Who is Dr. Gregory Washington?
We should remember the achievements of Southwestern’s first full-time Black faculty member and first Multicultural Affairs Director, while also considering how the roles he played reveal Southwestern’s culture as a PWI.
In the fall of 1986, Southwestern hired its first two African American faculty members: Dr. Felecia Johnson, a part-time Instructor of Music, and Dr. Gregory Washington, an Associate Professor of Philosophy, who was the first full-time African American faculty member. This entry is about Dr. Washington.
Gregory Washington obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Saint Xavier College in 1972 and went on to earn his masters and doctoral degree from Stanford in 1978. After being hired by Southwestern in the Fall of 1986, Washington taught courses in Philosophy for several years before accepting the newly developed position of Director of Multicultural Affairs in 1989. As one of Southwestern’s first African American faculty members, he served as a cultural advisor to students of color regarding general campus involvement, navigating student organizations, and preparing for internships. In an interview with The Megaphone, Washington stated that his role was not just to help students with minority backgrounds, but to help all Southwestern students develop a more diverse perspective on the world through their time in university.
Dr. Washington organized a wide variety of diversity education programs through the Multicultural Center, which addressed topics ranging from issues of race, gender, and nationality within and outside of the campus climate. In his position, Dr. Washington reported to the Dean of Students, so there were programs regarding diversity education hosted for staff and faculty as well as students, an early example of something like the Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity initiatives that we see on campus today.
Multiple interviews Washington took part in with The Megaphone highlight the pride he took in his work as the Director of Multicultural Affairs and student testimonials affirm the ways his various projects aided in improving the Southwestern experience for students of color.
He worked to document the history of integration and the experiences of international students and faculty members at SU. A separate Placing Memory entry details his research on the the story of the Negro School of Fine Arts in collaboration with a former Southwestern professor of history Dr. Martha Mitten Allen, who had been working with students to produce oral histories by people associated with Southwestern and Georgetown.
To help the wider Georgetown community, in the Spring of 1988 Washington developed Operation Achievement (OA), a program initiated to increase the retention rates of the Black and Latino middle school students of the Georgetown Independent School District by hosting events for OA participants on campus, giving them a tangible sense of what college life was like. Separate entries detail the history of Operation Achievement and other programs like it that establish connections between Southwestern and the surrounding school districts for prospective first-generation college students and underprivileged students.
As his position as the Director of Multicultural affairs became more established, Washington shifted from working with Student Life to working more closely with the President’s Office and the Admissions Office with the aim of increasing the racial diversity of Southwestern’s student body.
These efforts to create a diverse educational environment within Southwestern, and provide greater access to education outside of Southwestern, led Washington to achieve a variety of accolades including: the George K, McGuire Award presented by the Saint Xavier College, the Certificate of Recognition by the Allen-Wells Chapter of the American Red Cross for extraordinary personal action while serving on the Board of Directors, the Danforth Associate Award, and a Ford Foundation Fellowship.
Dr. Washington maintained the Director role until he left Southwestern in 1992. While his name is not currently commemorated anywhere on campus, his influence on the campus culture is evident through the various iterations of multicultural and social justice-related events, organizations, and physical campus spaces that have served similar purposes since, such as the current JEDI Center. I chose to place this pin here as Dr. Washington’s office as the Director of Multicultural Affairs was located in The Old Field House.
Without disregarding his success in the Multicultural Affairs Office, Dr. Washington’s position as one of the first black faculty members brought into this position also reflects a dynamic common among faculty and staff of color in diversifying predominantly white institutions (PWIs), where people of color placed in these positions are given extraordinary responsibilities but are not structurally empowered to carry out the changes they determine necessary, often leading to burnout. Where White faculty and staff at PWIs are hired into an institution that is already implicitly welcoming to them, and can focus on the immediate duties of the jobs in their job descriptions, people of color placed in these roles are given the additional invisible labor of building a space of belonging for themselves and the people of color around them while also performing their jobs.
This dynamic is complicated further when we consider the transition Dr. Washington made from being a faculty member to being in a more administrative role, where he continued to do invisible labor to aid his students, yet his primary duties shifted from providing diversity education in the classroom and as a faculty member and later Student Life leader to being expected to use that knowledge to perform the Herculean task of single-handedly enacting institutional change within the faculty and administration to improve the experience of minority students on campus.
Although Washington appears to have thrived in the position of Director of Multicultural Affairs for the years he held it, his time here was short. Dr. Washington’s reason for departing is not publicly known, so we can only speculate about why he left after only 3 years in this position and 5 years at Southwestern. What we do know is that Dr. Washington was hired into a contingent non-tenure-track position from the beginning and that there have been multiple other instances where this type of role has been officially and unofficially placed in the hands of staff and faculty of color since then whose time in those positions was as short as or shorter than Dr. Washington’s, pointing to a structural pattern that many scholars have noted is endemic within diversifying PWIs like Southwestern.
By illustrating the effects of Washington’s contributions to Southwestern in this entry while also showing the challenging dynamics surrounding his role, I pose the following questions: How can Southwestern more effectively commemorate the visible and invisible labor towards diversity education performed by faculty of color in the past? How can Southwestern make systemic structural changes that will better integrate these roles into the culture of Southwestern now and for the future?
