Quinton Williams

Zierler:

It is March 9th, 2020. This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is my great pleasure to be here with Professor Quinton Williams, department chair and professor of physics at Howard University. And we are here in his office. It is a great pleasure to be with you today, Professor Williams.

Williams:

Nice being with you also, David.

Zierler:

OK, so, we're going to get started right at the beginning. Tell me about your childhood, your family, your place of birth. Just start with your earliest memory, and we'll go from there.

Williams:

OK, sure. I was born in Indianola, Mississippi—that’s deep in the Mississippi Delta—to a family of 11 children, my mother and father.

Zierler:

Wow. Where were you in that?

Williams:

I'm number ten out of 11. And I guess the most favorite son out of my hometown is B.B. King.

Zierler:

Oh, wow!

Williams:

So it’s definitely a Blues town type of a deal. Within my family, I would say—there are four boys and seven girls. And most of the boys went into the sciences.

Zierler:

Really!

Williams:

Yes. Most of them did. So I'm the youngest son. But my older siblings, my older brothers, the oldest is a PhD research chemist who recently retired—

Zierler:

Where was he?

Williams:

From Corning, Incorporated.

Zierler:

Upstate New York?

Williams:

Upstate New York. The next oldest brother is also a physicist slash electrical engineer, so his PhD is in electrical engineering but he has a master’s in physics as well. And he is still actually employed with Corning, Incorporated, in upstate New York. And then the brother ahead of me went into the ministry. So he went to the military, then went into the ministry. So he didn't go into the sciences.

Zierler:

Sisters? Any sisters in the sciences?

Williams:

None of the sisters went into the sciences. They became teachers, and I have one that has her degree is in accounting, so she’s into logistics with the military. Others are affiliated with the educational system. One’s retired with a Masters in Social Work from the Univ. of Alabama.

Zierler:

So it sounds like education was really emphasized in your family growing up.

Williams:

It was. Believe it or not, my parents—my father had a—what was it, a third-grade education. My father was born like in either 1910 or 1911.

Zierler:

Oh, so he was older when he had you?

Williams:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s deceased now. Passed away in 1987, my freshman year in college. And my mother, has an interesting story. She only went up to the tenth grade, and as a part of her job as a teaching assistant with Head Start, they required everyone to go back to school at some point. So she was in her fifties when she went back—

Zierler:

Oh, wow.

Williams:

—completed her GED and did a two-year degree, an associate degree, all in her fifties. So that was motivation. With 11 children! So that was motivation to say, “Hey—”

Zierler:

So she still had kids in the house at that time.

Williams:

She still had kids in the house—myself and my younger sister, at the time. So that was very motivational to see her doing that. Very motivational.

Zierler:

Now looking at your older brothers, do you feel like going into the sciences was something that you were developing even in grade school, junior high?

Williams:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In elementary school, I can [laugh] remember one of my older brothers was in college at Jackson State University. Most of my siblings attended Jackson State. All of the boys did. Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. And my brother, Greg, was majoring in physics there. And I remember him coming back home -- I was in middle school at the time -- and he was trying to show me some math, and the math that he was trying to show me was some calculus. It was kind of a little tough getting it. He said, “Well, I know a place that can help you think properly.” So he didn't say, “I know a place you can go get a college degree.” He said, “I know a place that can help you think properly.” And he was talking about Jackson State. So that was also very motivational me, as he was trying to show me how to do calculus—you know, take derivatives—in middle school. So he left and graduated and went to MIT and did a master’s in physics there before going on to Cornell to get his doctorate in electrical engineering.

Zierler:

And how many years behind were you?

Williams:

We're ten years apart.

Zierler:

So all the way from middle school, you could see where his career was headed.

Williams:

I could see it, but of course it was our oldest brother, the chemist, who I think motivated us to go into the sciences. Because you always want to be like your older sibling as well. And again he started at Jackson State in chemistry and then he did his master’s at Yale in chemistry and then went on to do his PhD in chemistry.

Zierler:

A bunch of slouches you guys are, let me tell you! [laugh]

Williams:

—yeah, yeah, yeah—out in California at the University of California in Riverside. So all of that plays a part of motivating you to want to do.

Zierler:

So you must have had a pretty good math and science education in middle school and high school. You must have had pretty solid teachers.

Williams:

I think that the teachers were solid and committed at the time—can’t say much about now [laugh]—when you look at the rankings of the school. But there were a lot of students who graduated who have gone on to some fantastic careers as doctors, surgeons, lawyers, and you name it, that came out of Gentry High School in Indianola, Mississippi. It is just unbelievable. But it was just the commitment, I think, of the faculty who poured what they had in themselves into the students. And of course, it was a segregated city at the time, where the Black students went to the public high school, and typically the white students went to the Academy. There was one called Indianola Academy. So deep down south, that type of a system was set up where there were—those in the community on the other side of the track that you grew up on didn't necessarily want their children to attend the public school with the African Americans.

Zierler:

But with your brothers, you never felt like that was a limiting factor for you in terms of entering the sciences?

Williams:

I never did. I never did. And those messages that resonate with me came from them. And also even one of my faculty mentors from undergraduate school, Dr. Kunal Ghosh, who’s Indian, said—well, at the time, he was saying—it’s probably still relevant today [laugh]—as an African American, you have to work twice as hard to get ahead. So it was always that message resonating. You know, just be the best at whatever it is that you do.

Zierler:

And that lit a fire under you?

Williams:

Absolutely. Among a lot of other things. Yeah.

Zierler:

So you entered Jackson State—what year is this now?

Williams:

This was 1986.

Zierler:

OK, 1986. And are you a declared physics major from the beginning?

Williams:

From the jumpstart, declared a physics major.

Zierler:

Wow, OK.

Williams:

The interesting story there was that I wanted to major in engineering. I wanted to be an engineer but Jackson State didn't have an engineering program or an engineering school. But I also played the saxophone.

Zierler:

Really! OK.

Williams:

So I wanted to march in the band, be in the jazz band and all of that. So Jackson State has this wonderful marching band called the Sonic Boom of the South, and my brother that kind of told me about going to school there, said, “When you go to graduate school, you can always change into engineering after you finish your physics degree.”

Zierler:

Meaning like physics is foundational and then you can take that wherever you want.

Williams:

Absolutely. And so, of course, after getting there and taking a physics course and going to a conference—the National Conference of Black Physics Students, I was hooked. NCBPS was founded by this group of students from MIT and Harvard at the time, who came down and scoured the country to find African American students who were in physics to bring them to the conference. At the NCBPS conference, you met other people who looked like you who were studying physics. There’s not that many, but you met a group. And after going to that conference and attending classes, I was like, “No, I'm going to stay in physics. This is where I want to be, because I have to prove something to myself -- that I can do it. And it will also hopefully serve as an example to others that they can do it as well.”

Zierler:

Beautiful. Really nice. So you graduate with a bachelor’s in physics.

Williams:

Bachelor’s in physics -- right.

Zierler:

And did you have any faculty members that you were close with there who encouraged you, developed you, that kind of thing?

Williams:

I did. I would say Dr. Ghosh, of course, was there. And there was another gentleman, Dr. Lonzy Lewis who retired from JSU and went on to Clark-Atlanta University. He was an atmospheric physicist or an atmospheric scientist. He was the department chair and he would talk to me from time to time. He probably didn't know that he was mentoring me, but he was. I’d pick up little gems from him. I have a number of mentors who probably don’t even realize that they are mentors of mine. But there at Jackson State, those two really stand out on the science side. I had another facet of me, this music side, as well, too. In that realm, I had Dr. Russell Thomas, Junior, who’s still over the Jazz Ensemble there. Great ensemble, great guy, just about life and in general. And I always walked that parallel path between physics and music. He was very influential in my development, as well.

Zierler:

Now you were exposed to all branches of physics as an undergraduate? You took classes across the board?

Williams:

I took classes across the board, and I did a lot of internships as well, too. Going to Corning. So, in visiting Corning, I went in with my oldest brother, who was just showing me where he worked at his labs.

Zierler:

And that’s really applied physics?

Williams:

It really is, but eventually I moved out of chemistry into physics, light guide research which was what got me into optics. But in visiting him, met his manager, Robert “Bob” McNally who passed away a few years ago. And as Dr. McNally was speaking to me, I guess, of course, I'm young and the words—“Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and those sorts of things came out of my mouth as he was speaking to me. He said, “He is so mannerable. I think that we should bring him in as a summer intern.” And that opened the door for me to get an internship. It was just by happenstance. And so I started working with him and then moved out to working with other scientists, and moved into the light guide group, and that’s how I got into optics and photonics.

Zierler:

We'll talk about this later on, but it seems to me that you have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit in your career as well, and I wonder if that developed at Corning where you first realized, “Oh, I can get a really good job out of this field of study.”

Williams:

I would say that working on the industrial side of things definitely planted the seeds. It never entered my mind that I wanted to go into academia at any point until I was much older and later in life. So my plan was, go to school, get a PhD, forget a postdoc, go into industry. The industry would serve as my postdoc. Do that and eventually start a business and just make it that way. And then upon close to retiring, go to academia. But you know, life always has a way of changing your plans.

Zierler:

All right, so senior year, is there a thesis that you're doing, or it’s just completing the coursework?

Williams:

No, it’s just completing the coursework.

Zierler:

And at that moment, you're thinking you're going to go straight to Georgia Tech.

Williams:

Georgia Tech was not the only place. I applied to several other institutions. As a consequence of going to the National Conference of Black Physics Students, they taught us and trained us and exposed us to places like MIT and Stanford and all these other places, which were at the time the largest producers, I would say, of Blacks in physics. But I paid a visit, actually, to Cornell, visiting my brother who was in grad school, but also to Georgia Tech. And when I went to Georgia Tech, that’s where I met my thesis advisor, on that visit.

