The University of Findlay will welcome Tommy Lee Woon, dean of multicultural life at Macalester College, Oct. 31 through Nov. 3.

Woon, a Chinese American from San Mateo, Calif., will facilitate discussions related to creating a multicultural campus. He will meet with various groups of students, faculty and staff to provide assistance and consultation for the creation of an institutional diversity plan. Woon’s consulting visit follows a multicultural consultant who visited UF in May.

Woon received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California-Davis in 1974 and a master’s degree in counseling from California State Sacramento in 1977. After college, he served as a student counselor at Cal State Sacramento and Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash., counseled Indochinese refugees in Tacoma, Wash., and handled caseloads for the Employment Opportunities Program in Sacramento.

From there he moved on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where he served as an Asian American counselor/coordinator and later as assistant dean of student support services and director of Asian American and multicultural affairs. He was one of the founding members of the Asian Pacific American Federation of Northeast Ohio.

As associate dean and director of the Third World Center at Brown University, Woon was responsible for a mandatory freshman orientation program on “Pluralism, Diversity and Community Values,” involving 1,400 freshmen and 60 facilitators whom he trained. He also administered Brown’s Third World Transition Program, a four-day precollege orientation program for students of color.

During the academic year, Woon advised Brown University’s residence-based minority peer counselors and helped to organize annual ethnic history months. He organized “Allies in Training” to bring together students from diverse backgrounds to examine ways of developing effective alliances with other groups on campus. Woon left Brown University for Stanford in 1993 to become the assistant dean of students and multicultural educator.

In 2001, the Stanford Review identified Tommy Lee Woon as Stanford’s Person of the Year 2000-2001. The Review recognized Woon for his education of students on the Grape Boycott. Click here to read more.