Tom Brown was instrumental in launching the High Potential Program in 1973. LaReina Torres '25, one of the Public History students who helped flesh out the history of the program, is an HP student herself. “Now, we're willing to speak up about it and have some pride in the fact that we are first-gen,” she says. “We are accomplishing something.” / Photo by Francis Tatem
Student Action Helped Bring the High Potential Program into Being. Fifty Years Later, Student Scholars Are Preserving Its History.
一个在抗议中诞生的项目是如何代表“我们最好的学生”的——盖尔人的过去和现在都在讲述这个故事.
On March 13, 1972, only a few months into his role as Assistant Dean of Students, 22-year-old Tom Brown 走进圣玛丽教堂，与40名不比他年轻多少的学生积极分子谈判. Light streamed through the stained-glass windows above him, projecting kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls. Walking down the center aisle, he saw pillows on pews and sleeping bags on the floor around the altar.
The day prior, sophomore Tomas Ramirez ’74 在周日早上的弥撒中，他站起来宣布奇卡诺学生组织和平占领教堂，震惊了参加弥撒的人, Moviemento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MECHA), and the Black Student Union (BSU). They were protesting a lack of institutional support for “Chicano and Black students,” Ramirez told those present. And they intended to remain there “for as long as necessary,” vowing to go on a water-only fast until the administration addressed their concerns.
It was the latest development in a season of tumult for the College. That January, Saint Mary’s made the controversial move to terminate the contract of Odell Johnson ’58, 他是受欢迎的学生主任，也是学院历史上第一位担任管理人员的有色人种. During a February 27 basketball game against rival Santa Clara University, five SMC Black basketball players staged a walkout to protest Johnson’s firing. Then in March, two of the College’s four Chicano faculty members were let go, sparking a rally that drew hundreds of students and community members.
A few days later, BSU and MECHA held a joint press conference, 呼吁校园缺乏多样性，并强调需要“实施旨在满足文化需求的特殊项目”, personal, and academic needs of Black and Chicano students.” Many of those same MECHA and BSU students occupied the Chapel the following week.
Approaching the protestors, Assistant Dean Brown recognized an irony: Less than a year earlier, he would have joined them. As an undergrad at the University of Southern California, 他曾担任释放安吉拉·戴维斯联合委员会的早期公共关系主任，并参加了黑豹党的早餐计划, cooking up free meals for Los Angeles schoolkids. He had held a leadership role in his university’s Black Students Union, too. Now, he found himself on the other side, dispatched by the College’s president, Brother Mel Anderson, FSC, to negotiate with the protestors.
Still, Brown was a “stone-cold revolutionary” at heart, he recalls. After he left his meeting with the protestors an hour later, the demands had jumped—from four to ten. When he brought the new list to the President and his cabinet, he recalls the academic vice president shouting, “You threw gasoline on the fire!”
Perhaps. One could also argue that Brown was the right person at the right time. After days of negotiation between MECHA, BSU, and the College, the administration agreed to most of the requests, including increased efforts to recruit people of color as students, faculty, and staff. 梅尔修士还承诺增加“特殊项目”的预算，以帮助有色人种学生走上大学之路. 他责成布朗帮助发展这些服务——这一倡议最终将成为 High Potential Program.
高潜能(HP)的历史是学生生活和十大网赌平台的进步之一. Since 1973, HP has fostered the success of first-generation and low-income scholars, making it one of the longest-running such programs in the country. High Potential began as a three-day summer orientation program for a handful of students; in the years following, it grew to encompass academic workshops, mentorship, success coaching, and above all, social, cultural, and emotional support. Today, the HP community is worldwide and includes political leaders, educators, lawyers, and one of the very few two-time Oscar winners. For many, the program is the purest expression of the College’s founding mission: to, as Brown puts it, “provide an education for students that might otherwise be denied.”
As the Saint Mary’s community marks High Potential’s 50th anniversary, what Gaels are really celebrating are the success stories of students, past and present. It’s fitting, then, that current SMC students are the ones ensuring those narratives are being preserved.
