A Salute to Risk Takers
It’s hard not to feel contemplative in a holiday season bookended by a pandemic. Hallmark type that I am, I’ve decided to borrow the now famous Lexus December to Remember tagline and remember a few folks who have inspired me with their big ideas, bold vision, or simply by challenging long-held assumptions about the ways things should be done, especially in higher education where I’ve spent most of my career. I wish I could buy them all a Lexus, but this will have to suffice for now.
First up is Paul LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University. Paul is a well-known innovator and seismically big picture thinker who has turned challenging conventional thinking in higher education into an art form. He’s also turned SNHU into a powerhouse in online learning for both traditional and non-traditional students. For me, he’s the guy who made a decision to take a risk and add a literary program to a then mostly business school. That decision changed my life and many others. It also busted every assumption I had about quality or excellence in online learning.
The day I first set foot in SNHU’s Robert Frost Hall to register for classes for the new and still unaccredited MFA program in creative writing, I had big doubts. The program had well-known authors on the faculty. Still, I wondered if there was any way it could be as good, as personal, and as impactful, as the kind of learning I’d experienced in traditional classroom settings. It was the same day I met Lynn Safford, the woman in this picture. We were among the oldest in that first class. Over the next two years, we would become the best of friends, nurturing each other‘s ambitions to somehow write a book-length manuscript, but more importantly, to somehow finish. We met every month for dinner at a bistro in Manchester’s Millyard, where we celebrated another 30 pages of original writing completed and sent to our mentors, all accomplished authors in their own right, a team that SNHU had recruited to coach and mentor us to completion, faculty who shared their feedback, called us at home, coached us, criticized us, became our friends and pushed us to keep going, even when we’d run out of plot lines or coffee.
Lynn wrote about fictional and elegant women living in Paris and the Caribbean. I was writing about ten women living in prison cells, real women. Lynn’s women wore sarongs and fine jewelry. Mine wore T-shirts and prison-issued slip-on sneakers. The women had some things in common. They had broken hearts and unmet expectations, for themselves and the people they loved. Like so many women, they were carrying bits and pieces of unfinished business and hopes for the future.
Lynn and I decided we liked each other’s characters as much as we liked each other. They were raw and honest, imperfect and unfiltered. Lynn became another sister to me over those two years. At our last dinner, not long after we graduated, she shared the news that she had cancer and the road ahead would be rough. A year later, she asked me to take on one more writing assignment, her eulogy. And, on a crisp November morning, under a glistening sun, she made me stand up at the end of the lounge chair on which she was lying in her front yard, wrapped in a blanket, and deliver it to her.
“Perfect,” she said, “no corrections.” And then she laughed and added, “I’m not getting a rewrite this time so neither are you.”
Lynn Safford died in November of 2010.
I keep her last note to me and her manuscript on my dresser, not far from my degree from SNHU. They remind me that there are no accidental meetings in this life and that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a fine line indeed. They remind me also how important it is to challenge my own assumptions about people and possibilities, like whether an online graduate program can be personal or impactful, like whether a small literary program belongs in a business school.
So, here’s to Paul LeBlanc, Lynn Safford, and all of the risk-takers out there, the ones who took the first step, into Robert Frost Hall, into the story, into history.