In Black America; Paul Quinn College, with Michael Sorrell; Part 1

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is in Black America. I'm not going to be that president, we will not be that institution. We are Quinites, and Quinites strive to be servant leaders whose path and goal is simply that of greatness. Greatness is an easy, it's not comfortable, it doesn't mean that you can sit on the couch, eat Doritos and watch BET and think you're going to become great. It means that you get up off that couch, you roll up your sleeves and you go to work. Now if you accept that call, I am your best friend. If you reject that call, I am your greatest nightmare, because I am relentless in my pursuit of these dreams. We are going to become one of America's great small colleges. This community deserves that, my students deserve 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 that weren't, 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. Michael J. Sorrell, president, Paul Quinn College, located in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1872 in Austin, Texas, the college is named after William Paul Quinn, the fourth bishop of the A.M. in 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. From 1950 to 1954, a campus church, a student union building, a gymnasium and administration building will build. In 1990, the college moved to his current campus in South Dallas, located on the former campus of Bishop College.

Paul Quinn is a private, historically black college. Paul Quinn holds a distinction as being the oldest historic black college in the state of Texas. On March 27, 2007, Sorrell became the third president of Paul Quinn. And the fifth since 2001, his immediate predecessor resigned suddenly after only six months. Recently, Paul Quinn gave national attention when it implemented a new business casual dress code. Also, the college has revamped its admission policy and established a presidential scholars program. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. From this week's program, Paul Quinn College, with president Michael J. Sorrell in Black America. When I became president, March 27, 2007, I would walk around campus and I was humiliated. 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.

You 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. It's what I wore, a 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, right? 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. This was the first example of leadership. Under Sorrell's leadership, Paul Quinn has embarked upon an aggressive agenda that stresses academic excellence, accountability, and a commitment to student service. His 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 his 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. Morning Chicago, Illinois, Sorrell earned a BA degree in government from Oberlin 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. Sorrell.

My parents own one of the most successful barbecue restaurants on the south side of the city, and my mother ran a social work agency, so I tease people all the time and tell them that I am the product of a public-private partnership, but it was absolutely wonderful. Chicago is one of the most special cities you've got every culture and every culture has a section of town that is theirs, and their heritage, their practices, their styles are all there for your display, and it's just I can't think of a better place for a child to grow up. What was the name of the barbecue place? Sorrell's painted dog, no longer there, but I spent many a day eating ribs. Brothers and sisters? I have a younger sister, her name is Kelly, she is a teacher in the public school system in Chicago. I understand you're a basketball player, you play basketball in high school? I did high school and college. And what college did you decide to attend for your undergraduate? Went to Oberlin College in Ohio, about 35 miles outside of Cleveland. Why Oberlin?

Because they had a black head coach, which is what I was looking for, and my parents were adamant that I picked a school that was academically superior. And if the very first question my mother asked for cruise when they came to the house had nothing to do with graduation rates because she told them she expected me to graduate in four years, had nothing to do with playing time because she could care less. She wanted to know which top 10 graduate school programs that they send their seniors to. And if they didn't send them to any, their conversation was over. And that's, so Oberlin had great academics, had a black coach who was important to me, and they promised to let me shoot as much as I wanted to. Yeah, I just did. What were some of your favorite subjects in high school? In high school, I took a class on Roman and Greek literature, which I found fascinating. I enjoyed Latin, I was just a terrible Latin student. I liked my history courses and my English courses were probably my favorites. And you made you at Oberlin? I was a government major with a minor in black studies. Why government?

Because I knew I was going to go to law school and I had a keen interest in public service. Why did you know that you were going to go to law school? I grew up with a very real appreciation of civil rights movement and with the role that Thurgood Marshall and those brothers played in it. And I wanted to be an advocate for my community. And growing up, I thought the best way to affect change was through the court system because it was being a student of the civil rights movement. That's what it's seen. What I discovered in between graduate school and law school is that the best way to affect change is to improve a person's economic circumstance. You change a way a person can feed their family and lead their lives and you change a community. What preparation did Oberlin provide for you to consider and go to Duke University? Oberlin taught me to be entrepreneurial because with 2,800 students in a small town on Ohio and when you grow up in Chicago at a great high school in the heart of a big city, life in the country is a little slow.

So whatever we wanted to do, we had to create. My prep school gave me excellent training. We hit three hours of homework at night so I was academically prepared for the rigors of college and graduate school. And it came down to whether I would go to Harvard or Kennedy School or go to Duke and the reality of it is I just like to Duke better when I went there to visit. That's where I saw myself go to school. How did you happen to manage the academic rigors and being a quote, unquote student athlete? You know what? It really wasn't that hard for me. I had lots of people struggle with it but my family placed a premium on academics and I could always write well. It didn't take me long to be able to grasp information and what I also discovered was that there was plenty of time to do whatever you wanted to do. The question was being disciplined, you know. So I, you know, I DJed on campus, I pledged, I ran the athletic dorm, I mean so there was plenty of time to do everything that I wanted to do.

