Diversity: Lessons from Dr Pollard


03/25/2015

When Mike Davis '81 was asked to counsel Quad Cities youths being lured by gang activity in the late 1970s, the Sunday school teacher and then-Army lieutenant quickly turned to his own mentor: Freeman Pollard, PhD.

Remembered Davis, who studied political science under Pollard while pursuing his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology degree: "I told him I didn't know if I could do this. He said, ‘Not only can you do it, I'm going to help you do it.'"

A civil rights activist, military veteran and the first black professor at St. Ambrose, Pollard spent just nine years on campus but his legacy lives through the Freeman Pollard Minority Scholarship fund. Since its inception upon his retirement in 1988, nearly 500 students have received aid from the fund.

Minority students of any background may apply for scholarship assistance, and Pollard's truest legacy lies in a question applicants must answer: When you hear the word leadership, what comes to mind?

For Davis, the answer might well be the measured yet authoritative voice of Freeman Pollard.

"What I found was a source of information, strength and wisdom," he said of his frequent meetings with Pollard outside the classroom. "He was taking all those things he had lived through and helped me understand where I needed to go."

Raised in the Jim Crow south in Mobile, Ala., Pollard, who died in 2004, did indeed pack a lot of living into his 81 years. He was a US Marine Corps veteran of both World War II and the Korean War and carried mail in Mobile for 20 years before a fateful decision to return to college at the age of 48.

Focusing on a passion for political science he developed while an activist for voters' rights over two decades, Pollard earned a bachelor's degree from the University of South Alabama and a master's and doctorate from Indiana University. He joined the St. Ambrose faculty in 1979 as a professor of political science.

In his brief St. Ambrose career, Pollard influenced countless eager learners, particularly minority students like Davis, who is black.

"He taught me there was more you can do," said Davis, who retired as a colonel after 26 years in the Army and now lives in Fairfax Station, Va., and serves as the CEO of Davis-Page Management Systems. "He told me, ‘Take what you have experienced and take what you have learned at St. Ambrose and in life, and reach out to help someone."'

Davis honors those lessons by changing lives of young men and women, some from circumstances not all that different from those he counseled in the Quad Cities. He has established apprenticeship programs at his company for students, as well as a scholarship program that matches major corporations with high schoolers interested in science, technology, engineering and math.

"That's the type of thing Dr. Pollard instilled in me," said Davis.

Davis also is a leading donor to the Freeman Pollard Minority Scholarship fund and is active in a campaign to fully endow the scholarship by raising $1 million by the end of the decade.

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