Assistant Vice President for Campus Engagement and Director of the Davis Center Bilal Ansari will leave the College in May and return to his previous role as a chaplain at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Danbury, in Connecticut, he said in an interview with the Record. Ansari is the second administrator from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to recently announce a departure from the College, following the departure of Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leticia S.E. Haynes ’99, who will leave the College on June 30.
Ansari joined the College in 2011 as the first Muslim chaplain and served as assistant director of the Center for Learning in Action until 2014. He then left the College to serve as dean of student services at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., the first accredited Muslim undergraduate institution in the country. He then returned to the College in 2017 and assumed his current position.
Ansari said his decision to leave was prompted by personal considerations and a desire to return to prison chaplaincy, which had been his occupation for nearly two decades before coming to the College. “The value of all that I bring could be better served for the most vulnerable populations that are in the prisons,” he said. “I’m hoping that the remaining years of my service are spent cheering for those who are not thought of, neglected, or given no hope.”
In addition to his role at FCI Danbury, Ansari will continue as an associate professor of Muslim chaplaincy at the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace in Hartford, Conn., a theological seminary, where he oversees the institution’s graduate chaplaincy program.
During his time at the College, Ansari was involved in several institutional initiatives, including serving on the strategic planning committee that created Theme, Affinity, Program, and Special Interest housing. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he also helped found DIRE, a diversity, inclusion, and racial equity initiative in Town.
Following a 2014 hate crime at the College in which a threatening message was left on the dorm room door of a Black female student, Ansari joined students involved with the Black Student Union to occupy the Williamstown Police Department until authorities opened an investigation. “We went to the police station until they did something,” he said. “Some of my proudest moments were working with MinCo and being close to student activism over the years.”
Off campus, Ansari has conducted summer research projects documenting the history of the Black community in White Oaks neighborhood of the Town, where his third great-grandmother lived. He also served as executive director of Higher Ground, a local nonprofit that worked to rehouse families displaced after Hurricane Irene destroyed The Spruces mobile home park in 2011, leaving 226 low-income families without homes. He helped negotiate with the College to donate six acres of land at the end of Southworth Street, which became Highland Woods, a 30-unit affordable housing development, according to Ansari.
Ansari said watching students develop over their four years at the College has been among the most meaningful parts of his work. “Watching the individuals grow here in this special transitional time of a human being’s life, their four years of college … I think, is priceless,” he said.
Ansari also emphasized the importance of preserving the spaces and histories of Black students and alums at the College after his departure. “We worked hard to preserve [Black history] on the walls of Rice House and the Davis Center,” he wrote in an email to the Record. “Do not forget or allow the erasure of Black history at Williams.”
