her that black people could be whatever they wanted to be,” she said.
Years later, Boker would find herself in a position to “make it happen.”
She wears many hats in her current role at Washington University. In
addition to being the associate dean and chief of staff for the School
of Law, she is interim chief of staff for the Office of the Vice Provost
of Faculty Advancement and Institutional Diversity. Among her
responsibilities is to advise on the promotion, as well as recruitment and
retention of faculty members from under-represented backgrounds.
“What I do is not just based on race or ethnicity, but also representation
in all fields, like involving more women in physics or more Asians in
humanities,” she said. “I realized that this is what I was supposed to do.
Part of my role is to get more people like my daughter to be part of the
environment, in order to be more reflective of the population of the area.”
Boker’s daughter, now 18, is a first-year student at Washington University.
And Boker said those mother-daughter conversations are getting easier.
“I tell her she didn’t get into Washington University because she was
black. It was because she was capable, she worked hard … it was more
than just her ‘blackness,’ it was her community service, the way she
writes, the way she interacts with her teachers … ,” Boker noted. “Milli is
the first in both our families to have a traditional college education. Yes,
we are pretty stoked by this!”
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