Standing next to Representative Donald Humason, Jr. (R-Westfield), 104th Fighter Wing Commander Col. James Keefe salutes the colors prior to the Greater Westfield Chamber of Commerce September breakfast at Barnes Air Base. (Photo by 104th Fighter Wing Senior Master Sgt. Robert J. Sabonis)
WESTFIELD – The sun had barely risen as cars began pulling into Barnes Air National Guard Base, with area merchants and businesspeople in attendance for the Greater Westfield Chamber of Commerce’s September breakfast.
The featured guest speaker at the event, Westfield State University President Dr. Evan Dobelle, spoke of the changing of times in both America and the state of higher education in this country.
The speech came after the Tuesday release of the 2014 US News and World Report “Best Colleges”, where Westfield State University retained it’s placement in the top tier of the ranking, the highest placement of any of the nine schools in the state university system.
EVAN DOBELLE
After a summer in which spending at the 6,400 student University has been placed under scrutiny, the President chose to address broader issues during his speech, harkening back to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington last week and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legendary “I have a dream” speech.
“He laid out a hopeful but challenging vision of America, predicated on the power of education to change lives,” Dobelle said of Dr. King’s speech, seguing into his own vision for the University.
He would then go on to take the assembled cafeteria on a verbal tour of the formative years of the University, which turns 175 this year, and holds the distinction of being the first school with “no barrier to race, no barrier to gender, no barrier to poor people” in the words of Dobelle.
“It’s the people’s college,” he said.
He referred to Westfield State Founder Horace Mann as a “change agent”, a title that has been bestowed upon Dobelle himself in the past, and tipped his cap to the businesspeople present at the event, calling the city “the nicest community that I’ve had the privilege of living in and working in.”
Dobelle spoke of how the world has changed since his formative years in the 1960s, and stated that, when he occasionally lectures political science courses, the kids have changed, too.
“The average college freshman this year was born in 1995,” Dobelle said. “Which means that, not only were they not born in the 60s, but neither were their parents.”
Ages notwithstanding, he spoke of the current generation of students and the need to use education to “improve the human condition.”
“Anything is achievable when the cause is worthy and the will is good,” Dobelle said.
After his speech, Dobelle was asked the effect his spending has had on his school’s lofty ranking, and he spoke of the school’s work with the disabled and less fortunate.
“Ten percent of our students are learning disabled,” he said, before listing Aspergers, Autism, and bipolar disorder as conditions which affect students at WSU. “Another ten percent are urban education students, many who come from dysfunctional families.”
“We’re not taking the average kids – we’re taking kids that no one else takes,” he said. “But we retain them and graduate them, and that’s significant.”
Dobelle also spoke of the school’s noted international programs, which have come under the hottest fire this summer.
“We’ve added some international students,” he said, going on to say that the school’s foreign student body, which only had “twelve students five or six years ago” had grown to 125 students this semester who add “diversity and revenue.”
“The reality is, our expenditures are not extravagant compared to private universities,” he added. “I always find it interesting when someone says something is ‘exorbitant’ or is ‘excessive’. It seems to me that, what we’re dealing with is private versus public.”
“We’re talking about students who go to private institutions, they get full professors and they go around the world, and my students are supposed to come and get computers and go to work,” Dobelle said. “That’s not the way it’s going to work at Westfield. It’s private quality, public value.”
