A Proud Tradition

Commencement Address

To the Graduating Class of

Bard Early College Cleveland

June 5, 2018

By Charles S. Johnson

I want to extend my congratulations to the members of the class of 2018 for all of the hard work, dedication and sacrifice that brought you to this point, and to all of the institutional partners, the parents, family members, mentors and teachers who traveled with you along this journey.

Whether you know it or not, you carry on a proud tradition of extremely talented young people who stood out from their peers.

I have had the opportunity to know and work with some of your predecessors.

During the second World War, Morehouse College announced that it would accept any high school junior who could pass its entrance exam. As a young person I spent time working with an individual who rose to this challenge. After skipping the ninth and twelfth grades, this person graduated from high school, passed the entrance exam and entered Morehouse at the age of 15. This individual, Martin Luther King, Jr., went on to finish Morehouse, Crozier Seminary, Boston University, and played a major role in changing the society into which people of my generation were born.

As a young lawyer I spent time working with an individual who entered Dillard University at the age of 15 during the height of the Korean War, and he graduated from Howard University at the age of 19. This individual, Andrew Young, went on to become the first African American elected to Congress from the South since Reconstruction, to become the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, to become Mayor of Atlanta, and to play a key role in bringing the Centennial Olympic Games to Atlanta.

I worked with another individual who entered Morehouse College at the tail end of the Korean War and graduated from Morehouse at the age of 18. This individual, Maynard Jackson, not only went on to become Atlanta’s first African-American Mayor, but he fundamentally transformed the civic and economic life of the City.

We have come to expect great things from people like these who challenge themselves at an early age.

Let me tell you about the an experience that is very close to me.

My first home was on the campus of Fisk University. Two years after I was born, Fisk lost 100 of its students who were drafted to fight in the Korean War. Three years after I was born, Fisk lost another 240 students to this same Korean War-era draft. The wartime emergency resulted in an enrollment crisis for the university.

Some say it’s not a coincidence - perhaps it's a case of necessity being the mother of invention - but, with the generous support of the Ford Foundation, Fisk in 1950 initiated a basic college early entry program. The idea of the program was to seek out a few exceptional high school students at the junior and senior levels, take them out of unfriendly and unsupportive high schools, and allow them to proceed at an accelerated pace toward a bachelor’s or master’s degree on the Fisk campus.

The program was founded on the principle of individual ability and preparation - the notion that, when a number of alert and quick minds are brought together, the whole group can reach a higher level of interest and achievement. After the second or third year in the program these early entry students were integrated into the junior year of college.

Although on the same campus as the rest of the students, Fisk’s early entry students were set apart - living in separate residence halls, participating in extracurricular activities designed especially for them, taking separate courses. In some ways, it was a college within a college.

Even though these early entrants had one or two fewer years of formal schooling than the other people on campus, they scored better than the top regular-admission freshmen by a wide margin. These early entrants not only succeeded as undergraduates, but more than 91% earned at least one advanced degree – masters or above - and nearly 100% were involved in some kind of community service leadership after graduation.

The Fisk basic college early entrance program continued until 1956, when my grandfather, who had conceived of the basic college idea, and who had the relationship with the Ford Foundation, passed away.

In retrospect, there are those who have pointed out that, for all of its advantages, this program had some disadvantages as well. Chief among them was that, although the early entrants were academically advanced, not all of them were mature enough to cope with some of the aspects of college life, including the challenges of living in a social environment that was dominated by people who were a little more mature.

Nevertheless, we learned from experiments such as the ones at Morehouse, at Dillard, and at Fisk, that the early college idea - the idea of challenging young people when they are ready for the challenge - the idea that many of them are ready for the challenge much earlier than most people think - that this idea works, and it works very well.

But, in the wake of these mid-twentieth century early college experiments, we were left with an unresolved problem: How do you come up with a program for challenging precocious young people without placing them in an awkward social environment?

In the 1960s Betsy Hall came up with the idea of a stand-alone early college. This was the idea behind Simons Rock Early College. Simons Rock was not part of an existing college’s effort to combat a wartime decline in admissions. Instead, it was established for the sole and exclusive purpose of providing a challenge to the growing number of young people who were ready for college work at an early age, in an environment where they completed their high school requirements, as well as a challenging college curriculum, together (instead of being separated from their peers, instead of being sent off to a social environment that was not age appropriate).

This model of a self-contained early college soon caught the attention of Bard College, so much so that Bard not only brought the Simons Rock under its umbrella - Bard also became an evangelist for the early college gospel – the notion that 16 year olds are perfectly capable of doing university level work.

We made so much noise about this notion of the self-contained and highly challenging early college that the educational community began to call us out. The Chancellor of the New York Public Schools issued a challenge: If you’re so confident of your idea, why don’t you try it out in the setting of an urban public school, without cherry-picking those students who are the most well off and who have all the advantages?

Bard took the Chancellor up on his challenge. If we had failed, we would have folded after our first effort in New York. Instead, we now have a network that includes two tuition–free but highly challenging public high school early college campuses in the City of New York, one in Newark, New Jersey, one in Baltimore, Maryland, one soon to open in the Nation’s capital, and now, two in Cleveland.

But the number of campuses is not what's important: What's important is the results. We are frequently told that none of us wants to become a statistic. However, our record of performance includes statistics that we can all be proud of.

Whereas the average retention rate for 4 year colleges is 80%, And the average retention rate for 2 year colleges is 61%, Year 1 students at Bard Early Colleges are retained to year 2 at a rate of 98.6%.

82% of our students entering year 1 graduate with an AA degree.

A recent survey found that 85% of our high school graduates enroll in [a four-year] college within 18 months of completing high school. 96 % of our Manhattan and Queens alumni who enroll in college attain a bachelor’s degree within 6 years

So the record shows that this kind of partnership - between Bard, institutions such as the Cleveland public schools, the philanthropic community, our community partners, and our fabulous students - is a partnership that produces success.

That is why we have such great expectations of the class of 2018. We fully expect that the people in this room can and will change the world - in the manner of Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, or Maynard Jackson - or in your own special way in whatever field you choose.

We have these great expectations of you because you have already started along the same road that these giants have traveled. And as you have traveled along this road, you have met every challenge that we put in front of you.

And so I say to you, congratulations and best wishes for the continued success that we know lies ahead.