The first Tobin Scholars Arrive
By Daniel Penrice
How far is it from Mission Hill to Northeastern? Southwestward from
N.U.'s new Centennial Circle, the soaring Gothic spires of Mission Church
loom large above the red-brick skyline formed by the Alice Heyward Taylor
apartments on Ruggles Street. From where Mission Church stands up on Tremont
Street, one stop on the Orange Line will take you to Ruggles Street Station.
From there you emerge onto a campus that-with the construction of N.U.'s
new West Campus Residence Hall, not to mention the acquisition of Ruggles
Center (renamed Renaissance Park) and the approval of Davenport Commons
on Columbus Avenue-is extending its own skyline toward Mission Hill and
other parts of Roxbury.
In at least one sense, however, the distance between a neighborhood
such as Mission Hill and Northeastern has been increasing. As N.U. has
come less and less to resemble the streetcar school of its origins, building
housing for a student body that increasingly comes from places other than
Boston, some observers fear that there are fewer slots for students from
what used to be not so much the university's backyard as its backbone.
At the bottom of Mission Hill, in the shadow of Mission Church, across
the street from the Boston Housing Authority's Mission Main development,
the Maurice J. Tobin Elementary School is the vessel for the dreams of
many children in N.U.'s disadvantaged surroundings. Just because you can't
see Northeastern from the bottom of Mission Hill doesn't mean that the
Tobin School's students don't aspire to college. "When you ask these
kids, 'What would you like to be?' " says Holly Nathan-Colon, student
service coordinator at the Tobin School since 1989, "you get the doctors
and the lawyers and the hairdressers and that kind of stuff. So I don't
think these kids are any different from anybody else in terms of their
dreams and hopes. What's sometimes difficult is, how are they going to
get there?"
At the Tobin, the question How are they going to get there? takes its
pitch from several particular circumstances. Like working-class and poor
children everywhere, Tobin School students may have few, if any, role models
at home or in the neighborhood to help them chart a path that leads to
college. If-as is true for many children at the Tobin-they must deal with
such attendant circumstances of urban poverty as violence (at home or in
the streets), substance abuse, or teenage pregnancy, they may also have
insufficient attention or emotional equilibrium for the hard work of getting
an education.
Students at a place like the Tobin School also face a more insidious
challenge-particularly the overwhelming majority who are Latino or African-American.
With test scores continuing to show Latino and African-American students
lagging significantly behind their white counterparts in the Boston public
schools, most Tobin students must negotiate an academic and social environment
in which, despite many efforts to raise their achievement levels, some
of their teachers and peers will expect them to fail. In the face of such
obstacles, says Holly Carter, director of N.U.'s Office of Educational
Opportunity Programs, "What often happens is that these children's
dreams are put aside, because they're not seen as realistic."
Back in 1989, concerned that the opportunities afforded by a college
education were slipping too far from the grasp of students in America's
urban public schools, N.U.'s then president, John A. Curry, disclosed the
outlines of a plan for helping to bridge the distance. The university would
make a "compact" with 100 Boston public-school students, Curry
announced in his inaugural address: "Our promise will be that, if
these students graduate from high school, full, five-year tuition grants
to Northeastern University will await them."
Two years later, in November of 1991, Curry took the short ride down
to the Tobin School to propose a long-term partnership. Each member of
that year's sixth-grade class would be asked to sign a contract promising
to work hard in school. In return, the university would offer not only
tuition scholarships but also help for the students and their families
on the road to college. To get to Northeastern, the Tobin Scholars would
be required not only to graduate from high school, but to meet N.U.'s regular
admissions standards. Each new Scholar was presented with a "Ticket
to Success" redeemable for one of the proffered scholarships.
In the years since N.U. made its promise to-and asked for a reciprocal
commitment from-the initial group of 32 Tobin Scholars, a great deal has
happened. The Tobin Scholars program, run out of the Office of Educational
Opportunity Programs by Carter, has provided mentoring, tutoring, and an
array of other enrichment programs for the Scholars and their families.
