Posse at 25

For 25 years,

program has produced leaders the world needs

By Mary Dieter

Leaders at DePauw University had been striving for a decade to diversify the campus by attracting more students of color as well as students from cities and states not well represented on campus.

“It was not rocket science to understand that we couldn’t equip our students to live in a world in which they would be working if they didn’t have exposure to people from different races and different backgrounds,” said former President Robert Bottoms, who ignited the diversity initiative soon after taking office in 1986.

So when DePauw alumnus Timothy Collins ’78, an investment banker, introduced Bottoms to a new foundation that sought to connect colleges with top New York City students overlooked by traditional recruitment – and even agreed to pay the $10,000 membership fee – Bottoms signed DePauw up. Twenty-five years ago this fall, the university welcomed the first cohort of New York students, who joined the Class of 2001 and received full-ride scholarships. They had been recruited via the Posse Foundation and, as a group, were intended to support one another as fellow members of their posse.

Those students, and the nearly 400 who have followed since, endured a stringent application process to be offered admission at DePauw and, during their senior year of high school, were coached for months on study skills, conflict resolution and other issues to ease their transition to college. They also become acquainted with the peers who would be joining them at DePauw. When they arrived on campus, they met regularly as a group and individually with their mentor, a faculty or staff member who remained with the group all four years.

DePauw was one of the first schools to sign on with Posse; 64 institutions now participate. The late Timothy Ubben ’58 was so impressed by Posse’s early success at DePauw that he rounded up friends to finance a program in Chicago and fund scholarships for the 2001-02 academic year. Since then, DePauw has accepted about 10 students each from New York and Chicago every year and has graduated about 83% of its Posse students, a smidge off Posse’s overall rate of 90%.

“It’s a leadership organization,” Ubben said in an interview shortly before his death Dec. 13. Students “are selected based on what leadership they’ve shown,” he said. “The purpose of Posse is to produce leaders in the country, whether they’re a firefighter or whether they’re a board member at Goldman Sachs. Doesn’t matter. We’re producing leaders.”

That sentiment is echoed by Posse’s founder, Deborah Bial, who was inspired to create the program in 1989 while working for a youth organization in New York City. An advisee told her he would not have quit the prestigious university he was attending had he had his “posse” with him.

“Posse is a national diversity, college success and leadership program. It’s a merit-based program,” not a program “that’s based on any kind

of deficit,” Bial said. That’s a critical distinction, she said; if programs for at-risk and underprivileged students – as important as they are – are the only programs created to address diversity and inclusion, “then we underscore a stereotype.”

Bial said that “people who think of us as a college success program are only getting half the story. Really, our goal is to build a national leadership network for the United States of America, one that reflects the demographics of the American population. … If we can get those Posse graduates into leadership positions, so that they become CEOs, senators, college presidents, then we’re going to begin to see a different kind of decision-making happen – one that’s more inclusive, one that believes that we need to consider all voices when we make decisions.”

Those involved with Posse at DePauw hail it for its effect on not only its graduates – who have gone on to success in business, medicine, science, the arts, journalism and more – but also the university. Posse taught DePauw how to assess untraditional students who apply for admission, Bottoms said. DePauw emulated Posse’s pre-college training when the university created its first-year mentor program, which lasts an entire year and delves into deeper topics than orientation sessions at many other schools, said Cindy Babington, former vice president for student services and for admission and financial aid.

Meanwhile, Posse students “bring their unique traits and skills and academic drive to DePauw,” said JC Lopez who, as dean of student success, oversees the Posse program. Babington recalled that Posse students were “the impetus for social justice, social change on our campus. They brought up a lot of different issues. The first one I can remember was LGBTQ rights.”

Hillary Kelleher, an assistant English professor who has been the faculty mentor to three cohorts, including New York City students who just completed their first year at DePauw, said “the program is transformational, and not only to the Posse scholars” but to “the DePauw community, students, faculty, staff and administrators.”

Mentoring the Chicago Posse members in the Class of 2017 was “transformative for my teaching and advising,” said Dana Dudle, the Winona H. Welch professor of biology. “The scholars made me re-examine my relationship with students. For me, much of the joy of the mentor-student relationship was that I got to work closely with these talented, driven students who I didn’t have to grade, so we could just focus on their individual and collective pathways.”

And Jeanette Johnson-Licon, who has been a Posse mentor for two cohorts, including the Class of ’22 New York City posse, said that being a mentor “has been life-changing for me.” She is associate dean of experiential learning and has been involved with Posse students in several previous roles, an experience that has “frustrated, challenged and delighted me. It wasn’t always easy, but I feel very lucky to

Photo: Brittney Way have been part of their lives at DePauw.”

