Choose Me
The Democratic
National Committee (DNC) is looking for a new Chair. I read the names of those
interested in THE WASHINGTON POST, those vying or being considered – men who’ve
experienced winning and losing in the political arena, looking for a stepping
stone to the grandeur that keeps eluding them. I am proposing a viable
alternative.
“Throw out the
bums.” (A line attributed to Benjamin Harrison, our 23rd president
of the USA). Choose me!
Choose a
University administrator, if not a Chancellor or President, someone close to
that office. Choose me. I’m here, ready. I’ve worked with many Presidents during
my career in higher education. Choose among our cohorts of talented, visionary leaders
and managers who have guided our nation’s higher education institutions to
academic excellence and financial strength through massive social, economic and
technological change. Choose among those who expertly meld the needs and wants
of a variety of fractious constituencies - constituencies with factions within
and between their ranks.
Choose me – A
writer. A reader. Choose someone who reads, not only the tomes of “how to” and the
reflections of historical eras and personalities, choose someone who reads
essays, short stories and fiction, memoir, and other creative written and
spoken forms. Choose someone who explores the light and dark places in the
human psyche and experience. Choose someone who understands that telling the
story of the miniscule is not only the story of self, but of the universe.
Choose someone who can weave the tales of country and parties and peoples. Choose
someone who weeps, who feels viscerally both joy and pain in the theater of film and stage and life.
Choose me, who
persevered through bullying and misogyny at home and in the councils and
boardrooms of commerce. Choose me of the quotidian. Choose among the many, like
me, who worked the phone every day for three months to elect a city councilman Choose
a me who while walking my dog in my new neighborhood met a candidate for state
legislature and participated in his campaign. He lost that one, but came back
to win another. Choose me who befriends. Choose from all the “me’s” with transferable
expertise and accrued wisdom, the me’s who understand the groundwork to be done
because we’ve done it. Choose among the me’s who are not teetering on this
stepping stone to prepare for the next, but who will work to do no more or
less than this - to lead a moral renaissance.
