Where Are They Now?

Early Life and Career

The son of Mr. Willie Herbert and Mrs. Ada Jane Williams, James Herbert Williams was born in 1950 in a small farming community in segregated North Carolina. His father was a sharecropper — a legacy of slavery that was a common occupation for Black men well into the 20th century, Williams notes. His mother had a high school diploma, and his parents owned their own home — accomplishments that were uncommon for Black people living in the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

By 1960, both of Williams’ parents had died, and the 10-year-old and his siblings went to live with his grandmother in Cleveland, Ohio, where Williams spent the rest of his childhood and subsequently graduated high school in 1969.

When Williams started college, he initially wanted to be a chemistry major, but a sampling of social work courses and an internship at a school for young people with special needs shifted his interests. “I enjoyed it, and it started me on my path,” Williams recalls. “I love science — I’ve always loved science — but I felt unfulfilled. I realized that I’m more a people person and social person, so I changed from chemistry to sociology.”

He adds, “In the community I grew up in, the people I had access to, most of them were teachers and educators. Human services and social welfare is not that far from education and teaching — it’s in that realm of supporting people in being better at what they’re doing, making changes in their life, being more successful.”

Williams earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Grambling State University, followed by a Master of Social Work from Smith College. He then spent nearly two decades working as a social worker.

It was an MSW field education placement that initially brought Williams to Colorado — the first time he had been west of the Mississippi. He moved to Colorado in 1981, and in 1989, Williams earned a Master of Public Affairs from the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

Williams had been working for the Colorado Department of Public Health in a multidisciplinary program supporting children with physical disabilities, followed by social work roles in other community health programs, hospitals and schools. However, he recalls, “I felt as though there was another way I could impact the profession.” He decided to pursue a PhD — a way to blend the science he loved with the helping profession he was passionate about. In 1994, he earned a doctorate in social welfare from the University of Washington School of Social Work.

Williams joined the faculty at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, eventually earning tenure and becoming the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity. While there he also served as associate dean for academic affairs and associate dean for the school’s MSW program. From there, he moved to Arizona State University, where he was Foundation Professor of Youth and Diversity at the School of Social Work.

Impact at GSSW

It was a call from GSSW Professor Jeff Jenson that started Williams on the path to becoming GSSW’s 6th dean. They knew each other from their work with the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group and their mutual research interests in prevention. Jenson was on the GSSW search committee for a new dean and encouraged Williams to apply.

At the time, the University of Denver was focused on moving up in the national rankings and establishing itself as a research powerhouse nationally and internationally, and the University had similar ambitions for its social work program.

Williams recalls, “It was about what the potential for GSSW was. The energy at GSSW and the University was, ‘We have the potential to be something special.’ I wanted to be a part of that.”

Williams served as GSSW dean from 2007–2016. Building on the foundation established by Dean Catherine Alter, he shepherded GSSW’s rise from No. 38 to No. 17 in the U.S. News & World Report ranking. During his tenure, the school also overhauled its doctoral program, including creating the associate dean for doctoral education position, and updated the MSW program, introducing seven of its eight current specializations. The school also expanded its international courses to include Bosnia, Kenya and South Africa. GSSW saw steady growth in its graduate enrollment, from 383 to 525, and established the Western Colorado MSW Program in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, expanding the school’s statewide reach.

“James Herbert’s years at GSSW marked the beginning of a new era at the school,” Jenson recalls. “He encouraged faculty and doctoral students to focus their work on developing knowledge for practice and policy. Attention was paid to enhancing research infrastructure; submitting federal, state, and community grants; publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals; hiring high-quality faculty; and increasing the school’s presence in professional conferences.” Williams also held several key leadership positions in national and international social work organizations while serving as dean, and Jenson notes that “his visibility in these positions enhanced our reputation and increased the national rankings of the school.”

Notably, a large number of GSSW faculty retired — part of a nationwide retirement wave throughout higher education — giving Williams a rare opportunity to hire 20 new faculty members, including skilled clinical and field professors as well as research powerhouses who complemented the excellent educators, mentors and scholars who were already members of the GSSW faculty. Williams focused on expanding the school’s research infrastructure, including adding its first associate dean for research and establishing and expanding the Institute for Human–Animal Connection. GSSW also added two additional endowed chairs and cemented its position as DU’s top externally funded program — a legacy that continues today.

“I didn’t have to worry about getting a new building, so we were able to focus on people rather than the building,” Williams says. “It was one of the turning points of the school. It had been this wonderful place out West that was giving MSW degrees, transitioning to much more of a national and global brand than it had been before. It was an important time, and I was part of that transition.”

