Long climb and fast fall for Harvard student
By Tracy Jan and Keith O'Brien
NEW YORK - She was a young woman from the toughest of neighborhoods when Chanequa Campbell stood in the opulent ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and gave a speech about her past and her future, bringing the moneyed crowd to its feet in prolonged applause.
Campbell had benefited greatly from the largesse of the people in the room. They had funded the program that brought her from the grimy streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant to an elite prep school called The Packer Collegiate Institute. They listened intently to a young woman who was bound for Harvard University that fall, the consummate success story. Some in the room were sure they would be hearing about her accomplishments again.
"She was extremely eloquent, talking about living in two worlds: the world where she actually physically resided and the place where she went to school, and how she was sort of crossing the divide," said Bruce Dennis, the head of school at the Packer. "I remember being very moved by it, and I remember 1,000 people standing up and applauding her."
Four years later, they are hearing about Chanequa Campbell again - to their universal dismay.
With but a couple of weeks until her graduation from Harvard, Campbell's old world invaded her new one. A suspected drug dealer was shot inside the doorway of her quiet dormitory and died the next day. A suspect, believed by authorities to be a thief from Harlem looking to steal $1,000 cash and a pound of marijuana, was charged with murder. And Campbell was barred from Thursday's graduation as the district attorney linked two Harvard women to the suspect and the victim, saying, "The common denominator between those four people is drugs."
What was supposed to be a remarkable success story is devolving into a tragic sideshow of potential derailed. Gone for the moment are not only her dreams, but the dreams of dozens of others who have lifted Campbell up for more than a decade.
Try as she may to escape the problems of her old neighborhood, the elements of the May 18 crime - guns, drugs, and murder - are straight out of Bed-Stuy.
Campbell, a 21-year-old sociology major, responded to her ouster by going on the offensive, lashing out at the school that has supported her financially for the last four years and saying that she has been targeted because she is black and poor. And in a Globe interview on May 25, one week after the murder, Campbell maintained her innocence, saying she did not know the alleged drug dealer who was killed.
"All that I have is my reputation," said Campbell, who did not respond yesterday to an interview request. "I am so confused and frustrated. It's depressing. It's embarrassing. It's demoralizing."
Some black leaders are now questioning whether elite colleges provide enough support to urban students like Campbell as they move into a rarefied world, like Harvard. Others are defending Campbell, and still others are wondering what happened to the girl who was bound for greatness.
"Chanequa was a star," said Dennis, the head of her Brooklyn high school. "We knew we'd be hearing about Chanequa again. But not in a context such as this one. She seemed like someone who, from her time here, was destined for great things."
She grew up amid the dilapidated brownstones and sketchy bodegas of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood so violent in the 1980s and '90s that even paramedics, dispatched on medical calls, were often too scared to enter. Shootings and stabbings were part of daily life and still are. Just six months ago, Campbell's stepbrother was shot and killed in the neighborhood.
But Campbell, raised by a single mother, was taught from a young age to "sound like you're educated," said her grandmother Virginia Campbell. It was important not only to speak proper English, Virginia Campbell said, but also to sound refined.
Instead of saying "excuse me," Chanequa Campbell was taught to say "pardon me," her grandmother said, and the girl, being smart, learned fast.
In fifth grade, when her public school administrators were asked to nominate their brightest minority students for Prep for Prep, a nonprofit program that helps such students get into top-tier high schools, Campbell got the nod. Most of the roughly 5,000 students nominated did not make it, but Campbell did, earning one of the coveted 200 spots in the program.
For Campbell, it was a promise made good. In the fall of 1999, having completed 14 months of intense Prep for Prep training, she enrolled at Packer Collegiate, in the leafy Brooklyn Heights neighborhood.
Tuition at Packer costs more than $27,000 a year, and the school's demographic is decidedly different from what Campbell had known, richer and whiter.
But with support, Campbell did more than just get by; she thrived, becoming one of her class's top students despite being diagnosed with lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disease.
By senior year, she was captain and leading scorer of the girl's basketball team. She applied to 14 colleges, including five Ivy League schools, and got accepted at them all, said Dennis, Packer's head of school.
Among her classmates, said friend Jordan Malter, she made quite an impression.
"She was very outgoing, very loud," said Malter, who also graduated from Packer in 2005. "She definitely had opinions on lots of stuff that anybody was saying at anytime. Aggressive might be one way to put it."
At Harvard, where Campbell enrolled in fall 2005, classmates at times found her similarly tough to know, as if she were part of the Harvard community, but not really of it.
Like other Harvard students, she landed prestigious internships, working at Goldman Sachs in New York one summer. And like many, Campbell traveled the world, spending her junior year abroad, studying in London and in Milan, where she planned to return after graduation.
But Campbell was not any other student. She was unable to shake the "hood culture," according to a black Harvard student and friend of Campbell's.
In 2005, according to a source familiar with Campbell's record who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation into the killing, Harvard disciplinary officials investigated Campbell in the theft and forgery of a check for $300. She was not disciplined, the source said.
And according to students, Campbell became close friends with Brittany Smith, the Harvard student from Harlem whose boyfriend, Jabrai Jordan Copney, has been arrested and charged in connection with the killing of Justin Cosby of Cambridge.
"Anyone who comes from this neighborhood knows all about drugs and the dangers of drugs, so why would you be associating with that?" said Donald Dobson, who was a counselor at Campbell's Bedford-Stuyvesant elementary school but does not remember her. "It's like packing up a portion of the neighborhood and taking it with you, instead of leaving it behind and moving on."
What needs to happen now, some black leaders say, is a larger conversation about how Harvard can help these students fit in.
"I admire Harvard's efforts to reach out and diversify the student body through their financial aid initiatives," said Jacqueline Rivers, a 1983 Harvard graduate and codirector of the W.E.B. Du Bois Society, a program that works with African-American high school students at Harvard. "But what this says to me is there needs to be a lot of work thinking about how you help kids manage the transition in a setting where you're going to be rubbing shoulders with really wealthy people."
Others like Brandon M. Terry, a 2005 Harvard graduate and a member of the Harvard Black Alumni Society, hope the incident will spark a larger conversation about drug use on campus, which he believes is more widespread than many like to admit.
And still others are just worried about Campbell. Her attorney, Jeffrey T. Karp, is hoping school officials will reconsider their decision before they allow this "magical moment," graduation, to pass Campbell by.
Her family had big plans for the event, Campbell's grandmother said, with some two dozen friends and relatives traveling to be in attendance.
But now those plans are off, although Harvard hasn't given a specific reason for barring Campbell from graduating. There will be no grand parties, either. While her classmates have spent recent days marking the end of their Harvard careers with boat cruises, wine tastings, and dances, Chanequa Campbell has been holed up, weighing her options for her suddenly uncertain future."It's incredible how it's all gone," she said recently. "It's all gone."
John Ellement of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com; O'Brien at kobrien@globe.com.
— Tracy Jan and Keith O'Brien
Boston Globe
2009-06-02
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/06/02/as_graduation_nears_a_harvard_senior_finds_herself_in_trouble?mode=PF
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