In Black America; Paul Quinn College, with Michael Sorrell; Part 2

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. We are in the process of completing overhauling our academic program. It was not a rigorous enough program. Students were graduating without being fully prepared. That is never going to fly. When a student graduates from, if you attend Paul Klan College for four years during my presidency, people are going to know that you are prepared not just to exist in a job, but to excel in the job. We are going to push you out of your comfort zone. Look, we are unusual, we are a school that if you don't look like you want to get after it, we will suggest that you transfer, and you will say, look, maybe you don't fit in

here. Maybe you don't want to be special. If you don't want to be special, then plenty of other schools that you should go to. But as you are going to be here, we want you to want it. Michael J. Sorreo, president, Paul Kuin College, located in Dallas, Texas, founded in 1872 in Austin, Texas. The college is named after William Paul Kuin, the fourth bishop of the AME Church. The college later moved to Waco, Texas and established as a modern one day trade school at Aves Street and Mary Street. The original mission of the college was to teach industrial skills such as blacksmithing and carpentry to former slaves. In 1950 to 1954, a campus church, a student union building, a gymnasium and administration building were built. In 1990, the college moved to his current campus in South Dallas, located on the former campus of Bishop College. Paul Kuin is a private, historically black college.

Paul Kuin holds a distinct as being the oldest historic black college in the state of Texas. On March 27, 2007, Sorreo became the third president of Paul Kuin, and the fifth since 2001, his immediate predecessor resigned suddenly after only six months. Recently, Paul Kuin gained national attention when it implemented a new business casual dress code. Also, the college has revamped its admission policy and established a presidential scholarship program. I'm Johnny Ohenson, Jr., and welcome to another edition of in black America. On this week's program, Paul Kuin College, with president Michael J. Sorreo, part two, in black America. Right now, what we are doing is the maintenance that just hasn't been done. We do have some new building ideas. We built a new fitness center over the Christmas holidays, which is fantastic. You walk in there and you are in a legitimate fitness center. We remodeled the cafeteria, which looks great now.

We'll be getting to re-landscape the campus, so you see the baby hedges that are growing along the front of it that's going to change the front of the campus. We put new security cameras in because we never had security cameras here. I mean, just imagine a college with no security cameras. We're going to redo, we're going to actually not redo, but we're going to do a sprinkler system because we don't have a sprinkler. We have 146 acres of land, and by July, it's all brown. We are in a process of raising money for a new dorm, you know, called a first year living and learning experience. It'll be a renovation of an academic facility, and then we're going to build a new dormitory so the students have someplace new to live. We just, we think we should have a new campus, and we're going to build that. Under Sorreo's leadership, Paul Quinn has embarked upon an aggressive agenda that stresses academic excellence, accountability, and a commitment to student service. This vision is to create a nationally renowned institution of higher education that produces

quenites with enlightened minds, passionate spirit, and the capacity to lead in the global marketplace. In its overhauling of the admission, finance, academic affairs, athletics, maintenance, and development offices, modernizing the institution's operation and the creation of a partnership with home depot, bow for its beauty, and habitat for humanity. During Chicago, Illinois, Sorreo earned a BA degree in government from Ovalon College, where he was voted Secretary Treasurer of his senior class, and was a two-time captain of the basketball team. He received his JD and MA degree in public policy from Duke University. While in law school, he was one of the founding members of the Journal of Gender Law and Policy, and served as the vice president of the Duke Bar Association. Prior to accepting the presidency of Paul Quinn, he spent the majority of his career advising key decision makers at all levels of sports, Fortune 500 companies, and government entities. Recently, in Black America, spoke with Michael J. Sorreo.