Zierler:

Who’s that?

Williams:

That’s Dr. Rajarshi Roy. He’s now a professor at University of Maryland in College Park. But Raj introduced me to his graduate students. We all went out to dinner. He showed me a good time around his laboratory. He was doing some very fascinating work—four-wave mixing, also non-linear dynamics type research. And that really caught me. It attracted my attention enough to say, “OK, I feel comfortable with this institution.” And particularly with him and his research group.

Zierler:

What about it caught you?

Williams:

It was the fact that he made it seem so welcoming, so warm. And the fact that, OK, Atlanta has a high predominance of African Americans around the city, so there were a lot of people at least in the city that looked like myself; not necessarily at Georgia Tech, of course.

Zierler:

Were there other Black students in the program with you?

Williams:

That’s a good point. When I came in, there was one African American female student who was a grad student there at the time. She wasn’t doing so well that first year. Almost ready to be put out of the program. They accepted four African Americans in that one cohort that I came in. She, along with us four other African Americans, made a cohort of five. Then she joined the cohort and we all worked together, and all of us with the exception of one finished our PhD. She finished at the top of her class. She went from—[laugh] and I remember the department chair saying, “You're almost at the bottom of the class.” He was talking to Zelda Gills. “You were almost at the bottom of the class, so how is it that you changed and made it to the very top?” Because she was knocking out exams and making the highest scores on them. She said, “Well, simply because I have people to work with now.” She was alone and by herself initially. So there was power in having a core group of individuals.

Zierler:

You mean alone—racially alone?

Williams:

Racially. In the program. And in the department, there were no, and there still are no African American faculty members in physics. There have never been.

Zierler:

At Georgia Tech.

Williams:

At Georgia Tech, right. Even until this day, 2020. But there were individuals there who were committed to making something happen, and in particular, Dr. Henry Valk, who was department chair, eventually, but he has since passed on. But he was instrumental in terms of bringing that cohort together and making it happen.

Zierler:

Now was being in this group—was that important to the dissertation you eventually developed, or were those sort of two separate tracks?

Williams:

That was two separate tracks, because we all worked with different thesis advisors. One student did not finish his PhD there—he passed his PhD comprehensive exam in physics, went to engineering, passed it in electrical engineering, and said, “Well, I'm kind of tired of this” and decided to go to Harvard to get an MBA. He is brilliant.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

So he started working as a quantitative analyst out there, and just—super smart guy. But no, all of us worked on completely different research projects and most of us were in completely different research groups with different professors. However, Zelda and I finished our Ph.D.s with Prof. Raj Roy.

Zierler:

So what was it that you were collaborating on?

Williams:

We were in classes together. We took our core courses together. So you had classmates to study with, which makes all the difference in the world. You're not working in a vacuum. Because when it’s time to do problem sets in grad school, that’s a lot of information coming at you at one time, so it helped to have classmates that you really could work with and feel comfortable with. And we tried to integrate others into the group, or we tried to integrate ourselves into other groups, but it just wasn’t working out that way. But when we came together, Boom! That made all the difference in the world.

Zierler:

Now, how did you go about developing your dissertation topic? How did that process play out?

Williams:

Well, the way that it played out with me is that I kind of played on my experience from working in industry. So I had worked on some new technology that was up and coming at the time. It was called Erbium doped fiber amplifiers or EDFAs. An EDFA is a device that actually takes an optical signal input, for instance a communication signal, and amplify its wavelengths, and then push it along the communication line so that you can get more distance along the way. Well, no one at Georgia Tech was working with an Erbium doped fiber amplifier at the time, and I knew that I could get one from Corning. I was very interested in that technology and I was also interested in lasers as well. And so the idea was, OK, you can make lasers with erbium doped fiber amplifiers as your gain medium, and put that together and take a look at what can be done with it.

So in taking that and building a fiber ring laser, what I noticed was that if you change the polarization state within the laser ring cavity, you can get some very interesting temporal dynamics that take place, depending upon the polarization state of the light that’s circulating within the cavity. Some of that novel type behavior had been reported before, but I was able to look at the dynamics of a laser in a single round-trip time. My particular laser system would take 130 data points in one complete round trip and I was able to see what was happening inside of the laser as the dynamics evolved. With that information, I was able to see what took place in terms of ultrafast temporal dynamics inside of an erbium doped fiber ring laser. That information was useful. It was work that actually was taken and included in a textbook! So I got lucky on that one, in the sense of work that I had done was deemed important enough to actually be included in a textbook that is used to teach other people about laser dynamics.

Zierler:

Because of its theoretical value?

Williams:

Experimental data, and the theoretical. So I developed a model to explain that behavior as well, too.

Zierler:

OK. See, I thought you were going to say you were looking for something that had commercial value, because you were sort of headed in that direction. But it seemed like it worked the other way around?

Williams:

It worked the other way around, because to get the PhD, I needed to do fundamental research. [laugh] And what I did—I actually put together two advisors. I had one in physics, Raj Roy, and one in electrical engineering, Carl Verber. So I had taken a lot of electrical engineering courses with him because I wanted to do engineering at first. Prof. Carl Verber has also passed, now. But working with those two gentlemen was wonderful. But because physics was based upon fundamental work, and the engineering is a more applied type of work, it was kind of an oppositional tension between the two directions. And so I realized, “Wow, if I want to graduate, if I want to get out of here [laugh], I'm going to have to serve one [laugh]—one master [laugh]—at a time. And since my degree is going to be in physics, I need to do physics.” So Dr. Verber understood that, and graciously agreed to continue to serve on the committee. And a very good dissertation came out of it. I actually won the Dissertation of the Year award from the National Society of Black Physicists.

Zierler:

Wow. Do you remember the title of the dissertation?

Williams:

Yeah. It’s “Fast Intracavity Temporal Dynamics of an Erbium Doped Fiber Ring Laser.”

Zierler:

Very impressive. [laugh]

Williams:

Something of that nature. [laugh]

Zierler:

So professor Verber was like an outside reader?

Williams:

Well, I guess you would consider him outside. He was in electrical engineering and his building was right across the street. You wouldn't consider him to be outside of the university, but just in another department -- electrical engineering in his case.

Zierler:

How were you nominated for that award? How did that process go down?

Williams:

At the time, who was it? Professor Joe Johnson, who was a professor at Florida A&M University—he has since passed now as well, too—was over the committee that actually took dissertations from African American students from around the country, said, “Hey, you should submit your dissertation to be reviewed by the committee.” And so I submitted it in, and I was selected for Dissertation of the Year.

Zierler:

That’s amazing. Congratulations.

Williams:

Yeah. 1997 is when I got it, but I finished my Ph.D.in 1996.

Zierler:

1996, OK. So 1996, you defend. What are you thinking at this point? What’s your next move?

Williams:

Well, I had a lot going on in my life at that time. A lot going on. I was starting a new job at AT&T Bell Laboratories. They wanted me to start before I finished, so I—

Zierler:

How did you develop that initial contact with them?

Williams:

Well, I did a summer internship. I was kind of getting burnt out during the graduate program. I said, “OK.” And I always had worked on some internships. So I said, “I think I want to just take one summer and go and do an internship.” Go see some new things and learn some new things and what have you. So I interviewed with Dr. Ian White. Crazy Australian, but I love Ian. Big, big guru in fiber optics. I think he’s the author of one of these books on my bookshelf—well, one of these books that’s on here. But anyway, Dr. White—Ian, as we call him—Australian—interviewed me over the phone and he asked me a slew of questions. And it was my background in the electrical engineering courses, from taking integrated optics, fiber optics, and all of that, that interested him. And so he invited me to do a summer internship there.

Zierler:

At Bell.

Williams:

At Bell Labs. We were AT&T Bell Laboratories at first, and then we went through the trivestiture and became Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs. And this is the one near Atlanta. It was called the Atlanta Works.

Zierler:

So you were local for this?

Williams:

I was local for that. So at the time, it was the world’s largest integrated fiber optic cable manufacturing company, and they did light guide development work and next generation fiber optic development work, which was what I kind of worked in, and Ian worked in that as well.

Zierler:

So this is a summer internship, like ’95, ’96?

Williams:

This was 1993.

Zierler:

So you're still in school. This is a summer internship for you.

Williams:

Right, exactly. Like I said, I had a lot going on in my life at the time. While in graduate school, I was married and went through a divorce as well. Just the pulls of—the rigor of graduate school—you just don’t sometimes make it. You grow apart. So that internship kind of gave me a springboard into my position there. I was originally thinking that I was going to be going back to Corning, Incorporated, because I was a GEM PhD fellow. GEM stands for Graduate Education for Minorities. It was a national program by the GEM Consortium that actually pays for your graduate education in your first year, and then the institution that you attend will pick you up after that and continue to support you until you finish. But it’s a competitive program and Corning was my corporate sponsor. So it worked out that [laugh] AT&T said, “Yeah, we’d like for you to come and work here.” And it was right there in Atlanta. And of course that was kind of where I wanted to be. And the Corning situation didn't work out there. I guess they had already two Williams brothers there at the time, so why bring a third one in, right? [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Family business. [laugh]

Williams:

That’s right, that’s right. So I didn't go there. I ended up going to the Bell Labs in Atlanta. And it was funny because at the time, I was in fiber optics there, and my brother Greg was in fiber optics at Corning, and we could not talk about the physics work that we were doing to each other because we were competitors.

Zierler:

Oh, because of the trade secrets. Right.

Williams:

Right, we were competitors.

