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The White House
What Chabot
College did for me
Tom Hanks
Chabot College is a rambling series of academic buildings situated on
94 acres in Hayward, California. It offers more than 100 associate
degrees and certificates, an intercollegiate national
championship-winning ultimate disc team, and parking for a couple
thousand cars. It's also my alma mater.
Chabot's a community college -- and in the early 1970s, it was all
free, save for the effort you put into it and the price of used
textbooks.
As a student there, I went to school alongside Vietnam vets, moms, and
middle-aged men, as well as a few thousand young people like me who
needed time to sort out our lives and our options. We were looking to
get our general education requirements out of the way, to learn skill
sets to improve our employment prospects, or to discover the road to
new, unimagined careers. We all found a different home at Chabot, but
it welcomed all of us.
Later today, the President is heading to Watertown, South Dakota to
deliver the commencement address at another community college -- called
Lake Area Tech. (NOTE: If I had grown up in that part of South Dakota,
my alma mater would be none other than Lake Area Tech.)
He'll talk to students who, like those of us at Chabot all those years
ago, are going to go out into the world and do great things. And
they'll owe it in part to an educational institution that ought to be
an option for more Americans.
I drove past Chabot's campus a few years ago with one of my kids and
summed up my two years there this way: "That place made me what I am
today." Here's why: Over the course of my career, I've only continued
to reap the benefits of the classes I took there.
I produced the HBO mini-series "John Adams" with an outline format I
learned from a pipe-smoking historian, James Coovelis, whose lectures
were riveting.
Mary Lou Fitzgerald's Studies in Shakespeare taught me how the five-act
structures of "Richard III," "The Tempest," and "Othello" focused their
themes.
In Herb Kennedy's Drama in Performance, I read plays like "The Hot L
Baltimore" and "Desire Under the Elms," then saw their productions. I
got to see the plays he taught, through student rush tickets at the
American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Berkeley
Repertory Theatre. Those plays filled my head with expanded dreams. (I
also got an A.)
Here's my bottom line, and it's simple: More kids (and adults, for that
matter) should have this chance. The President happens to agree, and he
wants to make two years of community college free for up to 9 million
Americans who are willing to work for it.
I hope that's an idea that sticks.
Thanks,
Tom
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