We are going to become one of America's great small colleges. This community deserves that, my students deserves that, and this city deserves that. There's no other way to look at it. I don't know why you would be here if those weren't your goals. And it is uncomfortable to have students, who most of them have gone to school and urban public school systems, where people didn't expect very much of them, where they were praised for simply showing up, keeping their mouths quiet, and staying out of trouble. That's what you're supposed to do. I'm not going to praise you for doing what you are supposed to do. I will praise you when you are extraordinary, and we strive every day to be extraordinary, and we're going to be extraordinary. Tell us about the Presidential Scholars Program. That is a program that I started when I got here, and it allows us to go out and recruit the best and the brightest. It's a full scholarship. These students all four years of pay for as long as you maintain a 3.5 or better. You have a special counselor.

You have breakfast or lunch with me once a week. I monitor your classwork. You cannot be a disciplinary problem. We expect them to help us turn this institution around. They are our partners, they are our student ambassadors, and the program has gone exceptionally well. The first year we had, I think it was seven students in the program, four of whom were in graduate in the top 10 of their high school classes. Last year, we recruited students, and I think it was seven or again, and of that number, we had two valedictorians, a salutatorian, a class president. We had a young brother who graduated with some of the highest SAT scores in the state of Texas, so they get it, right? Our students get it. We're doing a president's scholar interview today with a young lady from Little Rock, Arkansas. She's number eight in her class, carries better than a 3.5, beautiful young lady. Her sister is a presidential scholar here, and she wants to continue that legacy, so hopefully she won't mess up her interview, and it'll be able to happen for her.

I was it important for you to change the dress code. When I attended college in late 60, early 70, there was a standard in which men and women had to adhere to attending class, Friday, if you had to go to chapel, so you had to have slacks on and a shirt, not necessarily a tie. What has transpired from then to now to have you change the dress codes of the students here at Paul Quinn? Yeah, I would call it what we are currently in the midst of in the black community is the ghettoization of our culture and our practices. The dress code has been borrowed from prisons, or the motor dress rather has been borrowed from prisons. We think that it's cool to be a thug, not realizing that there are no old thugs, okay? They're either dead or in jail, but they certainly aren't on the street, so we romanticize this notion. That unrealistic goal, all right? You don't go to college to remain uneducated, to mirror the street culture, which you left for and by the way, those who are truly immersed in the street culture want out, all right?

So because you are on the periphery of street culture, you think, well, man, yeah, I want to be a thug, right? I mean, there are many, many amazing stories I can tell you about that, but when I became president, March 27, 2007, I would walk around campus, and I was humiliated by what these students were. I would bring potential donors to campus, and I was embarrassed because young brothers and sisters were wearing durags, they were wearing wife beaters, pajamas, no way. We weren't going to be that school, and we were going to send a very clear message that it was not business as usual. So I literally took my high school dress code, all right? That's what I was saying, nation's college prep, shirts with collars, slacks and shoes, and brought it to college, and said, if you are going to come here, this is your place of business, the classroom is your place of business. Therefore, you will dress as if you are doing business. Our students thought that things had just gone bonkers, and they hadn't, all right? What we were saying was, we're going to set a different standard.

If you attend Paul Quinn College, the one thing that I can promise you, you are going to know how to do when you graduate is how to lead, all right? This was the first example of leadership. I don't care if every school in the country doesn't have a dress code. I don't measure myself, and we don't measure ourselves against those standards. We knew that our students needed help preparing themselves from professional backgrounds. My parents showed me how to dress. I owned a suit. I can't remember ever not owning a suit, so it wasn't uncomfortable for me to put it on. But for some of our students, the first time they wore suits was when they went to interview for a job. Now, think about this. The first time you wore a suit was when you went for a job, you didn't look comfortable wearing that suit. You looked out of place, and you were self-conscious. So instead of focusing on the interview, you were focused on how you looked and being uncomfortable, which meant you didn't do your best job at presenting yourself. The best part about the dress code is what it allowed the community to say.

