SERVANT LEADERSHIP: NITA WILLIAMS' DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN.

• Position: INSPIRING ENVIRONMENT: #SQUADGOALS

The door behind the circulation desk of Smith Library is always open.

It leads to the office of LaNita Williams, who has served High Point University students for 30 years.

Many students like Aria Real have walked through the door over the years to find Williams working but always welcoming. Her soft-spoken nature and willingness to lend a hand reminded Real, from Baltimore, that HPU is every student's home away from home.

"Miss Nita is this beautiful person I had great conversation with and felt at ease when I saw her smile," says Real, an interior design graduate and former co-president of HPU's Black Cultural Awareness Club. "When I was a student, she offered me a job in the library, advised our club and was a mentor every step of the way."

Williams' open door policy reflects the commitment of HPU faculty and staff to serve as heroes, models and mentors to students. They follow the adage that HPU President Nido Qubein shares: You can't teach values. Instead, you model them.

"I always tell students that I'm here if they need me," Williams says. "If you need to talk, come see me."

And they do.

WE LIVE, THEY WATCH, THEY LEARN

Williams is one of hundreds of faculty and staff who help students through the midst of their most transformative years.

She, too, has experienced transformation in her lifetime.

When she was a seventh-grader in the 1970s, her junior high school was integrated, and the first white classmate she sat next to pulled her desk away from Williams. By graduation, though, Williams and the girl had become friends who'd chat when they passed by each other in the hallways.

"I simply could not think that just because I was a different color, someone was not going to like me," she says.

After earning her English degree, she became the circulation manager at High Point College's Smith Library in 1987 and helped students found the Black Cultural Awareness Club.

When Qubein took the helm in 2005, she committed...