By Will Mari

The whir of the cappuccino maker in the coffee shop can’t drown out Barbara Clinton’s zeal for higher education.

The director of the Honors Scholars program at Highline Community College has a favorite quote by William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

And that’s precisely what she does.

“We’re willing to light the fire at any stage,” she said. As an opportunity facilitator par excellence, Clinton has dedicated her professional life to teaching, or more precisely, to navigating the sometimes strange world of higher education on behalf of her students.

The honors program she helped develop and now heads at Highline is one of a handful of such initiatives in the nation, and is modeled on the UW’s honors program. In fact, successful graduates from Highline can transfer right into the UW’s honors series without skipping a beat.

What started as a pilot project in 2003 has grown into its own department, with students successfully placed at four-year schools around the state and beyond, including Georgetown and NYU.

This year she has students seriously applying for the Ivy Leagues, including Harvard, Brown, Amherst, Swarthmore and Tufts.

And when Clinton says that her students are seriously applying, she means it.

So far, they’ve earned more than a $1 million in financial aid. Clinton specializes in helping low-income students achieve their dreams, literally. She’s the best type of mentor a student can have — the kind that deeply invests in and cares about the hopes of others.

Meheret Endeshaw, a 2005 Highline graduate and one of Clinton’s brightest stars, is a senior at Whitman College in Walla Walla, where she’s studying public health on scholarships Clinton helped her secure. Endeshaw, an Ethiopian immigrant, is also one of 100 students nation-wide who recently won a $10,000 Davis Foundation’s Projects for Peace grant; this money will help fund her efforts to help HIV/AIDS orphans in Ethiopia this summer.

“There have been a lot of professors that are nice and very helpful, but once you’re done taking their class or go to a different institution, they kind of lose touch,” Endeshaw said. “With Barbara, she is the one that works to maintain relationships with her students.”

“After I graduated she would send me e-mails once in a while to see what I was up to or if I needed any help. After a while I realized that this is a person that genuinely cares if I meet my goals or not, so I started responding to her e-mails and letting her know how I’m doing … if I seem out of it or [I’m] having a hard time, she will go out of her way to help me.”

Clinton has gone out of her way to help many students like Endeshaw because she believes in the power of an egalitarian education, one that transcends traditional barriers like economics.

“We can’t afford to have a two-tiered system, where the connection between a community college and the college and the university system doesn’t exist,” she said. “It needs to be a smooth, very accessible transition.”

In 2002, Clinton attended an academic conference in Texas. There, seeing the dearth of community college honors programs on the West Coast, she remembered a visit to her office by a student earlier that spring. This particular student had been a star in her public speaking class.

Clinton was shocked to discover that he was leaving Highline; he had finished his two-year degree in one year. During the course of the conversation, Clinton also discovered that he had received a 1460 on his SAT.

Aren’t you going on to more school? Clinton asked. No, he replied. He was going back to work.

By that point, it was too late to apply for a four-year college, but Clinton told the student to look into scholarships and to meet with her regularly. He indeed went back to work, but with Clinton’s help, he got a full ride to Seattle University the following September.

So when the idea of honors programs at community colleges came up at the conference, Clinton knew she what she had to do: make her own.

She spent the summer talking to four-year schools, and put together a proposal for the dean of transfer programs and the vice-president for academic affairs at Highline

She walked in with a data-packed, half-inch briefing, ready to go over in detail what she had prepared.

“The vice-president said, ‘Barbara, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but this is just a really good idea, so why don’t you just go see if you can do it.’ That was it,” she said.

Students can earn college honors in any class, regardless of their GPA as a whole, as long as they’re pulling a 3.5 or higher average in the course in question. The students then work with instructors to create and execute projects of their own design.

“You get to own your education,” she said. “That’s a private school experience.”

To graduate from the program as a fully fledged Honors Scholar, a student needs to complete 35 credits of honors-level courses, maintain a 3.5 GPA and attend several honors seminar classes taught by Clinton.

But it’s more than getting students to do intensive academic work, she said. It’s about what defines success in education and in life.

At the beginning of the quarter in one her basic communication courses, she had her students introduce themselves by telling others of a success story. A Running Start student talked about competing in a state track meet. A mom talked about the experience of going back to school. Another student talked about buying a red convertible.

And then a tall Somali man stood up. He was studying computer science, with the intention of transferring to the UW, and he quite the story to tell.

A group of armed men had burst into the man’s home in Somalia, killed his 15-year-old son and trucked the father away. When the armed men were ambushed on a road outside the city, a firefight ensued, and in the resulting chaos, the man escaped, walking all night back to his home. It had been burned to the ground and his family was missing. Devastated, he walked to Kenya and the nearest refugee camp. There, he miraculously found his family. They were sponsored by a relative in Seattle, and moved here, where he and his children were in school.

That was his success story.

“I had to call off class,” said Clinton. Nobody could top that tale. “Talk about a lesson.”

The 1990 alumna of the UW’s Department of Communication has spent a lifetime teaching.

After graduating from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Arts in English and American literature in 1967, and then a master’s degree in English and literature in 1969 from George Washington University, she taught high school in the Washington, D.C. There she met her future husband, a young lawyer from Wisconsin. While both enjoyed living in the D.C. area, it wasn’t where they wanted to raise a family.

A case took her husband to Seattle; Clinton came along, and they arrived on what she calls a “Perry Como day.” After a week of mountains and just-right temperatures, both knew it was where they wanted to live. She got a high school teaching job with the Issaquah school district, and he got a position at a law firm.

After the first of three daughters came along, she took a break, but then hopped right back into the fray in 1979, teaching at Villa Academy, a private Catholic school in Seattle.

Jody Nyquist (1960, 1967), the mother of one of Clinton’s students, was a communications professor at the UW. Nyquist befriended Clinton and encouraged her to co-teach a class on adolescent communication

Clinton was reluctant.

“I told her that after finishing my master’s degree, I had sworn I would never again seriously take part in higher education,” she said. Gradually, however, Clinton was lured into the department, taking a class every quarter until Nyquist finally convinced her to earn her doctorate.

“And I listened, and there you are.”

She got the chance to work with Nyquist on a number of research and teaching projects, becoming a teaching assistant and then a lecturer in her own right after graduating with her Ph.D. in speech communication (or, technically, communication development and instructional communication ) in 1990.

In 1994, she got a position teaching at Highline Community College in the speech communication program, eventually becoming the program’s chair.

She loves her work.

“I would almost do this for nothing,” she said. “This is the greatest job I could possibly have. I just can’t think of a better one.”

Her students, honors or otherwise, would probably agree: Clinton likes to light fires.