I talked about in my lecture last August, ability, hard work, access to resources, serendipity, but most importantly, all of the dream weavers along my path. When I completed high school with less than stellar grades, my father who had only completed the equivalent of Grade 3 said to me, “You probably want to study music; find a university, and I will find the money.” When I indicated that I wanted to study psychology, he responded, “Find a university and I will find the money.” My mother took over the household expenses and my father worked two jobs so that I could get my bachelor’s degree. My mother pointed out in a way that minimized defenses and maximized guilt that I had actually earned my less than stellar grades with an amazing lack of effort, leading me to resolve never to have to disappoint her that way again. Interestingly, in October of my freshman year at the University of Western Ontario, the birthday card that I received in the mail contained Amanda Bradley’s poem, “Follow Your Dream,” and several years later, my mother sent me the same card in the first fall of my PhD program here at Berkeley. I owe much to these early dream weavers.
I am here today because my high school music teacher, Lindy Ann Bodden Ritch lent me money from her recently deceased husband’s life insurance policy to pay for my first year at UC Berkeley, a loan without which I would not have gotten a student visa to come to the US. Indeed, her husband died during the week of final exams when I was an undergraduate, and she insisted that my friends not let me know until my exams were finished. George and Mary Fraser, who I refer to as my Canadian parents were individuals who I met on a six-week YMCA exchange to Toronto. When I went to university three years later, their home became my home. I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at my Canadian home, and they joined my parents for my graduation from Western for my BA and here at Berkeley for
my PhD. Nina Gabelko hired me to teach psychology at ATDP, which introduced me to the field of gifted education, in addition to allowing me to pay my rent as I could not work off campus as a foreign student. Mark Wilson recommended me for a GSR to conduct evaluations for a Lawrence Hall of Science project; he told Penn State that I was a stellar student who had almost completed my dissertation, when I had not yet begun to collect dissertation data, and he drafted me onto the Early College Initiative that led to Cal Prep in the first day in my office in Tolman Hall in 2003. Harry Murray who advised my Master’s thesis at Western handed me back my master’s thesis proposal with five words: “No thought shown; please redo.” Nadine Lambert, my late advisor insisted on me doing my best work, compared me to Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, boosting my ego considerably, and wryly suggested that if the scholarship she had written a recommendation for did not come through, I should consider the world’s oldest profession. Rhona Weinstein reminded me that I should give air-time in class to less enthusiastic students and made me do yet one more revision on my dissertation, for which I won an Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Graduate School of Education. Beverly Vandiver invited me onto the team that developed the Cross Racial Identity Scale. Rudy Mendoza-Denton invited me to work with him on the African American Life Survey. Zeus Leonardo invited me to submit an application with him to co-edit the Review of Educational Research. Lester, Jennifer, and Roxanne, my brother, sister, and sister-in-law, respectively, and my friends, Theo and Alvan, have been wonderful sounding boards that have allowed me to find my footing after yet another looking glass or Twilight Zone experience in the ivory tower. Note, the mixing of metaphors is deliberate. I have been incredibly blessed to have these and many other dream weavers, some of whom are in this room, in my life. And that is the essence of the work that I try to do that has resulted in this award, I believe. At Cal Prep, where College for Certain, Yes We Can is a frequent mantra, those of us at Berkeley who are involved in this endeavor work with Megan Reed, the principal, and her team to bring dreams of many possible futures to students whose experiences to date had left them with very limited visions of who they were and what they could be. At ATDP, we offer students opportunities to gain in-depth knowledge of the subjects that interests them, designing the classes in ways that are intended to engage our students' hearts as well as their minds. In Every Child’s Right: Academic Talent Development by Choice, not Chance, Gabelko and Sosniak (2008) described ATDP in this way:
Ours is a story of possibility—the possibility for significant academic
achievement and intellectual engagement of American children and
youth, across race, ethnicity, and social class, with students learning
together, sharing interests and aspirations, and accomplishing more
than might seem possible. (p. 1)
Dream weaving is what we should be about at UC Berkeley, and while there is much of it going on, I fear that there are also many dreams that are being destroyed. In my eight years on the Berkeley faculty, I have seen talented and eager graduate students lose their spark, lose their belief in themselves, not because of anything that they did or did not do, but because faculty have taken away their dreams. Faculty who operate under the assumption that admission is the sole requirement for success; if the admitted students do not work out what graduate school at Berkeley is about, then admitting them was a mistake. Rather than seeing our job as one of mentoring, many of us see our job as creating the next academic star to make our reflections brighter. Thus, some of our advisees get all of our time, clearly communicating that some advisees are more equal than others. I have had students tell me that they got their position paper back with a signature but it is clear that the paper has not been read. I have had students crying in my office upon receiving the signatures on the title page of the dissertations because they could not believe after working so hard for so long that the committee members had not read the dissertation. I have sat in meetings discussing student progress where faculty members have not wanted us to be honest in our written appraisals of students from minority backgrounds because being honest will not be supportive. I have also sat in presentations of Assistant Professors and seen the results of what happens when they have not been adequately and honestly prepared by their mentors—it is not a pretty picture, and indeed, it is a tragedy to those of us who care about equity. When we have university policies that reward unethical behavior, we are penalizing the students who choose to be ethical and demoralizing the staff who have to implement these policies. And much as the student in Grade 3 recognizes that the teacher does not think that I am as smart as the other students in the class, so too do many of our graduate students come to the conclusion that their admission to UC Berkeley was an accident, a mistake; because it is often not in the academic realm that the students who we disenfranchise are lacking. They are lacking the hidden curriculum, the secrets of the academy, the knowledge that faculty may not be available in the summer, the recognition that you are always auditioning and the knowledge that your advisor’s endorsement is often more important than your competence. If we do not teach these lessons to all of our students from kindergarten to graduate school, but especially to the ones who come to our schools and programs without this knowledge, then our claims to equity are hollow; they are castles built of sand that result in the crumbled careers of those we pretended to help.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear….
-The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
These well-known words by Robert Frost are a fitting coda to my words today. As dream weavers, our task involves making our students recognize that there are multiple options ahead, and preparing them to choose the path less travelled in their neighborhoods, if they so desire. In this room full of dream weavers in my adopted country, I close with these excerpts from one of my favorite poets, who understood the power of weaving dreams.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where
Liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
-I, Too, Langston Hughes
These sentiments—expressed by Langston Hughes—are the essence of the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, which I have been honored with today. Let all of us here continue to work so that no one ever has to say in the future, “America never was America to me.”
Thank you.
Frank C. Worrell
June 8, 2011