Zierler:

Fascinating.

Williams:

So we would be home at Christmas time and [laugh] we couldn't talk about our exact projects and what have you. We would see each other at conferences all the time across the country.

Zierler:

That’s funny.

Williams:

The Telecommunications Industry Association meetings, and we couldn't talk about what it was that we were doing, to each other.

Zierler:

How developed was fiber optics at that time? Do you feel like you were at like the cusp of a new technology? What were the top-line goals at that time?

Williams:

Yeah, at the time, fiber optics was booming. This was like ’96, ’97. So the telecommunications industry was growing like crazy, like gangbusters. So people all over the world—

Zierler:

Because of the internet? Was it growing on pace with the internet?

Williams:

Because of the internet. It was this insatiable demand for bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth, so that drove the demand for fiber optics and the installations out there that were needed. Corning couldn't make it fast enough. AT&T couldn't make it fast enough. And it was just—money was flowing freely, at the time. And so of course that led up to an internet bubble eventually, which will get me to the story of how I split from Lucent Technologies and went into business for myself. But that was driving and fueling the growth in terms of fiber optic type work and research.

Zierler:

So the day-to-day—this is more sort of hands-on? You're more drawing on your electrical engineering background? Or how much of this is like physics and theory and that kind of stuff?

Williams:

More so I would say at the first part of that, I was more like a process engineer. So I was manufacturing optical fiber. I had about 60 indirect reports, so these were the line workers. So anything that goes wrong on the production line, I have to—I was one of the engineers to figure out, OK, what’s happening here? What’s stopping this product from moving? Solving technical problems and challenges came up in that role. So there was work. It was applied-type research.

Eventually, I moved into development-type work. So at the time, we were talking about bringing fiber to the home. To do that, we needed short runs, short spans of fiber, and single-mode optical fiber was not the best thing to take to the home. So for these short runs, I think 800 meters or less, people were thinking, “Well, multi-mode fiber.” But with multi-mode fiber, you're kind of bandwidth-limited. So a new project arose which was called gigabit ethernet, and we needed a new fiber to be developed that could have this gigabit type of bandwidth over multi-mode fiber. So I was put in charge of developing a new measurement system. That pulled me out of the production side into the lightguide measurements development laboratory, where now I had three direct reports, and I was over optical and physical measurements and developing a new test set to develop this new gigabit fiber. And so that was the actual first product that I worked on to help develop which was actually launched out into the world. This was gigabit ethernet fiber.

Zierler:

Into residential and business?

Williams:

Residential and business. But I'm saying, it was a commercialized product.

Zierler:

I see.

Williams:

That’s what I'm saying.

Zierler:

Oh, so it was new across the board?

Williams:

Yes, yes. A commercialized product. So I saw it from beginning to end, and that was an interesting experience. And that told me, wow, if you can do this work in here and understand all that, you can do some of this type work for yourself as well, too.

Zierler:

Now, a lot of people would consider that a very daunting process—going into business for yourself. What put you over that convinced you that this was the way to go?

Williams:

I had to do a lot of mental—

Zierler:

I mean, I assume this was a steady job. You could have stayed on at Lucent if you wanted to.

Williams:

Absolutely, absolutely. And what they called it at the time—you had the golden handcuffs on. [laugh] OK? Because the pay is good.

Zierler:

Retention and all that, right.

Williams:

Right. Raises coming in, double digits all the time, and business was booming. But, there was this drive inside of me that was saying that you want to do something for yourself -- to be in business for yourself. And I always wanted a manufacturing company, as an engineer, OK? I always wanted that.

Zierler:

Your own, you mean?

Williams:

Right, right, right, right. A technology company. And so I had to listen to a lot of Napoleon Hill’s, Think and Grow Rich, and Les Brown, trying to get my mind just set to be able to walk away. I mean, I would drive in listening to the tapes, drive out listening to the tapes, drive home listening to them. And then eventually my mind was at that state of saying, “OK, you can walk away. You can do this. Just make a clean break, and just go and try to get the venture capital to make something like this happen.”

Zierler:

And there wasn’t like a glass ceiling or anything that you felt as an African American at the company? That wasn’t one of the issues, or was it?

Williams:

There was, I would say, an issue of a glass ceiling, but of course it was not as I guess as obvious as it was back in the ‘60s or ‘70s. But you could feel—

Zierler:

Doesn't mean it’s not there. It’s just not as overt.

Williams:

Yes, not as overt. That’s the right word for it. But I could feel that, yeah, I'm going to be here for a while, and I can still continue to progress. But I do remember a couple of little situations that took place that didn't sit very well with me in terms of training someone up to eventually be picked to become your supervisor when you brought them in the door. [laugh] Then they’re saying, “OK, well, this person, we'll probably have them as the manager.” And you've kind of showed them how to do all of those things. So you saw those little things take place. You'd work on projects and you'd come up with data or information, and someone else would take that information and run with it like it’s theirs when it was actually your work. So I experienced that kind of stuff.

Zierler:

So that was part of it—to be your own boss. That was part of the considerations.

Williams:

That was a part of the consideration as well, too. Yeah.

Zierler:

OK, so one day, you pull the trigger. How did that go down? What did you do? Did you have all your ducks in a row before you submitted your resignation letter?

Williams:

Absolutely. [laugh] Absolutely. Yeah.

Zierler:

You're not crazy. [laugh]

Williams:

No, I'm not crazy. I just didn't quit cold turkey. So I was in conversations with some of my childhood friends and my brother who was at Corning, on the fiber optic side as well, too. So these other two friends of mine were MBAs, and they had the business background from some high-powered schools and what have you—UVA and others. And my brother Greg also had a technical background just like myself. So we dealt with the technical side, and they dealt with the MBA business side. And so the idea was to put together an integrated optics photonics company and base it on some technology that could bypass what’s called OEO conversation—optical to electrical to optical conversion. That was a big thing at the time. How do you keep a signal from being converted from optical to electrical and then put it on a different path, then convert it back to optical. So it’s very inefficient. You want to keep the signal optical all along. Just light. So how do you guide the paths of it? So that was like one of the holy grails of this industry. Nortel and all these other companies were working on this. So we came up with an idea for a photonic switch, and we said, “OK, this seems pretty viable.”

Zierler:

We is who? Who’s we?

Williams:

Myself and my brother Greg, after talking and doing some calculations and looking at it.

Zierler:

So this is not trade secrets, because this is a separate project on the side.

Williams:

Right.

Zierler:

And he’s still at Corning at this point?

Williams:

He’s at Corning at this point, and I was at Bell Labs. So this is stuff after work and in the evening time and what have you. Not affiliated with any of the projects that we're working on, but it played on our backgrounds in optics and photonics. So then we said, “OK, this seems plausible.” So then talking to my other friends, the MBAs, one of them, Reginald Clay was really gung ho about starting this. He had worked in industry for a number of years as well, too. So he said, “OK, I'm leaving and I'm coming to Atlanta. I'll just come in and I'll stay with you.” So [laugh] he stayed with me. And then the other gentleman, my other friend Tommy—

Zierler:

Tommy what?

Williams:

—Tommy Holmes—had to leave his job. And he’s married, good job, banking industry and all that. And he left. He gave up a lot.

Zierler:

Oh, so now you've got to do this. [laugh]

Williams:

So he left. So now it’s like, “OK, I'm going to quit my job, and we're going to spend all of our time doing this.” And it was a hard sell to get my older brother, Greg, to leave and move down to Atlanta, so that we can do this.

Zierler:

So it’s the four of you.

Williams:

It’s the four of us.

Zierler:

Where’s the capital coming from?

Williams:

We were self-funded at first because we had good jobs and all of that, so we had our own capital to use. And we were burning through that. You know, you're talking about house mortgages—I had a mortgage and what have you. And the deal is that we went ten months without a paycheck.

Zierler:

Whoa.

Williams:

OK? Just self-funding.

Zierler:

What was your exit package from Lucent?

Williams:

It was nothing because I had pretty much resigned. I had some stock options that had vested so I could use those as well, too, and savings and what have you, and some other investments at the time.

Zierler:

Oh, so ten months is a long time.

Williams:

Ten months is a long time when you think about it. Anyway—

Zierler:

And you're single at this point.

Williams:

I'm single at that point. Single, and there were no children or anything, so that worked out. So the deal is that we said, “Well, what are we going to do?” So we started a networking company at first, where we were networking computers.

Zierler:

Literal networking. [laugh]

Williams:

Yeah, literally [laugh] networking computers. So of course I'm the technical guy out there hooking up networks and all that and learning how to program Cisco routers and all sorts of things.

Zierler:

And who are your clients at first?

Williams:

It was a gym that was our first client, first big client. Well, reasonable client. I forget the name of the sports center it was. And then there was another small business that kind of employed us to do some things as well. But it was at that point where the MBAs were running the numbers and said, “Look, this is not going to do it. We can’t compete against—” What is it—EDS, I guess it was? Down in Texas. And these other large firms.

Zierler:

The big guys.

Williams:

Yeah, the big guys. “To even grow to that level, this is what it’s going to take.” And we had a come-to-Jesus meeting one night and tried to decide, “Well, what are we going to do?” They said, “Well, do you have other technology that you're working on that there may be venture capital that we can go after to do? Because this is where the future’s going. It’s not in computer networking.” And so of course myself and my brother had been working on it, and said, “Yes.” And so we said, “OK, this is what we need to do. We need to go ahead and put the business plan together for this, and work on raising the seed capital and venture capital to launch this business.” And so that’s what we did. We first went to friends and family and got a little friends and family seed money, and then went to some early-stage investors and raised a little money there to extend it out a bit further to develop the ideas some more, and then went off to the big guys in terms of the venture capitalists that are out there. And eventually, they liked the space, of course, and a lot of money was poured into that space, and they funded us, and then we were off and running.

