“You didn’t know you were [talking] to a former jailbird, did you?” says Dr. Orlando L. Taylor with a hearty laugh. Currently vice president for strategic initiatives and research at Fielding Graduate University, he seemed thoroughly amused that among his esteemed titles — university administrator, scholar, pioneer in communications studies, advocate for women and Blacks in graduate education — he could count one that would seem absurd to anyone who’d ever met him.
Or perhaps it wouldn’t.
In 1969, Taylor had just given up his position as an assistant professor of communication at Indiana University (IU) — he was the university’s first Black tenure-track professor and only one of three Blacks on the faculty at the time — to assume the role of the university’s first-ever vice president of minority affairs. He was sitting in a faculty senate meeting when a group of Black students burst in to protest race relations on campus. The Bloomington Nine, as they were called, took everyone in attendance hostage. 
Dr. Orlando Taylor
Taylor became their de facto advisor as they pushed university leaders to address the racial climate at IU. After three days of negotiations, a grand jury indicted Taylor and the nine students for conspiracy to take over the university. The university rescinded the offer to Taylor and he went to jail. When faculty members bailed out the students and bailed him out a few days later, Taylor was unemployed. He’d given up his faculty position to accept the VP role that wouldn’t be.
“(Taylor) stood up against racial hostility in 1969 at the cost of his position at IU early in what has turned out to be a truly remarkable career,” said Robert L. Ivie, professor emeritus of communication and culture at IU Bloomington, in a statement released by the university honoring Taylor ahead of his receipt of an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 2007.
“That’s just what he does,” says Dr. Kelly Mack, who currently serves as vice president for undergraduate STEM education and executive director of Project Kaleidoscope at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “And anyone who’s ever known — meaning worked for — Dr. Taylor knows this well. Sacrifice of self, autonomy and excellence are the expectations, and you only achieve them through the indefatigable and unremitting work that Frederick Douglass talked about decades ago.”
To this day, Taylor “is as accessible to his thousands of graduates and students as he is to his higher education peers,” says Dr. Antoine M. Garibaldi, president of the University of Detroit Mercy, who has known Taylor for more than 40 years.
