Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange (Image: SCC)
After six years of leadership at Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College, Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange will leave her post this summer after being selected as chancellor of University of Washington Tacoma.
For Edwards Lange, the new post is an opportunity to expand her work from leading an academic institution dedicated to students in the core neighborhoods of a major city to an opportunity to shape learning for an entire growing city and region in the South Sound.
“Tacoma is beginning to experience a lot of the same things that Seattle did maybe 10 years ago,” Edwards Lange said. “An explosion in growth.”
First taking the role of president at SCC on an interim basis in 2015, Edwards Lange’s tenure leading Seattle Central has been most marked by the past year of challenges including the COVID-19 crisis and Black Lives Matter protests that shook the neighborhood.
“As a woman of color leading a major institution, some expected everyone in the building to be part of the movement. Students had different opinions about how engaged they wanted to be,” Edwards Lange said.
Her approach during CHOP is illustrative of her time leading SCC.
“Many of our students and faculty were on the frontline and engaged,” she says. Balancing the desire for change with keeping the campus and school community safe “often put me in the middle of people, to degree.”
Edwards Lange approached bringing solutions to CHOP and “so much pain and anguish” that grew around it by solidifying her relationships with community and business organizations in the neighborhood including the Broadway Business Improvement Area and a coalition of groups Mayor Jenny Durkan ultimately leaned on in making her decision to raid and sweep the protest zone away.
Edwards Lange leaves SCC as it emerges from a second academic year bent but not broken by the pandemic and with an ambitious growth plan that could see a six-story Information Technology Education Center on Broadway with nearly 200 underground parking spots next to the Capitol Hill light rail station and eventually new housing along E Pine.
But typical of Edwards Lange’s approach, she sees community partnerships as the most realistic, fastest route to finding housing solutions for Seattle Central’s students who increasingly cannot afford to live in the core of the city. She points to affordable development from Community Roots Housing and making sure students and faculty have information about how best to access that housing as the only real path right now to help.
Another partnership will change the school beginning this fall as Seattle Central will make a new home for Intiman Theater on Capitol Hill. The link will create a new associate degree program emphasis in Technical Theatre for Social Justice at the school and help to provide training and roles for diverse designers, lighting techs, and theater crews. It will also keep the school’s stages busy with performance.
“Six years went by in a flash,” Edwards Lange said. “When I came to Seattle Central, I thought I might retire in this job. Now I’m starting again.”
Seattle Central has not yet announced details of its search for a new president. The Seattle Colleges system is expected to name an interim president this week.
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