Zierler:

What does “space” mean? “Liked the space”?

Williams:

The optical networking space. So they liked that. That was big at the time. Like for instance, today you hear of pharmaceuticals or cloud-computing space or what have you. So it was the optical networking space at the time. This was around 2001 or so.

Zierler:

So at this point, what’s the name of the company?

Williams:

Quantira Technologies.

Zierler:

OK. Quantiro [sic]?

Williams:

Quantira.

Zierler:

So your name is in there?

Williams:

A lot of people thought that was my name, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t my name. The “tira” was derived from total internal reflection, which was the technology that this optical switch was based on.

Zierler:

Oh, and it’s quantum?

Williams:

There you go. [laugh]

Zierler:

It just sounds like your name is in there.

Williams:

It sounds like it was based on my name. Right, right, right.

Zierler:

I was gonna say, because your brother’s name isn’t Tira, so what’s going on there? [laugh]

Williams:

No, no, that’s—exactly. So that’s kind of how that went.

Zierler:

So at what point did you know that the business had turned a corner? When the real venture capital started coming in? How did you figure that this was really working?

Williams:

Well, at the time, you get what’s called a buzz, and everybody’s calling your phone and trying to get up with you—you can hardly do any work because you have the media calling, other venture capitalists trying to get in on the deal, trying to see if they can be a part of the next round, or if they can get into that round. And at that point, you know—OK, you're in. Then the Atlanta Business Chronicle ran an article on our company and what have you. So we were moving along. And then, the internet bubble burst! That dried up the capital markets out there.

Zierler:

Because the demand was no longer there, or because people just didn't want to invest anymore?

Williams:

Well, people did not want to invest anymore. The space where you had—what was it, MCI WorldCom?—I think they were driving it up and all of that. And everything kind of came to a head. So you have heard of the dot com bubble. That’s what it was. The dot com bubble burst. So we knew a lot of dot com companies were going to go away, and most of them did melt away. And then there was a lot of supporting companies building up infrastructure around that that got injured in it as well, too. And so we were part of that casualty, unable to raise a series B round of financing—we needed like ten more million dollars for the second round of financing, and that wasn’t going to happen.

Zierler:

And how many people had you hired at that point?

Williams:

I think we were up to about eight or nine? Somewhere in that neighborhood. This was just a group of PhDs working, primarily.

Zierler:

Clients were mostly regional, or you were all over the country?

Williams:

There were no clients at the time because we were pre-product.

Zierler:

I see. OK.

Williams:

The development phase. So no clients at the time. You're developing the product during that phase. So at that point, then we had to kind of have a come-to-Jesus moment with the board of directors, and we both mutually agreed—we all, not just both, because there were several others who made the consortium or the group of investors—agreed to just dissolve the company. And so at that point, then I was at a space where I could think about, “OK, what do I do? Do I go back to industry or start another company or—?”

Zierler:

Yeah, what’s next? Because the momentum you were on before the dot com bubble, you were just going to keep going with this, it sounds like.

Williams:

That’s right. That's right.

Zierler:

So what happened to the technology you developed? Did it just go on the shelf or—?

Williams:

It stayed on the shelf. Of course, your investors pretty much keep all the assets of the company. So all of that stuff is with those investors.

Zierler:

So you took a hit financially from this.

Williams:

I did. I did. We did receive a severance package from that, but of course it only lasts for a finite amount of time. And then it was again at the point to where we all had to decide what was it that we wanted to do next. Did we want to keep going and start another business, be a serial entrepreneur, or what? And at that time, I had gotten married again, and I now had a newborn.

Zierler:

Pressure’s on now.

Williams:

The pressure’s on. So I went to a physics conference, and met a colleague there who said, “Hey—” He was at Jackson State at the time. He’s now dean there. But he was a faculty member in physics. He said, “Look, we're in need of a department chair. I think you should really think about coming back to your alma mater.” And I said, “OK, I'll think about it.” So I had some industrial experience, had some entrepreneurial experience, and I thought that, “Ooh, I have something that I can offer,” and I went to academia. And when I got into academia, I was like, “This is the place for me.”

Zierler:

That’s it.

Williams:

[laugh] Yeah. So I've been in academia [laugh] ever since then.

Zierler:

It’s a big leap, it sounds like. They offered you department chair, especially with no faculty experience.

Williams:

Right. But the deal is with this—a lot of people don’t realize it, though—is that being the department chair is really—a lot of it is managing people.

Zierler:

Yeah. Sure, sure.

Williams:

[laugh] OK? You're trying to keep your faculty together. You're running—

Zierler:

You said you had 60 indirect reports on the factory line.

Williams:

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Zierler:

I guess a bunch of faculty members isn’t so bad, right?

Williams:

[laugh] There you go.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

So all of that training. Then of course the corporate training and experience that we went to—early stage management classes and things like that. Then being out there pitching to venture capitalists and working in operating the business—all of that was brought to bear on the department. “How do I take this unit, look at all of the little bits and pieces that are here, the skill sets of the individuals, and come up with something new and play to the strengths of this, to move it forward?” So that’s what I was able to bring into the position—those experiences there. As opposed to 99% of my colleagues who are in the department chair role, they were faculty members all along the way, and they've never really truly managed an organization and built something up, from the ground up, to move it along.

Zierler:

And the department was in growth mode at this point, or that’s what they wanted to bring you on for?

Williams:

They wanted to bring me in because the department was in declining mode. [laugh]

Zierler:

It was in declining mode, OK.

Williams:

It was a bad—

Zierler:

So you were there to reverse that trend.

Williams:

I went there to reverse the trend. In fact, when I interviewed with the provost at the time, he said, “Well, the department is on low productivity watch, on academic probation or whatever it is, by the Institutions of Higher Learning there in the state of Mississippi. And you have three years on it.” So low productivity means—

Zierler:

Before what? No more program?

Williams:

Yeah, before they phase out the program. And it was because the number of graduates was low and all of that. And then when I was getting ready to walk out of his door, he said, “And by the way, one of those years has already gone by!” [laugh]

Zierler:

Oh, boy.

Williams:

[laugh] So I said, “OK, thank you for telling me that.” But it was a challenge I was up for.

Zierler:

So really it’s almost like this is a new venture capital experience for you.

Williams:

Exactly. It plays on all those entrepreneurial skill sets that you have. And if I fast forward, it’s similar to when I came to Howard. That was why I was recruited to come here, as well, too, because the department was in a slump with low numbers. Very similar to Jackson State at the starting point.

Zierler:

Now the department, was this a specific problem for the physics department at Jackson State, or was the university as a whole experiencing decline?

Williams:

It was for physics. Some departments—if you don’t have the right management in place, no matter what institution you're in, your program will go down. Someone needs to be at the wheel, at the helm, driving that organization.

Zierler:

So what were some of the problems that you saw in your early years, where you say, “I see how this contributed to the decline of the program”?

Williams:

So when I arrived, the few majors that were there, they didn't even know each other. The students didn't really know the faculty. The faculty were not interacting with one another. You're in the same department, but you're not doing anything together, you're not communicating, and all of that. There was no vision as to where are you going, where are you headed.

Zierler:

The individual and the department.

Williams:

Yes, the department—there was no vision as to where the department was headed. It was just like, “OK, it’s on autopilot. Down.” [laugh] OK? Because no one was trying to make it go up. And so all of those pieces were missing. I said, “Well, there’s lack of infrastructure and what have you.” So that was not in good shape in terms of research and those things. And so you have to look at, “Well, what are the strengths here?”—the typical SWOT analysis—and say, “All right, I can chart a course out for this program to get it back in a growth mode and we can really make some quick gains here.”

Zierler:

And having gone through the program yourself as an undergraduate, you probably brought a very unique perspective.

Williams:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Zierler:

Because it sounds like you had a different experience when you were there as an undergraduate.

Williams:

Yes.

Zierler:

It was a program that was on the up and up.

Williams:

It was a program—it was steady. I wouldn't say that it was necessarily on the up—it was not in a serious growth mode. The number of students was still small. But it was steady.

Zierler:

It was steady, solid.

Williams:

It was steady and stable and what have you. But it had gotten to a state of decline after all those years. Nothing pretty much going on. And so having spent time there, eventually once I left the role, the department was back on the list produced by the American Institute of Physics of being one of the largest producers of African American students in both categories, geoscience and physics. So that was a great turnaround for the program.

Zierler:

Now, was part of that your ability to convince African American students that physics is an absolutely appropriate and exciting major for them? What’s the outreach that you're doing and the department is doing that explains this rise in enrollment over the course of your tenure?

Williams:

I would not necessarily take credit for that by myself, but what I will say is that it takes an individual showing that they care, and that’s what I think that I bring to that. I try to show students, “Look, I care about what you're doing. You want to do this? I'm going to help you achieve your goal and objective of becoming a scientist.”

Zierler:

But you have to get them in the door, too, to have that conversation.

Williams:

Yeah. So you go through—I've talked to some churches, parents, the alumni association, and other alumni. You try to talk to your admissions recruiters and tell them, “Hey, we exist over here.” So don’t tell students, “Stay away from math and science.” Tell them, “Hey, we have something over here.” And we can take them from where they are and get them where they need to be. So it’s just a lot of that, that goes on. And you find those individuals that’s willing to help you and you help them help you, and you benefit from that. So it’s relationship building. That’s what it boils down to.

Zierler:

And did you shepherd some students onto graduate programs also?

