He Walks the Walk
Santiago Potes CC’20
“The day that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced DACA’s termination in 2017, I immediately (and in retrospect, with perhaps excessive chutzpah) wrote to Dean Valentini, asking for a meeting to talk about how the College could best support its DACA and undocumented students. Within minutes, he offered to meet. Looking back, I can trace the arc of my DACA advocacy to Dean Valentini’s equal parts small and great act of generosity.
"One recalls the last sentences of Middlemarch: ‘But the effect of [his] being on those around [him] was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.’ Dean Valentini has no taste for bureaucratic bromides; he walks the walk, with verve and compassion.”