FieldAR2023OnlineAll11.13 - Magazine - Page 17
ALUMNI
Making
a
Dif f erence
Making Headlines
Maya Wiley ’82, J.D.
“What headline from your life would you share with your fourteen-year-old self?” an interviewer once asked her.
“ ‘MAYA WILEY RUNS FOR MAYOR’ ” she recounts telling the writer, smiling. “The question got me thinking…
At 14, I had just started at Field. I was just going about my life. I didn’t know what I was going to do at all…but
I would never have believed that headline.”
Maya Wiley has dedicated her life to working for equity and justice. In college at
Dartmouth, earning her B.A. in Psychology, she realized she wanted to be a civil
rights attorney. She enrolled in Columbia Law School, where she earned her
Juris Doctor in 1989. She initially worked for the ACLU and then for the
NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. She became a litigator with the U.S. Attorney’s
Office, and then moved into city government. She served as Special
Counsel to the Mayor of New York City before deciding to mount her own
campaign in 2020. Now, as the President and CEO of the Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the nation’s oldest, largest,
and most diverse civil rights coalition, Maya leads a coalition of 230
organizations, fighting for a just, inclusive, and fair American democracy.
But at 14, Maya had just arrived at The Field School. The School had been
housed in an old brownstone on Wyoming Avenue, but an expansion was
planned. For many years it had 15 students per grade, but Maya’s class was the
first with 30 students. Field opened the “New Building,” across the street on Wyoming
Ave, to grow the School.
“Everyone got together in the lobby and sat on the floor, and Elizabeth Ely called us to community.” Maya’s
parents were civil rights activists, so community-building felt very comfortable. But, she notes, “Elizabeth created
something I had not experienced before at school: the creation of a responsible community. Students at Field
were expected to drive their education and be invested in the life of the school.”
Maya studied abroad twice during winter internship, once living in a rural town in Colombia where she attended
school and lived with a family that ran a coffin-making business out of their home. “The experiential side—and
helping to create those experiences—was what the School was all about,” Maya says.
At Field, she experienced teachers who challenged and pushed her. And no matter how she performed in the
classroom, they focused on her potential.
“In other places, those kinds of teachers were outliers, the exceptions.
At Field, that was normal…. the teachers built us up!”
~Maya Wiley ‘82
Perhaps Field teachers saw the activist, the attorney fighting for change, the CEO, or the candidate for mayor of
New York City. Perhaps they saw Maya and knew how to meet her where she was in that moment. As Maya puts
it, “That’s the gift of an education where people see more in you than you see in yourself.”