When H. Michael Williams began at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s, he made friends easily. He was a student-athlete who had plenty of interaction with non-athletes.
“We each had roommates who were non-athletes, and many of those people are still in my life today,” Williams recalls.
It’s these coming-of-age experiences, along with a top-notch education, that Williams, who was appointed full-time director of athletics earlier this year, is trying to make more accessible to students who play in one of UC-Berkeley’s 30 intercollegiate sports.
Athletes make up more than 25 percent of African-American students at the institution that bills itself as the premier, public university in this country. But in recent years, many of the Black athletes have described feeling cut off from the rest of the student body and dissatisfaction with being limited to other athletes as their dorm roommates.
Although Williams did not necessarily experience the same sort of isolation as an undergraduate, “I was here (at Berkeley) when there were very few Black men. Every day in my career, I have been the only Black man wherever I was.”
A 1982 alumnus, Williams was a longtime philanthropist, university volunteer and vice chairman of the university foundation’s board, which completed a $3 billion-plus campus-wide fundraising campaign. He worked for more than two decades in finance, mostly in the San Francisco area, retiring in 2009 as vice chair of capital markets for Barclays Global Investors. Previous career stops included being a debt trader and corporate finance officer for Bank of America.
He was tapped as UC-Berkeley athletics director after holding the post for nearly a year on an interim basis. Although he initially voiced no aspirations for the permanent position, he had a change of heart when Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sold him on the idea. Simultaneously, he found himself won over during the course of becoming acquainted with many of the 850 student-athletes.
