Who is Tanya Williams?
Documenting how the presence of a new Director of Multicultural Affairs in the late 90s and early 2000s marked a changing perspective on the purpose of diversity education at Southwestern.
In 1992, the first Director of Multicultural Affairs Dr. Gregory Washington left Southwestern after 5 years on campus, 3 of those years spent in this newly developed position. A separate entry contains a more detailed documentation of his contributions to the campus.
In the absence of a director, decisions for the office were conducted by the Minority Presence Committee, coordinating events and maintaining the resources for students put in place during Dr. Washington’s time at SU.
There was a new director hired during the Spring of 1993, Bruce Smail, but his presence was brief as he left SU at the end of that semester. It was almost another 5 years before a new director was hired.
During the Spring of 1997, the Minority Presence Committee’s name was changed to the Diversity Enrichment Committee. The co-coordinators Charmane Higgins and Rebecca Sheller suggested that the name change would more accurately reflect the committee’s efforts towards promoting diversity education across the student body, rather than centering these efforts primarily through the student organizations that represented the marginalized communities on campus.
Before arriving at Southwestern, Williams, originally from Houston Texas, studied at Texas A&M and earned a BA in Journalism and English. During her undergraduate years, she was a member of the A&M chapter of Sigma Phi Lamda, a non-Greek sorority started in 1988 by a group of Christian women at UT Austin that was eventually introduced to Texas A&M, Southwest Texas State University, Texas Tech University and Stephen F Austin State University in the following years. Shortly after Williams started her position at Southwestern, she became the advisor for a new Sigma Phi Lamda chapter introduced to the campus in the Spring of 1998 with 12 founding members.
After completing her undergraduate degree, Williams continued her education at A&M, working towards a Masters in Educational Administration with a specialization in Student Affairs. Graduating in 1996, Williams went on to work at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Despite enjoying her work with the university, she decided to move back to Texas in the Fall of 1997 to be closer to family after finding the job listing for the Director of Multicultural Affairs position at SU.
In an introductory interview with the Megaphone published in October of that year, Williams identified that her goal with the Office of Multicultural Affairs was to focus on this idea of diversity education as people learning to respect those with differences from themselves. This was evident through a multitude of educational events hosted in and out of the classroom that brought together different communities on campus, emphasizing the importance of these conversations on a social, institutional, and societal level.
In the Summer of 2000, Williams taught a course alongside Dr. Maria Lowe, an associate professor in Sociology, where they took a group of students to visit major sites from the Civil Rights Movement. In an article published by the Austin American-Statesman, students talked about how the course revealed a lot of history about the Civil Rights Movement, while highlighting how the impact of that history is felt through those sites in the present. They noted that navigating these sites while recognizing that they represent a relatively recent history shows the importance of continuing to advocate for marginalized communities.
This course was a precursor to a series of events Williams organized over the following semesters titled “Diversity Drives.” She described these off-campus outings as the “intersection between education and entertainment,” where the Office of Multicultural Affairs would sponsor different fun, educational excursions off-campus to attend different cultural events in the Austin area.
During her initial 1997 Megaphone interview, an initiative Williams had mentioned she would like to create was a diversity education library filled with book recommendations from the different advocacy-related student organizations on-campus. This library was unveiled the following year in February, and housed in the living-learning community for international students on the first floor of Mabee Hall. Iterations of this library have been present in different locations across campus even in the years after Williams’ departure from SU, moving from Mabee, to the second floor of the Prothro building, and most recently the JEDI Center on the third floor of the McCombs Campus center.
In the Spring of 2001, Williams left SU to pursue a PhD of Education in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts. Although Williams also organized a variety of more conventional panels and presentations on diversity education during her time at SU, I documented these examples of field-based experiential learning experiences to emphasize their distinctive conception of multicultural affairs as issues that affect all of society, rather than just the minority/marginalized communities they typically represent.
In documenting Williams’ influence on SU, with an emphasis on how her presence was contextualized through the 5-year absence of a Director of Multicultural Affairs, this entry provides an important chapter in SU’s evolving representation of diversity education initiatives, reflecting the broader societal shift in what diversity education meant in the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
Images
