UW News

January 17, 2008

Ex-Oregon State staffers to head equal opportunity, counseling center

The Oregon State University football team may have beaten the Huskies this year, but during the same football season, OSU lost two of its talented staffers to the UW. Prudence Miles joined the University in November as the director of equal opportunity and affirmative action, while her partner, Ellen Taylor, followed in December as head of the counseling center.

For both women, the move has meant expanding responsibilities in a familiar area. Miles was the assistant director of equal opportunity and affirmative action at Oregon State. And although Taylor’s job at OSU was the same as it will be here — directing the counseling center — she sees her new job as a challenge because the UW has about twice as many students enrolled and is located in an urban area.

That this move happened came as something of a surprise to both Miles and Taylor, who say they weren’t really looking for new jobs. But when former UW Counseling Center Director Kathryn Hamilton announced her intention to leave, Taylor learned of the impending opening and “it sort of sung to me. Some of that was on a gut instinct level and I can’t even tell you all the pieces of the formula that led me to say yes,” she said.

Miles then began looking for a Seattle job, and was pleasantly surprised to find the opening in equal opportunity and affirmative action. “I’m not the sort who usually believes in ‘meant to be,’ but it felt meant to be,” she said.

Miles heads up an office whose primary responsibility is to ensure that the University is in compliance with the law and spirit of equal opportunity and affirmative action. “We’re required to do an affirmative action plan every year, so I’m the person who will be compiling and writing that plan,” she said. “The federal government wants to know all about our hiring and if we’re getting a diverse workforce.”

Washington, Miles said, has some challenges because of Initiative 200, which prohibits the state from using race or ethnicity in deciding whom to hire, but the University is still required to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to apply and that it doesn’t have any policies or procedures — whether formal or informal — that would exclude certain people from the workforce.

“One of the things I’m hoping to do in pursuing this goal is to work with hiring departments and with search committees,” Miles said.

Miles’ interest in equal opportunity dates back to her student days at WSU in the 1970s, when she was on the field hockey team. “In those days, the women paid for a lot of their own equipment and there were no scholarships for them,” she said. “So I did some research comparing men’s facilities to women’s.”

That research was later used by women athletes at WSU who sued the university under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination in education.

In Corvallis, Miles worked for the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence, and out of that came a couple of years on the volunteer City Council. During her term on the council, a civil rights ordinance was passed and the position of city ombudsperson was created to handle complaints. Miles held that position for five years, followed by a couple of years doing human rights investigations in Salem before joining OSU.

At OSU, Miles had a major role in grievance investigations, which won’t be part of her UW responsibilities. But she also was involved in preparing the affirmative action plan, just as she will be here. She’ll also be getting a completely new experience when the University undergoes a Title IX compliance review by the Department of Energy.

“I think we’re going to be the second institution in the nation to have one of these academic reviews,” Miles said.

However, the UW wasn’t singled out because of any suspected wrongdoing; such reviews are now part of a new congressional mandate directed to the Department of Energy. “The review team will be looking to see that we are treating women no less favorably than men,” Miles said. She said she’s been plunged into information gathering for the visiting reviewers.

Taylor, meanwhile, is learning the ins and outs of the UW Counseling Center, a unit whose mission is to support students emotionally. “It’s a place students can go when they’re overwhelmed, when things in their personal life are interfering with their ability to succeed,” Taylor said. “It’s a place where they can talk those things through, do some problem solving, develop some coping skills and get back on track. Getting back on track is a phrase I’m fond of because I think that’s a lot of what we do. We help students who are struggling get back on track.”

But, Taylor adds, the center is involved in education and prevention as well as treatment. “It’s really important that we educate the whole campus about mental health issues, about coping skills,” she said.

Taylor knows a lot about college campuses, having spent most of her life on one. “My father was a faculty member at a small college in central Florida, so I was literally almost born on a college campus and the truth is I’ve been on one ever since,” she said.

Her undergraduate degree is from Stetson University in Florida, and she followed that up with master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois, both in clinical psychology. After an internship at the University of Iowa, she spent three years at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh before moving to Oregon State.

She had never been in Oregon before the job interview, Taylor said, but she immediately fell In love with the Pacific Northwest and feels at home here. She spent 13 years at OSU — first as a counselor, then as clinical director and finally director.

Now she finds herself in a similar position at a larger school. “I love being director of a counseling center, and taking that on at a place that’s larger, that’s in an urban setting where there’s so much going on felt like a real challenge for me,” Taylor said.

One less well-known role the counseling center staff plays that Taylor wants to publicize is that of consultant. Faculty and staff who encounter students with serious problems and don’t know how to respond can contact the center for consultation.

“I’m often struck by the fact that people are concerned and they just don’t know what to say,” Taylor said. “They think, ‘This person is clearly off track and they’re struggling and I don’t know how to talk to them.’ What we can do is help them find the words so they can express care to that student.”

Ultimately, that kind of care can sometimes help prevent violent situations like the one at Virginia Tech last spring.

“Bad situations can happen anywhere,” Taylor cautions. “But I expect to be really involved in working to enhance the University’s safety net — working with SafeCampus, working with the violence prevention team, working with the consultation and assessment team that’s relatively newly developed, and making sure we have systems and procedures in place that can ensure that students who need our attention get it. I lead with let’s support students, and if we support students, and we do the best we can at that, that’s a pretty big step toward being successful at making it a safe campus.”