HBCUs: Presidential Proclamation. August 2011

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                                                                             August 31, 2009

 

 

NATIONAL HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WEEK, 2009
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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION

 

For generations, education has opened doors to untold opportunities and bright futures. Through quality instruction and a personal commitment to hard work, young people in every part of our Nation have gone on to achieve success. Established by men and women of great vision, leadership, and clarity of purpose, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have provided generations of Americans with opportunity, a solid education, and hope.

 

For more than 140 years, HBCUs have released the power of knowledge to countless Americans. Pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement, HBCUs offer us a window into our Nation's past as well as a path forward. Graduates of HBCUs have gone on to shape the course of American history—from W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, to Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Today, in twenty States, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, these colleges and universities are serving hundreds of thousands of students from every background and have contributed to the expansion of the African American middle class, to the growth of local communities, and to our Nation's overall economy.

 

This week, we celebrate the accomplishments of HBCUs and look to the future with conviction and optimism. These institutions will play a key role in reaching our ambitious national education goals, including having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. As our Nation strives toward this goal, we invite HBCUs to employ new, innovative, and ambitious strategies to help the next generation of Americans successfully complete college and prepare themselves for the global economy. During National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week, we recommit ourselves to never resting until equality is real, opportunity is universal, and all citizens can realize their dreams.

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 30 through September 5, 2009, as National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week. I call upon public officials, educators, and all the people of the United States to observe this week with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that acknowledge the tremendous contributions these institutions and their graduates have made to our country.

 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

 

BARACK OBAMA

Visionary: CEO Bans Email

  CEO Bans Email


You heard right.

Eighteen months from now Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos—one of the largest information technology companies in the world, plans to have eliminated email as a communication and collaboration medium within his company. “If people want to talk to me, call or send me a text message,” said Breton. “Emails cannot replace the spoken word.”

According to an article written by Peter Allen in the Daily Mail,  Atos’ nearly 80,000 employees in 42 countries will have stopped using email eighteen months from now and will have replaced it with social media tools, the telephone and face-to-face conversations. Should you read this and assume that Breton is a 30-something young maverick trying to make a statement, you’d be wrong. The 56-year old chief executive is the former French finance minister who believes that only 20 out of every 200 emails received by his staff every day turn out to be important.

“[E]mail is no longer the appropriate tool,” said Breton. “It is time to think differently.”
Breton cites a number of examples of how email wastes time including:

1. The “deluge” of information that plagues organizations
2. The need to review “useless” emails and the time it takes to get focused again on important tasks
3. The “pile” of email that employees end up sorting through after hours and the associated drain on employees’ personal time

What’s more “Mr. Breton pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so,” writes Allen. “Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.”

Email is such an integrated and ubiquitous part of how most organizations get work done that I’m not sure completely eliminating it from our cadre of communication tools is practical, but I am very interested in Breton’s implication that social media-like instant messaging has the same value as “the spoken word.”
I’m a big fan of anything that will help teams collaborate more naturally—and social media tools have demonstrated they can do that. What’s more, I don’t think it’s only younger members of the workforce who are seeing the benefit of a social media approach (as the 56-year old Breton demonstrates).

Writing for The Telegraph, Henry Samuel writes, “The younger generation have already all but scrapped the email, with only 11 percent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it, according to silicon.fr, and online social networking is now more popular than email and search.”

Although I don’t want to be a focus group of one, I find myself using (and often preferring) a text message or other social-media interaction to email for some communication. I have a number of friends and colleagues around the world with whom a text or Facebook message is our preferred way to interact.
“Companies must prepare for the new wave of usage and behavior,” said Breton. I agree.

Thirty years ago, I would never have imagined how personal computers, smart phones and the Internet would have impacted my life. I must admit, I didn’t take email seriously when I first started using it . Now, I probably spend more time using my smart phone for email or to text than as a telephone—I don’t think I’m alone.

I agree with Mr. Breton, email is not the most efficient way for teams to collaborate. Everyone has experienced the email thread that gets lost or buried, the person that needed to be included on the thread that wasn’t or the critical email that was accidentally deleted. The social media metaphor demonstrates a lot of promise as a vehicle for collaboration (provided we can keep the conversation focused on work—projects, issues and tasks). However, saying that, the lines between an individual’s work life and personal life are becoming blurred.

Judging from her emails, I have a colleague who gets a lot of work done at 1:00 am, hours after I have climbed into bed and called it a day. If she checks her Facebook a couple of times during the day is that such a terrible thing? Although I might be asleep at 1:00 am, for me, work life and personal life have become “life.” I continue to check email, accomplish tasks and otherwise “work” when I have time off, while on vacation or even on the weekends if I need to. So maybe the need to obsessively worry about limiting social media access in the workplace doesn’t make much sense after all (but that’s a topic for discussion on another day).

The big question becomes, what can we do to make sure that work colleagues are part of an employees’ network and their work is part of why they are interacting.

I will be watching for an update eighteen months from now to see if Breton is successful. In the mean time, I don’t think we can ignore the power of a social media-like approach to team collaboration. Something Twitter-like or Facebook-like that makes projects, tasks and issues part of the discussion just makes sense to me.

Ty Kiisel, Contributor