MURFREESBORO, Tenn. Former Vice President Al Gore says building a successful community starts with giving young people the tools to make it happen.
He hopes to do that in his own way this semester at Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University, where he met Monday with school officials to discuss a community building course.
Gore will start giving lectures in the coming weeks on how different segments of a community can work together for the greater good. Those segments include law, business, public health, architecture and criminology, he said.
The hope is that the individuals that finish the course successfully will have some skills and knowledge that they can take back to their home communities, Gore said.
He said the idea for the course came two years ago at his annual Family Re-union conference at Vanderbilt University, where he was a divinity student as a young man. The conference brings together experts from across the nation to discuss issues confronting families, such as violence, aging, education and health care.
People want to live in communities where families can find the support and connections that they need to raise their kids and to create a really great life, but Gore said they often don’t know what they can do to help make that happen.
Gore will travel to Los Angeles for a symposium Wednesday at UCLA, where officials from 14 schools, including Fisk and Middle Tennessee, will discuss developing a community building curriculum.
About 100 cheering students met Gore at the Middle Tennessee campus at Murfreesboro, where he held a private meeting for more than an hour with interim President Gene Smith, Provost Barbara Haskew and other faculty members. He then took a tour of some classrooms.
Saghar Talebi, 20, a political science major from Fayetteville, Ark., hopes she is one of the 100-150 students selected for the course. She’s says she registering not so much for the topic but because of the teacher.
I feel he will have a lot to offer, said Talebi, who voted for Gore in the 2000 presidential election.
Gore, who addressed foreign leaders and crowds of thousands during his eight years vice president, said he is a little intimidated about teaching.
I’ve never taught before. I’m scared to death of the idea of teaching, he said.
Gore, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, said he chose Middle Tennessee because of family connections.
My father graduated from here. The Gore center is here. There’s a Gore hall here, too, he said.
The Gore Center houses the papers and artifacts from the political career of the late Sen. Albert Gore Sr., Gore’s father.
I’ll be giving this Nashville, to Murfreesboro to Carthage triangle a real workout, said Gore, who will stay at his family farm in Carthage while teaching the course. Since I don’t have the police escort now, it’s not going to cause traffic jams.
Gore, who served Tennessee for 18 years as a congressman and senator, took some flak as vice president when he’d return home to Tennessee, flying into Nashville and then riding in a motorcade 50 miles east to Carthage. Traffic was often stopped in both directions on Interstate 40 as a safety precaution.
When Gore lost the presidential race to George W. Bush, he said in his concession speech that he would spend his post-political career mending fences in Tennessee. That’s because he lost his home state to Bush, and if he hadn’t, he would have won the White House.
As for mending fences, I will be doing quite a bit around the state, Gore said.