Filling the Archival Silence
Each year, Saint Mary’s Public History course offers students of all majors the chance to link past to present. Gaels get to go hands-on, 深入研究历史叙事——从女性对第二次世界大战的经历到COVID-19大流行的实时经历——并在最后的展览中展示她们的研究成果. In recent years, 该课程发现学生与圣何塞历史博物馆或越南裔美国人社区中心合作, gaining real-world (and paid) experience in historical preservation and presentation. And through the efforts of the Saint Mary’s History Department faculty, the College received grants totaling more than $100,000 toward establishing a Public History minor, one of the first of its kind on the West Coast.
In the spring of 2023, however, the class had Gaels digging into history very close to home: the High Potential Program. The course’s instructor, Professor of History Aeleah Soine, also serves as the Vice Provost of Academic Success, the office that oversees the HP Program. In anticipation of HP’s 50th anniversary, Soine and Jason Jakaitis, an associate professor of Communication and the HP faculty director at the time, soon discovered the lack of historical material. The College Archives held a single file folder entitled “High Potential Program.“除了1972年占领教堂的剪报和篮球罢工，历史教授收集的材料 Myrna Santiago—the folder held little else.
Jakaitis and Soine sensed opportunity. Here was a chance for students to flesh out a vital chapter of Saint Mary’s story for the first time, while inviting others to join in expanding the archival collection further. “It was a project that would allow students to actually practice creating history,” Soine tells me later. “They wouldn’t be just reading and thinking about what somebody else created. They’d be getting into the action themselves.”
而Jakaitis的社区媒体课程——也是围绕公共历史建立的——则专注于创建2023年惠普的新视频文档, 公共历史课程的学生们从整理圣玛丽学生报纸的过期开始, The Collegian. They began working with editions published in 1973, copying and archiving any articles about High Potential, and reaching out to networks of alumni to collect oral histories. College Archivist Kate Wilson 成为教育学生的重要伙伴，让他们了解历史学家所说的“档案沉默”:当文件的缺乏导致历史记录的空白时. Wilson also taught how to collect and record metadata for digital cataloging, to make historical sources accessible to broader audiences in the future.
“It was a project that would allow students to actually practice creating history,” says Aeleah Soine. “They wouldn’t be just reading and thinking about what somebody else created. They’d be getting into the action themselves.”
Asking the Right Questions
Soine’s Public History class was tailor-made for students like LaReina Torres ’25. A Chemistry and History double major, she has always gravitated toward hands-on research, she tells me. Growing up, she adored Bones, the Fox procedural drama about grisly crimes solved by examining, well, bones. “By the time I was five years old, I decided I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist,” she says. But her ambitions began to shift at the end of middle school. “I thought, ‘You know what? I think I've grown as a person. I can deal with people who will talk back and sometimes ask questions.’”
These days, Torres has her sights set on becoming a trauma surgeon. She is quick-witted and self-effacing; it’s easy to imagine her someday cracking jokes and putting patients at ease. In the Public History course, however, 她把自己的人际交往能力用在了另一个方面:对惠普过去和现在的学生进行采访. It was fascinating work, and also deeply personal for her. As an HP student herself, she saw her own experience reflected in the lives of those who came before her.
Torres was raised in Madera, California, an agricultural hub in the near center of the state. 她的母亲是镇上儿童医院礼品店和志愿者服务的协调员, while her father, who operated forklifts at a string of warehouses throughout her childhood, is currently studying to become an emergency medical technician. Torres is an only child, but it never felt that way. Her maternal grandparents and great-grandmother have lived with them since she was a toddler. “And don't think just because they're older or retirement age that they're going to bed early,” she says. “I never knew what quiet meant.”
The many adults in her life always expected her to attend college. “She’s smart; she’s going,” was the general sentiment, she says. For her, it was more a matter of where—and how. As the first in her family to pursue college, these were looming questions, ones she would largely have to answer on her own.
After applying to a range of schools, Torres ultimately decided on Saint Mary’s. Scholarships, combined with the tight-knit classrooms and culture, were deciding factors, she says. “It wasn’t just what could we afford, but what could I get out of it?” So the where and how had been resolved. But as she transitioned to campus, Torres now faced a whole host of new unknowns. How are you supposed to use the library’s databases? What are office hours actually for?
“When I started, I didn't even know the questions to ask,” she says. “I just knew I needed help.”
