Greetings from the Maryville College campus!

The Commencement speaker in May 2000 was Wayne Meisel, president of The Corella and Bertram F. Bonner Foundation. The College bestowed an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree that May on Mrs. Corella Bonner, but it wasn’t her first visit to the Maryville campus. She made it a practice to travel often to see her Bonner Scholars at more than two dozen colleges around the country, and she had included Maryville in her tour at least twice before.

It was wonderful to witness her with our Bonner Scholars. Diminutive, neatly dressed, every silver hair in place, regal in bearing and a smile lighting her face, she asked them about their Bonner service work and about their lives. She cared about them, and they were inspired by her. The Bonner experience that was the product of her vision and the leadership of Wayne Meisel shaped those scholars. Although Corella Bonner passed away only two years after that 2000 Commencement, her Bonner program lives on and is shaping students on this campus today.

In this issue, you’ll read about the Bonner Scholars of 2007, as well as plans for future Bonners – thanks to a recent $4.5 million grant from the Bonner Foundation to endow the program.

Quite a few readers of FOCUS are members of that generation known as Baby Boomers, born in the years between 1946 and 1964, and students at Maryville from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s. If you’re a Boomer, you may reject the “me” generation label so often assigned to your cohorts by those who see self-indulgence as a primary characteristic of the Boomers during their college years. However apt that appellation may have been for Maryville students a few decades ago, it misses the mark for the Bonner Scholars and their classmates on campus in 2007. Their trademark is service to others. You will see that in the reports by current Bonners and in reflections by past Bonners in this issue of FOCUS.

It is encouraging to note that in October 2006, the Corporation for National and Community Service reported a significant rise in civic engagement by college students in recent years. Over the three-year period between 2002 and 2005, student volunteerism increased by about 20 percent. All told, some 3.3 million college students, they tell us, are serving their communities and our nation. No self-indulgence there! At Maryville, the Bonner Scholars have led the way. They demonstrate every day what our slogan – “Be successful. Make a difference.” – really means, and so inspire other students to get involved in service activities that make a difference on this campus and in the wider community.

Mrs. Bonner’s refrigerator door in Princeton, N.J., was always plastered with photos of her Bonner Scholars. Once when I was visiting, she took me back into her kitchen to show me a picture of a current Maryville Bonner whose service had brought her special pride. She would take pride, I know, in the difference that her scholars are making in 2007, and in the difference that the Bonner Scholars Program is making in their lives, not merely by providing scholarship support for them, but of greater importance, creating in them a commitment to helping others.