Pleased to announce that I have accepted the 2025 Otterbein Honorary Alumni Award with a presentation ceremony of September 26-27 later this year in Westerville, Ohio for my distinguished contributions over the decades.
I'd first begun attending Otterbein in 1991 until 1997 when financial circumstances and an academic snarl involving an issue over whether or not religion and philosophy courses were part of the same major or not, among other details all led to my departure at the time to begin work on Southeast Asian refugee resettlement issues in Washington DC instead.
"... And the rest is history..." as they say, although it often led to a significant level of disparagement by fellow refugees and non-profit colleagues that frequently bled into a number of my personal relationships. This was even as my work was, and remains, taught in college textbooks and papers around the globe, and I am about to finish nearly 2 decades as the creative works editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement.
It's a nice vindication even I also note that it remains a challenge for so many in our community to attain a degree. 50 years in the US and fewer than 15% of the Lao and many other Southeast Asian refugees manage to successfully graduate college for a number of reasons rarely related to academic performance itself.
There are challenging conversation to be held in the future about this, and how we create successful alternate pathways for our community members to be contributing participants in our various democracies across the globe.
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