One of the pioneers of Duke's most recent push toward diversity has retired from the University, leaving behind a legacy of greater attention to race and employee concerns.
Myrna Adams became vice president for institutional equity after President Nan Keohane formed the Office of Institutional Equity in 1995. She worked on special projects for Executive Vice President Tallman Trask after she stepped down in 2000, and left Duke last September. Adams said she plans to do consulting work for several local organizations in Durham.
"Her legacy to Duke is multi-fold," said current Vice President for Institutional Equity Sally Dickson, who succeeded Adams at OIE. "I think [it includes] clearly Myrna's professionalism and her commitment and passion to issues of equal opportunity, respect for individuals and trying to make Duke a better place for everybody, particularly as it grapples with the issue of race."
The tasks Adams faced in her five years at OIE included defining harassment in Duke's work force and establishing the procedures for the harassment review board, considering how most equitably to lay off employees at the Medical Center and implementing compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"We hadn't developed a University-wide program of meeting the needs of disabled students and employees," Adams said.
Efforts to comply with ADA continue on campus today. The University settled a lawsuit in Feb. 2000 that claimed the campus had not been accessible enough to people with disabilities, and it has been working ever since to ensure that Duke remains accessible to physically-disabled people.
Adams' most challenging role may have been convincing the University community of the importance of having a centralized office for equity.
"We weren't talking about [diversity] and how to get it, how to deal with it," Adams said. "We were struggling with it. We're still struggling with it all over the nation."
Dickson said that when she arrived, the campus had become more sensitive to diversity and providing equality across the board.
"[Adams] told me all about the issues of diversity. [They really manifest themselves in all] types of stuff, when dealing with an institution that has a history," Dickson said. "While some people here will be supportive, there will be challenges."
As a special assistant to Trask, Adams worked on making the Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration a University-wide commemoration and training over 40 employees to serve as mediators in cases that would have otherwise been taken up as grievances. She also led a committee that looked at the challenges Latino workers at Duke faced. That report found Latinos suffered from a language barrier in being promoted and in finding out about benefits.
"The group [was formed] to think about how we could become friendly toward Hispanic employees, such as through courses in English for them, courses in Spanish for other Duke employees, which we have actually started to offer now," Trask said. "[The group also found that Latinos have to deal with several] financial issues, because many of them are undocumented or don't have bank accounts."
Adams came to Duke from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she served as associate chancellor and director of affirmative action programs from 1993-95. Before that, she spent 21 years at the State University of New York on both the Stony Brook and Old Westbury campuses in several roles, including director of admissions, director of counseling services, an official in student affairs, an assistant dean of the graduate school and assistant to the president for affirmative action.
Adams holds a bachelor of arts in Spanish from the University of Illinois, pursued graduate study in Latin American studies at the University of Michigan, earned a master of education degree in counseling psychology at the University of Southern California and a law degree from Hofstra School of Law.
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