With two more Tobin School sixth-grade classes-one inducted into the program
in 1994, the other in 1997-added to the ranks, the final number of Tobin
Scholars stands at 107, slightly exceeding N.U.'s initial commitment. Most
momentously of all, perhaps, 12 members of the 1991 "cohort"
of Tobin Scholars enrolled this past fall as freshmen at Northeastern.
Who are these students-8 young men and 4 young women-who have now come
to punch their "tickets to success" at Northeastern? What follows
are profiles of 4 of the freshman Tobin Scholars, who illustrate not only
what the scholarships have done for their recipients, but also the gifts
that this group of young people now brings to Northeastern.
"I didn't expect to make it to Northeastern, I didn't really expect
to get my act together," Tanzerious Anderson says. As you listen to
him talk about his experiences and ambitions, it is hard to imagine him
not succeeding at anything on which he manages to focus his clearly prodigious
energies. Taking time to meet with an interviewer in the midst of a frantic
schedule (including, during his first quarter at N.U., a full course load
and a virtually full-time job), Anderson is confident and self-possessed,
his poise particularly evident when he speaks about some youthful troubles.
Growing up fatherless, from an early age, on Mission Hill, Anderson
attended the Tobin School from kindergarten through eighth grade, doing
well enough to get into one of Boston's public exam schools. At the John
D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, he made the honor roll in
the ninth and tenth grades. After that, as Anderson goes on to relate,
he started to stumble. "The beginning of junior year, I started getting
into some trouble. I guess I was rebelling, just going against things.
Trouble in school, outside of school, fights-getting caught up in like
a street-life type of thing. I had a lot of anger about a lot of things."
Because his mother, a Massachusetts corrections officer, is "a
real strict woman," Anderson explains, his rebellion created more
trouble at home. Then last winter, only months before he would have been
set to graduate from high school if he hadn't fallen behind academically,
he learned that he was going to become a father. Finally, Anderson says,
"I just realized, 'I've got to do something,' and I couldn't do it
here. So I just packed up all my stuff and moved out to Cape Cod to live
with my cousin." While working to pay his share of the rent, Anderson
attended two different night schools to get enough credits to graduate
in June from Yarmouth-Dennis Regional High School.
Anderson hit the ground running at Northeastern this fall, enrolling
as a finance and insurance major in the College of Business Administration,
while also working thirty-eight hours a week at a Lids store in Braintree.
His typical day last quarter was a hectic one: up early to catch a bus
from Dorchester (where he lives with his mother), classes all morning,
a two-hour workout at the Marino Center, seven or eight hours at work,
and a late-night study session at Snell Library. Anderson also spends one
weekend per month in the Marine Corps Reserves, where he is receiving training
in accounting. Another benefit from the Marines, he says, is the discipline:
"That's something that I needed when I was younger, that I'm getting
better with now, but I can always try to improve."
By the end of the fall quarter, Anderson was planning to cut back to
a part-time job to give himself more time for his studies. Helping with
the care and support of his son has required a lot of his time and earnings
since the baby was born in August. Even so, Anderson says, he was able
to accumulate some savings last fall-money for which he already has investment
plans. "I know a lot of people who want to open up businesses and
need partners," he explains. "I want to definitely open up an
auto-body shop with my brother-in-law. My brother cooks, and he wants to
open up a really quality restaurant." The reason that he wants to
study finance, he says, is so that "I can invest my money right."
Despite these entrepreneurial schemes (among others), Anderson still
figures on holding a day job when he graduates from N.U., and plans to
become a fireman. "With the Marines and college," he says, "it'll
be easy to get in, and I can move up in rank-it's hard to move up in rank
without college. So I won't have to keep running into fires when I get
old. I'm not going to lie: when I'm fifty-something years old, I want to
sit down and relax and do my desk job. But at twenty-three, thirty-some,
I want to be on the move."
Although he still remembers the day, seven years ago, when he received
the offer of his Tobin Scholarship, Anderson says that the award's significance
hit him only last winter when, facing impending fatherhood, he began to
imagine Northeastern as a road not taken. "If I didn't go to college,"
he says, "there's no doubt in my mind that I could have made it in
life, I could have done things. But not as I would if I went to college.
