Transcript
Speaker: I'm JC Stoner, and this is the Swakuho Podcast.
Speaker: I've got a very special guest today, but you'll have to excuse him because he has never worked at a Swakuho-affiliated school.
Speaker: Recently, I just so happened to find myself in the same place at the same time with our guest and thought, what the heck?
Speaker: He's retired and probably has nothing better to do with his time, so I may as well take advantage of this window of opportunity.
Speaker: I did promise him that all of our listeners wouldn't hold his lack of Swakuho involvement against him just this once because he did attend the 1989 and 1993 Swakuho conferences.
Speaker: He keynoted for the Swakuho Supervisory Skills Workshop at Texas Women's University in 1988.
Speaker: He consulted on the Texas Tech, UT Austin, and
Speaker: and Texas A&M campuses during the 90s, and even served as an expert witness for a court case at the University of Arkansas in 2004.
Speaker: If what has been mentioned so far hasn't piqued your interest, then keep listening.
Speaker: Our guest today was the Director of Student Housing at the University of Kansas between 1985 and 2006, when he was then appointed as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Speaker: He agreed to the two-year appointment, but then got suckered into staying for six more years before finally retiring in 2014 as the Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs.
Speaker: Along the way, he was editor of the Journal of College and University Student Housing between 1978 and 1981.
Speaker: was president of Akuhoi for the 1989 and 1990 term, received Akuhoi's Parthenon Award in 2007, and more important than any of that, he is a longtime listener of this very show.
Speaker: For anyone listening who has ever worked with or for our guest today, we are not only covering some of the greatest hits, but also some deep cuts.
Speaker: Dr. Ken Stoner, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thanks for that kind introduction and pleasure to be here today.
Speaker: I've been listening to all your podcasts and I commend you and Swakuo for developing this innovation.
Speaker: I'm sure it's filled in some of the training gaps that have resulted from the COVID epidemic.
Speaker: So again, thanks again.
Speaker: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker: I'd like to hope it fills in some of those gaps.
Speaker: But first things first, including this one, how many podcasts do you listen to?
Speaker: Oh, not a lot.
Speaker: Every now and then I'll pick up on one, but I don't routinely listen to podcasts.
Speaker: Well, you always struck me as preferring quality over quantity, right?
Speaker: Yes, for sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: So what's been your favorite episode that you've listened to so far?
Speaker: Well, of course, I liked Sampson, your very first one.
Speaker: Kent and I have been friends for 55 years now.
Speaker: I met him at some of the Nakura conferences.
Speaker: Oklahoma was also big.
Speaker: And I give a shout out to them, too, because they hosted a lot of that early Nakura conferences.
Speaker: And I met Kent back in those days.
Speaker: So that was a favorite.
Speaker: But I've enjoyed them all.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: So part of our region is Texas.
Speaker: And you worked at Tennessee.
Speaker: What's the relationship between these two states?
Speaker: Well, I always kid my Texas colleagues, at least when I was in Tennessee, I did, that they were just cousins, Tennessee cousins.
Speaker: The connection is that Tennessee was always known as the volunteer state, and that harkens back to the War of 1812, but it took on new significance with the conflict with Mexico.
Speaker: The president put out a call for asking for about 2,000 to 3,000 volunteers from Tennessee, and over 30,000 showed up and headed to Texas.
Speaker: And following the conflict, they stayed, and they brought their families, and they brought everything else, too.
Speaker: The constitutions are virtually identical.
Speaker: Tennessee is the three-star state.
Speaker: Texas is the one-star state.
Speaker: And the only person in the history of the United States to be governor of two different states is Sam Houston.
Speaker: So I always kidded the Texans that they really just transplanted Tennesseans.
Speaker: And I know Texans like to believe we are our own little nation and there's never been anything but Texas.
Speaker: You called them cousins.
Speaker: But is it your professional opinion that all Texans are really just want to be Tennesseans?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Careful.
Speaker: You're going to get me in trouble here.
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: Let's go with that.
Speaker: That sounds fine.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: So let's start way back during your formative years of your career.
Speaker: When you were an undergraduate student, you worked the front desk of your residence hall and there was a pay phone at the desk.
Speaker: Tell our listeners the significance of one particular phone call made at that desk.
Speaker: Yeah, you're really taking me back to the dark ages here.
Speaker: Many of your listeners may not even recognize what a payphone is or a phone booth, a payphone booth, but there was one of those that sat fairly close to the main desk.
Speaker: When I first started college, there was actually a switchboard there and there were community phones.
Speaker: You didn't have private phones in the rooms.
Speaker: There was a phone on the floor or the wing.
Speaker: And the switchboard would ring that phone and somebody would answer it and they'd say, oh, we got a phone call for Ken Stoner, go get him.
Speaker: And they'd find him and they'd come to the phone and stuff.
Speaker: So that's the way the phones work.
Speaker: But they weren't private because they were all out.
Speaker: There was these public phones were in the hallway or, of course, the switchboard could always listen in.
Speaker: So they're kind of party lines.
Speaker: So if you wanted a personal phone call, use the pay phone that was there next to the lobby.
Speaker: And for a dime, you could call somebody and
Speaker: Some of the guys would use that to call the other payphone in the women's hall.
Speaker: They talked to their dates that way because they could shut the door on the payphone booth and those were private calls.
Speaker: But at any rate, somebody had the bright idea, a guy in the building that dated another girl over in the women's halls.
Speaker: And so he knew the payphone number.
Speaker: So we got that payphone number from him and somebody had the bright idea to just call it and see if somebody had answered it.
Speaker: Well, a gal did answer the call and they talked a while.
Speaker: Uh, they didn't know each other, but they visited a while.
Speaker: And, and she said, I have to go to class.
Speaker: She said, but here's so-and-so I'll put her on the phone.
Speaker: Well, then the marathon began that gave everybody an idea.
Speaker: So, uh,
Speaker: Before the day was over, there was a sign-up sheet, and you signed up for either 15- or 30-minute slots, and you'd be talking to different people over in the hall.
Speaker: I suppose the modern-day version of this is speed dating.
Speaker: Some of the guys ended up with dates on it and stuff, and the call went on.
Speaker: And before it was all over, it went on for quite some time, and even the phone company got involved in it.
Speaker: Kind of as an advertisement, bringing commercial attention to it.
Speaker: They'd say, can you believe that this phone call so far has lasted 508 hours and 12 minutes and it's still going on all this for a dime, you know?
Speaker: And so it was all good fun.
Speaker: But I think Mr. Brake rolled around and it kind of broke up, but it was kind of a fun thing at the time.
Speaker: The other interesting part about this is back then, like you said, the only access to the phone was in the lobbies and you had switchboards.
Speaker: But then at some point, housing went and retrofitted all of our resident rooms on campus to have their own phone lines, like in each individual room.
Speaker: Now many places have removed the phone lines.
Speaker: So does everything truly come full circle in campus housing?
Speaker: Well, certainly a lot of things do.
Speaker: The same thing was true with computers.
Speaker: Now we've got the wireless network and everything.
Speaker: When you mentioned this earlier, I got to thinking about it.
Speaker: And one of the things that surprised me a little bit is that
Speaker: I became aware of these units during some of my consulting times when I was asked to look at buildings and help with redesign and retrofitting of them.
Speaker: But some of the buildings that were built in the late 30s and early 40s actually had quarantine wings on them, which I found was interesting in light of what we're doing with COVID nowadays.
Speaker: In the late 30s, people were still remembering the terrible flu epidemic of the teens, and then polio was starting to hit the country pretty big time in the 30s.
Speaker: And so some of the campuses actually had little quarantine units in their housing units.
Speaker: And of course, now they're all in violation of code and they had to be retrofitted because most of them only had one entrance and exit.
Speaker: And that way they could control, you know, control the population to make sure there's no contamination and stuff.
Speaker: And some of them had nursing quarters built in with them.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Speaker: Some things do go in cycles like that.
Speaker: And now we all couldn't wait to close down all our quarantines fast enough so we could reopen them up for rentable space once again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's what mostly what they was doing, but they had to redesign those to get a second access, you know, access in the stairwells and other things to these various units that were designed to be isolated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So going back to phone lines then, for those out there who do not have facilities backgrounds, do they actually physically remove all the infrastructure of phone lines or did they just cover them up?
Speaker: They just mostly covered them up.
Speaker: They didn't actually remove them.
Speaker: So if the world were coming to an end and we ran out of Wi-Fi and didn't have cell phones for whatever disaster reason, we could theoretically activate all our phones once again and
Speaker: Well, assuming those lines hadn't deteriorated too much or something happened to them in the interim out there.
