By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

    W&L’s Shepherd Poverty Program is becoming a model for the nation.

    One in five students at the university in Lexington, which certainly has its share of rich kids, studies poverty.

    Harlan Beckley, a religious studies professor when he founded the program more than a decade ago, became concerned about the growing gap in this country between rich and poor.
    W&L’s poverty program has caught the eye of U.S. Sen. John Warner and of fellow Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who intend to secure grants for the program and to help create a poverty studies consortium of 10 universities across the country along the lines of the Shephard Program model.

    This small school in Lexington has a wonderfully long reach. Its 2008 graduates, who took their degrees Thursday, are a wonderful class of young men and women who value and practice civility, know a thing or two about honor and intend to do something about poverty.