And I can't really sit there and tell my son, 'You've got to go to college,'
and he's going to look at me like, 'Dad, you passed up college. You had
the chance to go and you passed it up. Why should I go?' "
During the summer between her ninth- and tenth-grade years at West Roxbury
High School, Florence Toussaint took a sociology class at Balfour Academy
(Northeastern's after-school and summer academic-enrichment program for
urban middle school and high school students) taught by Professor Jack
Levin. "When I came into his class," she recalls, "I was
just looking at him like, 'Okaay'-he looked like Einstein, with his hair
crazy. But the minute he opened his mouth, I was like, 'Oh my goodness,
I didn't know sociology was like this.' " Still enthusiastic about
sociology and psychology, while also being interested, she says, in "opening
up doors for inner-city kids," Toussaint enrolled in the School of
General Studies this fall hoping to transfer to the College of Arts and
Sciences and major in human services.
The first of three children born to her Haitian-immigrant parents, Toussaint
comes across as very much an eldest child: independent, conscientious,
used to taking responsibility for others. With her family now living in
Arlington, she is not too far from home in her dorm room at Emmanuel College
(where N.U. rents space for undergraduates). "For me, living in the
dorm is a great experience," says Toussaint. "Because I've always
been home in this little, safe place, where everybody's attached to me
and I'm attached to everybody. And I need to get away from that to get
into the real world. Even though they miss me, I still have to do it."
Toussaint says her parents always emphasized education when she was
growing up in Mission Park, and even before being offered her Tobin Scholarship,
she dreamed of attending Northeastern. "I would be on the Green Line,"
she explains, "and I would look at the campus and be like, 'Wow, it
looks so pretty-I want to go there.' " Once she had received her "Ticket
to Success" from the university, she looked into other local schools,
but only as potential backups.
Toussaint got a much closer look at Northeastern, and at college generally,
when she attended Balfour Academy, along with several of her Tobin Scholar
classmates. There, in Levin's sociology class, she heard the media-star
professor with the bad hairdo saying things that really grabbed her attention.
"He explained how other cultures think. He was talking about gangs:
What type of homes do they come from? What makes them into being gangsters?
I read his book-he gave us his book, I don't even remember him telling
us to read it. But I took it home and I read the whole thing that night.
And I was underlining stuff like, 'Yes-this is what I want!' "
In her senior year back at West Roxbury High, Toussaint started making
some of her own sociological observations. "I paid attention closely
to the guidance counselors, and what they said to other seniors,"
she says. "I would ask my friends, 'What did they say to you?' And
most of my friends were like A, B students, and the guidance counselors
were saying stuff that was okay to them. But the other ones, that were
lost, that didn't know what they were going to do, it was just like, 'Oh,
maybe you should do a community college.' "
The problem, Toussaint concluded, was that too many other students lacked
the kinds of opportunities that she was getting as a Tobin Scholar. At
her high school, she says, a struggling student who aspired to college
either wouldn't know about a place like Balfour Academy or, if she knew
about it and wanted to attend, might be treated as though she were "asking
for too much." Meanwhile, over at the Tobin Scholars program, Toussaint
was becoming close friends with a then staff member, Veronica Whycoff,
for whom she worked for a while as an office assistant. "I asked her
to explain to me what human services was," says Toussaint, "because
she was doing that herself. Her job led her into working with kids, which
is exactly what I wanted to do."
After college, Toussaint expects, "I'll probably want to work with
inner-city kids. I'll probably want to create a program like Balfour Academy,
because that program has helped so many people. Or else I would want to
work for the Tobin Scholars again, so I can give back, because they helped
me so much. I would probably want to work with them again, helping students
with mentoring, like Veronica did. Or maybe if I become a millionaire,
I'll donate like a million dollars or something."
On Senen More's voice-mail message, the Mission Impossible theme blares
in the background as a gravelly voice intones, "Leave me a message
and I'll call you, or whatever." Sitting down for an interview, More
wears a gleeful yet still cool and collected smile, as if enjoying a joke
that only he is in on. Asked a warm-up question-"What's the biggest
difference for you between high school and college?"-he hesitates
for a long time. "Freedom maybe?" he finally replies with a shrug.