And the community said, we love it, we support you. We held clothing drives, we gently used clothes, and people brought clothes for days. Churches, French and West Baptist Church, helped set up the clothes closet. American Airlines brought literally vans and vans of clothes. People guard during wind and law firm brought our students. Went down to the closet because the closet is free. You just walk in, if you need something, you get it, and you keep going. Our students are wearing Hugo Boss, St. John's, the young ladies. They've got clothes that, frankly, a whole lot of us don't have. We had to wash the faculty because they were trying to sneak in there and get some clothes. But the reality of it is, it's been great for our institution. You can tell when you walk around, the kids, the students feel better about themselves. They look good, they know they look good.

When we take them to events with other schools, and other school students come in in jeans and stuff. Our students are looking at them like, y'all are just substandard. That's who we are, we want them to feel like they're cut above. What academic preparation does Paul Quinn provide for the students of the tenure? We are in the process of completely overhauling our academic program. It was not a rigorous enough program. Students were graduating without being fully prepared. That is never going to fly. When a student graduates from, if you attend Paul Quinn College for four years during my presidency, people are going to know that you are prepared not just to exist in a job, but to excel in the job. We are going to push you out of your comfort zone. Look, we're unusual. We're a school that if you don't look like you want to get after it, we will suggest that you transfer.

We'll say, look, maybe you don't fit in here. Maybe you don't want to be special. If you don't want to be special, then plenty of other schools that you should go to. But if you're going to be here, we want you to want it. They tell me you had a heart attack, September 11th, last year, how did that change your perspective? Well, it actually wasn't a heart attack. I died. It was something called sudden cardiac death. And my heart stopped. I stopped breathing. Luckily, my girlfriend, who's now in my fiancee, was there, and she did CPR, she called now. I mean, I got lucky. Two and a half percent of the people who have what happened to me live. And they didn't tell me that until I was well out of the hospital. Okay. But they didn't drop the old 98% of the people die who have what you had. What that taught me more than anything else is life is precious. I went to bed that night, fine.

Woke up three days later, feeling like I was Iron Man, had wires coming out of everywhere. And it just, it's a very sobering thought. You know, I've been healthy my whole life. I eat, right? I exercise six days a week. You know, the joke with all my friends is if it happened to you and you are obsessive about being healthy, what does this say? I mean, so now they've all gone and had stress tests and heart tests. But I'm so blessed. You know, I mean, I have a job that I love, I mean, it's the hardest job anyone can have. We don't have close to what we need. Every day we make a way out of no way, okay? And we keep coming back because we know we're going to be a great school. If I have a job I love, I have a woman that I love who, you know, literally saved my life. And you know, I will spend the rest of my life thanking her for that. It just, it puts things into a very, very clear perspective.

I mean, I would tell you, do find that which you love and spend your life doing it because to spend a day doing things you don't enjoy, I mean, I'm lucky, I mean, you know, this is what I love doing, you know, and I'm happy, all right, I'm happy every day. So I'm blessed, man. I mean, the Lord clearly has a plan for me, I'm glad, okay, all right, because the other thing I worry about, you know, they tell you, you see white lights and stuff when you, when you, I saw nothing, which made me a little nervous that I might not be going up, right? So, but it's, I just, you know, I mean, I'm blessed. That's all I can really say. What's on the drawing board to move Paul Quinn forward in the sense of facilities and endowments? Yeah, we, we need to build a new campus, all right, I mean, that's just, and what we hope is on the drawing board is some of the stimulus package funds.

But right now what we are doing is the maintenance that just hasn't been done, all right, but we do have some new building ideas. We built a new fitness center over the Christmas holidays, which is fantastic. I mean, you walk in there and you are in, you know, a legitimate fitness center. We have, we remodeled the cafeteria, which looks great now. We have, we'll be getting to re-landscape the campus. So you see the baby hedges that are growing along the front of it that's going to change the front of the campus. We put new security cameras in because we never had security cameras here. I mean, just imagine a college with no security cameras. We're going to redo, we're going to actually not redo, but we're going to do a sprinkler system because we don't have a sprinkler. We have 146 acres of land, and by July, it's all brown, right? We are in the process of raising money for a new dorm, you know, called the first year of living and learning experience.

