NPR host and former White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe talked with WPSU's Emily Reddy on Tuesday before a discussion open to Penn State students and the public. Rascoe talked about what to expect at the event, her hosting work and her recent book.
The event is hosted by the Schreyer Honor's College and will take place at 7 p.m. at the Music Recital Hall on the University Park campus. It's free and open to all. Tickets can be reserved online and there will also be a live stream of the event.
Here's a transcript of Rascoe's conversation with WPSU's Emily Reddy.:
Emily Reddy:
So if people come out to tonight's event, what are they going to hear about?
Ayesha Rascoe:
So tonight I'll be talking about democracy with the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State. I'm really excited because the students will be interviewing me. And so, it won't just be me lecturing everybody. It will be me, you know, answering their questions. And so I'm really excited. I always love to talk to students, and so I'm excited to be able to do that tonight.
Emily Reddy:
I heard you at a panel discussion when you were covering the Trump administration – the first one.
Ayesha Rascoe:
Yes.
Emily Reddy:
And you talked about waking up at four in the morning, seeing what he had tweeted. You know, what you were going to be doing for the day. And now you're doing Weekend Edition Sunday. What is the difference there, between that weekly show and the daily grind?
Ayesha Rascoe:
Oh, I mean, that's the difference. It was a daily grind, and it was like totally unpredictable. Thankfully, with Weekend Edition, it's a little more predictable. We still have breaking news. You know, on Saturday nights there might be an attack on Iran or Venezuela. So you wake up and you gotta go to go to work on that. But it is not that every day, you know, you never know what's going to happen and you have to immediately jump into work. The good thing about being on the weekends, on Sundays, is a lot of times, a lot of the news has happened over the week. It's been chewed on a lot. So what we try to do is take a step back and give people context for what has happened when everything is so crazy, and then also to prepare them for the next week. So we get to do a little bit longer, maybe a little bit meatier, and just really provide that context and history for why things are happening.
Emily Reddy:
There's a book signing tonight, too. Your book is a collection of essays from alumni of HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, called “HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience.” So there's Oprah, Branford Marsalis, Stacey Abrams, and you have an essay in it. You went to Howard. Why did you choose to write that book? And what threads did you see in common?
Ayesha Rascoe:
I've always said, like, going to Howard was really a determinative, if that’s a word…It was like a real pivotal moment in my life, and it made a huge difference. And so I was approached about like, “Would you want to do a collection of essays about HBCUs?” And when I thought about my time at Howard and what it meant to me, I couldn't say no. And so pulling together those essays, it really showed me like how much HBCUs are about community, right? And like being really you're not just one of a number. But what I saw over and over again in these essays, which spanned decades, you know, different people there at different times and different universities large and small, was that they felt like they got a care from the people who attended the school, from the professors, that it was different, that they were treated more like family. So I got the community, also that there was a lot of diversity, right? A lot of times people think about HBCUs, they don't think that they're diverse places. But in actuality, a lot of times you're meeting people from all over the world, right? You're meeting people from different social classes. You’re meeting people from all sorts of different backgrounds. And so many students talked about that. They talked about being on these campuses where they were able to, yes, be black unapologetically, but also to see the range of what that meant and the individuality. Right. Like they were able to really be individuals. And so that was another thing that I got. But there were a lot of threads that popped up in the essays.
Emily Reddy:
Ayesha Rascoe, thanks for talking with me.
Ayesha Rascoe:
Thank you.