"Typical answer?"
With his terse, often rapid-fire way of speaking, More creates the impression
that he knows where he wants to go and how he intends to get there. A civil
and environmental engineering major, he plans to become a structural engineer.
What he likes about Northeastern is the co-op program. "I've heard
that's a great thing," More says, "because I get to have a résumé
before I graduate from college. And if I'm lucky, I can end up with one
of those companies that already know me. I'll work for someone else's company
at first. Then hopefully, if I'm lucky, I'll own one."
More grew up on Mission Hill, where he still lives ("just down
the street" from Northeastern) with his Chilean-born mother and Cuban-immigrant
father. When he enrolled at N.U. this fall, More joined his two older brothers-one
a junior at Suffolk University, the other in his second year at Bunker
Hill Community College-as the first generation in their family to go to
college. After he was promised his scholarship, he recalls, "Whenever
I was with my father and he bumped into one of his friends, he always mentioned
it to them, that I was part of the program at Northeastern and I got the
scholarship. So he was proud of that fact, and he wanted everyone to know
that I was going to college."
Having shown academic promise early, More left the Tobin School after
sixth grade to enroll in Boston Latin Academy. It was at Latin Academy,
he says, that he began reshaping an ambition that first came to him as
a boy. "My father worked in construction," he recalls. "I
remember one birthday I got my first Legos, and years after that I always
played with Legos and said I wanted to build buildings. At first I said
construction, and then in high school I said structural engineering. It
just came to me over time."
Yet even before he had decided on a career path, More says, he had a
clear sense of direction-something he attributes to his Tobin Scholarship.
"When I first got the scholarship," he remembers, "the great
thing about it was that I knew what I was going to do for the next 10 years
or so. I left Tobin in seventh grade, and I knew what I was going to do
for the next 10 years: 6 years at Latin Academy, then 5 years at Northeastern.
I knew what my future was going to be-that was the great thing about it."
With that projected future unfolding as planned so far, More shows little
inclination to linger on the journey. Even with co-op on his calendar,
he hopes to graduate in four years. What's his hurry? "I want to just
get out," he states laconically. With all his flinty independence,
More is open about his preference for a different kind of institutional
setting than Northeastern's. "One thing about Northeastern that I
will say I don't like," he offers, "is that you have to visit
five or six offices to get simple answers to a question."
When he was a senior in high school and needed to use a computer, he
would often go down the street to the Wentworth Institute of Technology
rather than to Northeastern. "I liked the smaller environment,"
he explains. Yet ever since he received the promise of his Tobin Scholarship,
More says, "I never thought of going anywhere else, because I was
already set here. I mean, they were giving me the money, so there was no
point in going anywhere else. And since I wanted to do engineering, and
I knew that Northeastern's a pretty good engineering school, I said, 'Eh,
you know, I'm all set. I'll stick around here.' "
Like his friend Tanzerious Anderson, Chris Pollini displays no embarrassment
in telling you that he struggled hard to make it to Northeastern. "I
was a punk back then," he says of his years in middle school and high
school. "I got in a lot of fights when I was younger." Having
obviously turned himself into a much shrewder, more effective kind of fighter,
Pollini disarms an older person with a crinkled, boyish grin that somehow
expresses an aura of hard-won strength and self-acceptance.
"I'm wearing last week's socks," Pollini cheerfully confesses
as he talks about juggling the demands of being a freshman while living
on his own-in the N.U. dorms-for the first time in his life. "Time
management is everything right now," he says. "I'm trying to
manage my time with school, I'm trying to lift in the gym. I want to try
to play football next year." Picking a major is another objective
Pollini will leave for next year; meanwhile, he is enrolled in the School
of General Studies. "I don't go home every day and think about what
I want to be yet," he explains. "I just think about what I need
to do right now to get my life together."
Pollini spent the earliest years of his life in Dorchester; relocated
with his mother to Quincy, in the third grade, after his parents had separated;
then moved back in with his father in Dorchester two years later. Expelled
as a seventh grader from parochial school, Pollini was given a choice by
his father of two public schools in Roxbury, the Dearborn and the Tobin.
