When a friend first encouraged Vineyard seasonal resident Emilie Townes to apply to be dean of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, a role she retired from this summer after 10 years of service, Ms. Townes didn’t think much of it.
“I cussed her out,” she laughed. “I said, ‘No, not even interested.’”
With her spouse’s encouragement, she reconsidered.
“It became more of a matter of curiosity for me,” Ms. Townes said.
She was curious as a born and raised Southerner who had spent her entire academic career outside of the South. She was curious even though she had just undergone an exhausting search for the dean at the Yale Divinity School, where she served as associate dean. And she was curious about the idea of a Black, queer woman helming the divinity school of a prominent southern university.
She submitted her application right before embarking on sabbatical. By the time Vanderbilt called her back, she had forgotten she applied. Still, she followed her curiosity and took the interview.
“All the yeses lined up,” Ms. Townes said. “It was very much an out of body experience for me... After it was over I called my spouse and said, ‘I think I may be in trouble,’ and she just burst out laughing.”
Ms. Townes took over as dean in August 2013, promising she would stay in the role for 10 years. Sure enough, she retired to focus on teaching full time this past June, passing the torch to Yoland Pierce, former dean of Howard University School of Divinity.
Ms. Townes celebrated her retirement with a four-day series of events hosted by her friends and colleagues on the Vineyard, culminating with a Womanist Wisdom Panel at the Union Chapel.
Looking back on her career, among former students and peers at Union Chapel, Ms. Townes was gratified by the different viewpoints she had helped shape.
“I realized I have produced some really, really good doctoral students,” she said. “And they don’t sound anything like me, which I love.”
During her time as dean of Vanderbilt’s divinity school, Ms. Townes oversaw a major renovation of the school’s building, a complete curriculum overhaul and the transition to remote and hybrid classes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of all her accomplishments, she said she is most proud of her work fostering collaboration, whether it be between the divinity school’s own faculty or within the rest of the university. Together, they worked with faculty from the nursing school, the law school and more to develop interdisciplinary practices. “We couldn’t quite figure out how to
hook up with the school of engineering, but we did try,” she said.
Ms. Townes said that interdisciplinary approach was also a response to her students’ needs; they were increasingly finding their callings outside of traditional denominational work. Roughly a quarter of graduates went on to take community-centric roles that were only tangentially related to religion, she said.
“It’s wrapped up in a lot of the infighting within all of the denominations, but it’s also about having the freedom to choose what you do with your calling,” she said.
Ms. Townes grew up in North Carolina in a family of academics. Her parents were both observant Christians, taking care to send Ms. Townes and her sister to the best Sunday school possible in order to establish a strong Christian foundation. Then, when the two reached high school, they were given the option to choose whatever spiritual practice suited them best.
“That was very unusual for Black parents of that generation to give their kids that amount of leeway,” she said.
Although she acknowledged that some people, especially queer people, have negative experiences with the church, Ms. Townes never felt her beliefs or her congregation were at odds with her identity.
“I’m not afraid to ask God tough questions,” she said. “If God is omnipotent, he can handle anything that I was throwing at him.”
Ms. Townes said she is part of the womanist movement, a school of thought popularized in the late ‘80s that explicitly centered around and included Black experiences, and was as an alternative to feminism.
At the Womanist Wisdom Panel in the Union Chapel, panelists — all of them prominent Black female academics — shared what womanism meant to them, acknowledging that its definition is deeply personal and ever-changing. Much of the talk gave credit to Alice Walker, who first introduced the term.
“A womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” panel host Stacey Floyd-Thomas said, quoting Ms. Walker.
Ms. Townes said she doesn’t care too much for labels, as long as her students are doing the work.
“Are we working for justice is the bottom line,” she said. “The current moment needs a lot of different approaches.”
For Ms. Townes, the current moment hinges on the events of Jan. 6, 2021 and its aftermath. One of her main projects during her upcoming sabbatical, before returning to teach Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt next year, will be examining the interplay between democracy and race in the U.S.
“In my 68 years I have never seen a defeated president and the folks that support that defeated president try to take over the U.S. government,” she said. “I do think we are at a place we have never been before as a nation.”
Another project, she said, will be to read more about Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, although her initial instinct is to reject pessimism as a response to injustice. Maybe she’ll change her mind once she reads more, she admitted, but for now she draws upon the faith she learned as a Christian and the hope she harbors to work towards solutions.
“I was not raised to live my life in despair,” she said. “I’m bone deep on that.”
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