After 20 years, Lauren Beckles returns to campus to finish what she started

Lauren Beckles at Hasbrouck Apartments' playground quad. She is a human development major in the College of Human Ecology from Brooklyn, N.Y. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Susan Lang

As a child in Trinidad, Lauren Beckles overheard her father saying that he didn't think his little girl was very pretty. "I got it in my mind then that if I couldn't be pretty, I'd better be smart; otherwise I would starve to death," said Beckles.

After her family moved to the Bronx when she was 13, Beckles was smart enough to become the first in her family to apply to college. Admitted to every college to which she applied, she was about to choose a school in Philadelphia when her guidance counselor said that you don't say "no" to Cornell. "I said, 'Why? What's Cornell?'" Beckles recalled. "I didn't know what Ivy League was."

When she found out, Beckles enrolled; it was 1977 and she soon co-founded the dance company Uhuru Kuumba Repertoire Ensemble, which still exists on campus. But she struggled academically. Then she got pregnant.

"I thought if this kid could get through all my birth control barriers, he deserves to be here," said Beckles who, for spiritual reasons, would not consider abortion. She dropped out in her junior year to return home. She spent the next 20 years raising her son, attending City College of New York's Center for Worker Education and becoming a licensed property manager. She managed apartment complexes and worked with homeless families, apartment re-entry programs and a senior housing facility, for which she facilitated grief and bereavement seminars.

"During those years, there were two things I told my son: You will go to college, or die, and when you go, I will go," related Beckles. "I was determined to finish what I started."

As soon as her son went off to the University of Arizona, Beckles contacted Cornell. "I made more than a dozen calls until, finally, I was asked to send a letter detailing what I'd been doing for the past 20 years." She was re-accepted, and this time she knew what it meant.

For three years, Beckles has been holding down three jobs each year; this year she is a graduate community assistant at Cornell's Hasbrouck Apartments, a Bartels Action Research Fellow working with the Varna Community Association (to which she donated $2,500 that she received as a 2002 Robert Smith Award winner) and work-study coordinator for the mature student group in her college.

"I'm still not finished with what I started, though," said Beckles, who hopes to attend the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs in the fall to work toward a master's degree. "I dream of going to an impoverished community and establishing what I fondly call 'The Little Red Hen House,' which would entail renovating a building to be open 24-hours a day, providing community services, such as counseling, after-school and day care and a soup kitchen. If you elevate the bottom, the top will also rise."