Larry Dessem ’73 has a long history of supporting and advocating for Macalester, including serving for twelve years as a trustee; hosting alumni gatherings with his wife, Beth Taylor Dessem \u201973; talking with prospective students; and serving on career panels. Today as a Class Agent, Dessem uses tactics like social media videos\u2014usually donning Mac gear with a grandbaby on his lap\u2014to encourage his classmates to give. He\u2019s also recruiting other Class Agents to help generate momentum for the Class of 1973\u2019s 50-Year Reunion gift. In honor of his tireless efforts, the Macalester Fund honored Dessem this year with the Class Agent program\u2019s Golden Squirrel Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dessem enrolled at Macalester in the fall of 1969, and his college education overlapped with a period of immense and rapid change on campus and nationwide. \u201cIt was a very unsettled time, and I\u2019m so thankful that I was at a place like Macalester, because I was surrounded by such thoughtful faculty and staff and students,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By senior year, Dessem could\u2019ve graduated early but decided instead to take classes with four professors he still wanted to fit into his schedule. Among them: political science professor Chuck Green, who later wrote Dessem a long recommendation letter for law school. \u201cTwenty years later, I was a faculty member and realized how much work those letters took,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou get to a stage where you look back and think about the people and institutions that molded you,\u201d Dessem says. \u201cMy Macalester experience was so seminal in so many ways. How can I help others have that experience? Everybody\u2019s got different ways they can contribute\u2014you learn that from day one at Mac, the lifetime of service.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019d encourage anyone to get involved as a Class Agent,\u201d Dessem says. \u201cYou\u2019re supported so well by Mac staff that you really can\u2019t mess it up, but you can start to realize how rewarding it is. You think you\u2019re helping someone else, but along the way, you\u2019re helping yourself in all kinds of ways. It\u2019s a good life, and we make it better by engaging with others.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Larry Dessem ’73 currently serves as a Class Agent after a long history of supporting Macalester.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17074"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30635,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17074\/revisions\/30635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}