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NEWS
A Name for Themselves
UW trans students can now choose their preferred names on diplomas, thanks to the efforts of a graduate student
By Chris Talbott
UW SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
Vern Harner spent a lot of time and emotional energy fighting to get their chosen name on their diploma at their previous school before heading to the University of Washington to begin a social welfare doctorate. Given the UW’s reputation as an LGBTQIA+-friendly environment, Harner didn’t expect to have to do it all over again as they neared graduation in Seattle.
After asking around, Harner found that many fellow trans people had asked the same question: Why can’t I have my chosen name on my diploma? “A lot of folks were surprised that this was still a battle that had to be fought in 2021,” Harner says. “We’re hearing from places like UDub that they value diversity, they value what I bring as a trans person doing trans work. But then they won’t put my name on the diploma? Those things are at odds, right?”
University Registrar Helen Garrett agreed with Harner and their list of reasons the policy should be changed—individual preference, professional clarity and personal safety among them. When she came to the UW in 2016, Garrett had overseen the University’s adoption of a preferred-name practice—students can choose whatever names they would like on their university records.
She was sympathetic to the idea. But UW policy required a legal name on diplomas, and Garrett didn’t have the power to change that. The decision rested with the faculty senate.
Garrett outlined steps the senate needed to take to change the policy permanently. Harner, who completed their degree last spring and is now an assistant professor of social work at UW Tacoma, decided to make sure it happened.
Armed with a petition containing nearly 32,000 signatures and with support from UAW 4121, the union of academic student employees and postdocs, Harner contacted faculty senate leaders. To them, in retrospect, the request seemed obvious. “Of course, you should be able to put whatever name you want on your diploma,” says Chris Laws, former faculty senate chair. “You work hard for that diploma and it’s yours.”
Obvious or not, the process took time. First, there were new procedures to work out with the registrar. Then there was a process of approval from the senate and the provost’s office. Graduates receiving diplomas in September 2021 were the first to have the option to use their preferred names. It took a few steps, but trans students will not have to fight this fight again. “The moral of the story,” Garrett says, “is if you want to impact change, you’ll want to find what are the systems and who is in charge, and that’s exactly what happened here. This is a good lesson for any student to learn. Following through on those processes will give hope to other students.”
“This is a real testament to how well shared governance works at the University of Washington,” Laws says. “People sometimes like to talk about how the governance system is clunky or doesn’t work. It does work. And this is a very clear example of how students and faculty and administration came together to solve problems in a very effective way.”
Harner hopes this process will make clear that there is still work to do to make all students feel welcome and hopes that University leadership will seek out other disconnects. “I know that to some extent there is an awareness of these issues there,” they say. “But I’d like for folks in power across campus to make these changes before a student has to become a squeaky wheel.”
While completing their PhD in social welfare, Vern Harner led the effort to change University policy for names on diplomas. Now it is possible for trans students to have diplomas reflecting their chosen names. Harner recently joined the faculty as an assistant professor of social work at UW Tacoma.
NEWS BRIEFS
MCELROY HONORED
Professor Emerita Colleen McElroy, ’73, was recently honored by the College of Arts & Sciences. Her name now graces the main conference room in the dean’s office in her honor.
McElroy, a mentor and inspiration to many students, earned her doctorate in education at the UW. Her focus was ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions. She also started writing poetry in graduate school. Early in her UW career, she supervised freshman composition in the Equal Opportunity Program and taught poetry classes, which eventually became a fulltime creative writing position in the English department. In 1983, McElroy became the first African American woman to be made a full professor at the UW. She is the author of 12 books, including “Queen of the Ebony Isles,” which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
A WELCOME TO NEW STUDENTS
The UW welcomed one of its largest and most diverse incoming classes in late September at the New Student Convocation at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. The ceremony set attendance records with more than 7,500 students, family and friends.
The incoming class at the main campus is estimated to top out at around 7,250 students, with nearly 15% being from underrepresented minority groups and 23% first generation. An additional 1,150 transfer students are expected to arrive this fall, about 80% of whom will be from Washington community colleges. Official numbers will be reported later in the quarter.
UW Bothell and UW Tacoma also welcome their incoming classes, with about 980 and 600 freshmen and about 510 and 640 transfer students expected, respectively.
A New Era for Campus Security
The UW’s new police chief brings experience and insight
By Hannelore Sudermann
The UW’s new police chief, Craig Wilson, is an alum, a Navy veteran, a career UW police officer and a parent. He brings all of it to the job as the UW’s lead public safety officer.
He takes the helm at a time when the University—with the help of students, faculty and staff—has been working to improve and transform safety school-wide. In September, the University announced a new Campus & Community Safety division that brings together SafeCampus (a unit that helps students, faculty and staff prevent violence), the UW Police Department and UW Emergency Management. The new holistic approach is a step in an ongoing process to reimagine safety—includ-
ing individual wellbeing, crime prevention, crisis response and unarmed interventions.
