Trent to continue as associate chancellor

By Craig Chamberlain

William T. Trent has been appointed as a UI associate chancellor, with
primary responsibility to advise the chancellor on issues and policy
related to the diversity of the campus faculty, staff and student body. He
also will be responsible for oversight of the campus Office of Affirmative
Action.

Trent has held the half-time post on an interim basis since August 1994,
but was approved for the permanent position by the Board of Trustees last
Thursday. He officially begins his new duties on Aug. 21.

He will continue half-time as a professor of educational policy studies and
of sociology.

Trent earned a bachelor's degree from Union College, Barbourville, Ky., in
1966; a master's degree from George Washington University in 1974; and a
doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1982. All
three of his degrees are in sociology.

Early in his career, Trent was the director of a program that supplied
support services for minority students at George Washington University and
then was the director of the Talent Search Project, which sought to
identify and assist Washington, D.C., high school students interested in a
postsecondary education. In the years prior to 1983, when he joined the UI
faculty, he held research positions at the University of North Carolina,
and Duke, Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins universities.