Title: Appalachia's Colleges and the Region's Future
Abstract: Appalachian Colleges and the Region's Future______________________________ Jack Russell I am glad to be in Berea. It is kind of like 'coming home.' Not only have I been here on campus several times and stayed at Boone Tavern, but I am a real country boy-an Appalachian myself. I grew up in a little town called Rural Retreat in southwest Virginia, and the first thing that jumped out at me when I looked at the attendees was Big Stone Gap. I have fond memories of Big Stone Gap, Bluefield, and a lot of other places represented by the participants in the symposium. I was one of the lucky kids, I guess, to grow up in Appalachia and go to college. To this day, that is not true for everyone. Interestingly enough, I never heard of Appalachia until I was in California going to school. It was a very interesting experience. I was taking a philosophy course at San Diego City College and had just finished a tour in the United States Navy, spending some time in Vietnam. Instead of coming back to southwestern Virginia, I decided to stay out there and attend college. I was working at International Harvester at night and going to school during the day. Also, I had one child at the time. It was a big adjustmentjust getting back into school after spending four years in the navy, and the first time I had an exam in this philosophy course I failed it. My professor just happened to be from Pulaski, Virginia, and, after I failed the test, I decided to go talk to him. I told him that I was having a problem adjusting to academic life and that I knew I could do better the next time. He said to me: "Jack, I really appreciate it, but you know my suggestion is that you should maybe forget about getting a degree and find a technical school. I understand that coming from Rural Retreat and your background you're probably not college material." Needless to say, I got an A in the course! Not because he gave me anything, but because I busted my gut. I did not want to be shown up! This was the person who reminded me that I was from Appalachia, and that Appalachians did not go to school-and the ones who did had problems. After growing up in Rural Retreat and working at the ARC for eighteen years, I have learned first-hand what the value of education is and what the high cost of ignorance is. Looking back at my ARC experience, I notice that the men and women who make a difference 44 and provide the leadership in these small communities are usually the people who are the products of local colleges and universities. One of the other things that I have noticed is that they are the people who are creative, they are imaginative, they have a sense of their community, and they are competitive about moving them ahead. They are usually the driving forces behind what is happening. The Appalachian Regional Commission realized that to assist these community leaders we needed to become an advocate and that we needed to form alliances. We also needed to learn how to stretch the agency's resources for the investments that we were going to make in the region, and we had to use other people's resources as well. We started out with a rigorous evaluation of our operations and completed a lot of socioeconomic studies of the region. Some of these were done by universities in the region. We had to use this new material to reach a consensus on our goals in Appalachia. And I think that our goals for Appalachia are the same thing that you have been discussing at the symposium. We want residents to have the skills and knowledge to compete in the twenty-first century, we want communities to have the infrastructure they need-that is, the water, sewer, and highways-and technical resources to start and sustain business. The last item on our list is we want affordable health care for the region. Over the last few years we have...
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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