Features
PossePlus Retreat: talking about how we talk
By Sophie Gaulkin ’17
February 11, 2016
Tags features
This past weekend from Feb. 5-7, more than 5,000 college students at 50 colleges and universities from all over the country participated in a dialogue about a pressing issue that affects personal lives, college campuses, and the nation as a whole at the annual PossePlus Retreat (PPR). In the fall, Posse Scholars across the U.S. voted for the topic, “Sticks + Stones: Language and Speech in a Diverse Society.”
The 80 Posse Scholars at Hamilton from the Boston and the Miami area constitute a significant portion of the campus. Posse is one of the most renowned college access and youth leadership development programs in the nation, lauded by education researchers across the world and even President Barack Obama, who said, “[Posse Scholars] end up graduating from selective colleges with a very high success rate.” Posse was founded in 1989 because of one student’s statement: “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.” Since then, the program has been identifying public high school students “with extraordinary academic and leadership potential who may be overlooked by traditional college selection processes.” Posse places these students, who go through an intense selection process, in supportive, multicultural teams, or “Posses,” of exactly 10 students and award four-year, full-tuition leadership scholarships. Posse is now a national initiative with chapters in Atlanta, the Bay Area, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Washington, D.C., Boston and Miami. Its partner institutions have selected nearly 7,000 Scholars and awarded almost 1 billion dollars for their undergraduate education. Posse Scholars graduate at a rate of 90 percent, which is well above the national average.
The reason for this model’s success may be that a small, diverse group of highly motivated students, “carefully selected and trained,” can act as an inspiration for personal and community development. Since the U.S. is becoming a more and more multicultural society, The Posse Foundation believes “that the leaders of this new century should reflect the country’s rich demographic mix and that the key to a promising future for our nation rests on the ability of strong leaders from diverse backgrounds to develop consensus solutions to complex social problems.”
While the debate over political correctness has been going on for a while, the conversation at PPR went deeper into controversial aspects of language. Questions included, “Who is allowed to say what? What about free speech? Can speech be a form of violence? Have you ever said something and immediately wished you could take it back? Have you ever been told something that you wish people weren’t allowed to say? How do we want to define the terms of our conversations on campus and beyond?”
Other subtopics included the merit of trigger warnings (statements that precede soon-to-be presented material for the purpose of informing the audience that it contains potentially distressing content) for course material that could cause an upsetting emotional response, microaggressions (the quotidien verbal, nonverbal or environmental slights that communicate derogatory or hurtful messages to individuals based solely upon aspects of their identity such as race, gender or religion) and the idea of coddling.
Every year, The Posse Foundation and Posse Scholars facilitate PPR, which allows members of the larger campus community, such as faculty, administration and students, to attend and to discuss critical issues, generally relevant to college campuses, that are chosen by Posse Scholars themselves. The presence of different social and cultural perspectives represents a cross section of campus culture and relevant voices who work together to make a positive difference. It is a weekend of interactive, personal and challenging workshops with the goal of tackling these issues through discussion and hopefully concrete plans. PPR was started by the first group of Posse Scholars at Vanderbilt University who decided that something needed to be done “that would create a positive impact for the campus community.” Since then, retreats have focused on themes of race, class, gender, power, social responsibility, education and advocacy, to name a few broad examples.
One of the unique aspects of this retreat is its fundamental idea of a safe space. “By creating a safe space for dialogue between campus community members who may not ordinarily interact with one another,” The Posse Foundation explains, “retreats today have become an important forum to engage in social, cultural and political issues.
The weekend-long retreat had generally good reviews. David Dacres ’18, a Miami Posse Scholar, stated, “PossePlus Retreat was really good this year. I felt as though we talked about things that are rarely spoken about which made it quite difficult but interesting.”
Reece Thompson ’18, an invited guest, agreed: “I felt like it was a really great forum to talk about issues that are only going to become more important going forward. I think we all need a solid understanding of how language functions and what effects it can have on the world around us. I had some amazing conversations about art and trigger warnings, safe spaces and identity construction that have fundamentally changed my views on these issues.”
What concrete changes will be made on campus remains unclear, although the conversation has showed no signs of slowing down after the approximately 150 participants at Hamilton’s PPR returned to campus.