UMB Staff
“The turnout on Election Day tells me that there’s still a vibrancy in America regarding who we are and what we want to be, despite what the red-and-blue electoral map might look like.”
– Michael Steele, JD
“It always seems like right now is the most chaotic time we’ve ever known. The lack of civility is troubling to me. But I have ultimate faith and optimism about the health of democracy in this country and the resilience of this country.”
– Ann Compton
“We walk through the park, the grocery store, and people say, ‘Oh your son is so cute, so adorable.’ And for me, I’m reminded that that will end much earlier for him than it will for his white counterparts. I consider the difficult balancing act of what it means to communicate to a Black child the realities of the world while trying not to make them feel as if they have done something to deserve it.”
– Clint Smith, PhD
“Hopefully we’ll have the COVID vaccines, and we’ll achieve what we call population-wide immunity so that we can stop this pandemic. And then in that setting, we think that it’ll just be among one of those common cold viruses, respiratory viruses that we see every year, but it will not be as lethal as right now.”
– Wilbur Chen, MD, MS
“We could easily make the argument that if we said nobody comes back to campus to do scholarship, we don’t serve the public good. But we can say the same thing about education, again being totally mindful of safety and health as our top priority. Nothing we do is without risk. But we always talk about risks versus benefits, and we also know there’s a balance there.”
– Jay A. Perman, MD
“Cops are killing black men; it’s like it’s a hobby. There’s no excuses. You can’t do that. Because you break us. You physically break us. It’s not easy making it in life when you’re only looked at a certain way because of the color of your skin.”
– Ray Lewis