The university likewise has had a few challenging moments. Early on, “we had to have a conversation with the Posse office because our students from New York were coming and then withdrawing at too high of a rate,” Babington said. “It wasn’t good for them, and it wasn’t good for DePauw. And so we needed them to find students who were really OK with being in the middle of Indiana.”

Posse “worked to better portray what DePauw was all about, what Greencastle was all about, and found students who were coming in with their eyes more wide open,” she said. The university brought students to campus for admitted student open houses, enabling them to experience campus and meet people connected to the university.

Since then, Posse students have been more likely to persist through graduation, enjoying the benefits of an education offered to any DePauw student and earning a degree from a prestigious university.

“We did the same thing for Posse students that we did for all of our students, and that is provide a quality liberal arts education, provide internships, chances to be involved in international study,” Bottoms said. “These were opportunities that a lot of students didn’t have, and the students wouldn’t have had if (DePauw) hadn’t been part of the Posse program.”

Posse prepared alums to promote positive change

By Emily Chew

When Anisah Miley ’01 and Tiffany Schiffner ’02 describe how their Posse and DePauw experiences shaped them, common themes of self-confidence, social change and a sense of purpose emerge from the first-generation college graduates.

Both women came to DePauw expecting to effect social change on campus – and feeling sufficiently prepared by the Posse Foundation to do so. Both women say the DePauw Posse experience was instrumental in their college and career success. And both women entered the mental health field, where helping clients to facilitate positive change is their driving force.

“Posse and DePauw reinforced my own values, the messages I received from my family and other amazing adults around social change – that you could use your beliefs, hopes and optimism to connect with other like-minded people to create change in your own life and the lives of other people and in the world,” said Miley, a member of the first Posse class at DePauw. “Those are the values that kept being reinforced in the way that I navigated my Posse experience and the way people supported me through it.”

Throughout her academic and

professional career, Miley, a licensed clinical social worker, has explored change. She focuses her New York City practice on Black and Indigenous people, people of color, women and people of diverse sexual orientation and gender experiences. She was an activist at DePauw, motivated by the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student who was beaten, tortured and left to die in rural Wyoming in Anisah Miley 1998. She traveled with other students to protest a World Trade Organization meeting in Washington D.C. and to Mexico with history professor Glen Kuecker to study the Zapatistas, experiences that “helped me define who I wanted to be in the world.” Miley said she learned that “I could combine my interest in feminist studies, which provided me with a framework for conceptualizing personal change and conflict, with my interest in political science to create my own degree in peace

Tiffany Schiffner

and conflict studies.” While earning a master’s degree in public administration, she explored how organizations effect change, and then, while earning a master’s in social work, delved into how individuals or groups do so.

Schiffner is a psychologist who treats patients, including disabled veterans, in rehabilitation and nursing care facilities. She offers services, such as crisis counseling, in English and Spanish to patients from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. She also is an adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida and Rollins College.

She had known she wanted to study psychology since high school and fondly remembers DePauw professors, especially Pam Propsom, professor emerita of psychology and neuroscience, and the late Karin Ahlm. “I was their only Latina student in psychology, and they understood the challenges I faced,” she said. “They responded in advocacy and worked with my strengths.” Schiffner was president of the Committee for Latina/o Concerns, “a great learning experience in terms of leadership development to make cultural spaces and enrich the campus community,” she said.

“We brought the first salsa band to

DePauw. We connected it to Dia de los Muertos (the Mexican holiday, Day of the Dead), and it became a tradition and was a great experience for us and for the larger community.” And even as a student, she regularly promoted wellness and “the importance of considering diversity when implementing wellness programs.”

Being part of Posse, Schiffner said, “was the best thing that happened to me and my ability to see it through. We loved each other, fought with each other, but even when we disagreed we were loyal and that sustains you, helps you see the bigger picture. It would have been really difficult without the posse. In that connection, you’re finding a piece of your way back home and you stay on a path moving forward.”

Posse alum demonstrates leadership in film world

By Mary Dieter

Chanelle Aponte Pearson ’05 has long held the goal of “making radical transformational change” in the lives of individuals and communities.

She has done it in her own life.

She had double majored in Spanish and women’s studies at DePauw and spent two summers as an intern at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. But even then, she envisioned a career in nonprofits and harbored a quiet wish to be a filmmaker.

It was only after she earned a master of public administration degree from New York University – while holding a series of jobs that demonstrated her acumen for data analysis, research and organization – that “I met a bunch of other filmmakers at NYU and saw that this could be a viable profession,” she said.

Meanwhile, Pearson connected with an old friend who was working on his filmmaking thesis at NYU, and “I could just sense that he needed support in organizing and really managing all the moving parts,” she said. She loves spreadsheets, she said, and she was invigorated by the opportunity to blend “being good at something and being really interested and passionate about what’s being said on screen.” So she joined MVMT Films as chief operating officer and senior producer.

