The new Assistant Dean of Students for Diversity and Leadership Development, Taifa Alexander, D.
In January the Wofford community welcomed Taifha Alexander as the new Assistant Dean of Students for Diversity and Leadership Development.
Through the pandemic, she has remained engaged by helping the Wofford community better understand diversity, equity and inclusion as well as practicing antiracism on campus. Dean Taifha’s appreciation for diversity, equity and inclusion “stems from the racial and ethnic diversity within her own Jamaican-Cuban-Indigenous-German-Irish family.”
She explains that she “grew up with acute awareness of how systemic injustice, inequity, paternalism and racism were operationalized to oppress and disenfranchise nearly every identity that I held.”
Her mother immigrated from Jamaica with little less than a high school reading level and because of this encouraged Dean Taifha and her sisters to “ascertain an education so that we could do what it is we wanted to do.”
Dean Taifha received her undergraduate degree in Legal Studies at St. John’s University. It was there that she connected with her forever “fem-tor” Ching Wen Rosa Yen the Director of Multicultural Affairs, who helped her realize the impactful nature that spreading awareness about diversity, equity and inclusion could have on enacting social change.
Post-grad, Dean Taifha earned her J.D. from Georgetown Law School where she focused her legal studies at the intersection of higher education, equity, critical race theory, diversity, inclusion and the law. However, after soul searching, she realized that she was happiest during her time at St. John’s when she was doing hands-on work with diversity, equity and inclusion.
Her passion for working with students coupled with the opportunity to continue working in diversity and inclusion is what attracted Dean Taifha to Wofford.
She says, “I’ve always been attracted to Wofford, it’s a renowned liberal arts institution providing a superior education to its students in hopes of preparing them to make extraordinary and positive contributions to society. There is this incredible sense of responsible citizenship and transformative experience that students are experiencing both in the classroom and through their co-curricular endeavors that I had hoped to be a part of for a long time.”
Over the summer Dean Taifha along with the Antiracism Action Team were energized to develop the Anti Racism 101 Teach-ins in order to help the Wofford community “better understand issues that relate to antiracism and how to be anti racist.”
Between the eight summer sessions there were 892 Wofford students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and members of other communities and educational institutions that participated in the teach-ins. Dean Taifha explains “my aspiration is that we can get to a point in which the entire campus community is aware of issues as it relates to diversity, equity, inclusion and antiracism.”