Williams:

Absolutely, absolutely. So we've had some to go on to some of the top schools, like right in town—University of Maryland—and others that could be named as well. But sure, they've gone on to do some good things.

Zierler:

And you moved up in the administration at Jackson State also, right?

Williams:

I did. I guess what happened is that some individuals took note of the progress that has been taking place here in this department—and I was also tapped to lead the reaffirmation of accreditation process for the university as well, too.

Zierler:

Which is determined by the state?

Williams:

Was determined by the regional board. So for Jackson State, it’s SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. So every ten years, you have to go through the whole university getting reaffirmed to be accredited, because if you lose that, then you can’t get any federal funds for student support.

Zierler:

So they saw what you were doing in the physics department kind of as a microcosm for what you might be able to offer the whole university.

Williams:

Right. And so I was pulled in and engaged in that process. So I was put over the institutional administration and governance standard at the time. And there was something else that went along with it. So I was working a little closer with the president on this—that was his area, his domain. But one of the things that I wanted to do—and I looked at him as a mentor, too—Dr. Ronald Mason, Jr., who’s now president of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) currently. But I said, “Hey, I want to know this institution from top to bottom. If you flush the toilet, I want to know how the water drains out the campus!”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

“I want to know it that well.” And so just talking to him and taking some of his advice and learning some wisdom from him, that helped as well, too, in terms of trying to set up a leadership training, a development program, for those individuals at the institution who would maybe one day become future leaders. I believe in succession planning. You need to have people waiting in the wings. You need to have a deep bench. And so in doing those things, I think some people took note. When President Mason left, the interim president was brought in, and he called me in because he was looking to get a new provost. So he asked me if I would be willing to do that. And he said, “Well, you've been chair for seven years.” And chair is one of the toughest jobs [laugh] at a university. So he said, “I know you can do it—I know you can be a provost.”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

[laugh] So that’s how that kind of happened.

Zierler:

If you could be chair, you could definitely be provost.

Williams:

[laugh] In his mind.

Zierler:

It probably doesn't work the other way—if you're provost, you can definitely be chair. [laugh]

Williams:

Right, absolutely. But it was those experiences, I think, that I was able to bring to bear on the organizational approach and means to get things done.

Zierler:

So you're provost—when are you named? Like 2012, 2013?

Williams:

That was 2010.

Zierler:

Oh, earlier on.

Williams:

Yeah, 2010 to 2011.

Zierler:

Were you still able to teach classes in the physics department?

Williams:

No, not as provost. No. Because you're running the institution.

Zierler:

Oh, it pulled you away. Yeah.

Williams:

I think at the time, it was probably close to 9,000 students at the university.

Zierler:

So not teaching, was that like a welcome break for you, or you missed it?

Williams:

Well, I enjoy teaching, but I also know that you can only do so much. Even a computer running Microsoft Windows, if you open up too many windows, it will lock up and freeze up on you. So you have to pull some things off your plate. But I did continue to do research. I still had a postdoc. So with my postdoc, I was able to continue to research and publish at the time, while I was up in the high administration.

Zierler:

Did you have a lab or you didn't need a lab?

Williams:

I still had a lab. I built my lab at Jackson State. I built a materials lab, believe it or not. I moved away from the photonics side because when I got there—again, the entrepreneurial nature—what I wanted to do, not many people were doing, so I would have been like an island, on my own there, in the program. So I looked at what were most people doing. They were doing things related to materials research. So I developed a materials lab where we were growing carbon nanotubes. So, I would go up during the summer to visit one of the scientists at Cornell University. Actually, I was looking at a lot of different labs there. And I said, “Wow, they're growing carbon nanotubes. I can build that system as well, too, down at Jackson State.” And at the time, no one in the state of Mississippi was growing carbon nanotubes. I called all the institutions, the big research ones—Ole Miss, Mississippi State, University of Southern Mississippi—and no one was growing carbon nanotubes. I said, “This is something that we're going to do at Jackson State.” So I built that system with some of my undergraduate students, and we started growing carbon nanotubes.

Zierler:

For what? What are they used for?

Williams:

Yeah. Well, carbon nanotubes, we were actually looking at taking them and incorporating them into polymers, plastics. So now you talk about there’s an electronic revolution that’s going on where people want foldable electronics. And just even recently now, you see—is it Samsung—what do you call it?

Zierler:

The Samsung folded—the phone that folds.

Williams:

Right. You couldn't—you didn't have foldable displays. Because what you do to make a display work—you take your glass display material and you put indium tin oxide on it. But it’s only so flexible. Actually, it’s not very flexible at all. And once you get past a certain point, it will crack, and so now you have a disconnected circuit. A broken circuit. So you needed something with some flexibility that could actually conduct electricity through it. So, with carbon nanotubes, some of them are conductive. You have two different types: semiconducting and metallic. You can get the metallic types that would conduct electricity and if you incorporate these nanotubes in there – that is to say, lightly dope your material—you can still have it transparent, but you can give it conductive properties. So that’s what we were working on with that.

Zierler:

And what would be the commercial value of this? Who would be interested in purchasing this technology?

Williams:

For instance, at the time—this was back in 2004 or 2005—Samsung is doing it now. Any of these phone or computer companies—

Zierler:

They're thinking that early about this technology?

Williams:

Yeah. That technology didn't just pop up, OK? So it has been working for a long time. And so we published a paper in Applied Physics Letters on a device that we put together in my lab, a photonic device that we put together—this was at Jackson State—where we were taking these carbon nanotubes and putting them into a cross-linked polymer, and actually showed that you could fold it, bend it and have it to emit light. So we're also using some conductive polymers as well, too, and made a photonic device with that as well, showing that the device can be flexible and still operate.

Zierler:

Now, did Jackson State have a graduate program at this time?

Williams:

It did not. Not in physics.

Zierler:

So in the lab, you're working with undergrads.

Williams:

I'm working with undergrads.

Zierler:

Wow.

Williams:

However, here’s the strategy. I'm at an undergrad institution. Undergraduate students don’t have the scientific background, so how do I get that? I can get postdocs. So that’s the entrepreneurial approach. So I got a postdoc, Xi Liu, a great guy from Caltech. He was great, OK? He had a polymer-type background, and so I hired him to help in that aspect of figuring out, which polymer? I used my photonics background and we put those things together. And of course, we had undergraduate students that we brought to bear on it as well, too, and actually worked.

Zierler:

Getting an education they'd never get in the classroom, right?

Williams:

There you go. There you go. Yeah.

Zierler:

Oh, wow.

Williams:

And like I said, that’s one of the papers that I'm very proud of because I know [laugh] how much effort it took to actually accomplish that. You're at a small institution, no graduate students, and—

Zierler:

Do you remember where you published it?

Williams:

Yeah, Applied Physics Letters.

Zierler:

And who funded the lab? Where did that come from?

Williams:

I would get money from a lot of different places. So I have the smaller grants from like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Department of Defense, and there were some from—EPA, FCC, you name it. Because early on, when I went in, I was trying to go after these large grants, OK? All right, if I have this, I can put all these things in place, build up the infrastructure, and boom, we're off and running. But that’s just not how the academic funding machine worked. It was like, “OK, well, we see that you're at a smaller institution. You don’t really have any graduate students, so what’s there for us to believe that this work can be done? You don’t have the infrastructure there.” So I said, “OK, I see where this game is going. I'll be bumping my head for years trying to get this one grant. So let me go after smaller grants, smaller money, and bring them in, and then outfit the lab one piece at a time.” It took a long time to do it, but I built up a wonderful lab at Jackson State. And I hated to leave it—that entrepreneurial type approach and that strategy, and just parlaying, piece after piece after piece, until I could get some world-class infrastructure.

Zierler:

And were you exclusively focused on the carbon nanotubes or you were involved in other technologies as well?

Williams:

That was what I was focused on exclusively at the time. And then of course I'm trying to sneak in some of my photonics work on—[laugh] at the time, I wanted to work on strain gauges. So you talk about smart structures in buildings and what have you, so running fiber optics through it and have a sensor that could detect the interference from small strains or stresses and you can see how much sway, or what have you, that there is. So trying to do some of that, at the time, but eventually I ended up just focusing on the materials aspect of research.

Zierler:

Provost is a full-time job in and of itself. Most provosts don’t run a lab on the side, also.

Williams:

Right, right, right.

Zierler:

So between that and running the lab, where are you finding the time? I mean, forget the family piece, right? That’s a separate conversation altogether. But in terms of staying on top of the literature, of seeing where the trends in the technology are going, how are you doing that?

Williams:

Well, just from reading different articles that you can get, talking to some contacts and people that are out there and what’s going on.

Zierler:

And you have a nationwide network. You're talking to people all over the place.

Williams:

Right, right. Now, I remind you, I was only provost for one year. I took a year to do that. OK? But just talking, and of course, as projects were kind of going on—so I had the postdoc to keep going on the momentum with that, and I could manage it from that aspect. So if it had continued on, of course I think things would have gone down a lot further, diminished or degraded a lot further. Because you don’t have time. That’s a 24/7 type of job. You're on all of the time in the high administration. And that made me realize at that point, “OK, you have to make a decision, too. Do you want to continue on in the highest of administration or do you still want to do science?” I feel like I still had some science in me, and I still want to work with students as well, too. So being chair is about at the right level, even more so than even being a dean, because you're not really working with students. But being chair, you’re working with some administrators, and you're working with faculty and students.

Zierler:

You go in both directions.

Williams:

And you get it from both directions, too! [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Fair point, fair point.

Williams:

That’s right.

Zierler:

So it sounds like at this point, when do you start getting involved in discussions with Howard to come here?

