How fragile we are, how short our time.
Sunday night I received the sad news that Kent Williamson, emeritus Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English, has died, succumbing to a long battle with a serious illness. He had been struggling with it for quite some time, yet he continued to serve NCTE until his worsening condition forced him to step aside.
I first met Kent about 10 years ago shortly after coming to the International Reading Association. Alan Farstrup, our former Executive Director, assigned me to work on ReadWriteThink, the online resource which is jointly produced by ILA and NCTE. In that capacity I began a long collaboration and friendship with Kent.
A Team of Colleagues
As the website’s corporate grantors changed, Kent and I worked to secure continued funding and to negotiate annual statements of work and intellectual property rights. We had hundreds of discussions on these matters, and we were joined on most occasions by other members of our staffs.
We made a great team. On our side, Bridget Hilferty, Kaylee Olney, Mara Gorman, Anne Fullerton, Wes Ford, Becky Fetterolf, and Shannon Fortner all played important roles on RWT. In NCTE’s lineup, Kent was joined by Lisa Fink, Sharon Roth, Kurt Austin, Scott Filkins, Traci Gardner, Christy Simon, and others. Collectively we acquired and posted peer-reviewed lesson plans, developed student interactives, and took the original site to a new version.
Over the years we all got to know each other very well and looked forward to regular get-togethers at our annual conferences. Our custom was to meet up after our evening RWT board meetings concluded. We’d talk about work, our kids, and just about everything in between. I can still see us all laughing together, Kent’s eyes twinkling as he graced us with his wit and charm, which he possessed in ample store.
Backchannel Chats
The past decade has been a time of great challenge for nonprofits. As our respective managements sought to chart a course through rough seas, Kent and I had many backchannel chats in which we sought each other’s counsel, brainstormed strategies, offered suggestions, and shared thoughts on a host of pressing issues including membership, marketing, communications, technology, and best practices.
If one of us had an open position to fill, or knew of some accomplished executive or literacy professional who was looking for association work, we would always let the other know. I distinctly remember a conversation we once had about the decline in sales revenues of professional associations. “You know what,” he said to me, “if this is the new normal, IT’S SCARY.” It’s a line I have quoted many times.
His Gift of Grace
Kent was a person who tackled things head on. What’s more, he did it with grace, which in my view is among the rarest of gifts. If hard decisions were called for, he made them and took the burden of it on himself. He defused tension with humor. He had a diplomat’s insight into the handling of controversies and knew how to come back hard at something without rancor, preserving comity in disagreement.
Kent relished the vision of what collaborative action might achieve. You could sense this in his enthusiasm for things like the Pathways project and the National Center for Literacy Education. I remember leaving a meeting in Washington, D.C. together when he asked me if I had any time left before I had to catch my train. I did and off we went to a little coffee shop. There, with keen excitement, he told me all about his plans for NCLE. And here sadness mixes with memory.
I went down to Washington last year to attend a NCLE meeting that Kent was coming to. By that time he had had a great deal of treatment, and was looking forward to getting about again. I so looked forward to seeing him and was quietly crushed when Barbara Cambridge, NCTE’s Interim Executive Director, broke the news that Kent’s doctor would not clear him to get on an airplane. True to form, Kent sent personal greetings in a cordial email. There it was again, as it was to the last—pure grace. I think it was from that moment on that I knew he was in very dire straits.
Let all of us at ILA pause today and in a moment of quiet reflection rejoice that such a wonderful person lent the best of what he had to give to a cause as important as ours, to spreading literacy.
Dan Mangan (dmangan@/) is the Director of Public Affairs at the international Literacy Association. Previously, he was ILA’s Strategic Communications Director and Publications Director and launched the original Reading Today magazine and Reading Today Online (now Literacy Daily). He is a veteran of commercial publishing, a former journalist, and an attorney.