Fighting for Justice: Ada Gregory

My first interaction with Ada Gregory occurred even before I officially started my freshman year at Duke. As the co-director of Project Change, a pre-orientation program offered to incoming first years, Ada ensured I was exposed to intellectually stimulating discussions, wonderful fellow first years, and many of the important social issues that pervade our society. After receiving a fascinating introduction to my Duke career, I was delighted to sit down with Ada to understand a little more behind the strong and confident woman I met 3 years ago. Graduating from Duke both as an undergrad and grad, Ada was able to offer a unique perspective of a previous student who has returned back to campus to work.
 
Ada Gregory is the current director of Duke University’s Women’s Center, a gender equity facility that advocates for women and men who experience issues related to gender. This includes student based activities and groups, gender violence services, and counseling. When explaining what the Women’s Center truly means, Ada shared, “Our mission is to promote social justice activism on a wide range of issues and to help students develop their own ability to change what they desire. By equipping them with tools to make change effectively, we embody a Feminist framework to empower them.”
 
In between the time that Ada was at Duke as a student and as a staff member, she was active in a highly diverse range of experiences and roles. After first graduating from Duke with an undergraduate Political Theory degree, she spent some time travelling. However, upon learning about President Clinton’s legislation, which forgave student loans if they served as a police officer or teacher, Ada decided to become an officer of the law (it seemed more adventurous, she explained) during her time at Duke Graduate School. There she received a Master of Liberal Studies, a certificate in Women’s Studies, and completed her thesis in the criminalization of domestic violence.
 
After graduate school, Ada gained more than 15 years of valuable experience working in the criminal justice and violence prevention fields. When asked how she became so interested and involved in this area, she replied that after 9 months of police academy, with only one 3-hour talk on domestic violence and hardly anything on sexual assault, she realized it was immeasurably important to expose this glaring problem. She found that the criminal justice field was “lackadaisical” in its approach to intervening, and reinforced “a lot of antiquated perceptions of victims and how violence is perpetuated.” Ada wanted to do something different, and ultimately hoped to change how the system worked. She poignantly shared, “Some people think it comes from a personal experience, but that’s not really what drove me. It was about recognizing what was happening in the world, particularly in a field that is predominantly male.”
 
Once Ada gained this insight, there was no holding back! In hopes of altering law enforcement programs, she applied for several federal and local grants. She was then able to work at the Governors’ Crime Commission and eventually served on Senate subcommittees that drafted legislation. During this time, Ada spearheaded several extremely significant projects, such as creating the department’s first Domestic Violence Unit, developing the first automated victim notification system in North Carolina, and monitoring a statewide training policy for domestic policy, all of which had wide spread influence across the state.
 
Working for the state, Ada admitted, was quite frustrating. With a lot of bureaucracy and nepotism, she left that career to try her hand in the non-profit world. It was at the Orange-Durham Coalition for Battered Women, a joint domestic violence and sexual assault program, where she worked as Executive Director for 10 years. This experience not only allowed her to gain numerous necessary skills to affect change, but also helped Orange County start its own program. In this time, Ada smiles as she explains how she had two beautiful and healthy boys, Aden and Luke, who are six and eight respectively.
 
After working for Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics for several years, she decided to take on the role of Executive Director of the Women’s Center, which she calls a “culmination of interests.” While recognizing that there are many pressing gender relations issue that pervade Duke, she disclosed with me what she believed is the most challenging: “People often arrive at Duke with ideas of what their gender means, what it means to be a man or a woman. Then these ideas get played out in social experiences. As a result, it’s really difficult to address what is subtle but powerful in our culture that impacts how they see themselves and interact, for both men and women.” She explained that whereas analyzing how many women do stem cell research or determining the number of female engineers are quite straightforward tasks, aspects of college life such as alcohol, dating scene, hookup culture, and parties, are much more difficult to address. The purpose of the Women’s Center therefore, she clarified, is to “empower students to address these issues, and empower them as they think it’s best to do.”
 
Looking back and comparing her different eras at Duke, she certainly acknowledges that our campus today has a far more diverse student body, which makes it a more rich and valuable place. Upon explaining that neither cultural centers nor the Women’s Center existed when she was a student, she voiced, “There are a lot more opportunities that cater to a wider breadth of student interests, such as Duke Engage, the Global Health Institute, and more.”
 
When asked whom her female role model is, Ada chuckled and admitted, “I always have the hardest time answering that question! I really don’t know!” What went through my head? Ada is already such an inspiration to others, that her need for recognizing a role model may be unnecessary!
 
Aside from saving the world, one case at a time, Ada has always been a keen runner (I bet she never let the bad guys get away…). Although she often trained for marathons, she confessed that she somehow always got injured right before them. Right now, she laughed, “my friend is trying to talk me into the “Rugged Maniac” – basically a 5K adventure style race that is full of obstacles… entrenched in mud.” Now that sounds legit.
 
Another fun fact to end on? She is a master at creating birthday cakes for her children. One of her son’s most recent birthday included an erupting volcano cake that she made herself. Okay. All I can say is that I’m calling her on my next birthday.