Speaker: But if they were workable when they were shut off or disconnected, then in theory, they'd be workable now.
Speaker: But I'm sure there might be a few complications with that.
Speaker: But yes, you could do that.
Speaker: We could all go back to Morse code, too.
Speaker: But I mean, how many people might remember that?
Speaker: Our number one takeaway so far is learn Morse code is a good life skill development there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So as an undergraduate student, did you once get kicked out of the dean of students office?
Speaker: Yeah, you told me he was going to bring this up and I thought about pleading the fifth, but yeah, in a fashion, it's...
Speaker: You have to remember, again, this is one of those things that goes around, comes around.
Speaker: I was going to college in the 60s, and the 60s were...
Speaker: in a way not unlike today.
Speaker: I mean, everybody was worked up and everybody was kind of mad and there was a lot of dissension and things going on.
Speaker: The civil rights movement was gaining ground big time.
Speaker: Vietnam War was going on.
Speaker: The 60s, all the boomers were hitting colleges.
Speaker: So we were too many students.
Speaker: There were lines.
Speaker: It was just tensions.
Speaker: Kennedy was assassinated in 63.
Speaker: And then both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated in
Speaker: So, I mean, it was pretty tense times on campuses.
Speaker: Like I say, not unlike the citizenry today, it was kind of one of those times.
Speaker: But at any rate, I had been elected president of the residence hall I was in, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction.
Speaker: So we had a whole bunch of things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: they said, I ought to go see somebody and get all this corrected.
Speaker: And they gave me a list of demands to go over and see somebody.
Speaker: So I didn't know who to see.
Speaker: So I thought I'll start with the Dean of Students.
Speaker: I'll go see that guy.
Speaker: So I looked it up.
Speaker: It was Dr. Chet Peters.
Speaker: And I went over to his office and he saw me and I went in and told him, you know, what was wrong with the world and the university and all the other stuff going on.
Speaker: And he told me essentially, I said, thanks for coming by, but get out of my office or something like that.
Speaker: He said,
Speaker: I don't have time to discuss the problems.
Speaker: I know what they are.
Speaker: He said, if you ever got any solutions or suggestions for improving things, then come back.
Speaker: Until then, thanks for stopping by.
Speaker: So I left.
Speaker: I thought, wow, that was kind of interesting.
Speaker: So I went back to the hall and discussed it with the exec board.
Speaker: And we came up with some ideas and things for making things better and solutions and suggestions.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So when I called back to make an appointment, I made sure I told the secretary, tell him I got some suggestions and some possible solutions to some of the things that might help things out.
Speaker: And so she said, okay.
Speaker: And I, so I had another point with him and he invited me in.
Speaker: It was very cordial.
Speaker: And, uh, we had a very nice visit and he, uh, accepted all my, uh, suggestions and proposals and said, he'd get back with me and thank me for coming by.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: It was kind of interesting.
Speaker: That became the start of an interesting relationship that we had over the course of my whole undergraduate years.
Speaker: I think the world of him today always did, but he was really quite the man.
Speaker: I think a lot of Chet Peters.
Speaker: Did they implement any of your suggestions or solutions?
Speaker: Well, they did.
Speaker: Some of them they did.
Speaker: Actually, one of them had to do with the guys.
Speaker: We had actually taken a vote and did a referendum in the hall before we did, and they agreed to a modest fee increase that would cover some of those services we were talking about.
Speaker: And so that was a pretty novel idea at the time to have a
Speaker: an add-on fee for just one building or for, you know, to do some things like that and have some programming and some increased things, which it was pretty interesting.
Speaker: And he found it interesting.
Speaker: And yeah, we got some things done and it was the start of a neat relationship.
Speaker: Like I say, I'd evolved over the course of my undergraduate years and later on student senate and stuff.
Speaker: And I don't think I would have made it without his blessing, but he was also advisor to Blue Key.
Speaker: And so my
Speaker: senior year, I was inducted to Blue Key there on campus and he was the advisor to that.
Speaker: And we stayed in touch for years after that.
Speaker: He's a good man.
Speaker: I love that example of like,
Speaker: It's so, you know, money's tight for everyone.
Speaker: And it's, it really shows an active role that students can, you know, really harness some power to like advocate for increasing a fee when nobody wants that.
Speaker: And that happened once I was at a ARH when I was an RA and,
Speaker: And I can't remember if it was Dr. Waring or Derek Jackson came out and was like, here's our budget proposal and we're going to we want to increase by 3% or whatever housing rates by 3%.
Speaker: Here's what we're all going to do it.
Speaker: You know, a real opportunity for like shared governance and transparency.
Speaker: And I just sat in the back as an RA was like, there's no way that everyone's gonna be like, no, no, no.
Speaker: And all the ARH sat around and they talked in private and they came back and they said, we do not approve your proposal for 3%.
Speaker: We want a 5%.
Speaker: And here's what we want the extra money to be spent on and have this laundry list of ideas.
Speaker: And I was just like, this was totally unexpected.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it was.
Speaker: And particularly those times because fees were relatively new.
Speaker: I mean, particularly when you isolated into a specific group of people like a living unit like that.
Speaker: that particular hall, you know, and stuff.
Speaker: And so it was a targeted thing for that particular population.
Speaker: But yeah, involving the students in the decision-making process.
Speaker: And Dr. Peters was great in working with us.
Speaker: And like I say, it was a good time.
Speaker: So I've asked each Swakuho past president guest on this show about niche roles.
Speaker: This question is largely inspired by things you've either written or said.
Speaker: Give us a quick rundown on what you mean by niche roles.
Speaker: Well, in my case, as you know, I'd written a chapter about this for Akuho and just about the need to fill niche roles and just a particular thing that needs done at the time that somebody needs to do and you step up to the plate and you
Speaker: you do that.
Speaker: And so I was very fortunate in that I had several of those come my way.
Speaker: And I was aware of that from early on, that that was my kind of role in life or a role I could play.
Speaker: And it helped over the course of my life and career.
Speaker: So when did you first realize the value of niche roles?
Speaker: Well, I actually probably went back to high school
Speaker: I was wanting to play on the high school football team.
Speaker: And, uh, and so they were short blockers and they were short of center.
Speaker: And, uh, I was just amazed because there was a lot of guys that I felt they were faster.
Speaker: They were bigger.
Speaker: They were stronger.
Speaker: They were better athletes than me, but they didn't want to be the center.
Speaker: They didn't want to be a blocker.
Speaker: They had to be the quarterback or the running back or the receiver, somebody with the ball, you know?
Speaker: And, uh, and so, uh,
Speaker: uh, which surprised me.
Speaker: So I, I, I practiced this center, particularly hiking the long ball for the punts, you know, and, uh, and stuff.
Speaker: And so, uh, tried out for it and there weren't that many.
Speaker: And, uh, I made the team and here I was, uh, uh, I made the team, uh, because I'd take a role that a lot of people didn't really want.
Speaker: And I was like, say, I was just amazed that, uh,
Speaker: A number of my friends that I considered better athletes than me weren't on the team because of that.
Speaker: So I kind of paid attention to that.
Speaker: I laughed because as I was thinking about this, I laughed because I remember the local newspaper always covered all the ballgames.
Speaker: Well, we won one ballgame.
Speaker: Well, we won more than one, but this one ball game we won.
Speaker: I was laughing because the paper of the following day carried this little, it had just a little run and said something like, and the go-ahead touchdown was set up following a fine run by the halfback Roger Stoner, the key block being thrown by his brother at the line of scrimmage.
Speaker: Well, I didn't even mention my name or anything like that, but I thought about it.
Speaker: That's what they need.
Speaker: You know, okay, give me, you know, he set up the go-ahead touchdown, but I'm
Speaker: but there was a blocker out there somewhere, I mean, and stuff.
Speaker: And so it was just kind of a fun thing.
Speaker: And I kind of remembered that settled in.
Speaker: So what are some of the niche roles you've played then?
Speaker: Probably the best example I can give and the one that really changed a lot of what I did in my career was when I was at South Florida.
Speaker: I was a resident instructor.
Speaker: That's kind of a hall director, except you had quarter time faculty rank with it.
Speaker: And you taught introductory psych or social every semester.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: At any rate, we were at staff meeting.
Speaker: Ray King, he was the director of housing.
Speaker: He came into one of those meetings.
Speaker: He said, I need somebody to help me out.
Speaker: He said, I'm hosting a meeting here in a couple of weeks.
Speaker: And I need somebody to make the coffee, get the donuts, take minutes, run errands, do whatever I need them to do, but be on standby for several days for this meeting.
