The trustees of the American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF) have established a multicultural mentoring award in honor of Jerome D. Williams, the F. J. Heyne Centennial Professor in Communication at The University of Texas at Austin.
The Williams-Qualls-Spratlen Multicultural Mentoring Award of Excellence is named equally for Williams, William Qualls of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Thaddeus H. Spratlen of the University of Washington. The award is intended to raise the awareness of mentoring successes from the university level to the national level. Over time, it will contribute to marketing faculty development by recognizing and rewarding the importance of mentoring graduate students and junior colleagues from underrepresented groups in academic marketing.
According to AMAF Executive Director Lisa Chernick, the award aims to encourage and reward outstanding mentors of graduate students and junior faculty colleagues in marketing. Award recipients will have a long-standing commitment to mentoring multicultural students and junior faculty and will have advanced research on issues of racial, ethnic and cultural diversity and their effect on the practice of marketing.
The $5,000 award will be given annually at the American Marketing Association’s Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference beginning in 2010.
Williams teaches undergraduate courses in multicultural marketing, advertising and Black representation, and consumer discrimination in the marketplace, as well as graduate courses in multicultural issues in advertising.
Since joining the Department of Advertising faculty in 2003, Williams has worked to increase enrollment among African American and Latino students in the graduate programs. Those numbers have grown in recent years to about 20 African American graduate students, including six Ph.D. students, and 22 Latino graduate students. In 2008, five African Americans earned their doctor’s degree from the department, representing 100 percent of the output of African American advertising Ph.D.s in the U.S. Williams chaired or served on the dissertation committee of each one.
Learn more about the Williams-Qualls-Spratlen Multicultural Mentoring Award of Excellence.