Tell us about that Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I was a graduate fellow at the Kennedy School Government which was an amazing experience. You know, there is really no substitute for having exposure to Harvard. Everyone should, if they have the ability, they should take that opportunity to really experience an institution that has been around since I think it's the 1600s that many of the presidents and world leaders have attended. Now, you have to find your own rhythm and your own step. For me, Duke was a place where I knew I'd be happier so I was more comfortable with that. But I loved it, it was a great experience. I went back this past summer to their new presidents program and enjoyed that experience immensely. Outside of opening was a significant or tolerable African American presence on these two campuses, Duke and Harvard? The African American presence at Oakland definitely was superior to either of those two institutions.

Duke was interesting in that when many people don't appreciate, this is a rich cultural heritage of entrepreneurship and wealth in the Durham community. Now my mother went to graduate school in North Carolina, University of North Carolina, but she had to stay at the campus of North Carolina Central because Carolina didn't allow blacks on that campus. So she was the first person to introduce me to it. I mean, it was Black Wall Street, I mean, you had the brothers who founded North Carolina Mutual and that legacy, how it spread down to Atlanta. So you never felt alone, I mean, there was always a barbershop that you could go to. There was always some soulful restaurants and many of my classmates and friends at Duke had family connections in Durham. So there was a great presence. There were playing black fraternities and sororities, there was an active black organization of students.

I never felt alone, I never felt isolated. Harvard was a little bit different. I mean, it really wasn't there long enough to immerse myself completely in that community and especially when you're in graduate school and the Harvard's graduate school programs are off the main quiet. Duke was a smaller environment, so you know, I was fine. There were plenty of people for me to talk to and when I didn't want to see somebody, I didn't have to see them. So it was okay. Once you graduated with your law degree, you co-founded a company that had entree into the sports industry? Yeah, it was interesting. I graduated from law school as a corporate securities lawyer. I practiced for probably about three years being a true corporate lawyer. Then I went to work in Washington and when I came back from Washington, I was lucky enough to join a small blue tea law firm that really represented the parole family's interest. And one of the things that we did, and I tell this joke all the time, there were the two partners.

One was Ross Senior's conciliarie. The other one was Ross Junior's conciliarie. Well, there were no more, you know, parole's for me to, I mean, there were younger, but there weren't any for me to be there conciliaries, so it was clear that I was going to make some decisions. We did two things there that I loved. The partner that I worked the most with was Chair of the Olympic Big Committee, Dallas, 2012. So my job, I was the Director of Communications and Government Relations. So I traveled around selling everyone on the idea of the Olympics. But we also ran two Olympic trials and did lots of other sports things, which introduced me to the, well, it wasn't the first time I've been introduced to the business of sports, but really helped me immerse myself deeper into it. And then we represented the, at the time that we were working with the pros, Ross Junior owned the Mavericks. So it was a great opportunity to see how you put together a deal to build a stadium and how you run a Pro Basketball franchise.

So the business that I co-founded really was an extension of that. And I used to run an event called the Global Games, which was an International Basketball Tournament for the top young basketball players in the country. And those things opened up the doors. Now sports is an amazing business, right, very full of interesting and colorful characters. But you have so much talent in an athletic sense that hasn't cultivated itself in an intellectual sense. So then you have this college industry of individuals. They're really, in their best case, served to help empower the athlete. In their worst case, they served to exploit the athlete. And that's, if you are a gentleman like me, it's an uncomfortable experience, because I get it, right, and I understand. And you wish that more brothers and sisters got it and understood it. But it was a fascinating experience.

I, you know, represented lottery picks. I worked with Coach Bill Self, who won a national championship last year. So I mean, that, for a guy who reluctantly went into the sports business, I had a pretty charming existence. What led you to the point that you wanted to accept the position of being Paul Quinn's president? I, when I was in college, my sophomore's junior year, I had the wonderful occasion to meet genetic goal when she was a president's spokesman, you know, sister president. And she was a graduate of Oakland. And I hadn't given a second of thought to being a college president before I had dinner with genetic goal. When I got done with that dinner with genetic goal, I knew I wanted to be a black college president. Exactly. So I knew that would be one of the things that I did with my career. And I, I mean, I didn't change any of my career, but I still knew I was going to law school,