Speaker: Who wants to do that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sounds great.
Speaker: Yeah, sounds great.
Speaker: And everybody kind of looked around the room.
Speaker: We all sat there to kind of quiet.
Speaker: I thought, oh, what the?
Speaker: Hey, he's the boss.
Speaker: You know, I mean, if I can help out some way, I'll do that.
Speaker: So I said, OK, OK, Mr. King, I'll do it.
Speaker: He said, OK, come by my office after the meeting and we'll talk about what you need to do.
Speaker: And I said, OK.
Speaker: So I went by his office.
Speaker: OK, Ken, I'm hosting the Research and Information Committee for a cool.
Speaker: That's the meeting we're going to.
Speaker: And it's in Miami.
Speaker: He said, you'll need to pack your bags.
Speaker: We'll be gone Thursday through Sunday of whatever week it was.
Speaker: And I said, oh, OK.
Speaker: So I did.
Speaker: So I traveled with him to Miami.
Speaker: Well, I did.
Speaker: I got donuts, made coffee every morning, and it took the minutes and ran all the errands and did things for the meeting.
Speaker: And that following Monday, after the meeting was over, we met Thursday to Sunday.
Speaker: I stayed up after we got home, and I...
Speaker: I whacked out the minutes because I knew he was concerned about those.
Speaker: And apparently I did a good job and he put them out.
Speaker: Well, I got all these thank yous.
Speaker: I guess the minutes had never been distributed within a month of the meeting.
Speaker: I mean, because whoever, it was all I do.
Speaker: And so they liked that.
Speaker: And so I was just surprised.
Speaker: He said all about six months later, he said,
Speaker: Hey, Ken, that was a really good job.
Speaker: He said, everybody really appreciated having the minutes out.
Speaker: And he said, you did a thorough job.
Speaker: It was neat and good and everything.
Speaker: He said, we're going to meet again.
Speaker: This time we're meeting up at the University of Florida.
Speaker: He said, Hal Riker's hosting that.
Speaker: He said, you'll be going with me.
Speaker: He didn't ask for volunteers anymore.
Speaker: He said, you'll be going with me.
Speaker: So I went to that meeting and then I went to the next meeting.
Speaker: It was out of state.
Speaker: I think it was up in New York.
Speaker: We flew up there and had the next meeting and
Speaker: And by then, somebody on the committee was kind of embarrassed.
Speaker: They said, you know, Ken's doing all this workforce and stuff, putting out the minutes.
Speaker: Why don't we just make him a member of the committee?
Speaker: Next thing I know, I'm on the research and information of Committee of Okua, which was unheard of.
Speaker: And that involvement in my doing the minutes and editing stuff, when they did the spinoff of the journal, they put me on the journal board.
Speaker: So I was on it for
Speaker: eight years and then the editor for three.
Speaker: And that sort of began my significant involvements with Akuho was that just offering to take minutes and get donuts.
Speaker: I mean, which was probably the, you know, one of the best niche roles I played, you know, you wouldn't think it would lead to that much, but it, it did.
Speaker: I was telling someone the other day, I always remember with great fondness and great memories about, and the benefits they got of like all the staff members I've had who have always said yes when everybody else said no, or when everybody else just stayed quiet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's something about stepping up and doing the grunt work that's not glamorous, but
Speaker: Well, yeah, it is.
Speaker: And actually that led to one of my promotions.
Speaker: We had a turnover and we needed somebody to supervise, to step in and fill in for the custodial staff and to work with our housekeeping staff and stuff like that.
Speaker: And same thing.
Speaker: It didn't seem too glamorous to anybody, but I said, I'll do that.
Speaker: That'd be a new and a different thing and a challenge.
Speaker: And I'd like to do that and see how it goes.
Speaker: And it
Speaker: It went well enough.
Speaker: They assigned it to me and promoted me to associate director.
Speaker: So, I mean, it was over the course of the time.
Speaker: So I think sometimes those opportunities may not seem like, but they're worth considering anyway and seeing what they lead to.
Speaker: And a lot of it seems like it's like foundational building blocks for like other skills or other, like, you know, you get really good at, well, picking up donuts, then maybe you'd be really good at like picking up steaks or, you know, you get really good at writing minutes, like writing.
Speaker: Well, for the journal and editing for the journal, because I wrote and edited those minutes and they thought maybe I'd be a good editor, you know, not a good editor, but at least a good person to have on the journal board because I read things thoroughly and could edit and read and write and
Speaker: put out and timeliness was the other thing too, that I think they appreciated on those.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's like presenting at an RA training is like the building blocks to presenting at a regional conference, which is the building block for a national conference, which is the building block for presenting to a board of trustees at some point in your career, I would imagine.
Speaker: You're absolutely right.
Speaker: I have a lot of colleagues that tell me they're going to write a book someday.
Speaker: And I say, wait, have you written an article for the newsletter?
Speaker: Well, no, not yet.
Speaker: Have you written a chapter for a book?
Speaker: Well, no, not yet.
Speaker: But I'm going to write a book.
Speaker: And I think,
Speaker: Boy, you start out writing for newsletters or you start out writing, you know, articles for the Kuhoi or you write a chapter, you write something else.
Speaker: But, you know, those are the building blocks that you have to put together.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Did any of your consulting gigs come out of like niche roles?
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I became an expert on windows out the windows because many of the accidents associated with residence halls when I got into consulting or particularly expert witness for universities, many of them involved windows, accidents with windows.
Speaker: And a lot of them were associated with, in the Midwest, the windows have, a lot of people call them ledges, but they're not really ledges.
Speaker: They're eyebrows or sunshades for a room below.
Speaker: And so they're like fins on a radiator.
Speaker: So they have these fins, sometimes they're vertical, but mostly they're horizontal, that shade the windows below.
Speaker: And that reduces the air conditioning load.
Speaker: And so, uh, students would crawl out their windows and get out on these ledges.
Speaker: And, uh, of course, half the time they were three sheets to the wind.
Speaker: And so then they'd, uh, there'd be an accident involved and they'd, uh, uh, you know, the families would sue the universities, uh, for the accidents of those.
Speaker: So I, I kind of got into that, uh, uh, as, uh, that particular niche role, uh, uh, and became known for consulting on windows and accidents associated, uh,
Speaker: with windows and how they've put together.
Speaker: I even shot a video, made a DVD on that that was used in several court cases and stuff related to how windows are constructed and then the shading effects of the ledges and the sunscreens that were outside the windows.
Speaker: So yeah, that was kind of an interesting... Is that DVD available on Netflix?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I haven't.
Speaker: Moving on.
Speaker: My department recently started asking a variation of this next question to candidates during job interviews.
Speaker: So when you were director of housing, if I were to ask your assistant and associate directors at the time how they knew when you were stressed out at work, what do you think they'd say?
Speaker: They'd probably say I didn't have the time for them.
Speaker: I didn't take time for them or just, you know, wasn't social enough.
Speaker: You know, I just, you know, how you, oh, fine.
Speaker: And I'd be off.
Speaker: You know, I'd just be, my mind would be somewhere else and I'd be focused on another matter.
Speaker: So they'd know when I...
Speaker: my attention was diverted elsewhere because I'd be pretty short with everybody and try to get to whatever was on my mind.
Speaker: I've really liked that question recently about, you know, we asked candidates, if you were stressed out at work, how would we know?
Speaker: Like what would manifest?
Speaker: And it's kind of a fun thought experiment, especially if you supervise people.
Speaker: Like we...
Speaker: don't often think about like, how are we, how are we behaving differently?
Speaker: And we think we hide everything and cover it up real well, but everybody knows when the boss has got something going on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No kidding.
Speaker: Everybody, everybody knows.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Looking back at your entire career, what is an opportunity you said yes to that afterwards you wished you would have said no to?
Speaker: Well, there's probably several of these, um,
Speaker: I say yes too quickly.
Speaker: That was a fault.
Speaker: Somebody calls, you do that.
Speaker: I was like, sure, I'll do that.
Speaker: Speak at this conference or write an article or things like that.
Speaker: And when I should have said, let me take a look at my schedule and think about it for a couple of days and I'll get back to you.
Speaker: Sometimes I'd be so excited.
Speaker: Somebody called me on the phone and said, hey, we need you to...
Speaker: write a chapter for us for this, that, and I was like, oh, sure, sure, I'll do that.
Speaker: And then I didn't ask about the deadline.
Speaker: I didn't ask about when it was due.
Speaker: I didn't ask about what the topic was.
Speaker: You know, I just got carried away with the moment of... And so sometimes I actually had to call them back, you know, and a few days later, I said, I know I said yes, but, you know, I'm just not going to be able to work this out.