It will be a renovation of an academic facility, and then we're going to build a new dormitory. So the students have some place new to live. We just, we think we should have a new campus, and we're going to build that. We hear the question of the necessity of historically black colleges. Obviously, there is a need, your assessment of that and the assessment of the necessity of park wind. Park wind, the new park wind is absolutely necessary. We need a black college that decides to set the standard for what black students will become and what young men and women will become. I think Spellman does an extraordinary job. I think Xavier does a great job. I think Hampton does a wonderful job, more house. But we want to join those ranks and then we want to be first, right? We are competitive. We make no apologies for that. You absolutely need black colleges. You know, the reason you need black colleges, if people question why you need black colleges and they should look around and see what's happening to young brothers and sisters who aren't

going to Harvard, right? They're going to the Stephen F. Austin, the University of trying to not integrate anybody school. They went to schools where they'd be far better served instead of being a number in a classroom where no one spends any time with them, no one gives them special consideration. They'd be better served coming to a college where they are special, where you not only know who they are, but you know who they are, all right? But Texas is an interesting place. They celebrate Juneteenth here, okay? Juneteenth was the original CP time or colored people's time for the uninitiated, okay? We were late in Texas finding out that we were free. Why would you celebrate being slaves for a year to two years extra, right? But that mentality is pervasive in this state, okay? Many sadly, many brothers and sisters don't know and don't understand and they are our

own worst enemies. We are going to make no apologies for being an unabashed lover of historically black colleges, all right? We need them because our students need them. Sometimes they need places where people put their arms around them and they say we love you, we support you, we are here for you. When my students' family members die, I go to their funerals, okay? I know who they are, I know what my students have my cell phone number, when it is midnight and they are upset, they know they can call every other week, I take two to three students out to dinner just because, right? Because I want to hear from them, I want to know what is it that is important to you, I want to know how to reach them when it is time to reach them. That is what black colleges are about, all right? My job is to put finishing touches on students that need that. It is to be honest with them and let's take it a step further. Many of our students don't know black men, okay?

I mean they literally don't know black men, they might know their coach, but the reality of a coach is it is a difference in imbalance relationship, the coach needs you to perform so he can keep his job, okay? I don't need you to perform, I need you to be the best you can be, my job is to push you to become great, not to pray you scored 25 points a game and you make my life easier, okay? Sisters need to see black men who love them just because they are precious, right? Not because they want something from them. You know, if my minister always says, if the first time your daughter hears, I love you, it's from a man, other than her father, she will spend the rest of her life trying to earn being told that again and she won't know how to do that positively. We tell our young ladies, we love you, we are here for you, we are proud of you, okay? But when they do wrong, we pull their co-tails, all right? We tell them that they do wrong, that is what we are here for, that is why we are so important. You can have everything you want in a black eye, now we don't have yet a bright shiny

new buildings, okay? But, you know, those bright shiny new buildings didn't seem to help the kid of Virginia Tech when he lost his mind, you know, they didn't help the young man down at a Columbine when he lost his mind, all right? If you put bad things in new buildings, those buildings don't look so new anymore, we're going to make sure everything that we do is about the student, we put them first and we love our students, I will never apologize for that. Which is a real couple of more questions. I spoke with Dr. Irvin, who is the president of Houston Children's University, last fall for the first time in, I don't know, maybe in the school history or at least a long time, the male freshman class outnumbered the female. What are you doing and Paul Quinn to attract our African American young man to seek a college education? You know, we actually have, we're close to 50-50, okay? But the brothers need something a little different, all right? And what we do is we tell the brothers, we're going to teach you how to be a man, it's

really that simple. Now, you need to decide whether you want to be a man, because it's going to be hard, right? No one's going to baby you, all right? And the misfortune you have, is you have a president who is young enough? You know, I can come, I can get with you, okay? And you know, it was funny, the, my first summer, I didn't fully appreciate the state of the young man. And one of the young men got very angry with me and wanted to fight, right? And I kind of laughed and I said, look man, I am 6'4", 225 pounds, all right? I still work out, I still run. The question you have to ask yourself is, if it comes to that, and you get hit and get knocked out by the college president, what that's going to do to your street cred, okay? Because you can go back and say, my college president looks like a linebacker, people aren't going to buy that, okay? You're still going to have got knocked out by college president. But, you know, and I would never hit one of my students, let me be very clear about that.

