This has been an especially good academic year for Skip Crownhart. The recipient of a Distinguished Service Award and the Institute for Women's Studies and Services Outstanding Woman Award, Crownhart, an associate director for academic advising, is gratified to see her work with international students recognized.

Crownhart has been a fixture on the Auraria Campus since 1979, when she started working with international students at the University of Colorado-Denver. In 1980 she moved to AHEC, handling international student concerns and study abroad for all three Auraria institutions. She moved to Metro in 1991; today she is responsible for advising Metro's 185 foreign students, many of whom come from Asian countries.

As the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, Crownhart has lived all over the world and the United States, and settled in Denver; she earned a bachelor's in English from DU and a master's in education administration from CU-Denver. But given her itinerant background, she enjoys the global perspective she gains from the students she advises.

"What I like about Metro is that it's a school for the community," she says. "Everyone should have an equal opportunity and Metro gives people a chance to come and fulfill their dreams."

Deeply interested in equal access, Crownhart and a group of colleagues are collecting oral histories from civil rights activists in Colorado, a much-less chronicled part of the movement than its southern and urban counterparts. Partially funded through a memorial fund established by Crownhart's father in her mother's name, the first two parts of the video series ("Rebels Remembered" and "Law Not Justice") are housed at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library (www.aarl.denverlibrary.org/index.html) in Denver.

"People know things went on around the country," she explains, "but they don't have a sense of what went on in Colorado."

Editor's Note: Skip Crownhart's father, James Reynolds, received the Anti-Defamation League's 2004 Civil Rights Award this December, along with former Metro State Professor Rachel B. Noel. Reynolds was the first Denver chapter chairman of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and the first director of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.