Walk through the University of Washington campus with Antoinette Wills (PhD, History, 1975), and you may see familiar sights with new eyes. A bench honoring graduates from the 1880s. A statue rubbed by students for good luck. A giant sequoia tree planted by Edmond Meany.
Wills arrived at the UW 41 years ago as a graduate student and stayed on as a staff writer and fundraiser, gaining a wealth of knowledge about the University’s history along the way. Now she is sharing that information through a series of video tours filled with historical anecdotes. The tours are posted on the College of Arts and Sciences’ website in celebration of its 150th anniversary. A brief history of the College, written by Wills, is also posted on the site.
The projects have been a perfect fit for Wills, who is passionate about history and the University. “History is just the way my imagination works,” she explains. “I look at something and I see the context of what used to be. It makes the world richer when you can see the layers.”
Wills’s own history begins with a childhood in a Polish-immigrant neighborhood in Philadelphia, where she was the first generation in her family to graduate from high school. After earning a BA from Vassar College and an MA from the University of Chicago, Wills arrived at the UW in 1970 as a doctoral student in history. She knew almost nothing about Seattle and even less about the UW, except that it was offering financial support in the form of a teaching assistantship. “So I came,” says Wills, “and I discovered that it is an excellent school.”
After earning her PhD, Wills had every intention of leaving Seattle for an academic post elsewhere. But faced with a stagnant job market in academia, she found work at the UW—in the School of Dentistry, the Department of Economics, the Office of the Vice President for Development, and finally the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office, where she was hired as a Special Projects fundraiser in 2000 and has worked in a variety of roles ever since.
It was during her years in the Vice President’s Office, where she was a writer, that Wills began offering tours of the campus. Her first tour was for a visiting alumnus. She borrowed information from a UW “campus walking tour” brochure, adapting it for her audience. She also read a history of the University’s first 100 years, written by UW Professor Charles Gates and published in 1961. “The book was more than two hundred pages, with footnotes,” recalls Wills. “Of course I read the footnotes. I’m a historian!”
Since that first tour, Wills has served as knowledgeable tour guide dozens of times, her audiences running the gamut from donors to staff to incoming presidents. “I have not yet given the tour to [current UW president] Michael Young,” she admits, “but when he and his wife have time, I would like to.”
Or President Young can just click on the College of Arts and Sciences website and view the tour online. To date, the College has posted a dozen brief video segments at different campus landmarks, from Drumheller Fountain to a bench honoring the class of 1885, which was Edmond Meany’s graduating class. “On that bench, you can barely read that it says Class of 1885,” says Wills. “But I think it’s such a perfect example of how the details of the University’s history are everywhere, and you walk by them every day.”
For those wanting more information, there is Wills’s brief history of the College of Arts and Sciences, also posted on the website. Wills tapped Gates’s book for information but also read old student yearbooks from Suzzallo Library. “I learned a lot about the history of the University by seeing it through the eyes of the students,” she says.
As the College’s 150th anniversary celebration wraps up in 2012, so will Wills’s UW career. She is planning to retire in June 2012, but she hopes to continue visiting campus regularly as an Access student. (The Access Program allows individuals, age 60 and older, to audit UW courses.) “I think it would be fun to take the 100-level history classes for which I was a TA in the 1970s,” she says. “The facts of history don’t change, but the way we understand them evolves as the world changes and as we get older.”
Wills also plans to stay involved as a donor to the University. After making annual gifts for years, she established the Antoinette Wills Endowed Fund for Graduate Students in 2005, through the University’s Faculty-Staff-Retiree Campaign. She continues to add to the endowment and is a member of the Suzzallo Society, having included a gift to the University in her will.
“My education is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “It was largely a gift from other people. I want to make that kind of experience possible for others.”
Thinking back on her years at the University, Wills sums them up with one word: lucky. “I’m lucky that I landed here, in this city, and I’m lucky that I found a home at the University of Washington, where I’ve had an opportunity to do things that I’m good at and that are important to me,” she says. “It’s been so much better than I ever imagined.”