08:45 AM EST on Monday, March 14, 2005

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Carol Bennett-Speight discovered her calling as a Philadelphia teenager caught up in the tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman

Carol Bennett-Speight, right, in a meeting with department heads last week, wants to reach out to community leaders and the the School of Social Work's alumni.

She and her classmates fought to change the name of their all-girls public high school from William Penn High School, named after the colonial governor who founded Pennsylvania, to Angela Davis High School, honoring the controversial civil rights activist. Despite organized protests in front of the Liberty Bell, the students lost their battle.

But Bennett-Speight found her passion for fighting for "issues of social justice," which eventually led her to social work.

Now 51, Bennett-Speight has been dean of Rhode Island College's School of Social Work since January, just the second person to hold the post. The first dean, George Metrey, retired last July, after leading the school since it opened in 1979.

Succeeding such a long-serving dean is one of Bennett-Speight's biggest challenges as she takes over the school, which has 17 full-time faculty members, 200 graduate students and 150 undergraduates.

"A lot of the faculty grew up together as a family," Bennett-Speight said this week, sitting in her office at RIC's newly refurbished School of Social Work. "You don't go into any family system and make big changes right away. You listen a lot at first. So I'm going to do a lot of listening this first year."

BENNETT-SPEIGHT, however, is moving forward with two initiatives. One is to create a 12-member advisory panel made up of community members, leaders in the business and legal worlds, politicians, doctors and teachers, to ensure the school is meeting the needs of the state and to brainstorm with different groups, she said.

She hopes the group will be assembled over the summer and begin meeting this fall.

Bennett-Speight also wants to bolster the school's connection to its more than 900 alumni, many of whom have stayed in the area.

"Why not tap into this resource?" Bennett-Speight said. "We want the alumni to be more involved. These are the people who can tell us 'This worked for me' or 'This didn't work for me.' "

The new dean's willingness to reach out to the state's larger community will, in turn, promote social work programs and help students find internships and jobs, said Jim Ryczek, who runs field education for the School of Social Work.

Because the former dean, Metrey, commuted to his home in New Jersey on the weekends, Ryczek said the faculty is enthusiastic about the fact that Bennett-Speight has moved to Providence.

In fact, Bennett-Speight is in the process of selling her home in the Philadelphia area. This weekend, she will return there, to pick up her 24-year-old daughter, Rhonda Speight, and the family cat.

"We place between 200 and 250 students a year in field placements," Ryczek said. "We're really thrilled to have a dean who lives here in the community and who wants to develop relationships with organizations and social service agencies. It will really help us build up our profile as a school."

RIC'S NEW dean -- a licensed practical nurse and the daughter of a Southern welder who migrated north after serving in Germany during World War II -- spent her whole life in the Philadelphia area.

Her parents, Holden and Dorothy Bennett, did not have the chance to go to college. But her father, who was only able to finish fourth grade, pushed his three girls to study hard. Bennett-Speight, who received her bachelor's degree from Penn State, was the first person in her immediate family to attend college.

"I remember him always saying 'I wish I had the opportunity to go to school,' and that always stuck with me," Bennett-Speight said. She went on to receive a master's degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She received a doctorate in social work from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for several years while maintaining a private practice. Before taking the job at RIC, Bennett-Speight was chairwoman of the social work department at Cabrini College, a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, and under her leadership, the program was accredited.

Returning to a public college such as RIC, which educates a high percentage of first-generation college students, resonated with Bennett-Speight.

"I remember what it felt like. Being scared to death, wondering if I'd be able to keep up," she said. "Who would have thought I'd be a professor, let alone a dean."

RIC'S FACULTY seems to like the fact that Bennett-Speight embraced the dual mission of the School of Social Work: providing clinical training and skills to students and imparting a broad understanding of the social and economic factors that promote poverty, mental illness, domestic violence and other issues, said Frederic Reamer, a professor of social work.

"She comes from a tradition, from her own work and training, where she understands the mission of the school -- to serve the least advantaged and most vulnerable of our society," Reamer said. "She has a fire in her belly, and she's eager to be a visible ambassador for the school."

Bennett-Speight says that she hopes to focus on the spiraling costs of medical care and insurance, especially for working families; children's welfare issues; and women experiencing substance and sexual abuse. She plans to work closely with the Poverty Institute at RIC and other advocacy groups on those issues.

Faculty members also hope that as the first black dean at RIC, Bennett-Speight will also draw more members of minority groups to the social work profession.

"She strikes me as someone extremely dedicated to the profession," Ryczek said. "Frankly, we need an African-American woman to be a role model for ethnically diverse students and faculty."