Williams adds, “I was fortunate that it was a time in our profession when many schools of social work were trying to move into the development of knowledge. It was a time when many things were in sync across the profession and within the school. I felt lucky to be there at that time.”

In 2010, Williams was named GSSW’s inaugural Milton Morris Endowed Chair. In 2016, he became dean emeritus and the Distinguished Emil M. Sunley Endowed Chair, which was named after GSSW’s first African American dean. When the University of Denver was designated an R1 “Very High Spending and Doctorate Production” institution in 2022, the milestone was in large part due to the efforts of Williams and fellow GSSW Deans Jack Jones (1987–1996), Catherine Alter (1996–2006), and Amanda Moore McBride (2016-2023).

Jenson says, “James Herbert was an enthusiastic and engaged leader whose positive outlook demonstrated a deep commitment to GSSW students, staff, and faculty. His tenure as dean created positive and significant changes in the school’s culture and productivity.”

Research Impact

Through his own formative experiences, Williams says he came to recognize the disparities experienced by Black Americans in areas such as health, education and crime. Ultimately, that recognition fueled his career as a social work scientist.

Williams’ research focuses on the intersection of race with youth development and social issues that affect Black Americans. Ultimately, his work promotes more effective practice methods in African American communities by identifying risk, protection and resiliency factors for delinquency and violence and exploring race differences in antisocial behaviors, the overrepresentation of Black males in the juvenile criminal legal system, health promotion and disease prevention, mental health service needs and utilization patterns in majority Black schools, academic achievement, community intervention strategies and social issues experienced by the African American community.

Williams has published more than two dozen journal articles over the last decade alone, and he has published five books, including Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning With Our History, Interrogating Our Present, Re-Imagining Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2023), which explores social work’s complex history of upholding white supremacy alongside a goal of achieving racial justice and practicing within racist institutions and systems while simultaneously working to dismantle them.

Among many accolades, in 2016 Williams was named a Fellow of both the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) — among the highest honors in social work research. He served a term as SSWR president, was editor-in-chief of the journal Social Work Research and served as either a consulting editor or editorial board member for several other social work journals.

Today, Williams directs the Arizona State University Center for Child Well-Being, which works to improve the overall health and well-being of children and families. Williams heads a team of nearly 30 researchers and is PI for two large projects funded by the Arizona Department of Child Safety. Over the past 20 years, Williams has been PI or co-PI for nearly $30 million in federally funded research projects.

It’s a remarkable tally for a scholar who served nearly a decade as a dean. Williams says, “Sometimes deanship and administration can suck up all your time, and trying to maintain a scholarly agenda while running a school, you lose somewhere. The only way you can do it is if you have a really strong administrative team with you.” He credits his GSSW administrative team and Executive Assistant Anne Enderby for contributing to his success and the success of the school.

The Next Chapter

After leaving GSSW, Williams returned to the Arizona State University (ASU) School of Social Work as a visiting professor and interim director of the school’s Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center. Williams was director of the ASU School of Social Work and the Arizona Centennial Professor of Social Welfare Services from 2017 to 2021, guiding the school during the tumultuous early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2022, Williams has split his time between his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the university campuses in Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona, where he teaches one course in person in ASU’s satellite MSW program. Similar to GSSW’s Four Corners and Western Colorado MSW programs, the Yuma program primarily serves first-generation Latinx students, Williams notes. “I always had a passion and commitment to [these types of] programs because they take education to the community, and many of the people who graduate stay in the community.”

Reflecting on his time at GSSW, Williams says, “I’m very proud of things we accomplished at GSSW — the growth of the school, growth of the student population, significant growth of the endowment, the growth of the faculty. We wanted to gain national and international recognition in research, innovation and education. I think we accomplished that.”

Williams hasn’t yet set a retirement date, but he is planning for it. He says that heading the Center for Child Well-Being will be the coda to his long academic career.

Williams loves to travel and still has one continent, Antarctica, to scratch off his bucket list. “I plan to enjoy our home and garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have new travel experiences, spend time with family and friends, and continue to learn about culture and history,” Williams says. Like his GSSW predecessor Catherine Alter, Williams also hopes to learn weaving — an artform he says allows the artist to watch the transformation of their idea into something new.

“I’m trying to refocus my energies into non-academic type activities. In the world of academia, you can become so identified with your profession, you lose track of the other things that should go along with that,” Williams says. “I’m trying to figure out the next adventure when academia is no longer the center of my life.”