Wilson, ’94, hails from Alabama and served aboard the USS Long Beach, a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. The Navy brought him to the Northwest and “I immediately fell in love,” he says.
After his tour of duty, he enrolled at the UW to pursue a degree in law, society and justice. He then pursued his MS in law and justice at Central Washington University.
After graduate school, Wilson joined the department. “The rest is history,” he says. For the past 26 years, he has climbed the ranks from patrol officer to deputy chief. In January, Wilson was tasked with leading the department while a national search for a permanent chief took place. The best choice was already on campus. In late July, the announcement of Wilson’s promotion to chief cited his “track record of community collaboration and trust.”
The UW Police Department is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies and the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. The officers are trained in law enforcement, critical incident management and customer service.
“When you look at our size and the totality of the community that we represent, it is the size of a city,” says Wilson. “However, it is kind of a different type of policing we do at the UW.” The department works with students, faculty and staff to provide a safe and secure environment where the community can focus on learning and research.
The UW is also engaging with the City of Seattle, Seattle Police and the U District Partnership to prevent violence near campus. Events in early October, including a shooting on The Ave where four students were injured, prompted the University to deploy a trained (not armed) security patrol on Friday and Saturday nights.
In recent years, the UWPD has faced scrutiny with both internal challenges and national events—including the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis—exposing a widespread distrust for law enforcement. Student groups called for defunding the department and disarming the officers.
The UW administration began working in earnest with faculty, staff and students to explore long-term changes in public safety work as the country began reckoning with the history of policing and the spread of expectations facing officers.
Police and other safety staff are focusing on how to respond to incidents in ways that respect individuals and help them feel safer. Under Wilson’s leadership, UWPD continues to work with campus groups on determining how UWPD’s officers, Campus Safety Responders and security guards help achieve safety and the sense of safety, and help the campus thrive.
There are more changes ahead, Wilson says. “We want to make sure the community has a police department that is here to represent everyone and here to protect everyone,” he says. “It’s a new era of public safety on campus.”
The UW's new police chief, Craig Wilson, has served 26 years in the department.
UWPD
Lawyer, Educator, Innovator
The UW’s new law dean wants to infuse social justice and civil rights throughout the law school curriculum
By Chris Talbott
GREG OLSEN/UW SCHOOL OF LAW
In late summer, Tamara Lawson started work as the Toni Rembe Dean and professor at the University of Washington School of Law. The UW’s new law dean, Tamara Lawson, brings both a record of academic and of fundraising success and real-world experience. Her scholarly work includes examining the trials and outcomes of the Trayvon Martin and George Floyd cases. Her expertise includes enforcement inequality in crimes against women and police brutality. She is also passionate about mainstreaming civil rights in law school curriculum.
“She’s amazing—obviously,” says law student Annalyse Harris. When Harris, then at St. Thomas, heard Lawson was headed for the UW, she transferred to follow her. “She is so intellectual. She encompasses so much more than just education. She advances equality and justice and always promotes an academic and innovative atmosphere. And she’s so personable. People love her.”
As dean at St. Thomas University in Florida she turned a financial deficit into a surplus, boosted enrollment by almost 40% and secured a $10 million donation, the largest in St. Thomas history. She also oversaw the retooling of the curriculum at the College of Law and founded the Benjamin L. Crump Center for Social Justice. During her 18-year tenure at the school, she taught courses in criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence and seminars on race and the law, twice earning professor-of-the-year honors.
Lawson was born in Los Angeles and grew up in California. She attended Claremont McKenna College and the University of San Francisco School of Law. Her work as a Clark County deputy district attorney in Las Vegas included the special victim’s unit for domestic violence. She also argued cases before the Nevada Su-
preme Court. Not long after completing a Master of Laws degree from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2003, she joined the St. Thomas faculty.
As Lawson started her new job at the UW this fall, she spent her first few weeks building relationships. “Dean Lawson is quickly establishing herself as an engaged and visible leader,” says Provost Mark Richards. “She has met with members of the Washington State Supreme Court, UW faculty, staff and student leaders. In addition to exploring a philanthropic campaign to secure resources for scholarships, she plans to share her expertise with students by teaching a course on race and the law.”
Lawson sees UW law as a “good bones, good foundation” school with a community that wants to expand its diversity work. “As they say in the international world,” Lawson says, “there’s a coalition of the willing. And we want to work together for this larger goal—the goal being the best public law school measured by global impact and the programs that we have.”
