Chemeketa Voices

The History of "T":
Taylor Marrow

As a child, there was probably little question that Taylor Marrow would grow up to become a history professor. He was steeped in it from the beginning.

He’s is the youngest of five children in to grow up in a Princeton, New Jersey, home his grandfather built with a Federal Housing Association loan provided to returning World War II veterans. His father grew up in the same house and lives there to this day.

If that isn’t enough to sway the opposition, there’s also his name. One grandfather, his father, an uncle and two cousins are all named Taylor. His other grandfather’s middle name was Taylor as well.

So, when it came to naming his daughter, there was little doubt as to what name he would choose.

“She’s the first female in our family to be named Taylor. She goes by Little T,” said Marrow. He commemorated her birth with a tattoo of an upper- and lowercase “t” on his wrist.

 (For the record: One of the other T’s in Marrow’s family is Tracy Marrow, although many will recognize him better by his stage name, Ice-T.)

Marrow was fortunate enough to attend one the top high school in the state and one of the highest-ranked schools in the nation, Princeton High School. At Princeton, Marrow said, there was no question whether he would go to college, it was just a matter of where.

“It was ingrained in everyone that college what you do when you graduate.  You talk about it with all your peers, you talk about it with your parents, you talk about it with your counselors, your teachers, and on, and on. All of them have this expectation that: One, you can make it in college. And, two, you will go to college out of high school,” he said.

Despite such preparation, Marrow had an epiphany while in line to register for college classes.

“I thought, ‘Man, this is not where I wanted to be at this point in my life,’” he said.

He took six years off and traveled to see the country beyond his hometown. He lived in California and Washington State, and visited Oregon. He ended up settling down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Mostly because it was time, he felt, “to get a real job.”

Marrow began taking classes at Guilford Technical Community College and earned enough credit to transfer to Indiana University.  He double majored in telecommunications and history, but realized that making a career for himself in video production was going to be harder than he’d expected.

“You have to really be in the top one percent or know somebody. I wasn’t in the top one percent and I didn’t know anyone,” Marrow said.

He set his sight on a master’s degree in history from Ball State University, focusing race relations in 20th Century U.S. history. While he appreciated the education he received in Indiana he was looking for more diverse surroundings to set his roots.

“I decided I wanted to be in the most liberal place I could find outside of Indiana and settled on Portland,” Marrow said.

He started applying to schools within 50 miles of the city center, including Chemeketa. He was driving to the Rose City from Indiana when he got a call from Chemeketa’s Lori Murphy offering him an interview. The interview was followed by a job offer as an adjunct professor, but Marrow was soon hired on full time.

In addition to his teaching duties, which include U.S. history, world history, and African American history, Marrow recently accepted a position as Chemeketa’s interim director of diversity and equity.

“Basically, I am the head coordinator for issues of diversity as it relates to programming, training and community outreach. I am the person who spearheads it and facilitates it,” said Marrow.

The position is primarily an extension of what he does the classroom, only on a grander scale.

“We have a large population of students that do come from rural areas who don’t understand diversity and acceptance, and that there is a larger world outside of Oregon. What I like is reaching students that have not been exposed to other points of view before,” he said.

By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.

Updated October 2, 2007 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.