When Dr. Arnold Mitchem got an offer to head up a special program for “culturally distinct” students at Marquette University in 1969, he viewed it as an attempt to co-opt him into “the establishment.”
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When Dr. Arnold Mitchem got an offer to head up a special program for “culturally distinct” students at Marquette University in 1969, he viewed it as an attempt to co-opt him into “the establishment.”
“I didn’t believe the system would make any real changes, and I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Mitchem recalled of his outlook at the time, which he said was influenced by the protests of the era. “I didn’t want to be an agent of repression as I saw it.”
At the same time, when he considered all the people who had risked their lives for the cause of civil rights, he didn’t feel that he had done enough.
“And so here was an opportunity to do something for Black people,” Mitchem said of the opportunity at Marquette, where he was teaching the university’s first Black history course and hoping to become a tenured history professor focusing on Black history.
“So, hey, I’ll put my academic and personal visions aside and take this practical responsibility of trying to empower other people’s children,” Mitchem said of the opportunity at Marquette. “And so that’s what I threw myself into,” he said of agreeing to serve as head of the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette.
Mitchem initially thought he’d serve five semesters. But he ultimately stuck with the program much longer. That fateful decision put Mitchem on a path to become the architect of a national movement to protect federal TRIO programs – an array of outreach and student service programs meant to help low-income individuals, first-generation college students, students with disabilities and veterans to succeed in higher education.
The programs – which came about as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” – now include the Upward Bound, Talent Search and Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement programs. The programs currently serve about 880,000 students a year. Over the past 60 years, the programs have been credited with helping millions of participants enroll in college – and complete their degrees – at higher rates than they would have otherwise. Alumni of the program include U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore.
Dr. Arnold Mitchem
The programs might have disappeared long ago were it not for the vision of Mitchem, a key figure in the formation of the Council for Opportunity in Education, or COE, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for TRIO.
“Without Arnold Mitchem, TRIO programs would have faded into a distant memory decades ago,” said Kimberly Jones, president of COE.
“However, because of his bold leadership, strategic vision, and unrelenting tenacity, everyday individuals from every walk of life coalesced around a single idea and worked together to create a national, multi-racial coalition,” Jones said in reference to COE. “This unified vision has sustained the movement for decades.”
Mitchem’s reputation extends from the halls of Congress to the halls of academe.
Dr. Marshall C. Grigsby, former president at Benedict College and a former chief higher education specialist of the Committee on Education and the Workforce in the U.S. House of Representatives, says he has “never encountered anyone more effective and efficient in representing their concerns as Dr. Arnold Mitchem has been with Federal TRIO Programs.”
“Even in lean years, when Congress was making appropriations cuts to virtually all organizations, TRIO Programs, at a minimum, received level funding and in most instances received an increase in funding,” Grigsby recalls. “In my eight years on Capitol Hill, that was an enormous feat and virtually unheard of.”
The cause drew bipartisan support.
“Democrats and Republicans alike all wanted to be associated with supporting COE, and the TRIO students it represents because of the outstanding work of Arnold L. Mitchem and his team,” Grigsby says.
Early years
Mitchem spent the earliest part of his childhood growing up in the 1940s in the Robert H. Brooks housing projects on the West Side of Chicago. He developed a case of polio that messed up one of his arms at the age of four.
His family moved to Pueblo, Colorado in 1950. His mother was a file clerk and his father worked as an automobile mechanic. Both parents were employed by the Pueblo Army Depot.
Mitchem attended Pueblo Catholic High School, where going to college after high school was pretty much a given.
Mitchem’s success in the arena of higher education policy is all the more remarkable given his early stumbles as an undergraduate.
“I had the brain power,” Mitchem recalls. “I didn’t have the discipline.”
His problems began in the 1956–57 academic year, when he was a freshman at Marquette University.
“I wanted to be a journalist. I also fantasized about writing the great American novel, like [Willard] Motley and Richard Wright and those people,” Mitchem says. “But one fateful June day, my parents got a letter from the dean of the school of journalism that read: Your son is not college material. He can’t come back in the fall.”
Mitchem then went to Pueblo Community College before he managed to get into the University of Wisconsin, where he again got thrown out of journalism school for not going to class.
“I was spending too much time playing Bid Whist and playing politics in Der Rathskeller,” Mitchem confesses of the time he spent at UW Madison’s student union, though he insists he had a “B” average despite his absences.
He wound up back in Pueblo, Colorado and graduated from what is now Colorado State University in Pueblo in 1965.
“It took me nine years to get a bachelor’s degree,” Mitchem says. Asked whether he sees himself in the students served by TRIO, Mitchem said: “Yes, I do.”
“Our society, as organized, has put them in an unfortunate position,” Mitchem says. “And they need help to extricate themselves so that they can realize their humanity and the rest of us can benefit from their contributions to society.”
The legacy of TRIO
He says the personal connections between TRIO counselors and students is what makes the programs work.
Dr. Howard Fuller, distinguished professor emeritus of education at Marquette University, served as associate director of the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette under Mitchem from 1979 until 1983.
“Mitch changed my life,” Fuller — a pioneer of the school choice movement — recalled of the job, which enabled him to get back to his calling in education instead of selling insurance.
Fuller said Mitchem came to see a need to build a movement to support TRIO programs.
“He realized that in order for these programs to exist, you had to have a national infrastructure that would do the political work that was necessary to sustain these programs,” Fuller said, noting that the COE that Mitchem helped found in 1981 has “protected TRIO programs through today.”
Mitchem — who served as COE’s first president from 1986 to 2013 — counts two things as his proudest accomplishments at COE: Building a broad coalition of support and keeping funding for TRIO front and center in his dealings on Capitol Hill, where a keen understanding of the appropriations process, the players and the culture, all came into play.
“That’s what Mitch focused on. I’m always saying ‘the money, the money,’” said Mitchem, who is now president emeritus at COE. “I preached that from the pulpit for the whole time I was there.”
Mitchem says he is unfazed by efforts to eliminate TRIO — an idea that he says has been put forth by presidents ranging from President Ronald Reagan to President Donald J. Trump.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a bipartisan bill to keep Federal TRIO Program funding at $1.2 billion for the 2026-2027 program year.
“TRIO is eternal,” Mitchem says.
Mitchem is the 2026 recipient of The EDU Ledger Dr. John Hope Franklin Award, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to higher education and his lifelong commitment to helping the disadvantaged and the poor.
The Dr. John Hope Franklin Award was created in 2004 to pay tribute to Franklin, historian, writer, educator, and humanitarian who made significant contributions to shaping the perspective of American history in the 20th century.
This article originally appeared in April 2, 2026 edition of The EDU Ledger.
