March 3, 2025
Ferris State partners with Nobel Peace Center, National Collegiate Honors Program to help veterans tell their stories
Veterans on the Ferris State University campus and in the Big Rapids community will get a chance to tell their stories during the 2025-26 academic year thanks to a new partnership between the university’s honors program and Partners in Peace, a collaboration between National Collegiate Honors Program and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.
The year-long undertaking will result in a collection of those veteran testimonies, written by Ferris State students based on interviews. The project also will culminate in two events, one on campus and the other in the Big Rapids community, where students will discuss what they learned about veterans’ needs and advocate for veterans’ support from both campus administration and from the community at large.
The idea for the project began when Victor Piercey, honors program director at Ferris State University, saw presentations by PiP and came away impressed by the emphasis it has on the connections between local actions and global consequences. That theme, he added, is part of the pillars of honors programming at Ferris State.
"One of the threads we hope to see in our honors programming is an appreciation for the international contexts in which we all find ourselves in the 21st century, and how everything we do, no matter how localized, has the potential to have global consequences," he said. "PiP felt like a fantastic vehicle for this message, and the connection with the Nobel Peace Prize connects students to big ideas with big impact, which is not only exciting, but will provide them with experiences that will benefit them in the workplace and as citizens."
Having been inspired, Piercey then had to get to work. The application process to earn a PiP designation is extensive, Piercey said, including a detailed plan both for implementation and assessment, along with a timeline. It also included drawing connections between what Ferris was proposing and the Partners in Peace program.
Last month Piercey found out that the veterans project proposal has been accepted by PiP.
"I was quite excited," he said. "While we could have carried out the project without the official endorsement, the opportunity for our students to contribute to peace discourse and be recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is truly exciting and inspiring."
Piercey said that PiP wants students to apply the work of the most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner to a local problem, emphasizing local efforts with global consequences. The 2024 winner was a Japanese organization called Nihon Hidankyo, recognized for its work for nuclear disarmament, including telling the stories of survivors of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"The use of storytelling as a method of advocacy struck me," Piercey said. "When I thought about local groups on our campus and surrounding communities who could benefit from this approach, I immediately thought of veterans. We have a significant population of veterans both in Ferris’ student body and in the Big Rapids community."
Piercey, a Kalamazoo native, said he’s also excited that the project is inherently interdisciplinary, a trait he built into his program when he was a university student, attending Michigan State with an eye toward a career in law. Indeed, after graduating from MSU in 1997, he went on to earn his law degree in 2000 at Columbia University in New York City, where he settled down and began practicing. But being a lawyer, he soon discovered, wasn't for him.
"I discovered that the work made me miserable," he recalled. "The work felt alienating and was nothing I was passionate about." Living and working in New York City on 9/11 was a wake-up call. "After that, I decided not to wait to make a career change," he said. "I remembered how much I loved the math classes I took in college and finally settled on becoming a mathematician."
He went on to do a master's degree in mathematics at MUS and then a Phd at Arizona. His first job after graduating in 2012 was at Ferris State, where he has been ever since. It's been the right fit for him, he added.
"Many of Ferris’ students, including our honors students, come from underprivileged and underserved backgrounds," he said. "I came to Ferris to create exciting opportunities for those students to find their voice, both their mathematical voices and otherwise."
And he can't wait, he said, to have his Ferris students help veterans find their voices.