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LAFAYETTE TODAY
CBS News Spotlights Posse Scholars
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric featured the Posse Foundation and Lafayette’s Class of 2007 Posse Scholars in
its June 5 telecast. The segment, in the program’s “Shades
of America” series, calls the College’s ’07 posse “a wildly successful team” and cites Posse’s record of “graduating minority students from top colleges at twice the national rate.”
The telecast was accompanied by an array of related content on the CBS Evening News web site, including video interviews with President Daniel Weiss and Deborah Bial, Posse’s founder and president; a story transcript, and a lengthy post by CBS News reporter Wyatt Andrews in the Couric & Co. Blog.
Posse identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams, called posses, which enroll at top-tier colleges and universities. The incoming class this fall will be Lafayette’s sixth class with a posse from New York City and second with a posse from Washington, D.C. The College awarded Bial an honorary doctorate at the 2006 Commencement, and she delivered the address.
Andrews (right) and a video crew shadowed Lafayette’s ’07 posse members on campus for two days in early May and again on Commencement Day.
The students are Danielle Bero, the recipient of the Pepper Prize, who created her own major in creative media and social justice,
Tito Anyanwu (mechanical engineering), Terese Brown (economics & business and art), Osa Egharevba (neuroscience), Roger Ellis (computer science), Maly Fung (international affairs), Lai-Juan Huang (psychology), Mauricio Leyva (international affairs), Silvia Mancebo (neuroscience),
and Pablo Torres (international affairs). The piece also included an interview with Egharevba in his home neighborhood in the Bronx.
“When Silvia Mancebo graduated this spring from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, she credited her 10-member posse. So did Osa Egharevba—
he was in the posse. So was Roger Ellis,” the CBS News story begins.
“In urban America, your posse is the group that has your back. They understand you—and that’s the concept here. This group was picked four years ago by the Posse Foundation in New York. The students are all from
the inner city, almost all minority, almost all low income; and they got scholarships to go to Lafayette—together. . . .
“[It’s] a wildly successful team. Tito Anyanwu is an engineer. Egharevba
is going to medical school. Terese Brown will be a fashion buyer. Ellis is off
to Lehman Brothers.”
In an interview in his campus office, Weiss says Posse students “graduate at a rate higher than the rest of the school [and] not only succeed academically, they lead. They get involved in programs on our campus to make the learning environment and the living environment richer and more exciting. It’s not enough just to have students who can get good grades. What we want are students who can help make the learning environment rich and lively for all
of us, and this they do.”
It’s the second straight year the media have focused on Lafayette and Posse. Last May The New York Times gave Posse major national publicity, highlighting the College’s successful affiliation with the program.
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