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FeedRunning Toward the Future
New DSU president Harry Lee Williams has never stopped moving forward.
(page 5 of 5)
Williams has been networking with movers and shakers across the state, especially his peers and predecessors. He initiated meetings with UD president Patrick Harker and DelTech president Orlando George on their campuses to discuss ways in which they can cooperate. To connect with the history of DSU, Williams and his wife, Dr. Robin S. Williams, invited former president William DeLauder and his wife to dinner at the president’s residence. He has spoken with Sessoms twice and has invited him back to the campus. He has met Mayor Carleton Carey, and he has been out and about in the community, dining, by a perhaps somewhat exaggerated estimate, “at almost every restaurant in town.”
Williams’ already prominent local presence ratcheted up markedly in May, when Mrs. Williams and their 9- and 14-year-old sons moved to the Dover campus. Since becoming provost at DSU, Williams had seen them only on weekends while his wife served as associate dean at North Carolina Central in Durham.
Williams made at least one other trip to North Carolina last year. In May, he went home, back to Sylvia Free Will Baptist Church, where he was the featured speaker for the Men’s Day program. With his mother in the audience, he delivered a moving speech. His theme, as anyone who knows Harry Lee Williams might have predicted, was threefold: faith, family and passion for your work. When he finished, the man who would become the 10th president in the history of Delaware State University got a standing ovation.
