Virginia Gonzalez

Virginia Gonzalez is a professor in the Counseling Department at Northampton Community College, where she has worked since 1973.Her accomplishments at Northampton include creating the Career Planning Center, and extending New Choices/New Options (a program serving displaced homemakers/single parents and nontraditional job seekers) from a county to a regional program. She spearheaded adding bilingual programming and services to the New Choices and New Options program thus enabling access to Latinos/as who had been previously underserved because of language barriers. She is also responsible for establishing a Hispanic Caucus on campus, a group which has promoted Hispanic cultural events on campus, created a scholarship fund for students of color and has provided programming that has benefited Latino students. She has served on numerous College committees, including Academic Standards and the College Senate, both of which she has chaired.

Active off campus, Gonzalez has written papers and made presentations for several organizations, including the American Association for Higher Education, the Pennsylvania College Student Personnel Association, the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, the Adult Education Research Conference, and the International Women in Higher Education Conference. In addition, she chaired the Hispanic Caucus of the American Association for Higher Education in 1998 – 1999 and 2004-2005 and has been a member of its Advisory Board. She also chaired the Education Committee of the Hispanic Business Council of the Lehigh Valley in 2003. In addition to teaching at Northampton Community College, Gonzalez is an assistant professor of adult and continuing education at Teachers College Columbia University where she teaches at the graduate level.

Gonzalez earned both a master’s and a doctorate in adult and continuing education at Columbia University, where she was a Penn Fellow in the Leadership in Teaching Program. She also earned a master’s in counselor education from Boston University, a master’s in developmental psychology from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s in psychology from Moravian College.

In 1986, Gonzalez was selected to be a Hispanic Leaders Fellow, a program funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the American Council on Education. Gonzalez was recognized at Northampton as Club Advisor of the Year in 1987 for her work with the national honor society, Phi Theta Kappa. In 1995, she was the recipient of the Athena Award from the Twin Rivers Chamber of Commerce in recognition of her work and research regarding women. Also in 1995, she received a Hispanic Leadership Award from the Hispanic Business Council of the Lehigh Valley. Gonzalez received the first Outstanding Latino/a Teaching/Service Award in Higher Education (Teaching Institutions) in March 2004 at the AAHE National Conference in Washington, DC. The award was presented by the Hispanic Caucus.