By Andrew Danielson
College students and recent graduates will have a chance to relate their educational experiences with the Fort Wayne community at a unique forum opportunity on Tuesday.
The forum, entitled “Students Speak Out” is open to the general public and will be held Feb. 24 from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. in Meeting Room B at the Allen County Public Library, 900 Webster Street, Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Organized by the Higher Education Working Group, the forum is a chance for students to share their positive and negative experiences of studying at an institution of higher education in a public, “citizen’s hearing” style of meeting.
“It’s important to hear from local people about how higher education works,” Dr. Leonard Williams said.
Williams is one of the main organizers of the event and he’s no stranger to education. Now a professor emeritus in political science, Williams spent nearly 40 years teaching American politics and political philosophy at Manchester University before retiring from there in 2020.
Now, Williams is returning to his educational roots.
In 2024, Williams, together with a few colleagues and friends, formed an informal organization called the Higher Education Working Group.
“It’s a group of faculty, students, staff members, some current and some former, who got together to kind of raise the profile of higher education issues in the Fort Wayne area and northeast Indiana generally,” Williams said.
He said that the group held a teach-in event last November, focusing on issues in higher education. The response from that first event was so engaging that the group began planning their next event, the “Students Speak Out” forum.
“The reception we received there was that we need to have more events to kind of talk about what’s happening to higher ed, not just in Indiana, but across the country,” Williams said.
That passion for sharing the student perspective is shared by one of Williams’ co-members of the Working Group, Dr. Noor Borbieva O’Neill.
O’Neill is the President of the Indiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and a Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University Fort Wayne. She explained that this meeting, sponsored in part by the Indiana Conference of the AAUP, was a chance to hear from the students’ perspective on higher education.
“We’re hoping this second event [of the Working Group] is going to give us a much clearer sense of what needs to be done to help students, to make sure that higher education is serving their needs, our needs as a community,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill explained that the Working Group is hoping to hold a third event in the coming months with a possible screening of the film “Freedoms Under Assault” (date to be determined).
Folks not able to attend the forum can still participate and share their experiences by emailing the Higher Education Working Group at their email address: HiEdWkGp@gmail.com