Williams:

So we had a program that was running with the National—what did we call it?—National Center for Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS) here, that’s funded by NOAA, at Howard. And Jackson State was a part of that consortium. And so I would always be coming back and forth to D.C. to meetings at AIP, because I was on the governing board there, and then coming here to these meetings as well. And the director of the program—[laugh] he said, “Look.” No, no, no—actually, he came in second—the position for chair came available, and someone else called me—one of my colleagues from the area, Dr. Arlene Maclin, called and said, “Hey, there’s a job advertisement for the department chair at Howard. You need to take a look at it.” So I said, “OK, all right, I will.” I took a look at it and thought about it and said, “No, I'm comfortable here at Jackson State.” And then I received a call from another mentor—this was a real mentor—Dr. Jim Stith who was a Vice President at AIP also. He was one of the executive members there at AIP. And so he said, “The position is there. You should really look at it, because I think that you have the skills or you have what’s needed to help that program get back up on its feet.” And so I said, “OK, let me think about this and go and pray and talk to my wife about it as well.” So I did, and then I said, “No, thank you.” [laugh] OK?

Zierler:

It sounds like it’s 2003 all over again for you, right?

Williams:

Exactly.

Zierler:

Adopting a program in decline.

Williams:

Yes, exactly. And so then, Dr. Vernon Morris, who was here at Howard, actually came to visit the campus at JSU. As he was sitting in my office; he said, “Look, you really need to consider coming to Howard, because I think you can do something with that program, and it needs some leadership.” So I thought about it, went in prayer again, and then this time, I thought about something I had written back in 2010, an article for Physics Today. And that article was, “HBUs are—”— “Can we stop the losses?” And this time when I gave it a critical thought, I said, “Wow, if Howard’s program goes down--Howard is the flagship of the HBCUs.” It has bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD programs. The oldest PhD program in physics at an HBCU. If it goes down, it’s going to send a message through the HBCU community that physics is not all that important, because they're not supporting it, so we should let it go as well.

Zierler:

So all of a sudden, you realized this was a lot bigger than one department.

Williams:

Yes. This was ground zero. And the line had to be held here. So that started driving my thoughts, saying, “OK, this is bigger than just changing jobs. This is your why. You have to go there to hold the line.”

Zierler:

Right. There’s going to be ripple effects throughout the entire country.

Williams:

Absolutely, absolutely. And that drove my decision to say, “We're going to go to Howard to do what we can there.”

Zierler:

Now obviously all of the work that went into the TEAM-UP report, this isn’t just things that were discovered in the past few years.

Williams:

Right.

Zierler:

These are systemic problems. So when you started to think about this, like 2009, 2010, what was the state of play at this point? In other words, if Jackson State was in a period of decline, the physics program, was that emblematic of historically Black college physics departments in general? And did you note that at the time? Did you realize that this was a larger issue than a local issue?

Williams:

Yes, I did, at the time. This is because I had served as president of the National Society of Black Physicists from 2006 to 2008, and so of course—and nationally, looking at what’s going on.

Zierler:

These are the things that people are talking about in those meetings.

Williams:

Well, yeah. Some of the things were that we were trying to recruit more students into physics. But I'm looking at it with a more critical eye. I'm saying, “Wow.” I'm seeing that programs are struggling. Programs are being pushed out and shuttered and what have you. And there are only so many programs. And this is the gateway, really, for African American students to go on to graduate school in physics. Because you typically need a physics bachelor’s to go on to get a master’s or PhD in physics.

Zierler:

Of course.

Williams:

So, if we close off the gates at the HBCUs, then we're naturally going to see the numbers decline nationally , because this is where most of the students at the time were getting their degrees in physics. Even though they're small in numbers, if you add them together—two here, three here, one here—this is the pool that you have that can move on to graduate school. So that’s what caused me to ring the alarm to say, “Wait a minute. We're losing programs here. We need to do something about this. Because if we don’t, you're going to see a big decline, a big drop-off, in the number of African Americans getting degrees in physics.”

Zierler:

Now, in developing solutions, you have to identify the problem. So how did you understand this phenomenon, this crisis in declining enrollment of African American students in physics? What was that about? How did you understand this trend?

Williams:

Because I had been at an HBCU. I'm going around the country. Again, I'm involved with the National Society of Black Physicists. So I'm looking at numbers, I'm looking at trends, I'm talking to people and all, and I'm really giving a critical look at not just physics but also geoscience. I've done work in geosciences as well, too. Their numbers are even worse than physics, OK? So I’m trying to figure out how to increase that.

Zierler:

But why? Why are they bad? Why are the numbers bad?

Williams:

There were no programs in Earth Systems Science at HBCUs, and there are very few programs where African Americans can earn degrees in geoscience at HBCUs. So the access points are limited.

Zierler:

Aha. I see.

Williams:

So I ended up starting a new bachelor’s degree program in earth systems science at Jackson State University to try to help reverse that trend. So with fewer access points, is the way that I have always explained it, you're going to see this decline.

Zierler:

So that means—I want to make sure I understand this, crystal clear. It’s not that the students are no longer expressing interest in these programs; it’s that the programs themselves have a declining capacity to accept the students. It’s a programmatic problem. It’s not a cultural problem or a cultural shift among students where you'd say like, “Well, maybe African American students don’t want to go into the sciences anymore.” That sounds like that’s not what the case was.

Williams:

I didn't see that as being the case. I saw that that was just not an option that was available.

Zierler:

It was not an option.

Williams:

But if it was an option, and it was presented as a viable option for the students, then you would get more to choose it.

Zierler:

So you can draw on your own personal history, right?

Williams:

Absolutely.

Zierler:

Why was it an option for you circa 198…early 1986, right?

Williams:

Eight-six, right. Because—

Zierler:

And fast-forward 20, 30 years. Why had it stopped being an option?

Williams:

Well, it was an option for me because I wanted to go to Jackson State but they didn't have engineering. Remember, I wanted to go into engineering initially? So that put me into physics. So engineering wasn’t even an option for me at the time, but it just so happened that I got into physics and I really loved it, that I decided, “OK, this is for me. I'm going to stay in this discipline. This is what I'm going to do.” So you think about other students who may want to go into physics, but if their school doesn't offer it—

Zierler:

They didn't have the programming.

Williams:

Yeah. They may, say, major in chemistry or biology or something else. Because where they were going to go to school, that was just not even on the palette of things to offer.

Zierler:

And when these schools are determining their budgets, and they're devoting less of those budgets to developing a physics program, for example, why would that be? Why would the physics department get the short end of the stick in those kinds of decisions?

Williams:

It’s a good question. Because now I can see—I clearly see the answer to it, having served as a provost. Because what happens is that the universities have to deal with accreditation. So you have programs in engineering, music, psychology, computer science, and some of these other fields and disciplines—education—that have accrediting bodies, and you have to have certain things in place, certain standards have to be met, in order for them to keep that accreditation. You don’t want to lose your accreditation in these disciplines.

So when you're looking at allocating funds as an administrator, you have to say, “Wow, OK, this music program, they need to have a digital music lab.” Or what have you. So now this is—all these computers with these digital audio work stations or whatever. OK. So now we gotta put resources towards that. Well, the pie is only so big. If you slice it up and you say, “Well, I have to divert funds to engineering, to music, to psychology or whatever,” then that leaves very little for programs that are not accredited by a national body, for instance physics. Physics doesn't have a national accrediting body for it. So that’s going to put you kind of at a disadvantage for receiving priority for university funding.

Zierler:

And that’s true of the discipline at large, you're saying?

Williams:

Yeah, that’s physics. Physics, period. There’s no accrediting body for physics, OK? I like it that way, OK? [laugh] I think several of my colleagues like it that way as well, too.

Zierler:

But this is the downside.

Williams:

This is one of the downsides, right. Because you can’t now go to the administration and say, “Look, if we don’t have this undergraduate lab with ten oscilloscopes at ten work stations here available for students, the accrediting body is going to say, ‘You don’t have enough to service your students’ or ‘the stuff that you have is outdated.’” So now funds are not going to be allocated. That is what I think have hurt a lot of physics departments.

Zierler:

So there was no pressure from administration to satisfy a requirement that didn't exist, basically. Got it.

Williams:

Right, right. It’s like, OK, we'll get to it when we can get to it. But as the fiscal resources keep getting squeezed, you're going to be at the back of the line.

Zierler:

So it would sound, though, that that would be a problem that has nothing to do with race, though, right? This would seem to be a challenge for physics departments all across the country, historically Black or not. But my understanding of the TEAM-UP report is that there’s a unique demographic crisis among African American students. So there must be something else going on as well.

Williams:

No, no, no. I wouldn't say that. I’d say, yeah, the problem exists at all of the institutions, but some institutions are better established or more well-heeled than others. So if you're at an institution—

Zierler:

I see. If it’s a bigger pie, it’s a smaller piece, but it’s still a viable piece.

Williams:

Right, exactly. And you can do things there.

Zierler:

I got it.

Williams:

So that’s what it comes down to, OK? And then if you look at the students at HBCUs—not just at HBCUs; let’s look at the report that the Federal Reserve put out a couple of years ago that shows that the median net worth of African American households, is like—well, the medium net worth of white households is ten times higher than that of the median African American household.

Zierler:

Across the board, you're saying?

Williams:

Yeah, across the board. The median net worth. So that’s a big gap, OK? A big disparity in terms of resources. So the students are coming from those households that are already squeezed, and it just—the situation is just exacerbated when you look at the high cost of education. So yes, finances come into play. And from some of the work that we did with TEAM-UP in terms of the surveys, finance was one of the biggest issues that we came across when surveying students of color.

Zierler:

Financing meaning as a specific explanation for why they weren’t going into physics?

