Dr. Williams will take over a college that was once CUNY's flagship, known for turning out renowned graduates like Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Malamud Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, as well as eight Nobel Prize winners. Despite lingering strengths, it is now more often known for the large numbers of students who cannot pass CUNY's placement tests and the state's teacher certification exams. Morale is low.
Finances are strained.
Many longtime professors say they have not had a strong president since Dr. Robert E. Marshak in the 1970's. CUNY's board pressured the college's last president, Dr. Yolanda T. Moses, to resign in 1999, saying that she was not providing the leadership the troubled campus needed. Dr. Williams's job will be to re-establish the college's academic credibility while not shutting out minorities and other disadvantaged students, a difficult challenge. Dr. Williams brings a provocative biography to a campus in Harlem where race has been an open issue since the late 1960's, a time when African-American and Hispanic leaders pressed for an open admissions policy. The son of a white mother who abandoned the family before he was 10 and an alcoholic father who was partly African-American, Dr. Williams grew up in the black housing projects of Muncie, Ind., and worked at multiple jobs to help feed himself and his family before he was a teenager.