With Taylor, Rust College picks strong leader, mentor
Former San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor will make an excellent college president, and we have no doubts she will make her mark at Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss.
After all, Taylor made her mark here in San Antonio as a community development coordinator with the city and then District 2 city councilwoman before her historic tenure as mayor.
Taylor was the first African American, and second woman, to serve as mayor of San Antonio. She was appointed as interim mayor in 2014 after Julián Castro left the office to serve as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was appointed, in part, because she said she would not run for re-election. But she did — a flipflop that always troubled us — and was elected to the office in 2015.
We had our fair share of disagreements with Taylor. Notably, on her early decision as mayor to kill the modern streetcar project and her vote as a councilwoman in 2013 against the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance that extended protections to the LGBTQ community.
But there was also much to admire in her poised and calm leadership. While she voted against the NDO, she enforced and supported it as mayor. She achieved a contract agreement with the San Antonio Police Officers Association, despite bitter attacks against her. In doing so, she settled an acrimonious dispute and made headway on public safety health care costs. She advocated a back-tobasics approach to governance. Her decision to derail the streetcar likely reflected the views of the majority of voters.
Taylor governed with a refreshing lack of partisanship. She enjoyed support from San Antonio’s East Side and black community but also from North Side conservative voters. As she told Express-News reporter Bruce Selcraig, she didn’t want to be boxed in as a leader but rather seen for her own ideas and values.
“I didn’t like being pigeonholed. I wanted the conversation to go beyond my being black and female,” Taylor said. “Some people were actually offended when I had my own ideas.”
We often saw a mayor who sought to build consensus and was pragmatic about solving problems. She was a champion of workforce development as a pathway out of poverty — arguments many local leaders are advancing now during this crisis — and she launched My Brother’s Keeper as a way to mentor young minority men. And, of course, she had an outstanding book club. Impeccably credentialed with a bachelor’s degree from Yale and master’s degree in regional planning from the University of North Carolina, and soon to be awarded a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, Taylor will make an excellent college president at Rust, a historically black liberal arts college.
She has said she hopes to grow the college’s media program and encourage more black men into the field of teaching, and plans on amplifying social justice history.
“When I was that little black girl at Yale, I made friends,” she said of her undergraduate experience. “But I never really had anyone on the faculty or in the administration who took an interest in me or my future. I want to develop that sort of mentoring environment at Rust.”
She will be an outstanding leader and mentor. Here’s to an exciting new chapter for a former mayor whose public service helped make San Antonio a better place.