Raising Awareness In 1999, Utah Valley State College invited Jean Van Delinder, an expert on the landmark civil rights case Brown vs. Board of Education, to serve as the keynote speaker for its observation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Impressed by the small institution’s exhaustive itinerary of presentations and seminars, Van Delinder, associate professor of sociology, shared the program with her department head at OSU. When Patricia Bell saw what Utah had done, she showed the program to Earl Mitchell, who was assistant vice president for institutional diversity at the time. “Dr. Mitchell remarked how OSU faculty members were being invited to other schools for Martin Luther King celebrations, and we weren’t doing anything here,” says Van Delinder. “The next year, OSU had a Martin Luther King celebration, and the framework for it was the Utah Valley State program.” A faculty member since 1996, Van Delinder has toiled quietly to improve the status of diversity education at OSU. A one-time coordinator of the AfricanAmerican Studies program, she will serve this fall as inaugural director of Women’s Studies as it makes the transition from certificate to minor degree program. Combining elements of the College of Arts and Sciences’ English, foreign language, history, political science and sociology departments, the program will be headquartered in a new Women’s Studies Center within the sociology department. It has been written that in America, race is never not an issue. The same can be said of gender, according to Van Delinder. “We can’t really talk about women’s issues without talking about race, and we can’t talk about race without considering gender,” she says. “It’s part of our democratic values to believe that we’re all equal, we’re all the same, but the reality is if you’re a person of color or if you’re a woman, you’re going to be treated differently,” Van Delinder says. “The importance of having programs like Women’s Studies and African-American Studies is they remind people — particularly, white people — of their privilege. “We’ve had the civil rights and equal rights movements, legislation, affirmative action, but still, during our day-to-day interactions, racism and sexism are still present, and they’re not going away until people are made aware.” Van Delinder’s interest in minority and women’s issues was stimulated, particularly, during her graduate study at the University of Kansas. While pursuing her master’s, she worked as a freelance researcher for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. “I did a lot of traveling through the South, and talking to people got me interested in why so many risked their lives for the civil rights movement,” Van Delinder says. She subsequently penned her doctoral dissertation on Brown vs. Board of Education, actually five separate anti-segregation lawsuits brought in South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C., as well as Kansas. Her interviews, writings and research on the civil rights struggle in states along the Mason-Dixon Line will be published as a book, Border Campaigns, later this year. Adam Huffer Erika Contreras faculty excellence “We’ve had the civil rights and equal rights movements, legislation, affirmative action, but still, during our day-today interactions, racism and sexism are still present, and they’re not going away until people are made aware.” College of Arts and Sciences
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAxMjk=