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 23^rd 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.