Speaker: So I think...
Speaker: Probably I said yes too fast to some of the things like that, and I regret that I did that, and I should have been more intentional with those.
Speaker: What about a missed opportunity?
Speaker: Anything you wished you would have said yes to that you had passed on?
Speaker: Yeah, there's one.
Speaker: I thought about this.
Speaker: This happened when I was in Tennessee, and I got this call from the Hospital Corporation of America.
Speaker: And they said, hey, we got this gig for you that we'd like you to do.
Speaker: It involves a week.
Speaker: We want you to fly to Saudi Arabia for a week with us, a consulting team, and give us some advice on this hospital operation, this new operation they're starting over there.
Speaker: And I'm going, shaking my head, and I'm saying,
Speaker: You know, you got the right person here?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I said, you know, I don't I don't speak the language.
Speaker: I don't know anything about hospitals.
Speaker: I've never been to the Saudi Arabia.
Speaker: I know nothing about the country.
Speaker: And they said and so they come back with this, you know, something along these lines.
Speaker: They said, well,
Speaker: isn't it true that you house 8,000 students there at the university?
Speaker: And I said, yeah, yeah, that's true.
Speaker: And they say, isn't it true you move them all in with about into the facilities within about two or three day period?
Speaker: I said, yeah, yeah, we do that.
Speaker: They said, well, isn't it true that you have a record on every one of those students and you keep track of them?
Speaker: And I said, yeah, we do.
Speaker: And they said, on any given day, you know where they live.
Speaker: You know, I mean, if they move around, you move them to different rooms and you keep track of them.
Speaker: I said, yeah, we do that.
Speaker: And you have a record of all that.
Speaker: I said, isn't it true that
Speaker: between each of these turnovers and stuff like that.
Speaker: And every time a tenant, one of them moves out, you clean the rooms or you clean the facilities and you turn them around and have these deep cleans and routine cleans.
Speaker: I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do all that.
Speaker: And they kept going through and I kept saying, well, that's exactly what we need.
Speaker: We need to do this.
Speaker: But it was one of those, I wish I had done it, but
Speaker: I have no regrets because if I'd done that, then there'd be other things I wouldn't have done.
Speaker: So, yeah, that would have opened that door, but there might have been some other doors that closed.
Speaker: But I always thought about that.
Speaker: And for your podcast listeners, don't ever underestimate your transferable skills that you're getting on there.
Speaker: Because like I say, when they was running through it, they were saying, you know, I kept thinking, what do I know about hospitals?
Speaker: What do I know about this country?
Speaker: What do I know about...
Speaker: You know, the language or, you know, the culture.
Speaker: And they, you know, they went through all this and they said, it sounds like, you know, everything we need, you know, we want to do.
Speaker: We want records.
Speaker: We want somebody to keep track of the records.
Speaker: We want somebody to check people in and out.
Speaker: We want it inefficient.
Speaker: We want cleanliness.
Speaker: We want the facilities done.
Speaker: You know, we want individual records.
Speaker: You know, so it's just kind of an interesting thing.
Speaker: Actually, my housekeeping supervisor here at UTD, she used to work in the hospitals and talks all the time about the same stuff, just kind of a different timeline.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: What's the most ridiculous meeting you ever sat in?
Speaker: Well, it's probably a committee meeting.
Speaker: They had some lofty title, something along the lines of workload reduction or simplification committee or something like that.
Speaker: And I think the purpose, the person establishing the committee had some lofty goals and stuff, but it was too nebulous and too vague.
Speaker: And so the committee got together and we weren't quite sure where the problems was other than they thought there was too many forms and maybe some of them were overlapping and, uh,
Speaker: and maybe we could reduce the number of forms.
Speaker: And so the first thing the committee did was create a form that we sent to all the department heads to tell them to itemize the forms they used and provide a sample of each of the forms.
Speaker: I think before the committee disbanded, we had more forms than we did before we started.
Speaker: I mean, it was just one of those that was, you know, the marching orders of the committee or the charge statement wasn't real clear.
Speaker: We kind of got bogged down in the mire situation
Speaker: out there in the swamp.
Speaker: And we just, I think we ended up in a place that was worse off than when we started.
Speaker: I mean, isn't that the result of most committees?
Speaker: Well, there are quite a few of them, unfortunately, probably.
Speaker: Did you ever receive a piece of critical feedback in a performance evaluation you didn't agree with, but later realized was correct?
Speaker: No, I don't think so.
Speaker: As performance evaluations have changed a lot over the time, over time.
Speaker: you know, over time.
Speaker: And frankly, I didn't always receive an annual performance evaluation in the course of my career.
Speaker: For the most part, I generally officed in close proximity to my immediate supervisor, and I pretty much knew where I stood on any given day and on any given issue or topics.
Speaker: And the communication was always good and open.
Speaker: So
Speaker: It wasn't like I had a lot of surprises.
Speaker: If I needed to change something, I knew about it.
Speaker: And so the feedback in that exchange was good.
Speaker: So I can't say is that I ever got any major surprises in an evaluation.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What was a big decision you had to make that you knew was going to be unpopular among the staff?
Speaker: Well, I don't know if there's any...
Speaker: huge big decisions but I you know I told her there's an old Arabic proverb that says something along the lines the dog barks in the night but the caravan moves on you know there's no such thing as a no barking zone at a university I mean people can bark about anything I mean even well thought out and good decisions there's be somebody that barks at them but I think one decision that I I thought about that at the time really concerned me a little bit is that
Speaker: At the university, we had our maintenance, mainly in maintenance, but we had a fleet of about 30, 35 vehicles or something like that that serviced the buildings and did things.
Speaker: And I was concerned that I just felt like we were getting too many accidents.
Speaker: These minor fender benders, accident reports and stuff like that.
Speaker: And a lot of them read that our staff was at fault because they had either parked illegally or done something, backed out and wasn't paying attention to stuff.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: I hammered out a new policy with HR and asked for their support and got it.
Speaker: And basically the policy was that if you had an at-fault accident, you were suspended for one day without pay.
Speaker: If you had a second one within a year, you got a three-day suspension and then you had three at-fault accidents within the
Speaker: a two year period you were dismissed.
Speaker: So I went down to the staff, all those, everybody, but mainly the people that drove the vehicles.
Speaker: I said, this is our new policy.
Speaker: We're just having too many accidents.
Speaker: I'm not blaming anybody.
Speaker: I'm not saying, but we got to put a stop to this and this is the way it's going to work.
Speaker: And so I laid it out and went over it with them.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a little bit of grumbling, but I told everybody on the front end stuff.
Speaker: Well, as luck would have, bad luck, good luck, depending on which side of the coin you're on.
Speaker: The very next week, the landscaping supervisor, he was out in this pickup and he saw a piece of trash or a bottle or something there by the road and he stepped out to get it and he didn't get his pickup in park, right?
Speaker: Well, it rolled off and hit the back of another car.
Speaker: So the police come right up the axiotech fault.
Speaker: Well, he comes over and I said, well, I, I'm going to lay you off for one day without pay.
Speaker: Well, he was upset.
Speaker: He had never had an accident in the 25 years he'd worked for the department.
Speaker: It was funny.
Speaker: So, but he was a supervisor too.
Speaker: So if you don't hold the supervisor, then anybody that comes after that with an accident, they're going to say, well, why didn't you enforce it here?
Speaker: So he was all upset, but I held firm and HR held firm and we gave him a suspension for one day without pay.
Speaker: And
Speaker: my, our, our accident in the department radio went to almost zero.
Speaker: We had almost no accidents for the rest of the time was there.
Speaker: So it's just, but I mean, you have to, sometimes you just have to make decisions.
Speaker: There's a lot of things like that, that you just, but I think any decision that holds people more accountable or is toward a design toward the improving of performance, you'll get some initial pushback initially, but, but, uh, uh,
Speaker: Along the way, people will buy in for it.
Speaker: Well, your poor landscaping supervisor, too, was just trying to do a good deed and pick up some trash and make campus more beautiful.
Speaker: No good deed goes unpunished.
Speaker: And he had a great – I haven't had an accident since I've worked here.
Speaker: This is my very first one.
Speaker: I can't believe you're doing this.
Speaker: That's the policy we whacked out.
Speaker: That's just the way it's going to be, so –
Speaker: So most campuses are hopefully taking a breather after August trainings, move-ins, and welcome events.
Speaker: I think everyone feels a particular moment at some point in the summer, and I'm sure it's different for everyone, where it's like, there's no turning back now.