Williams:

No, most of these were students who were already in physics. But, in terms of talking about their obstacles and the things—

Zierler:

I see. They were already in, but to stay in.

Williams:

Right, to stay in.

Zierler:

Got it, got it. OK. So we've got to rewind the clock back. Let’s go back to the beginning of your tenure at Howard. So you come here, and it’s basically a repeat of Jackson State.

Williams:

It’s basically a repeat.

Zierler:

It’s a department that’s in decline.

Williams:

Right.

Zierler:

You see the same structural problems here that you were seeing at Jackson State, but the stage is just a bit bigger.

Williams:

The stage is a bit bigger, right. But the program here, another attractive piece for me is that it had graduate programs—master’s and PhD. So now I could be the graduate advisor of grad students and have them in my laboratory, working, and we could work on some problems together. So that was a draw as well to that.

Zierler:

Did you get the lab up and running right away when you got here?

Williams:

I got the lab up and running within that first year.

Zierler:

And did your research follow you, or it sort of was owned by Jackson State? How did that work?

Williams:

Yeah, everything at Jackson State, I left at Jackson State. So I came here—

Zierler:

Built from scratch.

Williams:

Built from scratch. So I had to start all over again, OK? But Howard gave me a startup package, so I was able to—instead of spending seven, eight years amassing equipment and instrumentation one piece at a time—

Zierler:

Hit the ground running.

Williams:

—I could at least get maybe about four or five pieces of equipment and start from there. So it kind of shortened it down. And then I could still work on the battery technology which is what I work on now, here. Ramp that up. Because I was starting to do that at Jackson State, but ramp that up here and say, there’s no battery research taking place at Howard, so I want to bring that to this university so we can start growing in renewable energy and work in that space, because that’s where technology is headed. So I've set up a battery lab downstairs, and the students are doing fine. Just graduated my first PhD student in there this past December. What month is this? This is March?

Zierler:

We're in March now.

Williams:

Wow, yeah.

Zierler:

It’s 74 degrees out, so that might be throwing you off!

Williams:

[laugh]

Zierler:

But it’s March.

Williams:

Yeah. So it wasn’t that long ago, he just finished, and now he’s at Intel.

Zierler:

What’s his name?

Williams:

His name is Adewale—we call him “Wale”—Adepoju. Yeah, Wale.

Zierler:

And now he’s at Intel.

Williams:

He’s now at Intel out in Arizona. And I have two other doctoral students who should be finishing up this May. One is an African American female, and the other one is a male from Mali. And I have another PhD student who just defended his thesis proposal; he’s now moving into candidacy. He’s from Saudi Arabia. So he’s also now working on battery technology, but with a different material that is more so for automotive or electric vehicle applications. So hopefully he will be with me for another two to three years.

Zierler:

Now in terms of the declining enrollments from the undergraduates, what was your game plan for turning that around here?

Williams:

Showing people that we care, talking to the recruiters here, putting the word out with alumni and being on the phone and talking. So that number went from—we had 13 majors when I walked in, and we got up to like 36 majors. We've just graduated eight physics bachelor’s degrees, three master’s and three PhDs this past year. That’s the highest output that the department has ever had in any given academic year in its history. So we've definitely made some big gains on that front.

Zierler:

And this is a positive trend? This is still going in that direction?

Williams:

Oh yeah, it’s still going in that direction.

Zierler:

Wonderful.

Williams:

So you'll see Howard now is going to start to be to be listed again on the list of top producers of African Americans in physics.

Zierler:

Now, we were talking earlier about the ripple effects of this. Do you see the turnaround that Howard has had portending well for what’s happening at other historically Black colleges, for their physics departments?

Williams:

Unfortunately, no, I don’t. I see where it may have slowed down the decline or the shuttering of these departments, but we're still losing departments out there. Again, I still think that it really boils down to leadership. If you don’t have the right person in place to really build that department up, it’s going to go into decline.

Zierler:

So where is the National Society for Black Physicists in all of this?

Williams:

Yeah, it’s working also to try to address this issue, but not—more so on the leadership side of the chairs. That’s from my perspective. And I see, OK, I think that's ground zero. If we hit it there, then we have a better chance of getting these programs going, if we get the right people in places. So the program—NSBP is still out there encouraging those students who are in physics to continue on, to try to help with attrition, try to get those students to go on into graduate school to receive their degrees as well. So I see that’s where the main focus is with the organization. But I want to try to plant into their minds that, OK, I think we also need to focus on these departments themselves and the leadership in these departments. Now, what would that entail? I don’t know. Maybe there’s leadership development that we need to do for these programs, start developing the next set of leaders that will go out there. Because the way that it is now, I think a lot of students have many options once they finish. If you finish and you have a good dissertation, you can be picked up quickly by organizations.

Zierler:

Intel, for example! [laugh]

Williams:

Intel or any of these organizations, right? They're going to pay a lot more than our institution will pay. So the options are plentiful out there for those who are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Zierler:

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your motivations here. So if we take the coordinate zero, zero, where the assertion is African American representation in physics is a good thing, right? So that goes in both directions. African Americans is good for physics, right? And physics is good for African Americans, right? It seems to work both ways.

Williams:

It does.

Zierler:

So in terms of your motivation, do you sort of swing equally in both directions, or personally and intellectually and from your career, what are the things that motivate you to ensure to continue to be able to assert African American representation in physics is a good thing? How does that work in both directions?

Williams:

Well, I will say that I even go all the way back to my childhood on that, in terms of motivation. So what was my earliest job? The first job that I actually had [laugh] was actually going out chopping cotton, going to a cotton field. We made $13 a day working from, I don’t know, what was it, about five or six o’ clock in the morning to maybe three or four o’ clock [laugh] in the afternoon. In the heat! In the summer heat, right? So one of the things that I remember—being out on a long, long cotton row and saying, “I know that I can do better than this, and I know my mind is better than this. And I know what I don’t want to do, and I know what I can and am able to do, and I'm going to do.” And so I could think just as well as anyone else. And I would always say that to myself, of course. And so that’s a big motivation, a big motivator to me.

Zierler:

That you have something to offer.

Williams:

That I have something to offer, right, from the intellectual side. Not just physical. Not just entertainment, as well. Even though I can entertain [laugh] too. But I can offer something intellectual as well. And the fact of society saying that you as an African American, you don’t supposed to be doing physics—you know, this is not for you—I have to prove that wrong.

Zierler:

And you feel like that’s a message out there in society that’s getting to students, that’s still out there?

Williams:

I hope that that message is still out there. I'm very hopeful that it’s still out there. But that’s something—those experiences and then those early mentors still ring in the back of my mind, that OK, you have to be twice as good. And you look at the circumstances that you're given [laugh], it seems like I'm always put in circumstances where I don’t have enough, but I have to make something out of nothing -- out of very little of anything. And I just wonder sometimes what it would be like—I had that experience when I was at Lucent -- Bell Labs—to be able to have all the equipment that I wanted to, and I could actually work on the things that I wanted to work on.

Zierler:

Not being in a limited environment, you mean?

Williams:

Right! Right, right, right, right. And I know what that feels like, and what it felt like. It felt good. But I need it here, in this environment. If I don’t do it, who else will do it? Who else will? So that kind of drives me to keep pushing.

Zierler:

And I'm sure this is inspirational for your students, too, to see the arc of your life.

Williams:

I don’t know. I mean, I would hope that it would do some good to some of them. Some of them say, “You seem to be always on ten.”

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

“Where are you trying to go.” But look, if you're not sure, you're gonna just be left behind. Just be out there.

Zierler:

So in terms of your current research, battery technology, talk a little bit about that. What are you doing? What’s the next frontier?

Williams:

Yeah. So what we're doing right now is we're looking at—the first material is lithium iron phosphate. So of course lithium ion batteries are kind of ubiquitous in the things that we use today.

Zierler:

Cell phones to Teslas, right?

Williams:

Cell phones to Teslas, right. But the chemistry inside of those could vary. You have layered materials or olivine materials. Lithium iron phosphate has the olivine type crystal structure. So it’s very stable and it doesn't necessarily catch on fire and all that, that you see with some lithium batteries, like the lithium cobalts and others do. But it has a drawback to it. Even though it’s renewable, it has low intrinsic conductivity. So that means it doesn't conduct electricity so fast through it. So how do you increase this? Because if you increase that conductivity, you can increase the speed or the rate at which current or electrons can flow through it, right?

Zierler:

Which means what? Longer lasting and more power?

Williams:

Which means that you can have a shorter charging time.

Zierler:

Shorter charging time, OK.

Williams:

Right. So the idea is from the applied standpoint if you look at it, think about when you take your cell phone and you plug it up and you have to let it stay plugged up for an hour or something like that before it’s fully charged—well, when you want your phone charged, you plug it up and you want it charged up in five minutes, right? [laugh] OK. They want the same thing with automobiles as well, too. Just like the amount of time that it takes to pump gas to fill up a tank—that’s about as much time they want you to have to charge the battery. So you need the material to be able to allow this to happen. So we're working on different approaches at increasing the C-rate, as it’s called—the conductivity rate—of the materials—and we're using materials such as carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers, graphene, and also metallic nanoparticles as well, too. To use those as dopants into the mixtures of the cathode composition to increase those speeds. So we've made some progress and some gains with it, where we've kind of halved the time down that it would take to charge it.

Zierler:

Is lithium still part of the mix, or you're moving away from lithium?

