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Light snow is falling as I enter the old building that houses President Sidney Ribeau's main office. With me is a graduate
student in music. We've been talking earnestly about the lyrics of four art songs she will be singing in recital, in front
of her professors, as she completes her degree requirements. I want her to meet the president. Warm and outgoing, yet disciplined
and organized, he inspires confidence. Young people need to see and learn from their leaders, and meet them when they can.
The president and I go downstairs, where the official photographer instructs us to look relaxed. We are relaxed. While the
photographer snaps away, the president and I chat about his visit some time ago to France, to the town from which his Ribeau
ancestors came almost two centuries ago. His notes on the visit are somewhere, he tells me; he's not sure exactly where. His
family's past fascinates him, but not enough to take his eyes off the present and the future. Sitting upstairs in his office
I ask him about growing up in northwest Detroit in what was still a mainly Polish-American neighborhood. He talks about his
father, a postal worker, who taught him to love books but also to love life. The president looks back fondly, wistfully, but
he returns quickly to the present.
Obviously he's proud of what he has accomplished in his decade here at Bowling Green State University, where he once applied
for a teaching job and was rejected. That was a piece of good luck. He headed west, grew as a man and an educator, and then
found that coming home to the region where he was born was much sweeter for having had to go away. He flourished because he
had faith in himself, in the people around him, in the dignity of his profession. He is an educator, a visionary educator,
an educator in action. Bowling Green State University has been and is the greatest challenge of his life.
At my prompting, Dr. Ribeau talks about his first year at the helm, when he made honest dialogue the key to everything that
was to come. He wanted everyone at BGSU–from the cook preparing breakfast for hungry, sleepy students, to the students at
work on their biology projects or their art songs, to the administrator sent out to meet potential donors–to know exactly
why he or she was at Bowling Green State University, and what he or she wanted the University to become. BGSU had to be a
place of excitement and vitality, originality and flexibility, pleasure and dedicated purpose. To be so, or to become so,
would ensure the success of its mission of serving the needs of its students and, through its students, the community, the
region, the nation and the world.
The president then set major goals. Most have been accomplished. Student enrollment, almost in free fall when he arrived,
has risen to its highest ever. About 13,000 transfer and freshmen applications come in now for 4,500 spaces. Those who enter
bring higher scores, better grades and better all-around training than ever before. Student residences, once under occupied,
are filled to capacity. The new Bowen-Thompson Student Union is a glittering success. Athletic teams make us proud and take
the name Bowling Green State University across the nation. The quality of faculty is higher than ever. Academic programs have
multiplied; new areas of inquiry were identified and explored.
What does the president regret? What does he want to see happen? He wants a faculty involved even more directly with students,
their hopes and dreams as well as their academic training, than they already are. He wants the encouragement of diverse ideas
to become the heart of the University. He wants BGSU to be a place that transforms people, a place where lively, informed
communication bridges the gap between differences in academic and personal interests and aims to improve the quality of life
for all. He would like to see the immense political capital that resides in the prestige of Bowling Green State University
applied more directly to the urgent problems of the region around us. He is passionate about the set of crises that involves
the environment and believes it is virtually a life-and-death issue and a challenge that all of us must tackle.
The president sees a healthy, confident community. However, it's his business to look for dark clouds. The darkest cloud is
the constant threat of reduced financial support. Without sufficient money, little is possible. Support from the state is
dropping here as it is dropping almost everywhere else. And yet the cost of a high-quality education–the only kind he wants
for BGSU students–is soaring. To bring a high-speed computer network to the campus (the kind of expensive capital project
that didn't exist even 10 years ago) cost the University $50 million. With state support dwindling, the president must plead
with alumni and other friends of the University to give more. Students, many of them already in need, must pay more. He and
his fellow employees, who must be paid a fair wage, must be ready to make sacrifices if the economy turns bad.
Who can tell, he asks rhetorically, what's in store for us as a community, a region, a nation? Unemployment is low right at
the moment, and the economy is growing, but the stock market is shaky, as if it knows something that we don't. Whatever happens
will affect, in one way or another, our ability to do our duty.
We can take pride in what we have accomplished but we must be vigilant. What we do at Bowling Green State University, the
president stresses, is of crucial importance. It is the difference between a culture of need and despair, on the one hand,
and one of joy and fulfillment, on the other.
Sidney Ribeau has no crystal ball, but sometimes one doesn't need a weathervane to know which way the wind is blowing. Science
and technology threaten to overwhelm the humanities. Nevertheless, we must have both, and we must blend them in order to make
a whole community. Experts tell us that the 21st century will be the century of Asia, as the 19th century was that of Great
Britain. Is Bowling Green State University ready for the challenges and opportunities if the world order is indeed realigned
in this way? W hen I leave the president's building, snow is still falling. Looking around, I see a campus remarkably like
the one I first saw 40 years ago. In other places, Bowling Green is new. What will it look like in 2045, if my son, say, should
visit? It's the president's business to make the University ready not only for its centennial but for 2045, when he will no
longer be president.
His father's favorite saying to him was neither “Be rich!” nor “Be great!” but “Be a good person.” The elder Ribeau wanted
him to know the value of spiritual strength and human excellence, of kindness, trust, optimism, hard work and generosity.
Learning from his father, Sidney Ribeau believes in Bowling Green State University but knows, too, that he needs help. He
needs help above all not for himself but for the beloved community that resides in these old and new buildings. I walk carefully,
gingerly, through the deepening snow and slippery patches of ice. Who knows where we are going? What I do know is that I have
confidence in the man upstairs in the presidential office, who has returned to work after bidding me goodbye.
Dr. Arnold Rampersad '67
Noted scholar, critic and biographer Rampersad is Bowling Green State University's 2005-06 President's Visiting Scholar in
the Humanities. A 1991 winner of a $300,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the BGSU alumnus is senior associate dean for
the humanities and Sarah Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
Rampersad grew up in Trinidad and came to the United States in 1965. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English
from Bowling Green in 1967 and 1968, respectively. He went on to Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in English
and American literature in 1973.
His life's work has centered on interpreting the African-American experience through the lens of biography. His prize-winning
books include
The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois ;
The Life of Langston Hughes (two volumes);
Days of Grace: A Memoir , co-authored with tennis legend Arthur Ashe, and
Jackie Robinson: A Biography. Currently he is writing a biography of the novelist Ralph Ellison.
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