Her job as producer was “like wrangling cats,” juggling talent, crew, investors and, in the case of the film “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” animators and illustrators.

“My career really, really took off” when the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, she said. She went on to write, produce, edit and direct several other projects at MVMT, including the narrative web series “195 Lewis.” In 2018, she joined the New Negresses Film Society, a collective whose founders “saw the need for a very intentional space to focus on the work of Black women directors.”

The collective sponsored the Black Women’s Film Conference in 2019 and hopes to reprise it in the near future. In addition, the group “has grown to a point where not only do we exhibit work, but we also are producing each other’s work,” Pearson said. To that end, she is developing her own scripted anthology series and is executive producer on another member’s film. Her leadership comes as no surprise, given that Pearson secured a Posse scholarship that enabled her to attend DePauw. The program prepared her and her posse members for college, including the move to rural Indiana, she said, but “that definitely was some culture shock. … I was just really glad I was there with my posse and that I was not alone.”

She started at DePauw in the same year that the first posse from Chicago came to campus, and she became friends with those students too. And because “there’s something about going away to a new school where you feel like you can just start a new chapter,” she joined the step and dance team, “a huge part of my experience on campus.”

DePauw education, Posse experience prepare ’03 alum for career

By Mary Dieter

Edmond Krasniqi ’03 directs a team that analyzes complicated data to target clients’ advertising strategies. And he’s comfortable doing so, he said, because of what he learned from being a Posse scholar at DePauw University.

As unlikely as his evolution from history major to a project director in advertising may seem, Krasniqi easily connects his academic and professional experiences.

Posse’s precollegiate training, coupled with his experiences at DePauw, enables him to “take information better, more comfortably, (and) analyze the information as it comes to me,” he said. “… I don’t feel scared or overwhelmed when I see a lot of new information. … I continue to apply a lot of those things that I learned and experienced.”

Krasniqi was about 10 when his parents, wary of political unrest and media suppression occurring in their native Kosovo, fled with their three children and spent several years staying with friends and family around Europe. They immigrated to New York City around 1995, avoiding the 16-month Kosovo conflict that ensued in 1998.

While he attended Manhattan International High School, a counselor mentioned the Posse program to him. At the time, Krasniqi thought of little outside of soccer, but his younger sister pushed him, and he was intrigued within moments of entering – while still wearing a sweaty soccer uniform – the first mass gathering of students competing for Posse’s promise of a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious college. DePauw accepted him and, upon his first visit, he had “the sensation of being here by myself. Incredibly intimidating. Middle of nowhere.” He was a “Muslim from Europe (who) doesn’t fit anywhere.” Then it struck him that his posse members were “going through the exact same experience (and) I realized I was actually not alone.” When he returned to Greencastle to start classes, “I didn’t think of it as being as intimidating anymore.”

Early in his DePauw career, he leaned a lot on his posse, an experience that “gave me that courage” to venture out – enough so that he was elected student body president for his junior year, with a goal of involving students who represented every faction or organization on campus.

Meanwhile, Krasniqi studied history at DePauw with a goal of moving into international affairs, the subject in which he later pursued a master’s degree. But he became disillusioned during an internship during his master’s program, when he witnessed the slow pace at which bureaucracies address urgent issues.

“That really just catapulted me to seek technology, the other part of what I was interested in,” he said. He also was interested in global cultures, graphics, photography and technology, and realized they melded in advertising. And his Posse experience, which has “become part of me now,” coupled with his DePauw education, prepared him for the field, he said. He has held several project management positions at media companies, including Publicis Health Media, where he is a project management director.

“DePauw was such a beautiful bubble,” he said. “… Posse gave me the courage to reach out. But DePauw was really the place to do that.”

Posse and DePauw partner to prepare promising professionals

By Mary Dieter

Aaniyah Childs ’23 plans a career as a pediatric neurosurgeon who uses Eastern medicine to treat some conditions.

New graduate Tsian DeFour’s appreciation for “weird things, … the abstract or the avant garde” will guide him as a producer and director of films, especially romantic and dramatic ones.

Cesar Mendoza, also a member of the Class of ’22, will spend two years in an Orr Fellowship, rotating through three health-related experiences at Indiana University Health before beginning his studies to become a dermatologist who treats underserved communities.

And Lauren Lillis ’22 wants to become a documentary filmmaker focusing on social justice.

These are the sort of graduates DePauw University sends out into the world. They found their place in the world at DePauw because of the Posse Foundation.

They also found the support they needed to excel at DePauw, the very purpose of the Posse program. The idea is that students will stay in school if they have a support system, a posse, on whom they can rely.

The 10 or so students who make up each Posse – DePauw has accepted 11 from Chicago and 11 from New York for its incoming class – generally don’t know one another beforehand. Posse offers a pre-collegiate training program to facilitate the members’ relationships and ease their transition to college.

