The Howard Fuller You Probably Don’t Know: An Advocate’s Remarkable Life

Fifty-five minutes into Thursday’s one-hour “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program, prominent education advocate Howard Fuller finally began talking about the last 20 years of his life. Because the conversation was dragging on? Definitely not. It was because Fuller has led such a remarkable life, with so many chapters (and so many stories to tell) that talking about earlier years was appealing and confining even a well-paced interview to an hour was hard.

Many people in Milwaukee associate Fuller with his nationally significant role as an advocate for private school vouchers and charter schools in the last couple decades. But the full story of his life offers not only a remarkable personal narrative, but provocative perspective on the development of political thinking and advocacy among African Americans in the United States since the 1950s.

Fuller, 73, provided a healthy dose of that narrative and perspective in the session with Gousha, Marquette Law School’s Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy, before a capacity audience in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. In much more detail, it is what he provides in his autobiography, No Struggle, No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Education Reform, published this month by Marquette University Press.

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“I Want to Make Sure I Don’t Educate Monsters”

During an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” discussion at Eckstein Hall on Sept. 11, Michael Berenbaum, a prominent scholar of the Nazi Holocaust, described the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on Jan. 20, 1942, when 15 leaders from branches of the German government met to develop ways to cooperate effectively in killing Jews by the hundreds of thousands. The leaders did not set the policy of killing Jews, he said, but they greatly increased the pace and efficiency of the genocide. At the time of Wannsee, four out of five of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust were still alive, Berenbaum said. Fifteen months later, four of five were dead.

What Berernbaum noted about the conference was that all 15 participants had university degrees. Eight had doctorates. Seven were lawyers.

A responsibility of all teachers, he said, is “to make sure that we do not create educated monsters who have all the skills and the abilities of modern men and women, all the genius of modern technology, all the capacity for creative thought, and no moral core.”

“I want to make sure that I don’t educate monsters,” Berenbaum said in summarizing his goal as an educator.

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Lovell Wants to Build on “Penned Up Energy” of Marquette Community

One thing Michael Lovell has learned about Marquette University since starting as president on July 1 is that there are many people on campus who have great pride in the institution and who want to make it better.

“There’s a lot of penned up energy,” Lovell said during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday. “People have some great ideas and they’re just waiting to go . . . For some reason or other, they just didn’t feel empowered to take those great ideas and just make them happen.”

That will be one of his main goals, Lovell said: Providing the resources and guidance for fresh ways to improve Marquette in all its aspects.

But Lovell held off on giving many specifics on what his agenda will be. For one thing, he said he is planning to unveil some plans during the events marking his inauguration next week. He reiterated previous statements that filling “a lot of open senior positions,” as he put it, is his first priority. “It is so important to get the right thought leaders in place.”

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