UConn’s brightest

The University of Connecticut waited a long time for its first Rhodes Scholar, but in Wanjiku (“Wawa”) Gatheru, it has one who makes the wait worthwhile.

Gatheru is a resident of Pomfret, making the news all the sweeter that she is from eastern Connecticut. Yet in accomplishments and ambitions, she is a citizen of the world.

A senior majoring in environmental studies and minoring in global studies and urban/ community studies, she plans a public service career that taps the expertise of “frontline communities” to save the global environment. She wants to remedy an acute crisis — the planetary heating caused by carbon emissions — and a chronic problem — the marginalization of communities of color. With the urgency of youth she sees the dire need and the great potential of “culturally competent conservation.”

We admire Gatheru’s practical genius in seeing and pursuing what is right before the eyes of all: that people are experts on what is happening in the locales they know best. Science and wisdom are both vital to solving the planet’s problems, and local experts are as important as academic ones to sounding the alarm and tackling the problems.

The daughter of Kenyan immigrants to the United States, Gatheru has an arm’s-length list of awards, scholarships and achievements at UConn and beyond. She is among 32 people in the United States and others from around the world elected to the American Rhodes Scholar Class of 2020, through which they will continue postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford in England. Utlimately she wants to serve as the first black congresswoman from the Second District. That would not surprise us in the least.