Exonian Profiles
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Richard Scribner ’54: Learning Through Listening “I have seen lives turned around by the use of books,” says Richard Scribner ’54, president of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), the nation’s leading educational library for people with print disabilities. The group provides instructional materials in recorded formats for students from kindergarten through the postgraduate level. “Our primary focus is the leaning environment and many of those who use our service continue to learn well into their later years.” Scribner says that his group works with students who are “extremely smart, but aren’t able to access standard texts. We put tools into the hands of children and adults who are intelligent and very motivated. These students deal with visual, learning or other physical disabilities.” RFB&D was founded in 1948 to provide recorded textbooks to veterans who were blinded in WWII and wanted to take advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. Today, more than 70 percent of the 116,000 members have been identified as dyslexic. This population has grown rapidly as learning disabilities are better diagnosed, Scribner says. Of the more than 91,000 texts that are recorded by RFB&D’s volunteers, now numbering nearly 6,000, many are specialized titles that require readers who have a specific knowledge of the topic being covered. The books run the gamut from tomes on the essentials of medicine and collider physics to Horton Hears a Who and A Light in the Attic. The title that is circulated more heavily than any other is To Kill a Mockingbird, because it is used so universally in high school English courses across the country. Among the collections in the RFB&D library are materials on science, medicine, environmental issues, law, women’s studies, Jewish studies and literature. This fall RFB&D, which operates 31 recording studios nationwide, saw the culmination of its most ambitious project to date. “We began offering our most popular titles in digital format on CD-ROM,” says Scribner, “replacing the analog tape cassettes that had been in use for the past 20 years. This enables us to place a book that once would have taken up 10 to 12 four-track tapes on a single CD.” Scribner came to his present position by what he terms the confluence of two lucky coincidences. He joined RFB&D’s board in 1991 as he was looking to replace another just-completed volunteer commitment. Then, in 1999, the president of RFB&D resigned and Scribner left his position as a managing director of Salomon Smith Barney to fulfill his long-held wish for a “last career“ in the educational or nonprofit world. “This was an operation that I respected and it was an easy decision to move from a volunteer board member to become the chief executive officer,” he says. Of this and other like organizations, he says, “I think it is something unique about the United States, that volunteers take on responsibilities that in many countries are filled by the government or some kind of quasi-government organization.” For Scribner, the idea of giving back “is tied very strongly to my time at the Academy. The inspiration for that kind of thinking was shaped during my years at Exeter.” “One of the truly gratifying things for me is to see young people who are failing, and who carry with them all the attendant damage to their self-esteem, suddenly have their lives turned around when they have become users of our books. Many go on to achieve extraordinary things as students and citizens.” —Julie Quinn |
