Cheyney University

Pennsylvania's own Cheyney University, founded in 1837, is the oldest historically black college or university in the nation. The school should not be allowed to follow the course of other such institutions into non-existence. But that possibility looms large. Cheyney is facing a backbreaking $2 million deficit, in part a result of dwindling enrollment. The university needs an infusion of administrative talent to help fledgling president Michelle Howard-Vital not just right the ship, but also steer it to safety.

Cheyney University president W. Clinton Pettus, who stabilized the financially strapped state-run school but faced growing pressure to improve enrollment, has decided to step down at the end of the year. Some say that Pettus was unable to overcome the many problems left by previous administrations and a faculty that includes some who showed strong resistance to the kind of change that he and the university's trustees felt necessary. "Dr. Pettus tried very hard and faced many challenges," said Robert W. Bogle, chairman of Cheyney's trustee council.

Over the years, E. Sonny Harris, president of the Cheyney University faculty union, has not been one of the school's quieter figures. He has called the State System of Higher Education "racist" and in November orchestrated a faculty vote of "no confidence" in Cheyney's new president, LeVerne McCummings. But last week, it was a reserved and cautious Harris who pledged to "support any plan that enhances the university's position. " His caution was well-founded. On Tuesday, the board of governors of the State System of Higher Education (SSHE)

Tucked away on Page 593, midway through Gov. Corbett's budget proposal, are two lines that would mean little to most readers, but that could spell trouble for hundreds of students and graduates of Cheyney University. The spending plan would eliminate all funding for the Cheyney Keystone Honors Academy and the Bond-Hill Scholarships, two student-aid programs that last year together received about $2.4 million. Both were established as part of agreements in the 1980s and '90s between the state and the federal Office for Civil Rights, in an effort to erase the vestiges of segregation by enhancing programs and educational opportunities at the university.

He's been on the job officially since July, but this weekend, W. Clinton Pettus will get a belated inauguration as the eighth president of Cheyney University, one of the oldest historically black institutions of learning in the nation. The four-day festivities began yesterday with an African American heritage lunch featuring sweet potato and smoked Louisiana sausage bisque, Southern-fried catfish fillets, and bread pudding. Concerts and academic symposia will lead up to the inauguration at 11 a.m. Saturday in Alfred Cope Hall.

W. Clinton Pettus, Cheyney University's sixth president in slightly more than a decade, sees stability as the key to moving the nation's oldest historically black institution into the future. "I believe that the state would like to see us stabilize the administration here," said Pettus, who has served as the school's provost and vice president of academic affairs. "If you have people who are dedicated to the institution, you can begin to believe that you are truly a community. " His selection will be ratified tomorrow at a Board of Governors meeting of the state System of Higher Education.

One of eight children of Virginia sharecroppers, W. Clinton Pettus was picking tobacco for $5 a day on a hot, sticky day in the early 1950s when the concept first hit him that he, too, could go to college. Pettus was about 7 when word came to the tobacco field that his eldest brother, Kermit, wanted to leave to attend a small private college. "I just didn't know any people who went off to do that," Pettus said. "What I knew basically about was tobacco. " But the owners of the farm did not want to lose the labor.

On the campus of Cheyney University in Delaware County, the Pennsylvania Historical Society and Museum Commission has placed a marker that reads, in part: "Fanny M. Jackson Coppin . . . educator, writer, humanist . . . Principal, Institute for Colored Youth . . . Coppin pioneered industrial arts and teacher education. " In the expanding literature of black American history, Fanny Coppin remains a footnote. Yet some historians believe that her career merits more attention than it has received.

Eighteen years ago at a party in a Cheyney University dormitory, 20-year-old Ellen Lewis was gunned down in a deal promising a gun, drugs and money totaling $10,000. The shooter is on death row. But the fraternity brother who authorities say hired the shooter had remained free until yesterday. Police arrested Russell Moss, a former chapter president of Groove Phi Groove fraternity and now a lawyer in Elkins Park, and charged him with ordering the hit on Lewis to keep her from testifying against him in a bank-fraud case.

Following 15 years of turmoil, turnover and talk that it couldn't survive, Cheyney University - the oldest historically black college in the country - appears to be emerging from its financial nightmare and pointing, finally, to the future. To be sure, the road to recovery continues to have speed bumps. Enrollment is at best stagnant, marketing strategies for the school remain vague, and there are large loans yet to be repaid. Yet, compared to the immediate past, officials from the college and the State System of Higher Education think some rejoicing is appropriate: For the first time since 1978, the school is not running a deficit.