Speaker: What's your take on this phenomenon?
Speaker: I like to talk about critical speed, you know, where there's no turning back, uh, uh, critical speed.
Speaker: I borrow that from the airlines.
Speaker: It's, uh, I think more specifically, they call it refusal speed or maximum abort speed as background.
Speaker: Uh, so, uh, generally somebody in the cockpit, generally the navigators assigned to keep track of this.
Speaker: So, uh,
Speaker: You're racing down the runway, getting ready for takeoff.
Speaker: And when the navigator says critical speed or maximum abort speed, they say critical speed.
Speaker: That means the plane's taken off or pieces of the plane are taken off.
Speaker: Something's leaving the runway, but there isn't enough runway left to abort.
Speaker: So you have to attempt to take off.
Speaker: So, uh, I think, uh, I used to tell my staff that we've reached critical speed.
Speaker: You know, there's, uh, no turning back on this.
Speaker: We're, we're moving forward.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: Something's leaving the runway.
Speaker: Hopefully it's the airplane, but if not pieces are, something's coming apart.
Speaker: So we talked about it.
Speaker: I think there's those times in any of our schedules where there's an event or there's a deadline up there, and that's immutable.
Speaker: That's not going to change.
Speaker: That's the way it is, and we've got to either meet it or there's going to be a kind of a disaster in the works.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is there ever a time in your career where your plane reached critical speed and it did not take off in glorious flight, but rather in pieces?
Speaker: I always have a backup plan or a plan B, but I was in the process of renovating scholarship halls and I was renovating and trying to do one a summer.
Speaker: Sometimes we did two.
Speaker: And that was a tight schedule, that summer window was, because although some of them weren't total reguts, I mean, it was a new furniture code upgrade, you know, a whole variety of things on those.
Speaker: And I'd already successfully done several.
Speaker: And this one came up, it was Pearson Scholarship Hall, and it was coming up for the renovation.
Speaker: In all the other cases, the contractor knew the tight schedule.
Speaker: He had a van there before, and as soon as the students cleared, they hit the thing because they knew they were on a tight schedule.
Speaker: Well, in this one, the summer started, the contractor wasn't there, and the equipment office showed up.
Speaker: Two or three days later, the crew showed up, too.
Speaker: I thought, we're not going to, I could just see it.
Speaker: We are not going to open this scholarship hall-off time in the fall.
Speaker: And of course, it's on the front end of a project, just two or three weeks into the schedule, you can't hardly say, go to the meeting and say, hey, this contractor is not getting it done.
Speaker: Although I was saying that, they said, well, he's got his three months and he says he's going to do it, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And I'm thinking he's not going to do it.
Speaker: So I cleared the floor out of another residence hall that had a common lobby that could have
Speaker: you know, they're between there's 30 on a wing.
Speaker: So that would accommodate the 50 men.
Speaker: And I designated, told them, no, nobody got assigned to that floor.
Speaker: So this is where we're going to put them in when we don't open.
Speaker: They said, but they say they're going to open.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: At any rate, that was my backup plan.
Speaker: And sure enough, it didn't open and there were lawsuits and everything else.
Speaker: And before it was all over, we, that guy was term, that contractor was terminating.
Speaker: We had to bring in a, you know, a backup contractor to finish the project and stuff.
Speaker: But there's times where,
Speaker: That's the always have a plan B or a backup plan or always be asking yourself what possibly could go wrong and be thinking of options.
Speaker: So of all the jobs you've held, which was the most important to you?
Speaker: Well, I tell people the most important job you'll ever have is the one you have right now.
Speaker: I always tried to operate with that philosophy that I was always a little bit, I don't know, put off or concerned about people that always talked about their next job or acted like this job wasn't all that important, that it was just a stepping stone and they were putting their time in.
Speaker: And it's unfortunate that somebody of my caliber has to pay my dues and do this job, you know, when really I'm cut out for something higher or better.
Speaker: But I always found that if you did a good job at what you were doing and the position you had now, you tended to get other jobs and stuff.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I always say the most important job is the one you have right now.
Speaker: Do you think people are generally too quick to want to move up before developing the necessary skills along the way?
Speaker: I don't know if they're too quick.
Speaker: I think we're all, particularly when we're younger, I think we're all...
Speaker: anxious to arrive or to do something that we feel is really significant or important.
Speaker: But if it, you know, every job is important or we wouldn't have that job, it's a significant job.
Speaker: And if you treat it as significant and do your best at it and, you know, make improvements and develop your toolbox, you know, your professional skills, you'll get other opportunities.
Speaker: So I think every position needs to be treated as if it's very important.
Speaker: What is one piece of advice commonly given to new professionals that you would tell them to ignore?
Speaker: There's always people say, don't sweat the small stuff.
Speaker: You know, it's all small stuff.
Speaker: Well, you do.
Speaker: The details are important.
Speaker: I think people need to pay attention to the details.
Speaker: Details are the issues that are significant to an operation and you have to make sure they're all covered.
Speaker: So I think I've heard a lot of times people say, oh, don't sweat the small stuff.
Speaker: You know, somebody else will take care.
Speaker: Well, there's details in every job and you need to pay attention to them.
Speaker: Yeah, somebody else's job.
Speaker: And I think you kind of alluded to this earlier.
Speaker: It's like there's always at universities, there's always something somewhere that someone could be doing or that something needs to be done, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: So then do you have any advice for new professionals?
Speaker: My advice for anybody is only work for somebody you like and respect.
Speaker: Hire a great staff.
Speaker: and make sure every year of experience is a year of experience.
Speaker: What do you mean every year of experience is a year of experience?
Speaker: Well, there's a difference between five years of experience and one year of experience for five years in a row.
Speaker: And I think we can get dead-ended or pigeonholed in your job and you can have one year of experience and then you have it five times.
Speaker: Or you can have five years of real experience.
Speaker: I think that's harkening back to your question on evaluations.
Speaker: I think that's one thing that I always work in every year.
Speaker: with my immediate supervisor.
Speaker: I wanted to make sure that there was something a little bit different or I had a different opportunity or there was something else out there that, and for the most part, your supervisors will work with you as long as you're getting the job done and meeting their expectations and fulfilling the job requirement.
Speaker: You say, and these can be all over the waterfront.
Speaker: I mean, I
Speaker: One year I, well, two years I was president of the Credit Union Advisory Board for the university.
Speaker: And I thought, well, I mean, that was nice.
Speaker: You know, one year I was on the NHTI, the National Housing Training Institute faculty, you know, and you do different things like that over time and you work them into your job description, get buy-in from your boss, and they let you do that.
Speaker: I mean, my involvement with Akuho or Advisor to Nakura, I
Speaker: You know, I've edited a couple other publications other than just the journal, traveled a little bit with endowment, done a lot of building committees and housing and stuff, but I got pretty good at that.
Speaker: And then I was asked to chair the building committee for a health center, for a rec complex, for a student union.
Speaker: Probably the most interesting one that I went and asked my boss if I could do, I'd been invited to be on the college advisory board for Walt Disney World.
Speaker: And so, which required me to make two trips to Disney World every year at their expense.
Speaker: I mean, just something a little different.
Speaker: that expands your toolbox, makes you a better person, makes you a better supervisor, makes you a better employee.
Speaker: And so I would always try to make sure that I got buy-in from my boss on those each year that I could, you know, work in a few things like that.
Speaker: And like I say, they don't always have to be related to your profession, but, you know, most of the time it brought credit to the university or it was helpful to the university in some way.
Speaker: Well, and some of those things bring notoriety back to your department that's, you know,
Speaker: What boss is going to say no if you've brought in some notoriety back alongside of your professional growth?
Speaker: One year I did some grant reviewing.
Speaker: Well, you know, we'd read grants and they'd send out these press releases.
Speaker: Ken Stoner's been reading grants for our, you know, for this.
Speaker: It was on alcohol prevention at the time.
Speaker: It was one of the grant programs out of Worsley, and I read grants for them.
Speaker: Well, I mean, that's all good for the university, and it doesn't really, you know, it's just positive recognition and good for everybody.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Housing programs typically have direct access to a large population of students and therefore, for better or worse, often get instructed to serve other departments by putting bodies at programs or supporting non-housing related campus initiatives.
Speaker: In your experience, why are housing programs so often expected to step up to the plate at the cost of their own staff time, resources, and money?
Speaker: This is probably the most complicated dilemma that people in housing will have to face, or they do face on a daily basis.
Speaker: Housings look to, one, they got access to the people, but mostly they have a different pot of money.
Speaker: And I wrote a chapter once for NACUBO on fund integrity.
