Guest Contributor: Rex Bickers, FCHS 1970

If it takes a village to raise a child, then it surely helps to have a local university to build a better village. This month, we feature two alumni doing great things at IU Southeast. One is an accomplished scholar who just turned 70. The other is a rising star, not yet 40, in his first professional position.

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Alan Zollman, FCHS 1969

Alan was inducted as a Floyd Central Hall-of-Famer in 2021. At the banquet, in his remarks, he repeatedly referred to “204 feet”. It’s the distance his family lived from the school district boundary. It determined whether he would enroll in the NAFC School system versus Lanesville Schools. Alan feels quite certain about this: those 204 feet changed his life. Floyd Central provided the foundation for his career as a professor of mathematics and education.

Alan earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at IU Bloomington. He chose to serve and see the world through the Peace Corps, teaching high school math in Ghana. Back in the US, he was among the first half dozen FC grads who returned to teach there. Yet he kept on, in the pursuit of his own education, completing a master’s degree, and then his Ph.D. (also in mathematics), in 1986.

The path to “the top” in academia often means a lot of intermediate destinations along the way. Alan had a typical number of stops, one was at Northern Illinois University. He earned tenure and had a very successful span of 21 years there. But a temporary opportunity opened at IUS in 2014. He took it and has stayed here ever since. Moreover, his career has flourished at IUS with million-dollar grants for the program “Growing Tomorrow’s STEM Teachers” and other accomplishments. In 2019, the School Science and Mathematics Association (SSMA) bestowed Alan with the George Mallinson Distinguished Service Award. It’s the highest award granted by the SSMA. And in 2020, he earned the IUS campus-wide Distinguished Research and Creativity Award.

We asked Alan what made the greatest impact on him during his student days in the NAFC school system. He replied: My father never made it beyond 8th grade. So, becoming a university professor wasn’t something I planned. Yet FCHS stressed academics. I learned how to learn, even to love learning at Floyd Central. This began my quest for knowledge journey that I am still pursuing – and enjoying.

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James Wilkerson, NAHS 2001

After high school, some highly focused students know what kind of education they want. Perhaps an MBA from a top business school, or advanced study at a cutting-edge engineering mecca. The strategy is… “get the degree; figure out the career overtime”.

James knew that he wanted a career in higher education. He just had to figure out his educational journey as he went along. He earned an English degree in 2006 from U of L, motivated by his strong skills in writing and public speaking. But his early job experiences felt unsatisfying and unlikely to lead to his goal. Graduate school moved him closer. He completed a master’s degree in communication at Bellarmine in 2013. Finding the best Ph.D. program was the next logical step. Yet sometimes, signs along the trail point to another approach.

U of L’s Brandeis School of Law came as an unexpected path, adding clarity to converging goals: teaching, advocacy, social change, and particularly: policy. College campuses are natural “laboratory environments”, nurturing the critical examination of policy. Universities focus on how policies are born, how they’re carried out, and how they evolve over time.

James joined IUS in March 2020, where he serves as Director of Staff Equity & Diversity and deputy Title IX Coordinator. You might think (as I did just a month ago)… quite naively… that Title IX is mostly about female athletes. It’s about equal treatment and equal impact for everyone in education. That especially means equal protection from harassment and sexual assault. Prevention is often priority one. It’s a cornerstone of James’ career focus, beginning at least two years before law school with the African American Male Initiative, a program dedicated to staying in school and graduating. He has pursued leadership opportunities repeatedly across Kentuckiana to promote healthy masculinity and accountability. His distinguished abilities in writing and in public speaking have put him in high demand, and there’s a lengthy list of college campus guest presenter invitations that he has accepted.

He has a system-wide view of Indiana University broadly, and he has a clear objective to become a national voice in the conversation on diversity and sexual assault prevention. It will be New Albany’s good fortune if we can keep him here, as he moves toward that goal.

We asked James to tell us more about the term “the Title IX Guy”. He replied: “The Title IX Guy is my answer to the question ‘what area of law are you going into.” It’s my passion, my calling, my brand, and my way to make our colleges a safer place.

Read the entire February 2022 Legacy Ledger (Issue 18).

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