Kerrita Mayfield ‘93 has been an educator for her entire professional life. Her career path started with teaching high school and led her through opening a school and teaching at the college and university level. She has come full circle and today teaches middle school in Montague, Mass.
Simeon Stolzberg ‘92 has worked in public education in a variety of capacities, including policy and governance as well as a teacher, principal and charter school founder. Out of college he worked at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, DC, and evaluated federal education programs. He taught high school history in public schools in DC, started a charter school in Massachusetts, and served as a middle school principal in Brooklyn and a charter school authorizer. Today he’s an education consultant based in New York evaluating existing schools and helping start new ones.
Kerrita and Simeon met at Williams in the early 1990s through anti-racism activism.
Illustrations by Angela Hsieh
I remember that we did a lot of National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) work together. We were doing trainings for faculty, staff, and students. By the time I graduated we had trained all the students and any faculty and staff who wanted it on anti-racism. Is that your recollection?
Yeah, there was a new multicultural center at the college.
Led by Nura Dualeh, also an alum!
The Multicultural center helped us start an orientation program for new students. The program challenged freshmen to start talking about race and identity basically the first day of school. It was a fairly provocative model starting some really challenging conversations right off the bat.
It was powerful stuff. I’m smiling now because I remember both how contentious it was and how powerful it was for me. I have to admit you were my first brain crush—the first person where I thought, “Oooo I like this person’s brain.” I was happy to meet another brain that was problematizing the same way as I was.
It took us a couple of years to build out the training and orientation and get buy-in from the administration. We started small and then began applying it to larger and larger groups.
Nura started taking us to conferences and we could connect with the wider community of people who were engaging in bridge-building and peace work.
There were a bunch of issues, apartheid, and hiring issues, and a hunger strike to try to get more Latino professors.
And the march in response to the Rodney King verdict. We were part of a small group who planned this 26-mile march between campus and the county seat in Pittsfield. We basically closed the campus down because by the time of the march there were a couple hundred students I think?
I think it was more than that. I remember filling the rest stop down on Route 7.
It was a significant effort, we had to bus all the students back so there were lots of logistics and it happened very fast. I remember being in the BSU when the verdict came down and we were all stunned and thought: “What are we going to do?” and “Who are our allies?” And within two weeks we had the march.
Being on campus felt like such a bubble and with the march it felt like we were speaking to the larger world.
I remember an image of the march was in Jet Magazine! The work with NCBI set me up for a life of inquiry. I’ve been doing peace work and social justice work since I graduated.
We didn’t have the term intersectionality back then but we had a lot of different groups who were coming together. We formed the Minority Coalition to bring all those groups together.
I’m from the rural south and grew up in a segregated town. You were the first Jewish person I had ever known.
The thing about residential college is that you bring all these people together and they all have to learn from each other. I’m still embarrassed about the questions I asked—things that you don’t know about but you want to understand. It was eye-opening. It’s interesting how we both traveled into education. I think we both have thought a lot about how you take the things we learned at Williams into the world of education and learning.
I think of the word germination—how Williams is a progenitor for a lot of my practices or at least a seed that got planted and watered. It was the place where I started to grow and bloom.
The difference from 30 years ago is that I thought we were going to do these workshops and change the world overnight.
Really?
I think i’ve learned that it doesn’t work that way. There are many steps.
I tend to work small and hope big. I think teaching is a long game and doing that kind of work at Williams lets you understand that. The long game is anathema to the current culture but it's an investment.
You can never know how you’re going to affect a kid. So you know, that work with you was the epitome of working with a partner.
I know, right?! Thank you. I've really appreciated that experience - and I've been chasing it ever since