I still knew I was going to do the things I did. I thought that I would be a college president, maybe at 60, when, you know, I had done other stuff and just was going to raise money and just, you know, kind of, hey, I thought maybe I'd be president of Dillard, you know, where my mother and my grandmother and my godfather went. But I am, I love it, right, I mean, I absolutely love it. It's a special experience to be given responsibility for the children of your community, you know, for parents to say, I'm giving you the most precious gift that I have and I ask that you take good care of this gift, that you nurture this gift and you hand me back a young man or woman that is prepared and capable of leading a great life. And I just can't imagine anything in life better than this. You mentioned that doing spring break and other times that you take a group of students to different campuses around a country, this particular break, you went to New Orleans. Tell us about that experience and how has that assisted in shaping you as a college president

knowing that your four parents had attended historically back college? We do something called the President's Spring Break Service trip and the students and I get on a bus and we travel different places in the country. The first year we did it, we went to Charlotte, North Carolina and Washington, DC and we got to see Johnson, C Smith and North Carolina. We also stopped at my mother's duke on the way up to DC, you know, sorry, you know, no offense, but and then we saw Howard when we were in DC and this year, you know, we went to New Orleans and let me just say real quick on New Orleans, New Orleans still isn't back. Right. If you have been to New Orleans prior to the hurricane and you go now, it will break your heart and it is an injustice that that city has been allowed to remain in the state that it is and it is hard to believe that there's anything more play there than politics

and some good old fashioned back door racism because if that were New York, New York would be rebuilt. If that were Chicago, Chicago would be rebuilt. If it were North Dallas, North Dallas would be rebuilt. That's, it's a crime, but we went to Dillard University and my grandmother went to Dillard, my mother went to Dillard, my godfather went to Dillard and to walk the campus that they walked, you know, in their footsteps to try and put myself in their place and to wonder what it would have been like to sleep in this dorm, to eat in this dining room. It really was quite emotional because we don't have a lot, I mean, my father never went to college, right. He grew up on the streets of New Orleans, it was a good man, but you know, he had a little bit of the street in him and I don't have that legacy on that side of the family. And just to see it, it made me feel incredibly proud.

I set up a scholarship in my grandmother and mother's name so that other students I'd be able to help them have the experiences that they had. It made me tease my sister some more for not going, but I loved it, it meant the world to me. Obviously you have goals and objectives as president of Paul Quinn. How has it been in changing the culture and attitude of the staff and of the students here in South Dallas? Yeah, we don't play, right. I have been called everything from a visionary on a good day to an arrogant, cocky, you know, I'll touch brother on the worst day. The reality of it is I love my students, I love this community, I love what we're going to do. I am not going to make any apologies for demanding excellence, I'm not going to make any apologies for telling the people they aren't good enough, all right. I come from an athletic background and an athletic background, if you aren't good enough,

you don't play. Now you can sit there on the bench and reflect upon life, you can be angry at the coach, but at the end of the day the only way you're going to get the place if you go after hours and work at becoming better, all right. So for me to pretend that the people who were here were good enough when everything around the screen that they weren't would be unrealistic and would be untrue and I'm not going to lie. Now did it make people feel good about themselves? No, all right. But those individuals should have taken the challenge to become stronger performers. We do the same thing with the students. This is a tough, tough world. If you aren't prepared, people will eat you alive. And what you should not expect is for people to make you feel good about being mediocre. I'm not going to be that president, we will not be that institution. We are Quinnites and Quinnites strive to be servant leaders whose path and goal is simply that of greatness, all right.

Gradness isn't easy, it's not comfortable. It doesn't mean that you can sit on the couch, eat Doritos and watch BT and think you're going to become great. It means that you get up off that couch, you roll up your sleeves and you go to work. Now if you accept that call, I am your best friend. If you reject that call, I am your greatest nightmare because I am relentless in my pursuit of these dreams. 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. What was 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 because again, we are not paying for mediocrity, okay? 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 and they're wonderful. One young lady who was a valedictorian of our high school classes, a working model. We have worked out in an arrangement with her where she moves to New York next year to pursue her modeling career. She won't have to leave Paul Quinn because we'll do some online courses and some things that allow her to pursue her dream while she remains a quintite. We're excited about it. We're doing a presidential scholarship interview today, with a young lady from Little Rock Arkansas. She's number eight in her class, carries better than a three five 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. Why 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 mode of 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. But unrealistic goal, all right, you don't go to college to remain uneducated. You go to college to become enlightened.

The mirror of the street culture, right, the mirror of 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, 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, I was humiliated by what these students wore. 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, it's what I wore, 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, right? 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, okay, I owned a suit. I can't remember ever not owning a suit, all right? 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. So 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 law firm. Our students went down to the closet because the closet is free. Michael J. Surrell, president, Paul Quinn College. We will conclude our conversation on next week's program. If you have questions, comments or suggestions asked to future in Black America programs,

email us at lowercasejhansenhansen 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 Alvarez, I'm John El Hansen, 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. 7-8-7-1-2. That's in Black America CDs, KUT Radio. One University Station. Austin, Texas.

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