Gianna Hayes
News Editor
On Tuesday, July 1, President Anne McCall announced via email to the campus community that the College’s partnership with the Posse Foundation would be ending after the incoming class of 2029. There was no clear explanation stated in the email for this decision, though McCall encouraged students, staff or faculty to reach out to her if they had questions or responses.
The Posse Foundation is an organization that partners with higher education institutions to handpick high school seniors that showcase leadership qualities for admittance, with the goals of “reflect[ing] the country’s rich demographic mix,” supporting students throughout their four years of college, per their website. Colleges and universities partner with the foundation to provide full-tuition scholarships and support a cohort of approximately 10 students and 1 faculty or staff Posse Mentor. Room and board are not covered.
Davidson College, a private liberal arts college in North Carolina, also announced their decision to end their Posse partnership this May. In a May 9 article from the Davidsonian, a current Posse Scholar at Davidson asserted that the decision was unrelated to political pressures from the Trump administration. At the same time, other institutions have doubled down on their Posse partnerships — Oberlin College, now with two Posse cohorts from Chicago and Houston, and Vanderbilt University, with four cohorts from Miami, Atlanta, New York City and Houston.
In an October 27 interview with the Voice, McCall shared that “the political and legal situation is volatile. And different institutions take different approaches based on each institution reading its own values, risks, approaches, strategies, history and future, and the board [of trustees] and I have the fiduciary responsibility to make the decisions that we think are in the best interest of the College, and so, sometimes that means changing strategies, it does not mean changing values.” She mentioned working to follow the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that ruled race-based affirmative action decisions programs to be unconstitutional.
The strategies the College will be changing are in regards to nurturing leadership in students and providing priority financial aid packaging for students who are eligible for Pell Grants, particularly for students from Ohio and surrounding areas. Approximately 35% of College of Wooster students are Pell Grant-eligible, according to McCall. “This is a very substantial commitment to our students,” McCall said. Davidson will be implementing a similar strategy.
She also spoke directly to reactions from the campus community. “I get that people are upset, it does not surprise me that people are upset,” McCall said. “I can imagine that, for people who are very attached to [the Posse] program, pursuing those goals with different strategies does not make up for the sadness of leaving the program.”
McCall emphasized the need for internalizing the commitment to promoting student leadership.
“If you look around the country, there are institutions who do a very good job who are not Posse members. So I guess, I would say to everybody, if we can only do this because we’re Posse members, then we’re using them as a crutch — we haven’t taken on full responsibility for internalizing it and integrating it into our college identity. You don’t just get to say ‘oh, I’m outsourcing.’”
Laura Burch, associate professor of French and francophone studies, served as a Posse Mentor for the College’s 2020 Posse cohort. In an October 29 interview with the Voice, Burch shared how impactful the program was for her. “It pushed me to think about how to change and how to look for and adopt practices that were more empowering, more liberating, more welcoming of difference. It was a life-changing experience,” Burch said.
“I’m grieving the loss of it, I’m just kind of devastated by it. My Posse cohort just graduated a couple years ago, [and] I had imagined doing it again at some point in the future … I had thought that that chance would be there,” Burch shared.
Nwanne Eke ’26, a current Posse scholar, echoed similar sentiments. “I think it’s disheartening … as an organization, I think Posse is just really good for both scholars and their campus communities,” Eke said. “More so than being upset that it’s gone, I’m kind of upset at the way we were told about it, and then the lack of real explanation behind it.”
Eke continued, saying “if you take Wooster at face value for what it is … I absolutely would not go here if not for the Posse scholarship. To see [the Posse scholarship and Allen scholarship] get dissolved with no real explanation or no real alternative for them, it just seems like the President and the board of trustees and whoever is making these decisions is just trying to push out non-white students.”
McCall emphasized that the decision was not related to financial constraints, though some faculty and students push back on that assertion.
“It’s not an insignificant cost to the College to have this program,” said Burch. “So it wasn’t the cost of the program, it was the potential cost of the legal means that would be necessary to defend the program should it come under attack. But there’s no indication that that’s happened already,” said Burch.
Laura Sirot, professor of biology and department co-chair, is also a Posse Mentor, whose cohort graduated in 2022. She shared that, through her work in Posse, she was inspired to apply for a Howard Hughes Medical Institution grant for inclusive excellence in STEM education.
“What I had proposed to do, and it was based on my experience with Posse, was to interpret education as including research mentoring,” Sirot said. “So now we have a formal mentoring training program at The College of Wooster … all inspired from [Posse].”
Sirot also said that current students had told her the decision to end the partnership with Posse “made them feel weird and in limbo.”
At the November 3 faculty meeting, a resolution proposed by Burch was passed, detailing the faculty’s recommendation “that the College of Wooster renew its partnership with the Posse Foundation, welcoming the next cohort of Posse scholars in the 2027-2028 academic year.”
