My final column after four years writing for The Temple News:
An open letter to President Ann Weaver Hart
By Christopher Wink | May 12, 2008 | The Temple News
I am graduating. After four years on North Broad Street – two more than you – I have plenty I want to share with you. Space is limited, so forgive my suddenness.
Throw your students into the surrounding communities.
For 45 years, this university has tried to figure out how to trick middle-class students into studying amid one of this country’s densest collections of black people, many of them poor and uneducated. So we built walls and took publicity shots facing south. We closed North Park Avenue, tried to close 13th Street and turned inward.
So, each year, a portion of accepted students confuse Temple with shootings at the Norris Apartments and confuse Philadelphia with an abandoned row home at 20th and Diamond streets.
That’s backwards. Have Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico amend our new general education requirements to involve 10-credit hours of “community education.” The engineering students can take a class on the most efficient means of backfilling condemned buildings, architecture students can figure out what’s wrong with the North Philadelphia subway stop, and students of the social sciences can work with the nonprofits that are trying to help our neighbors.
Leverage our intellectual capital and market it as the most unique academic experience in the world.
Continue reading The Temple News: An open letter to President Ann Weaver Hart