That’s where High Potential came in. She first learned about the program at orientation and signed up almost immediately. Soon, she was meeting regularly with her peer mentor, Daisy Guzman ’23, who walked her through “all the unwritten rules” of college. (Example: office hours build connections with professors, which can lead to opportunities down the road.) She was also assigned a success coach, Joy Aburquez MA ’19—now the Associate Director and Lead Success Coach for HP—who has “literally been a joy,” Torres says. Aburquez helped her navigate the intricacies of financial aid, and she regularly emails Torres about internships and job opportunities.
“It’s opened my mind to what I could do and what I'm supposed to be doing,” Torres says. As she began digging into HP in the Public History course, she saw how the Program helped expand the horizons of hundreds of others.
The Cutting Edge
Over the course of Spring 2023, 托雷斯和她的同学们追踪并采访了几十位惠普过去和现在的学生和管理人员, working to compile the first comprehensive timeline of the program. What became clear was just how much HP has evolved over the past five decades. “I learned a lot about the program’s early days and growth,” she says. “It was definitely ahead of its time.”
Of course, as Tom Brown will tell you, being ahead of your time means trailblazing without a map. 直到20世纪60年代的民权运动之后，大多数大学才开始积极招收更多的“少数族裔”学生, and the programs created to support them were only a few years old.
In the summer of 1972—a few months after the Chapel occupation—Brown and his colleague, Assistant Dean of Students, Harry Acosta, climbed into Brown’s cherry red Fiat Spider for a whistlestop tour of California colleges. Looking at existing Educational Opportunity Programs and similar initiatives, they visited private Catholic and non-Catholic schools alike, as well as public schools. Brown also visited LaSalle University in Philadelphia and Manhattan College in New York, two Christian Brothers’ campuses with comparable programs. Soon, they began outlining the basis of High Potential. “We recognized that if these students were going to be successful, 他们需要项目和服务来弥合他们的现状和他们的需求之间的差距,” Brown says.
Many of the services that Brown, Acosta, and their colleagues created for High Potential students would, in time, become part of the fabric of the College itself. First-year and parent/family orientation, academic advising, career coaching, tutorial services, the Writing Center—these were all developed for HP students first. Eventually, 当梅尔兄弟将布朗提升到新设立的研究副院长职位时，他被要求将这些服务扩展到整个校园.
“We even started the bus!” Brown says. The BART station in Orinda had just been completed, 将圣玛丽附近的社区与整个湾区的新快速交通系统连接起来. But commuting students still had to catch a ride to get to campus. “So, we bought an old school bus, painted it red and blue, and called it Saint Mary’s Area Rapid Transit: SMART.” Now, of course, the Contra Costa County bus line runs every hour.
As HP grew, its scope expanded. Where the program had once included primarily Black and Latino students, it now encompassed first-generation and low-income students of all backgrounds. With a grant from the Irvine Foundation, Maria Hernandez—who oversaw High Potential from 1987 to 1994—and Brown hired John Dennis to serve as the first full-time HP Director. Under Dennis, affectionately known as “Dr. D,” the three-day orientation evolved into a multi-week academic boot camp. Students read and discussed Homer’s Illiad in preparation for Collegiate Seminar and took part in writing workshops. They received sessions on time and stress management. And, most memorably for many, they tackled a ropes course at Fort Miley in San Francisco, where the incoming HP students helped each other “climb the wall.” For Dennis, the exercise spoke to the entire project of High Potential, which “epitomizes the dream of Saint John Baptist de La Salle,” he said in 1988.
The support services were proving successful, too. In her interview with Public History students, Maria Hernandez recalled an HP graduation rate of 84% during her tenure. She credits her students’ tenacity, as well as the concentrated attention and encouragement they received from staff and faculty. “As a first-generation, college-bound kid, you really do depend on the grace and generosity of strangers,” she says. “I knew that firsthand.”
With Saint Mary’s entering the 2000s, 即使在资金波动的情况下苦苦挣扎，惠普仍在为留校率和毕业率设定标准. In 2015, however, the program received a $1.1 TRIO Student Support Services Grant—an award pursued and secured by then-Vice Provost for Student Success Tracy Pascua Dea and then-HP faculty co-director Gloria Aquino Sosa. Through the efforts of Dea, Sosa, then-HP Director Tarik Scott, High Potential能够将自己重新定位为一个“以优势为基础的综合项目，拥有专职员工”, evidence-based practices, and increased scholarships to eligible students," says Jenee Palmer, who served as High Potential's Director from 2018 to 2021.