Speaker: And so there's state-appropriated funds, there's endowment funds, private funds, and the auxiliary funds, which are housing.
Speaker: And so it's a different
Speaker: It's a different pot of money.
Speaker: And there's a very fine balance there, a delicate line that everybody tries to walk.
Speaker: On the one hand, you want to be a team player with the university.
Speaker: And rightfully, there's some appropriate percentage for administrative fees and overhead and things that ought to be assessed to the department.
Speaker: But these can become excessive.
Speaker: And so it's a fine line out there of what to do on that.
Speaker: There's ridiculous examples.
Speaker: One campus that I was aware of,
Speaker: Their sidewalks were deteriorating all over campus.
Speaker: They were shot.
Speaker: But they deferred the maintenance and stuff.
Speaker: And so they finally did the sidewalk project, and they sent a third of the bill to housing.
Speaker: And when the housing asked about it, they said, what's this about?
Speaker: They said, well, a third of the students that live on campus, I mean, a third of our students live on campus.
Speaker: So a third of the people that walk on the sidewalks are housing students.
Speaker: So you'll get a third of the bill.
Speaker: Well, they could apply the same logic to the College of Liberal Arts.
Speaker: A third of the students were in the College of Liberal Arts.
Speaker: But that is state appropriated.
Speaker: When money is needed, sometimes that fund integrity breaks down and it can get kind of murky out there.
Speaker: Let's see, this is really a fine line out there that has to be dealt with.
Speaker: On the one hand, you want to protect your funds because you know that you have to build reserves for upcoming housing projects and renovations and new things that are on the horizon.
Speaker: So you want to protect them.
Speaker: But on the other hand, you have to be a team player with the university and contribute your fair share, certainly, to being a part of the university.
Speaker: But it's always a that's always a difficult situation.
Speaker: So what I'm hearing is housing is better at managing money than universities are.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Not always.
Speaker: It's just not always.
Speaker: But when there's fund integrity, it's easier to have accountability.
Speaker: And fund integrity means if you don't mix auxiliary monies with private monies or you don't mix them with, because once you start mixing them, you get used to that mix.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: I'm thinking of everything as one pot of money, and it's really not.
Speaker: If you overtax the housing office and they don't have money for the renovations and projects that they need in the future.
Speaker: On the other hand, housing may not be doing a great job either.
Speaker: If they don't have any money to tax, that probably means they're not doing it.
Speaker: a very good job.
Speaker: But if you get too big of a reserve, there's always people that look at it.
Speaker: Well, and you think about three years ago when occupancy levels dropped to like 50% or less, it's like, you know, I know a ton of reserves were tapped all over the place.
Speaker: If you don't have reserves, it makes it harder to weather storms like that.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: It is hard to weather those storms and hard to set aside for projects that you know are coming up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when thinking about every position in a housing department,
Speaker: What position would you recommend a new professional get in really good graces with when they first start there to build departmental capital, get out on the right foot?
Speaker: Find out who the gatekeepers are.
Speaker: There's gatekeepers of the university and they're not labeled gatekeepers, but that's who they are.
Speaker: And I think finding those people, like when I was at Tennessee, we had a full building.
Speaker: It had a full-time staff member at the desk, a 40-hour week person.
Speaker: And
Speaker: We had one student in the building.
Speaker: Well, it actually turns out he is a non-student, but there's a person in the building that I couldn't clarify his student status.
Speaker: And so I really was struggling with that.
Speaker: And I went by his room and talked to him a little bit.
Speaker: And, well, his dad's check bounced.
Speaker: They'd removed him from student status, but that was all being cleared up and everything was going through drop ed now and it would all clear.
Speaker: Well, a week or so goes by and nothing cleared or whatever.
Speaker: And so I'm going to go back by the building.
Speaker: I just got to figure out this guy's status.
Speaker: And I'm stopped there at the desk and I'm talking with her name was Wanda.
Speaker: I'm talking with Wanda and she said, what are you doing?
Speaker: I come by to see so-and-so.
Speaker: up there.
Speaker: I said, hey, student status hasn't cleared and I need to get that cleared up.
Speaker: I'm here to visit with him.
Speaker: She said, well, he's not a student.
Speaker: I said, what do you mean he's not a student?
Speaker: She said, he's not a student.
Speaker: I said, how do you know that?
Speaker: She said, because I've never seen him with a backpack or a book.
Speaker: She said, students will walk by the desk.
Speaker: If they're going to class, they're carrying a backpack or a book.
Speaker: He said, he's never been in the building with a backpack or a book.
Speaker: And then I thought back in my mind, I thought,
Speaker: She's right.
Speaker: I was in his room and I didn't see one book in the room.
Speaker: I didn't see anything on the bookshelf.
Speaker: I didn't see a book in the room.
Speaker: Students have books, you know, I mean, or they have papers or stuff like that.
Speaker: And so at any rate, it turns out he wasn't a student at all.
Speaker: He was just trying to be a college, pretend he was a college student and want to be.
Speaker: But
Speaker: But there's lots of gatekeepers like that and I get to know them.
Speaker: And I don't know if we had time for another example, but I'll give you one other example of gatekeepers.
Speaker: We had, I think it was a Veterans Day program and housing got asked to do the setup and the takedown.
Speaker: They said everything would be delivered.
Speaker: So, you know, they were delivering the platform and stage and all that other stuff and microphones.
Speaker: We just had to set it up and take it down, provide some bodies.
Speaker: That was our role to fill in.
Speaker: So I, and including about, I don't know, 30, 40,
Speaker: potted flower plants that were set around the stage and decorative and stuff.
Speaker: Well, the program was always doing all the takedown and we'd loaded all these flowers and, uh, you know, potted flowers in a van.
Speaker: And it turns out, uh, they were supposed to be giving these away to the, uh, various, uh, speakers and stuff.
Speaker: Uh, and some of the veterans that attended the event, they forgot to do that.
Speaker: So here I have all these potted flowers in a van and stuff.
Speaker: And so, uh, and, uh, what to do with them?
Speaker: Well, since they were going to give them away anyway, uh,
Speaker: Well, I took my business card and I wrote on the back of a whole bunch of them and said, thanks for all you do for the university.
Speaker: And I head over to the administrative building and I find the night supervisor, the custodians, and I talk to her, give her a pot of plant and thank her for all she's doing.
Speaker: And she lets me into all the offices.
Speaker: I put one on the president's secretary's desk, you know, and the chancellor's secretary and the dean of students, a couple of vice chancellors, a few other secretaries and made the rounds and stuff like that.
Speaker: Holy moly.
Speaker: I mean, it was really, I mean, it was just one of those things, but it was an act of, you know, just, it was legitimate.
Speaker: I mean, we appreciate these universities, but it opened gates, it opened doors, it gave me access.
Speaker: I just, sometimes little things like that get to know people that are in those key positions, those gatekeepers around the university.
Speaker: They can be very, very helpful to you.
Speaker: One last example.
Speaker: I traveled to a lot of conferences.
Speaker: I was amazed at the number of people that come up to me after conference and say, hey, do you know my uncle or so-and-so works at the University of Tennessee or works at the University of Kansas, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And I'd say, give me your business card and I'll say hello to them when I go back.
Speaker: So they'd give me their business card.
Speaker: And I'd say, write whoever, write your relative's name on the back so I get it right and make sure I knew them.
Speaker: And then I would just stop by and if they were available, I'd say, hey, you're
Speaker: granddaughter, your aunt or your nephew, or somebody told me to say hello.
Speaker: And I just thought I'd stop by.
Speaker: Here's their business card.
Speaker: And we'd visit for a little bit.
Speaker: One time I was at a conference up in Ohio somewhere and the niece of the president, President DiPietro at the University of Tennessee, his niece came up and said, you know my uncle?
Speaker: I said, I don't know.
Speaker: Who's your uncle?
Speaker: She's Joe DiPietro.
Speaker: I said, president of the university?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I said, I know him.
Speaker: She said, well, tell him hello when you go back.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: You know, I wasn't at the level where I routinely brush shoulders with the president of the system.
Speaker: You know, we had a chancellor on campus, but he had an officer on campus.
Speaker: So I took her business card and I went by the office and I didn't expect a meeting, but I went into his administrative assistant and said, she said, hi.
Speaker: And I, and I'd left her a potted plant earlier, you know, stuff.
Speaker: So we had a nice little visit.
Speaker: I said, she said, what do you need?
Speaker: I said, well, I said, I'm just here to drop off a business card.
Speaker: I said, I bumped into Dr. DiPietro's niece at a conference.
Speaker: She wanted me to say hello.