The school’s current Asian and Indian law programs are great strengths, and the Ph.D. program is “unique in the country,” she says. There are other natural partners in the community for future growth in teaching and scholarship, she adds. “Our proximity to Asia and the benefit of technology right here in our backyard, these things are synergies that we have to maximize for the benefit of our students.”
Lawson has written and lectured exten-
sively on legal issues, tackling troubling aspects of our legal system like police brutality, prosecutorial bias and stand-yourground laws. Her pieces blend easily identifiable cultural references with tricky legal concepts. In one study, she looked at how TV shows like “CSI” are harming the criminal jury process.
She points to prosecutorial discretion as a problem in a legal system that requires lawyers to be experts in increasingly complex areas like race and civil rights. She has written about the legal cases surrounding the deaths of Martin and Floyd, whose killers received very different legal outcomes. Martin’s killer was exonerated, while Floyd’s will spend decades in prison.
“Not only do you have to deal with your objective facts, you also have to as an effective litigator deal with what’s truly on the mind of the jurors when they go in their room and deliberate,” Lawson says. “And so we saw a very different version when we saw the prosecution of Derek Chauvin for the Floyd allegation of murder.”
These sorts of distinctions are more obvious to those who have a varied law school experience, she says. Many American law students receive little or no training in the areas of race and social justice. Lawson would like to see that sort of coursework woven throughout the UW’s curricular tapestry.
“I do know that the faculty is very aware of the importance of these issues, as well as the University,” Lawson says. “The DEI work of the University of Washington is first class or model setting, I would say. And it’s part of what drew me to this particular school, because there’s a desire to impact justice.”
Lawson also blends an entrepreneurial background with her social justice and academic work. Her skills in negotiation and networking helped her connect Benjamin Crump, the prominent civil rights attorney who represented the Floyd family, with St. Thomas. He had no previous ties to the school, but Lawson engaged him in supporting a social justice center to train the next generation of social justice legal experts.
She plans to build similar relationships at the UW. “It’s important that we look at not only our alumni base and our existing donors to reinvigorate them and engage them, but we also need to bring in new partners and to make the case as to why it’s important that they should partner with us,” Lawson says. “I bring that entrepreneurial spirit to being a dean. And I think I’m unique among my peers, that I not only embrace the teaching, embrace the scholarship, but embrace the going concern of this business enterprise that we have for the benefit of the students.” Botanical gardens have historically been exclusive spaces. The University of Washington is working to change that starting with its own gardens—the Washington Park Arboretum and the Center for Urban Horticulture.
Many botanical gardens around the world originated as private spaces for predominantly white and wealthy individuals, says Christina Owen, director of the UW Botanic Gardens. And building the collections often involved biopiracy and replacing the plants’ Indigenous names with scientific names that often referenced the collector, she says.
“There’s a history of colonialism,” Owen says. “That is the bedrock on which we’re standing. Plants and collections that exist throughout the world were collected in ways that did not honor the people and did not honor the plants themselves.” Along with the land and the plants, this legacy has come with the many gardens that were gifted to cities and universities.
The UW's gardens have plants from around the world. In the Pacific Connections Garden in the Washington Park Arboretum, for example, visitors can view plants collected from Cascadia, Australia, China, Chile and New Zealand. “It’s important to be intentional and thoughtful about these plants and places, how they’re collected and grown and the meaning to the people that are from there,” Owen says.
How to address that and make the gardens more inclusive is the challenge for the University’s Botanic Gardens department. When Owen came to the UW in 2021, the department's equity and justice committee was creating a speaker series to explore how public gardens can meet the needs of diverse local communities. Owen is building out this effort to center equity and social justice work, increase the diversity of staff and enhance the culture of support for employees of color.
The recent speaker series addressed topics like engaging with local Indigenous communities, developing youth leadership, creating job-training programs and finding opportunities for public land to support urban food systems and BIPOC communities. It culminated in September with a town hall to explore a new vision for how public gardens can serve their communities.
“We’re learning a lot about the priorities of the communities that we want to connect with,” says Jessica Farmer, the adulteducation supervisor for the gardens. Understanding and responding to those priorities will help build relationships, she adds.
In early October, the outreach continued with the Urban Forest Symposium, which brought tribal leaders and tribal ecologists together with UW scientists and state resource managers. This year’s event, which was held at —Intellectual House, focused on bridging the gap between tribal practices and local government.
“We’re looking at Indigenous people’s access to and role in the management of the local urban forests,” Farmer says. “We’re looking at an identity shift for our organization, but we need to hear from others in the community and not have it be an insular conversation.”
Uprooting Exclusivity
The UW Botanic Gardens team seeks to better serve communities
By Lauren Kirschman
The UW Botanic Gardens are centers for horticultural research and conservation. Around 600,000 people visit each year. Visitors can access the arboretum via canoe, like the one below from the campus Waterfront Activities Center.
UW PHOTO
