Leigh A. Williams

The Leigh A. Williams Memorial Endowed Music Scholarship provides support for two students with a music major annually: one studying brass instruments with a preference given to a student studying the French horn, and the other studying voice.

The scholarship established by Clair D. Williams in memory of his sister, the Rev. Leigh A. Williams and was first awarded in academic year 2016-17. Mr. Williams was graduated by Northern Illinois University in the spring of 1972 receiving a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Accountancy. He later worked for the university for thirty-seven years as a member of the operating staff in a variety of capacities in the offices of internal audit, accounting, controller, and university legal services.

Rev. Williams had a love of music and theater and was a strong believer in education having had numerous degrees conferred on her: Bachelor of Arts, Mundelein College; Master of Arts, University of Chicago; Doctor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology; Master of Divinity, Yale University; and Master of Sacred Theology and Doctor of Theology (ABD), the General Theological Seminary, New York City. As a teenager she attended NIU’s 13th annual Music for Youth Camp. During her career, she served as an officer in the United States Navy, a clerk for a circuit court judge, a teacher in the NIU Colleges of Business and Law, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in Newfoundland and Maine, and as the religion teacher and chaplain at church-affiliated schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Tulsa, Oklahoma. She died in January of 2005.