Williams:

No, the lithium is still part—that’s your active ion that’s moving back and forth between the cathode and the anode. So that’s still a part of it. And right now, we're looking at decreasing the weight of the nickel cobalt metal type battery, the NCM batteries, using these carbon nanofibers in there instead of some of the so-called carbon black that you put in there. So what that will do is if you decrease the weight of the battery, of course that takes away from some of the things that drawn down on the—waste the use of the power. The heavier the car is, you're using power to push all that extra weight; it’s not contributing to it. So if you can decrease the weight, you can increase the distance that your cars can go and batteries can last longer. So we're making some gains on that as well, too.

Zierler:

And who are your partners out in industry that are working on this with you?

Williams:

Right now, I don’t have an industrial partner, but I do have someone who’s in Detroit who I'm talking to. In fact, she’s a consultant. She went into some high-level meetings, according to her, last week, to talk about the work that we're doing to some venture capitalists, to see if they're—

Zierler:

Uh-oh. Getting back into venture capital. [laugh]

Williams:

I know, I know, I know. And it’s not what I—

Zierler:

You've got patterns in your life. I see this. Things come, and they come again.

Williams:

[laugh] Right, right. Not what I prefer to do, but she’s kind of excited about this and what we're seeing. So we'll see where this all heads.

Zierler:

And you see the practical applications mostly for cars or—?

Williams:

For that material, for cars—for electric vehicles. But for the other, lithium iron phosphate, for mobile devices, power tools, and things like that.

Zierler:

And are you doing things in the lab here that are not being done anywhere else as far as you know?

Williams:

Yes, yes. Using those materials—those materials that I named—the carbon nanofibers and some of the graphene work—those combinations with the active material to actually give you or enhance those properties of those materials. So that’s the name of the game. You're trying to find a niche where you're doing something that others are not doing. You're looking in places that others haven't necessarily looked, and you're trying to come up with little discoveries there.

Zierler:

All right. Well now, we're going to move into what I’d like to call the big questions in my—

Williams:

Uh oh!

Zierler:

—interview. Look back and look forward. So far in your career—you're on ten. I see you've still got plenty of work to do. Right now, what are some of the achievements that you feel you've made that have really pushed the ball forward in physics?

Williams:

I still go back to the fundamental understanding that I saw in my graduate thesis. I think that was a good piece that really helped move forward the understanding of the dynamics, internal dynamics, of lasers. Because before that work, no one had seen what was going on within one individual round trip time, one cavity round trip time. But in setting that laser up and looking at that, with all these points within one round-trip time, you can see the evolution of what’s happening with the light in terms of those polarizations that are going around that laser cavity in one round trip.

Zierler:

So this was a real aha moment that has endured.

Williams:

Yeah. It still endured and it’s still being used. People still—a couple of research groups around the world still looking at it as well. So I would think that is something I'm still most proud of.

Zierler:

What about politically or socially—your major achievements in those arenas?

Williams:

I’d say some of the progress that was made in working with the American Institute of Physics. The time of serving on the governing board there, working with that organization in conjunction with the National Society of Black Physicists. Putting something in place where the smaller HBCUs could gain access to the physics journals. That sounds small, but most of the HBCUs, as we surveyed at the time, who had a physics program, the only subscription that they had was to Physics Today. And you get Physics Today free with your membership.

Zierler:

But the real journals, it was all closed off to them?

Williams:

Right, just because of lack of—

Zierler:

Budget.

Williams:

—of budgets and what have you. But we actually made that available and accessible to those faculty members at the HCBUs out there for a period of time. The program is not going on right now, but I think it was a resounding success, just to be available for them and their students to be able to pull the literature to be able to keep up with what’s going on, to be able to develop new ideas and new thoughts about next technologies.

Zierler:

It’s wonderful to hear about AIP’s impact.

Williams:

Oh, yeah.

Zierler:

What was it about AIP that allowed you to do this, in terms of AIP’s reach in the community?

Williams:

At the time, Fred Dylla was the CEO and we worked very, very well together, in terms of trying to make this happen. And this was done in conjunction with also National Society of Hispanic Physicists. So our three organizations looked at, “What can we do to make a meaningful impact on the community?” And that was one of the initiatives. Another thing that I'm really proud of is the fact of in serving there—there are several committees that AIP has—in terms of being able to nominate and put names of people forward from diverse communities, where these committees before had very little diversity at all on them. I think at that time, there were more African Americans serving on these committees, working on these committees to try to help change the organization from within, than there probably had ever been in the organization’s history. So that’s something that I am very proud of. And I think more of that is needed. You need to be at the table to make change. So all the change can’t be made from out in the streets, saying, “This is not being done right.” Sit at the table, and let’s give input and make some things happen this way.

Zierler:

And now we'll look forward. What work remains to be done for you? On the physics side, where does your lab go from here? What are the big things that you want to achieve?

Williams:

Well, one of the things I wanted to do when I came here was to bring, in terms of physics research, renewable energy, battery research. So I have a functioning lab that’s here that’s—I'll say—I put it as late teenage, to early adult [laugh] age, OK?

Zierler:

[laugh]

Williams:

The other lab that I'm in the process of building—

Zierler:

You're supporting it more than it’s supporting you, right? [laugh]

Williams:

Right, right, right. The other lab—but the payoff is coming. The payoff is coming. The other lab is a photonics lab, so that—I've had the space renovated, and now I'm starting to put furniture in and about to start putting some equipment in there. But infusing photonics even more so into the curriculum here at Howard I think is something that we should be doing. Because light—you know, we're not going backwards. We want to use light, OK. Things operate at the speed of light. Light, you have therapeutic uses of light. I mean, it’s wonderful. And I've always been fascinated by it.

So, if I can get that lab set up—not if I get it; I'm going to get it set up—get that set up and functioning and operating, that will bring another dimension to this program. We've already added some courses—laser physics. We're working in terms of getting a non-linear optics course developed here, and I want to add quantum optics as well, too. I love that subject. So, if we can put those pieces in place with some of the ultrafast work that’s taking place—we have a terahertz spectroscopy lab, we will be really moving forward. One of my young faculty members is doing some fantastic work on some next generation technology, the stuff that you kind of see in the Black Panther movie. You know, the invisible cloaks and all those sorts of things. He’s working on some cutting-edge stuff. Get more of that in place and that will excite students. That will excite even more funding agencies. He has gotten some good funding there and that will put us where we need to be in terms of being prepared for this 21st century technology and workforce.

Zierler:

And these are things that you feel like you could push forward here at Howard.

Williams:

Absolutely. And working on those things.

Zierler:

Now politically and socially, what work remains to be done for you?

Williams:

Well, on the national level, I’d say really trying to look at this whole issue of including or opening the door up for more African Americans to enter physics. Again, as a viable career alternative. Something that they can be positive contributors to—the science and technology that is being developed. And just to make that space available for other groups that may necessarily be marginalized, whether it be, I don’t know, Hispanics or Native Americans or LGBTQ or whatever. Open it up, let more—get involved—and we'll be amazed at what wonders we are to see going forward, just by having the diversity of inputs.

Zierler:

Now, every generation has their own unique challenges, but there are some challenges that go from generation to generation. So comparing your own experience as an undergraduate with the students you're teaching here at Howard, do you see more continuity or more change in terms of the challenges that they're facing versus the challenges that you faced?

Williams:

A lot of change. A lot of change.

Zierler:

How so?

Williams:

How so! So as an undergrad back in the ‘80s, it was more a spirit of unity, cohesiveness. You're working together. It’s me and my cohort. We have to do this thing together to get through to the other side. You knew what the obstacles were and what the challenges were. Now, the generation that’s in place is of the Obama generation, OK? And I hate using the word post-racial, but some of them seem to think that it’s post-racial. But it’s really not. You can see the climate and the environment that’s out there now [laugh] where it’s really bubbling back up in a big way. But you still have a lot of students now who feel like, “Well, I can do it all on my own. I can work it—I don’t necessarily need to work with groups or what have you.” And then they find themselves in trouble, because they're trying to do it all alone, as opposed to working together, coming together, working in groups and learning from each other and helping each other. So that’s a big difference that I see between when I was coming through, when I first started in academia, and where it is right now, is what I experience students that are coming through the class now.

Zierler:

But that must be incredibly delicate for you as a mentor, if there are students who are, I don’t know, naïve and innocent, that they're not aware of the lingering structural problem of race relations in this country.

Williams:

It is.

Zierler:

And you want to give them a reality check, but you also don’t want to be discouraging, either.

Williams:

Right. I don’t want to jade them.

Zierler:

So how do you do that? How do you draw that line?

Williams:

Well, some of the things—for instance, in our earlier conversation, when you asked about some of the experiences that I had at work, I had a lot of experiences, but I don’t dwell on those. So talking to the students, I may not necessarily give them all the experiences that I've had, but I try to make them aware enough to say, “OK, you need to—”

Zierler:

You didn't glide into your position. It wasn’t easy for you either.

Williams:

And don’t come with a big chip on my shoulder, mad because I saw this and that and the other. But how can you learn from that, to try to position them in a way such that they will come out stronger on the other side? And again, trying to get them to connect with one another, to work well. And don’t be so naïve to think that the system is set up and designed for them to succeed. Because it’s not! It’s not.

Zierler:

But they can anyway.

Williams:

But they can anyway. In spite of—

Zierler:

And that’s the message.

Williams:

In spite of. Right.

Zierler:

And so in that sense, it’s quite similar to where you were, in the mid-1980s.

Williams:

In that sense.

Zierler:

In that sense.

Williams:

In that sense, yes, yes, yes.

Zierler:

OK. Well, I think we're going to leave it here. This was an honor. I learned so much. There are going to be so many people who are going to gather so much insight and wisdom from the words that you shared with us today. So Professor Williams, I really want to express my appreciation, say thank you to you for your time today, and it has been a delight.

Williams:

Thank you very much, David.