Speaker: So I just brought her business card by.
Speaker: And if you'll tell Joe that I'm bringing greetings from his niece, she's,
Speaker: She'd appreciate she's oh, hang on, hang on just a second.
Speaker: Hang on.
Speaker: Well, she slipped into his office.
Speaker: Next thing I know, I'm in the president's office having it.
Speaker: And then we just have a nice job, not business or anything like that.
Speaker: But it was just an example of a gatekeeper.
Speaker: You know, these gatekeepers are think we don't give them the importance or do.
Speaker: But there it's it's it's helpful.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: That's a great story.
Speaker: In the mid-1990s, there was a research study that defined four domains of campus housing, including residence education, maintenance, business fiscal management, and dining services.
Speaker: 235 housing professionals were identified as having expertise in at least one of the four areas.
Speaker: At that time, you and Jim Grimm were the only two housing professionals who were identified as having expertise in all four domains.
Speaker: But housing programs aren't as comprehensive as they once were.
Speaker: In the past two decades, components like maintenance and dining have frequently been stripped away from housing programs.
Speaker: As the resident expert, what is the meaning of this?
Speaker: It's just a sign of the times.
Speaker: You know, I've been able to talk on both sides of this issue out there.
Speaker: As things get redefined or reorganized on college campuses, yeah, generally the maintenance is often pulled away, and certainly the food service has.
Speaker: But originally they were all grouped together into –
Speaker: One house is part of the auxiliary operation.
Speaker: So housing funded their own in-house maintenance, their own in-house custodial, their own food services and their residence education.
Speaker: That was all a package deal.
Speaker: But then, you know, as funding and other things become more complicated, as universities evolved, some of these got split off.
Speaker: For example, a particular, let's just use food service as an example or dining services, a
Speaker: Well, sometimes renovations, you're going through the state bureaucracies, it's a little bit hard to get things done and it takes a little bit longer.
Speaker: Well, if you privatize and you hire it out, they can renovate a facility because
Speaker: they're separate.
Speaker: And so you can just have a renovation and do a contract with them.
Speaker: And so that they can do things quicker, get equipment because they're standardized across the country and they know exactly what equipment, the specifications are the same and they don't have to go through the bidding process.
Speaker: So that, in that sense, it makes sense.
Speaker: So sometimes they can make changes quicker and stuff like that.
Speaker: But the downside of that is, is that
Speaker: You got one more level in there and one more, it's one step removed, whether it used to all be in-house and everybody knew each other.
Speaker: If I think something's wrong with dining services now, I got to go to the contract administrator.
Speaker: The contract administrator has got to take it up.
Speaker: And so you end up with a...
Speaker: You know, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Speaker: It really depends on the contract administrator on campus and the arrangements you have.
Speaker: But yeah, the things were all together at one time, then they've been split off and back and forth on that.
Speaker: So it's a real challenge sometimes.
Speaker: Is this another example of things coming full circle?
Speaker: Like, are we about to reabsorb them all again and then split them apart 20 years from now?
Speaker: I don't think the reabsorption is going to happen, but it does go around like that.
Speaker: I mean, things do have the cyclical nature, but I think they're probably split apart.
Speaker: Certainly housing and dining services are probably split apart for good.
Speaker: You mentioned dining.
Speaker: In nearly every annual assessment I've come across, either at my schools or schools where friends and colleagues have been at, dining is always rated low with poor overall satisfaction.
Speaker: Was this the case when you ran the dining program as a self-op at KU?
Speaker: No, I think, again, your satisfaction is, I mean, really, it's just a challenge.
Speaker: So I think dining services, I tell my sonny to say, if you're only as good as your last meal, I mean, that's what students remember.
Speaker: And so that's just the nature of the beast.
Speaker: But it's difficult to have great satisfaction when you're not the person in charge.
Speaker: You know, I mean, yeah.
Speaker: If there's other layers in there and you have to go across channels, it's just a little bit more difficult to get useful feedback and implement it in a timely fashion.
Speaker: You know, if you're the person that's the hands-on person that's there and on the scenes, you can implement change, particularly in satisfaction, areas of satisfaction, things that students are interested in.
Speaker: Those can be implemented fairly quickly.
Speaker: fairly quickly.
Speaker: It's a little more difficult with the contract food service that or a third party food service that's in it because they've got a profit mode in there to boot.
Speaker: And what you're suggesting may not be as quick to implement or might have a monetary angle that seems to take away from the bottom line.
Speaker: What about residents who are fickle about preferences?
Speaker: How do you satisfy them?
Speaker: Well, you know, that's an interesting question.
Speaker: Yeah, I would always tell the staff that you have to be really careful about what you ask students.
Speaker: And I said, students talk with their feet, survey their feet.
Speaker: You know, we'd ask survey questions.
Speaker: We'd say, like one was when I was constructing that new cafeteria, the survey said the students ate more grilled food, more, you know, hamburger fries.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Grilled stuff.
Speaker: Well, the truth is they eat more pasta and pizza and stuff like that.
Speaker: So I had to switch the grill and the pasta area around immediately after we opened because the survey said they ate more grilled food, but their feet said they ate more pasta.
Speaker: The same thing with the survey says they want light stuff on the salad bar.
Speaker: Well, they survey light, but they eat heavy.
Speaker: Their feet say they're eating heavy, but...
Speaker: And I don't know, I guess they feel like they'll lose weight by looking at it.
Speaker: But the truth is that you have to really pay attention to what do these things mean?
Speaker: And that's particularly true in food service.
Speaker: Students talk with their feet, survey their feet.
Speaker: I've always felt the best years of a long-term dining contractor, the first year when the company wants to reinforce you made the right decision, and the last year when the company wants to encourage you to re-sign with them for the next term.
Speaker: Why don't we just do two-year contracts then so all we have are just first years and last years?
Speaker: Well, there's a significant investment to changing contractors.
Speaker: And that first year they put a significant investment in there.
Speaker: So, uh, I want a five year minimum contract with a renewal option.
Speaker: Like we give to coaches, you know, that after the end of the first year, you can roll it over another year.
Speaker: And so, uh,
Speaker: So there's always incentive for them to maintain it.
Speaker: At some point, you'll have to re-bid it, but I always tried to do a five-year with a renewal.
Speaker: So at the end of the first year, if things were going great guns, I'd give them another year, you know, another...
Speaker: we'd roll it over for another year.
Speaker: And so if we could get a long-term commitment from a unit that we really liked and a contract administrator is really good at it, that you could make it work.
Speaker: All right, let's talk about maintenance then.
Speaker: Another area you were identified as an expert in, but these have been getting slowly peeled away from housing.
Speaker: In episode one, Kent Sampson, who you mentioned earlier, told us that the wildest meeting he ever sat in was when campus leadership told him
Speaker: quote, in no uncertain terms that his maintenance team was going to be absorbed into campus-wide facilities and operations.
Speaker: How would you have reacted to such a meeting?
Speaker: Probably the same way Samson did.
Speaker: Fortunately, that didn't happen on my watch, and we kept the maintenance staff throughout, but they –
Speaker: They're a critical part.
Speaker: You just can't, people have to understand the distinction between housing, you know, maintenance on a classroom is a lot different on maintenance on a student room.
Speaker: The student lives there around the clock and you can't have the same ticket mentality that typically exists with tickets, you know, that
Speaker: You've got to just got to attend to those things and you got to attend to them now and quickly.
Speaker: And you have to be very, very responsive.
Speaker: You know, it's one thing if the air conditioner is out in your classroom for a day, you know, and you have to go there one hour.
Speaker: It's something else if it's out in your room.
Speaker: You know, I mean, yeah.
Speaker: You just have to, I think those are the things that have to be taken into account on maintenance.
Speaker: So across the board, one size just doesn't fit all.
Speaker: It's a whole different ballgame.
Speaker: So how did you show appreciation for, or how did you demonstrate value for maintenance and housekeeping staff?
Speaker: Well, there's probably two things.
Speaker: One, I learned as many names as possible.
Speaker: give you an example that I, when I first went to the university of Kansas, I, well, I, I've done this wherever I have, I have howdy rounds.
Speaker: I,
Speaker: I go out and I try to get out in the buildings and say hello to the staff and meet them and visit with them just informally.
Speaker: I don't take a lot of time, but I would spend time every day somewhere making a howdy round out in the buildings or a building that I hadn't been to for a while and stuff.
Speaker: And I'd visit with them.
Speaker: And I remember one day I was making a howdy round and I saw one of our painters there in the lobby and went over and spoke to him.
Speaker: I said, his name was Don Eric.
Speaker: I said, hello, Mr. Eric.
