campuscurrents
The Power of Inexperience
Commencement weekend speakers offer passionate options for change For Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach for America and this year’s commencement speaker, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is a fellow pragmatist. In accepting the Nobel this year for his work in spreading the idea of micro-credit across the developing world, Yunus emphasized not that he was making a dent in an intractable problem, but that poverty is an artificial creation and that the world can be povertyfree—if we want it to be. “Wow,” responded Kopp to that sentiment in her address to this year’s class of 521 graduating seniors, including thirty-nine Frances Perkins Scholars. “The reason his message struck me so powerfully is that it’s so consistent with what I’ve seen firsthand about educational inequity. We can solve it.”
ben barnhart
Kopp, whose organization is the nation’s largest provider of teachers
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