President Jon Greendeer:
Education has always been one of the highest and hardest struggles for communities, whether they're the communities of color, I mean, racial groups, or communities that had suffered through economic deprivation for generations. Education is also the cure for poverty, and the cure for racism, and the cure for a lot of the social epidemics that we go through. If we were to take a regressive analysis of communities that aren't dealing with opioid addiction, poverty, domestic abuse, elder abuse, you'll find, in most cases, you'll find affluent communities who aren't just old money and generationally rich, but communities that are sophisticated and educated too, and have opportunities for professional development. And we haven't had that for a long time. So UW-Madison is really sourcing the cure, and making it really hard to not go to college and develop some sort of personal value, academic value, academic capital for a community to build on. So I do believe it's a promise, all belated, but a promise kept.