“It’s definitely a part of the plan to get us, when we get here, to want to be a part of the community, even though we are, in a way, injected into somewhere totally foreign,” DeFour said.

“I definitely wouldn’t have made it through without them. We actually haven’t always been very close but, no matter what, we’ve always known that we were there for one another,” he said. “… We have these very complicated relationships with one another, and they teach you about the world and then you learn a lot about yourself, because you figure out how you’re going to deal with these people.”

Childs said she and her fellow posse members sought other friends on campus, but “to this day, I’m still really close to people in my posse … and I would definitely go to them first when I need things. I’ll go to my community and reach out to them.”

One’s posse provides “a way to hold each other accountable, to be honest and make sure that we’re all doing well,” Mendoza said. “Not only do we catch up with each other, but we also check in to make sure that we’re all okay. … I see myself in them sometimes in the way we like to go above and beyond to achieve success. And so being in a community with them also helped me grow as a person.”

Posse staffers, Lillis said, “tell us when we come here that we’re leaders and we’re chosen for a reason. And I think that encourages a lot of us to make change on campus and be a leader in different communities, whatever we see fit.”

Here’s a little more about the three new graduates and the rising senior:

AANIYAH CHILDS ’23

From Chicago. Neuroscience major. Science research fellow who investigated problematic use of social media. Bonner scholar. Cheerleader. Will study in Hong Kong in the fall.

Interesting fact: Her young cousin, who has autism, inspired Childs to pursue medicine with a twist – combining science with Eastern techniques.

Comment from Robert West, psychology professor and chair, with whom she has conducted research during two terms: “Aaniyah embraces every new opportunity with a positive attitude that has been apparent in our work together on research projects and in my course on Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.”

TSIAN DEFOUR ’22

From Brooklyn, New York. Film studies major. Media fellow who landed three internships through the New York Arts Program and even earned a mention on IMDb. Presidential ambassador. Vice president of allocations for DePauw Student Government. Intramural sports social media intern.

Interesting fact: DeFour did not play football in high school but liked the game, so he walked on to DePauw’s team and played four years as an outside linebacker. He said he wasn’t very good, but “I didn’t quit” and “it taught me a lot.”

Comment from Jeannette JohnsonLicon, associate dean of student success and his Posse mentor: “‘This semester, I only want to work on creative projects,’ Tsi tells me at the start of his final spring semester at DePauw. He laughs at my raised eyebrow and rueful look, but he knows that I appreciate his dedication to his filmmaking. I remind him that sometimes we have to work on projects that we are less passionate about, but I think to myself, maybe it’s okay that he is so focused. He’s going to make beautiful things.”

LAUREN LILLIS ’22

From Queens, New York. Sociology major; film studies minor. First-generation college student. La Fuerza treasurer. Member of DePauw Student Government’s Board of Allocations. Vice president and planning committee member of ¡Feminista! Vice president of Enlightened Voices Poetry Club. Planned events as a Posse intern at DePauw Campus Life for two years. Interesting fact: Lillis’s father died, without warning, of a heart attack when she was 16, making her question her plans to go away to college. “The next year,” she said, “this opportunity of Posse was presented to me and I just kind of felt like that was a sign in some ways, like that was him telling me that it’s going to be okay,” she said. Her mother told her “‘your dad would want you to do this. And I’m okay with you going.’ And I think that was all I needed to be able to come to DePauw and to be able to accept Posse as this opportunity to maybe change my life.”

Comment from JC Lopez, dean of student success and Lillis’s supervisor when she was a Posse intern: “I have seen her succeed as a Posse scholar and bring her leadership, experiences and knowledge into the DePauw community. Her academic and cocurricular impact has fostered lasting relationships among our community.”

CESAR MENDOZA ’22

From Berwyn, a Chicago suburb. Biochemistry major; minors in computer science and Hispanic studies. First-generation college student. Science research fellow. STEM guide. Presidential and Admission ambassador. Residential adviser for three years. Vice president of programming for DePauw Student Government. Did eight weeks of cancer research at the University of Chicago, focusing on immunotherapy. Volunteers at Putnam County Hospital. Interesting fact: Mendoza’s high school counselor discouraged him from pursuing a Posse scholarship, saying the program was for extroverts, not a “reserved” student like him. He participated in an enrichment program at the University of Illinois Chicago, Medicina Academy Apprentice Program, and an instructor there nominated him for Posse.

Comment from Jacqueline Roberts, Howard C. and Mary Ellen Black professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Mendoza’s academic adviser: “Cesar is an amazing student, going above and beyond in the classroom. He has served as a STEM guide for the Enzyme Mechanism class in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Students speak highly of Cesar’s ability to help all students navigate this challenging course.”