Tim Hume, a defensive lineman at Cheyney University the last four seasons, looks at the future and wants it to include football. Hume knows he can play the game. Cheyney won just a single game this season, but that didn't stop Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference East coaches from naming Hume the league's defensive player of the year after he recorded 211/2 tackles for losses. "I'd give up all the honors to make the playoffs," said Hume, now a finalist for the Gene Upshaw Award for NCAA Division II lineman of the year.

Tucked away on Page 593, midway through Gov. Corbett's budget proposal, are two lines that would mean little to most readers, but that could spell trouble for hundreds of students and graduates of Cheyney University. The spending plan would eliminate all funding for the Cheyney Keystone Honors Academy and the Bond-Hill Scholarships, two student-aid programs that last year together received about $2.4 million. Both were established as part of agreements in the 1980s and '90s between the state and the federal Office for Civil Rights, in an effort to erase the vestiges of segregation by enhancing programs and educational opportunities at the university.

La Joie de Vivre , Cheyney University's entry in the sprawling Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, has a unique take on the event's thematic Francophilia. Cheyney theater professor Jann Ellis-Scruggs created the piece (billed in the program as "an educational music-theatre work") to highlight "Paris Noir," the period between world wars that drew African American artists and intellectuals to the City of Light, where they found unsegregated audiences and acceptance. As the nation's oldest historically black college, Cheyney is in a privileged position to round out the fest with a well-researched, illuminating look at this Franco-American creative alliance.

Anthony F. Pinnie, 78, of Wallingford, an educator, a lawyer, a marathon runner, and a Mummer, died of pancreatic cancer Saturday, Aug. 14, at Crozer-Chester Medical Center. The son of Italian immigrants, Mr. Pinnie grew up in South Philadelphia and began marching with comic divisions in Mummers Parades when he was 16. He graduated from South Philadelphia High School and earned a bachelor's degree in education from Pennsylvania State University, where he played intramural football.

If the allegations prove true, Kim Bacone, a former Philadelphia police officer, will go down in history as the anti-Robin Hood of Strawberry Mansion. Instead of stealing from the rich to feed the poor, Bacone stole from the poor to line her own pockets, according to a criminal complaint filed in Chester County by Cheyney University police, where Bacone now works. Bacone, 48, who was dismissed from the Philadelphia police force after a 2000 arrest for attempted shoplifting at the Cherry Hill Mall, was hired as a Cheyney police officer a few years ago. But in at least three instances since January 2009, authorities say, Bacone took large quantities of potato chips, toothpaste and other goods from Philabundance - a nonprofit that provides free food to people in need - and sold them at cut-rate prices to Cheyney students.

As a star quarterback at South Philadelphia High School, Jalil Harris could throw. But if he saw an opening he wouldn't hesitate to run. "He was like a Randall Cunningham or an early McNabb," said coach Stanley "Stosh" Tunney. "He liked to run the option. He liked to have the football in his hands at all times. " In 2004, Harris led the Rams to their first victory in 15 years over St. John Neumann High. "It was like winning the Superbowl for us," Tunney said. On Monday night, Harris was with friends, watching an NBA playoff game on a TV set up on a stoop in the city's Point Breeze section.

John Chaney remembered that C. Vivian Stringer was the first person he met after signing a contract in 1972 to coach the men's basketball team at what was then Cheyney State College. Stringer was in her second year as the women's coach at the school, which is the nation's oldest historically black institution of higher learning. "I remember seeing him with a big straw hat on," Stringer said with a laugh. On Wednesday, the two Naismith Hall of Fame coaches were back where it all started.

Pankaja Kooveli Kadaba, 81, of Newtown Square, founder of a drug-discovery firm based at Cheyney University and holder of several chemical patents, died of esophageal cancer Thursday at the Neighborhood Hospice in West Chester. The focus of K&K Biosciences Inc. - the business she began in Lexington, Ky., in 1993, after she left the University of Kentucky faculty - was developing drugs for epilepsy and strokes. "My mother was a pioneer," said her daughter, Lini, an Inquirer staff writer.

A federally recognized agency has warned Cheyney University that it could lose its accreditation if it does not make changes in its long-range planning and finances. Cheyney was among four universities out of 521 to receive a warning from the Philadelphia-based Middle States Commission on Higher Education in its most recent round of actions in November. The state-run Cheyney - which has long struggled with financial woes and declining enrollment - failed to meet three of the commission's 14 standards.

While her fellow inductees were being adored by millions and recognized from coast to coast, Rutgers University women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer was quietly achieving a similar level of greatness, albeit without the same spotlight. But tonight in Springfield, Mass., alongside NBA stars Michael Jordan, David Robinson, John Stockton, and longtime Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan - a blockbuster Hall of Fame class - Stringer's achievements will be honored on the sport's highest stage: induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.