"The Dearborn was like a dungeon," he recalls, "but at the
Tobin, I just felt more at home." He still got into his share of fights
at first, Pollini says, but eventually found the Tobin School a kind of
haven. "I felt like I grew right into it. I met some of my good friends.
I felt like I just bonded with a lot of people."
After graduating from the Tobin School, Pollini decided that he needed
to move out of his father's home and went to live with his grandparents
in Braintree. At Braintree High School, he struggled academically but began
to gain some footing on the shoals of adolescence. "In ninth grade,
I played football, and I really enjoyed that," Pollini explains. "It
gave me discipline. It helped me get a lot of aggression out. Then in tenth
grade I didn't play, because I met my first girlfriend. She helped me through
a tremendous amount of things. She would be the one sitting up at nighttime
helping me learn to write English papers and stuff like that."
During his time at the Tobin School and into the ninth grade, Pollini
had had someone else in his life to help him get on track: a Northeastern
student named Jim Ahearn, his first Tobin-program mentor. "He was
the best mentor," Pollini says. "He was there for me through
a lot of things. He listened to a lot of things. He was involved with my
family. He was an older person, he was in the Army, he had a life before
college. So I think that's why he understood a lot of things." As
for the rest of the Tobin Scholars program, Pollini says, "I don't
know if it helped me get the grades that I wanted, but it helped make me
feel like school was the right place to be."
Today, as he works to get himself off to a good start in college, Pollini
intends to prove, to himself and to others, that Northeastern is the right
place for him to be. Besides, he says, "My destiny is not just to
'be here.' I don't know about the other Tobin kids, I don't know whether
they're going to be here for just a little while or what, but I want to
get through here and end up with a good job and education. I want to do
better for myself all the time. It's coming along slowly-I haven't got
my whole life completely organized and everything. But I'll get there soon."
In the meantime, Pollini offers a summation of what it has meant to
him to be a Tobin Scholar. Looking back on his high school years, he says,
"If I didn't have the scholarship, I probably would've dropped out.
Actually, I wouldn't have dropped out, because I always told myself that
I'd never drop out of high school. But I wouldn't have tried to learn my
basics, I wouldn't have tried as hard as I've tried. I wouldn't have even
tried to get my life together emotionally. I think I would have been a
totally different person if I didn't have this scholarship."
Chris Pollini's statement-but also much of what Tanzerious Anderson,
Florence Toussaint, and Senen More have to say about their Tobin Scholarships-provides
one kind of testimony, sometimes eloquent in the extreme, about the impact
that the program is having for a handful of young people. What else might
be said about the fruits, so far, of a much-heralded display of the university's
vision, generosity, and social commitment?
If one measures the success of the Tobin Scholars program by the number
of students in the 1991 cohort who have enrolled at Northeastern so far,
that figure-12 out of 32-may look underwhelming. To those 12 current freshmen,
however, can potentially be added one Tobin Scholar now attending Bunker
Hill Community College in hopes of gaining admission to N.U. Moreover,
if, as program director Carter expects, 4 to 6 more members of the cohort
who have not yet qualified for college manage to do so within the next
year (and Tobin Scholars have five years from their expected high school
graduation dates to redeem their scholarships), then anywhere from 17 to
19 of the first 32 Tobin Scholars may have enrolled in the university by
January 2000.
Another way of assessing the record so far is to look at college attendees
as a percentage of high school graduates. Two members of the 1991 Tobin
group are now attending college outside Massachusetts, so that 15 of the
17 Tobin Scholars who have graduated from high school are currently in
college. This yields a college attendance rate of 88 percent for the first
Tobin Scholars high school "class." Given how this number compares
with the Boston public schools' latest available percentage of high school
graduates enrolled in post-secondary school nine months after graduation-68
percent for the class of 1997-the Tobin program would appear to be doing
well at helping its high school graduates get into college.