In 2020, Palmer, Dea, and Sosa secured another TRIO grant of $1.5 million. To date, it is the largest amount HP has ever been awarded. 这笔赠款使高潜力能够继续加强和扩大其一揽子援助服务, strengthening the program’s “interconnected view of students’ success,” Megan Mustain, then-vice provost for Student Academics, said in 2020. TRIO, she said, 通过认可和庆祝第一代和低收入家庭学生给圣玛丽带来的优势，促进学术卓越."
“Fifty years ago, students of color and their allies were occupying this Chapel, trying to make Saint Mary's a more inclusive community,” says Tom Brown. “They and I could never have imagined.”
A Badge of Honor
For Torres, 她在研究《十大网赌平台》时发现的最显著的变化是自我认知的变化. In the early days, students in the program might have kept that to themselves. But no longer. “Now, we're willing to speak up about it and have some pride in the fact that we are first-gen,” she says. “We are accomplishing something.”
That evolution is something Soine, who was teaching the Public History course, hoped her students would recognize as they captured the history of HP. “我认为，让他们意识到惠普的学生和校友们是如何真正改变了这种形象的，这一点很重要,” she says. “They really exemplify what it means to have a Saint Mary's education.”
Certainly, Brown, Hernandez, “Dr. D,” and all the High Potential leaders who have followed since have blazed educational trails. “在高潜力项目中发生的事情确实成为高等教育的最佳实践,” Soine says. But ultimately, she notes, it’s students who led the way—a truth that feels core to the mission of the College. “It’s really a badge of honor that these are the best of our students."
These days, members of High Potential consider themselves a family—and last fall, Torres and Soine got to experience something of a family reunion. On November 11, 2023, 第一代和低收入家庭的学生和领导聚集在Soda中心庆祝该项目成立50周年. Many of those present were alums that Soine’s Pubic History students interviewed, along with past HP directors like Maria Hernandez and Tom Brown. For months, Torres and her classmates had pieced together the arc of the program, filling in the archival silence. Now, history was echoing all around them: mingling, embracing, and reconnecting over the made-to-order omelets.
Later during the reunion, HP’s current director, Chameeta Denton MA ’10, stepped up to the microphone, 对与会者表示感谢，并概述了她对“高潜力”下一章的愿景:将在校学生与校友导师联系起来. “It's so important, as you all know, to pass the baton to the next generation of students,” she said. “Once we've done this, we can build a coalition that is unstoppable and one that people cannot choose to ignore.”
Brown sat in the front row, beaming and nodding. Later, he tells me about an epiphany he had at the memorial service of his dear friend, Brother Camillus Chavez ’57, one of HP’s spiritual guides and leaders. Brother Camillus passed away on May 31 of last year, and his service was held a few days later at Saint Mary’s. The Chapel was “packed,” Brown says, and as the memorial got underway, “I was smiling the whole time.布朗听了墨西哥流浪乐队的演奏，看着两名高潜力校友在棺材上盖了一张帆布毯. As the crowd in read liturgies in both Spanish and English, Brown couldn’t help thinking back to 1972.
“I was smiling because, fifty years ago, students of color and their allies were occupying this Chapel, trying to make Saint Mary's a more inclusive community consistent with its Lasallian heritage,” he says. “They and I could never have imagined.”
Not that the story is over, Brown says. “The High Potential Program has persisted, so I’m encouraged. But I’m never satisfied.” Perhaps that’s the stone-cold revolutionary talking.
LEARN MORE about the High Potential Program and its legacy of student-centered support. CONSIDER GIVING to support its mission. And if you’re a High Potential graduate, please add your info to our ALUMNI DIRECTORY.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS: On Wednesday, February 21, 2024, attend Tom Brown's keynote, "The High Potential Program at 50: A Most Lasallian Endeavor!" RSVP HERE.
READ MORE: Fifty Years of High Potential: Vicki Martin-Smith ’83 on the Power of Community
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Hayden Royster is Staff Writer at the Office of Marketing and Communication for Saint Mary's College. Write him.