But what it is is sometimes with the brothers, they have to know that you understand where they come from. And then you meet them where they are and you lift them up, all right? That's what we're doing, we're out on the road recruiting. We take the young brothers with us, all right? We let our students help recruit. And they tell them what it's like, you know, and they'll say, look, you know, I came here and I had cornrows and braids and, you know, it wasn't cool. And no one told me I had to cut my hair, but I knew I needed to cut my hair because that wasn't who I wanted to be. And what we do is we use a very, very personal touch in recruiting. And we tell you, when we meet you, what you need to do to become the man you want to be. Now, it doesn't appeal to every student. Plenty of students have told me they don't want any part of this.

That's okay because we didn't want any part of them. Everyone cannot be a quenite. It is a different group, it is a special group. And you have to be willing to humble yourself and to spend the time becoming great in order for you to claim your greatness. One more question, there are two individuals that I speak to periodically and they are quenites, cheerleaders for Paul Quinn and that's Willis Johnson and Cheryl Smith. How are their efforts assisting you in what you're trying to achieve here? People don't realize there may be no better advocate for Paul Quinn College than Willis Johnson. All right. You know, I call them kingpin. Okay. Willis brought back the Bishop Five, which is a fundraiser featuring some of the best ministers from Old Bishop College, raised over $150,000 for us last fall, okay, at six day revival, okay.

Willis has always been there. He is a cheerleader. He backs it up with raising money. He brings people to campus. He, far as I'm concerned, Willis Johnson is a true, true friend of this institution. And Cheryl, I mean, you know, you don't get people like Cheryl very often. She loves this institution. She has served as a professor. She has taught in the communications department. She's taught in developmental course. Now she's a director of communication. She is committed to the old school notion of black excellence and she demands it from the students. She loves them. She is patient with them. We would be a much poorer school without Cheryl Smith. I would just say thank you for the opportunity to bring our message of the Kuinite Revival or Renaissance to your listeners. We are proud of who we are.

We are 137 years old and we're excited for what the next 137 years are going to bring. Now I don't think I'll be here for all of those, but it is just, it is a joy to be present of this institution and I would hope that anyone who wants to come be part of this would understand that this is about loving something greater than yourself. We have the four L's of Kuinite leadership. We leave places better than we found them. We leave from where we are. We live a life that matters and we love things, we love something greater than ourselves. That just sums it up. That's the principles that all of us should have been raised on and if we weren't, it's not too late. Someone listening to this program, how can they go about assisting you and your endeavors here? You can, first of all, you can write a check which we are always happy to receive and our address is 3837 Simpson Stewart Road Dallas, Texas 75241 and you can make the check out to Paul Kuin College and just on the envelope address it to the president's office.

You can follow us on our blog. We have a blog now. It's PaulKuincollege.blogspot.com. You can visit our website, www.pqc.edu or you can send us students and send us students who want to be great, who are dedicated to becoming great. We'll take the 4.0's but we'll take the 2.7's as well. We want students who want it but it's a great place to go to school and it's a great time to be here. Michael J. Cherelle, president Paul Kuin College located in Dallas, Texas. Have you have questions, comments or suggestions asked to future in Black America programs, email us at lowercasejhansom.org at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station

or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org until we have the opportunity again for a technical producer, David Averis. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America CDs, KUT radio, one university station, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in Black America CDs, KUT radio, one university station, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT radio.