Speaker: I said, how you doing?
Speaker: He's fine.
Speaker: We visited for a few minutes and I,
Speaker: Appreciate his work.
Speaker: He said, well, I'll be sure.
Speaker: And he said, Mr. Stoner, he said, mind if I tell you something?
Speaker: I said, no, I'd be all right.
Speaker: He said, and it went like this.
Speaker: I don't know if you're competent or not.
Speaker: And I kind of laughed about that.
Speaker: He said, well, that doesn't sound quite right.
Speaker: I said, I don't know.
Speaker: What were you going to say?
Speaker: He said, well, I don't.
Speaker: He said, I don't know what you're competent.
Speaker: I have no idea what you do other than you're the big boss.
Speaker: I said, but I said, here's what I do know.
Speaker: I do know that I appreciate the fact that you call me by name.
Speaker: that every now and then I see you, you appreciate my work.
Speaker: He said, I've worked here 20 years and you're the first.
Speaker: He called me a suit.
Speaker: You have the shirts and suits.
Speaker: The shirts are the...
Speaker: You know, guys that wear the uniforms and stuff and then their suits.
Speaker: He said, you're the first suit that has ever called me by name.
Speaker: And so I got to thinking about that.
Speaker: He's right.
Speaker: You know, I tried to be competent.
Speaker: You know, I tried to stay up with the reading in the field.
Speaker: I tried to write.
Speaker: I tried to meet all my goals and objectives.
Speaker: But he has no idea what those are or what I was thinking.
Speaker: what I was doing, but he does know that I called him by name, you know, and that I appreciated his work.
Speaker: And so I think those howdy rounds and that.
Speaker: And the other thing would be is that any time a special day or a special occurrence, check-ins, check-outs, inclement weather days, you know, somebody has to shovel the snow, you know, on an inclement weather day.
Speaker: Not all the staff gets that day off.
Speaker: So if we had an inclement weather day and I had a crew working somewhere, I'd be in on the university and I'd make the rounds.
Speaker: I'd make sure I was out on that sidewalk thanking them for shoveling the snow or the tractors that were moving things around.
Speaker: I'd make an appearance at those desks or check-in days.
Speaker: I'd make it around and I'd
Speaker: hit the floors and I'd see the custodians and stuff.
Speaker: I wanted them to know that I knew they were working.
Speaker: I wasn't home having my, you know, just a nice, nice warm day at home while I'm making all the staff work.
Speaker: So I tried to always make an appearance at, at special events or special days, check-ins, check-outs, snow days, things like that.
Speaker: I'd make the rounds and I'd make myself available.
Speaker: I just didn't go to the office.
Speaker: I, in fact, I tried to avoid the office.
Speaker: I would head out to all the buildings where the,
Speaker: where the frontline staff was doing what they needed to do.
Speaker: Were you grabbing a shovel to sling snow?
Speaker: No, I wasn't slinging snow, but I was appreciating them for being there and thanking them and stuff like that.
Speaker: But no, I wasn't doing that.
Speaker: I've sometimes, uh, you know, stopped by housekeeping and like, Oh, I got this.
Speaker: I got this.
Speaker: I'm going to clean this and go vacuum or like clean up something.
Speaker: And I'm sure as soon as I left, they just redid it over.
Speaker: Cause can't do as quality a job as they could.
Speaker: But you know, it's such a nice thing when you've got staff at those levels that just take such pride in their work.
Speaker: And then I still think it's like, Hey, let me help you out here.
Speaker: They're like, no, no, no.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, nobody in their right mind is going to give me some floor wax and a buffer.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: So, but at any rate, they know what they're doing and I am proud of them.
Speaker: I think that's a perfect illustration too of like, you know, nobody really is bigger than the game.
Speaker: And there's a sense of like, you know, humility that people can pick up on is like, you know, we're willing to be there and we're willing to do that.
Speaker: Like that means a whole lot.
Speaker: And just the other day I was out.
Speaker: dumping a couch with my staff and I was up on trying to make it fit in the roll off.
Speaker: So they wouldn't pick it up because I knew somebody later on was going to have to come in and rearrange that.
Speaker: And, you know, the beta sky sky was like, nice to see you out here jumping on that dumpster.
Speaker: I'm like, yeah, don't tell anyone I'm doing this.
Speaker: Cause I'm sure I'm breaking some sort of OSHA rule.
Speaker: Well, that's great.
Speaker: You know, staff,
Speaker: They really don't care how much you know, but they do know how much you care.
Speaker: You know, I mean, they do know if you care or not.
Speaker: And so, like I say, I don't know if you're confident.
Speaker: Well, I mean, they didn't, but he did appreciate, you know, so they don't care how much you know, but they do know how much you care.
Speaker: So I think that's important.
Speaker: So we've talked a little bit about the pandemic.
Speaker: So just a quick question.
Speaker: We talked about budgets,
Speaker: if you were still in housing and in control of the housing budget, when the pandemic started, if you had half occupancy, where would you have cut to save jobs?
Speaker: Well, that's a, that's a real tough question.
Speaker: I, uh, I'm not sure, uh, where I'd cut.
Speaker: I'd, uh, look on the administrative side of it first, but I'd try to preserve as many of our, of the, uh, frontline staff as possible.
Speaker: They're the people that you need to save.
Speaker: So I try to save on that.
Speaker: You know, it's tough because each campus, depending on what their debt load is, because debt has to be paid, you know.
Speaker: I mean, there's no way around that.
Speaker: Depending on debt load and reserves and things like that depends on how severe the cuts have to be or what you can get by with.
Speaker: But like...
Speaker: I mean, this doesn't really have to do with cuts, but one thing that I realized, this was at Tennessee, we had a lot of part-time staff in the summer.
Speaker: And so we were having trouble with some of our housekeeping staff just keeping them on board because they were only part-time.
Speaker: Well, by rearranging what we did in conferences, we was able to make them all full-time because by increasing the conference load and working around that, we didn't make a lot of money, but it meant you could keep people on the payroll full-time, which gave them benefits, which gave them
Speaker: And they appreciated that and they worked for it.
Speaker: And so I think sometimes you can rearrange the distribution.
Speaker: In that case, we
Speaker: by changing the way we did conferences and our conference incomes, we was able to get everybody full-time and benefits, which was a big, a big plus.
Speaker: But where you make cuts, it's hard to tell because if you, I say, because cuts will depend on debt load and, and reserves and a lot of things like that.
Speaker: And it's always easiest to cut the front line, but I'd try to preserve them as much as possible if I, if I could probably, you know, like,
Speaker: you hate to do it, but you, you know, you end up cutting travel.
Speaker: You cut some of the administrative, uh, things that you do, uh, which everybody did anyway, but, uh, you just have to do what you have to do.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: As we, as we look to close down, you were president of a Kuhu'ai.
Speaker: Was it more fun and enjoyable being president or being past president?
Speaker: Well, certainly I didn't have as much stress being the past president.
Speaker: Uh, I got rotated over into the, uh, you know, the foundation board and, uh,
Speaker: I did that and was secretary of treasurer or treasurer of that for three years.
Speaker: But I, I, but at any rate, the pressure, a lot of the pressure was off because, uh, you set some goals and objectives going in.
Speaker: You wanted to make sure you accomplished those and, uh, did some significant things while you was president.
Speaker: But, uh, the past president role, uh, I like to say most of the pressure was off and I, uh,
Speaker: I had some opportunities there, but it wasn't like the expected to be at the regional conference or I wasn't expected to speak here.
Speaker: I wasn't expected to, you know, to do all this.
Speaker: So the expectations are that most of the, a lot of the pressure for commitments or making appearances at different places was off.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And that is a wrap for this episode.
Speaker: I want to give a big thanks to our guest, Dr. Ken Stoner, for spending some of his time with us today and reflecting on how so much of our jobs is not only annually cyclical, but also macroscopically too.
Speaker: I take it as a positive sign that I didn't hear him once say that he would have rather been fishing than spending some quality time with us.
Speaker: Don't forget to submit any questions or ask for advice through the anonymous form linked in the show notes.
Speaker: I've got a few ideas and some tentative guests lined up for the next block of episodes, but I'm always looking for more guests and topics.
Speaker: If you and some of your colleagues just want to come on and shoot the breeze stream of consciousness about anything housing related, I'd definitely be open to some less structured, more organic episodes.
Speaker: Someone who will remain nameless actually suggested doing after dark episodes.
Speaker: I'm not sure exactly what that means, but my assumption it involves booze and curse words, which I don't know if I'm ready to go there yet.
Speaker: And with that, I say to you, good day.
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