By Oswald Osaretin Guobadia
In the 25 years since I graduated from Wesley College with a bachelor’s degree in biology and starting an interesting career on Wall Street that led me to an entrepreneurial journey in Africa, I have been asked many times for my advice to Wesley students.
Invariably, this is what I say: “Where you are does not define where you are going. The key is to be prepared for all eventualities, as prepared people always appear lucky.”
As a faithful alumnus, I don’t think I have quite followed my own advice. The eventuality that I did not fully prepare for was the emotional impact of the closing of Wesley College and the acquisition by Delaware State University of the campus I called home for four years. Today, as I sit in Nigeria, where I have taken on a new assignment as the senior special assistant for digital transformation to the president of Nigeria, I cast my mind back to Dover in an attempt to understand what has happened and how these changes will affect everyone’s future.
What happened seems simple enough: Our patchwork system of higher education has become broken in many ways, and small, private liberal arts colleges like Wesley are increasingly an endangered species.
Predicting the future is always a speculative venture, yet it is also an unavoidable requirement to survive and thrive. While I feel deeply the same sadness as other Wesley College alumni at this passing of an age, I see signs that lead me to be hopeful.
First, I believe that the ties binding the Delaware State University and Wesley College communities together are much deeper than many suppose and that those connections bode well for our common future. Many Wesley graduates have migrated the few minutes north to that larger Dover campus to make their careers there. To cite two examples, President Dr. Tony Allen’s executive assistant and the university’s vice president for government and community relations are both Wolverine alumni. The Hornet football team’s offensive coordinator and the chairperson of one of the university’s largest academic departments both held prior positions at Wesley.
Now, these are to be joined by more than 70 Wesley faculty and staff members, to include dozens of the professors that our legacy students already know and admire. It is worth pointing out that these individuals had choices about what to do after Wesley’s closure, and they chose to continue their careers at Delaware State University.
I am told that between 300-400 Wesley undergraduate and graduate students will complete their degrees at Delaware State University. As personally unsettling as this may be for many, it is a rare chance to broaden their horizons, interact with new professors and take the best of a blended tradition into their upcoming careers.
I know plenty about the potential quality of that blended tradition: My wife, Tanisha, graduated from Delaware State University in 1999. Thank you, DSU!
In Delaware State University, I see many values shared with the Wesley tradition. In my own case, I have gravitated toward entrepreneurship in Africa, and recently published “In Pursuit: Journeys in African Entrepreneurship” with my friend and co-author, Chukuka Chukuma. At the university, I am happily moved to see the emergence of the Center for Global Africa, which has forged a working relationship with the African Union to mobilize the resources of the diaspora for the development of the continent.
With the launching of The Global Institute for Equity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights, I see in Delaware State University the same commitment to positive moral impact and giving back to one’s community that I learned at Wesley. “Great Things Await” and “Go Forth and Serve” seem to me to be completely compatible mottoes. Great things always await those who go forth and serve.
I counsel my friends and fellow Wesley College alumni to find acceptance and growth toward a celebration of the greatness of our shared traditions, rather than turning away from our future. It is never quite the future we wanted or predicted that arrives, but it is still the one in which we all have to love, live and learn to thrive. It’s time to support those Wesley employees and students who have chosen to continue at Delaware State University because they are still, and always will be, our family.
Oswald Osaretin Guobadia graduated from Wesley College in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. He is co-founder of DBH, a global information technology company, and serves as senior special assistant for digital transformation for the president of the Republic of Nigeria.