On the other hand, the total of 17 high school graduates, to date, out
of a total of 32 Scholars is harder to evaluate-particularly in the absence
of high school graduation figures for Tobin alumni generally. With five
members now neither in high school nor pursuing a Graduate Equivalency
Diploma (and therefore qualifying, by the Boston public schools' definition,
as dropouts), the 1991 Tobin group has a current dropout rate of 16 percent,
compared to a systemwide high school "cohort rate" of 27 percent
(for the period 199195). Carter points out that 3 of these 5 students
continue to show interest in obtaining a GED, so that only 2 out of 32
appear to have definitively dropped out of the program. In any event, only
time will tell how successful the Tobin program will be in helping its
first group of Scholars to graduate from high school.
Down at the Tobin School, the results of the program so far are seen
as cause for celebration. While calling the proportion of at least potentially
college-bound students from the first group "pretty amazing for any
school," James A. Early-a fifteen-year veteran of the Tobin faculty
who has been the homeroom teacher for all 107 Scholars-also stresses the
importance of looking at more than just the numbers, or even just at college
admissions.
Speaking of the 1991 Scholars as a group, Early says, "I think
the scholarships just opened horizons for them. Maybe some of them have
decided that, rather than going to college, they want to go to trade school,
or to be a beautician. Is that success? You bet it's success. And whether
they're in college or not right now, they still know that they have that
choice. I see it as, when they first came here they had blinders on, they
were on one path. And then with all the things that we've done for them,
all of a sudden the blinders have started to open, and they've said, 'Oh
yeah, there's that over there, and that over there.' So the world has just
opened up for them."
Back up at Northeastern, President Freeland says that "when I go
to the Tobin School and see whole classes of middle-school-aged students
in Northeastern T-shirts, excited and energized about the possibility of
going to Northeastern, I see the impact of this program in a very strong
way." Freeland goes on to speak of that impact in terms of providing
hope and motivation. "What you need to do," he states, "is
give these young people reason to believe that the future holds something
for them. The overwhelming impression I have is that this program has engendered
enthusiasm and hope in young people that would not have been there otherwise."
Meanwhile, Holly Carter rejects the notion that admission to, and graduation
from, N.U. ought to be the primary measure of her program's success. She
also portrays the Tobin Scholar freshmen as a kind of challenge to the
university.
"When I came to Northeastern twenty-three years ago," Carter
says, "one would say that the greater majority, if not the significant
majority, of the students on this campus were much like the profile of
these Tobin Scholars. That is, coming from working-class environments,
really understanding the significance of being able to attend college.
And so in many ways, I think, the Tobin Scholars take Northeastern back
to its roots in terms of what the ethos of this institution was to be all
about. This was not an institution, when I came here, where the students
didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives, and were here because
it seemed to be a nice place to be as long as Mommy and Daddy were paying
for it."
How far is it from Mission Hill to Northeastern? Does the university
risk attenuating its roots if the distance increases? President Freeland,
for his part, asserts that N.U. will remain accessible to youths from places
such as the Tobin School.
"One of the key elements of the university's identity and mission
is our commitment, as an urban university, to be a positive force in our
immediate community," he says. "One way-and perhaps the most
important way-that we can do that is to provide educational opportunities
for young people from Boston, and particularly from Roxbury. That's always
going to be part of Northeastern's identity, even as we become a more national
institution, even as we become a more selective institution. There's always
going to be some room at Northeastern for young people who grow up in the
circumstances that exist in the neighborhoods immediately around us."
In the shorter term, much work remains for the Tobin Scholars program.
At Northeastern, there are a dozen freshmen, along with others who may
follow soon, to be supported and encouraged on the road to graduation.
(Seven of the 12 current freshmen are enrolled in the School of General
Studies, the university's remedial freshman-year program.) Down at the
Tobin, and in high schools all around the city, 75 Tobin Scholars from
the second and third classes, along with students from the original group,
still pursue dreams that may or may not eventually bring them to N.U.
Here at Northeastern, too, those who have been working for so long in
the Tobin program to help the Tobin Scholars reach their dreams can count
on a hand from someone who is new on campus. "If it wasn't for a lot
of them supporting me," says Tanzerious Anderson, "I wouldn't
be where I'm at. They asked me, 'Do you want to be a mentor?' and I said,
'Just tell me what I've got to do.' There's not much I wouldn't do for
them."
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