00:00:00Tamara: So if you begin by saying your name, please?
00:00:04Edward: My name is Edward Spencer.
00:00:05Tamara: I should’ve said this is December 12th, 2012, I’m Tamara Kennelly.
00:00:10Edward: 12, 12, 12 [laughter].
00:00:11Tamara: 12, 12, 12 yeah.
00:00:13Edward: An auspicious day, right?
00:00:14Tamara: Yeah absolutely. Where were you born?
00:00:18Edward: I was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on August 18th, 1945.
00:00:24Tamara: Would you tell us about your family?
00:00:26Edward: Sure. My father grew up in Rhode Island and moved to Massachusetts when he was eighteen years old in 1927, just before the Depression began. He took a job with General Electric right out of high school, wound up working for GE for, I think it was forty-two years. Which happens to be identical to the number of years I also worked in my profession.
00:00:56Tamara: Interesting!
00:00:57Edward: My biological mother was from Pittsfield and she died when I was not quite four years old and my father was left with this three year old boy and this nine year old girl. He continued on his job, found housekeepers and so forth. Long story short, eventually married my stepmother, who was one of our housekeepers, actually. So we lived in Pittsfield for the first, let’s see. Eleven years of my life and in 1956 my father was transferred to Decatur, Illinois with GE as they moved their plastics division headquarters out to Illinois.
00:01:38Tamara: What was his position?
00:01:40Edward: At that point he was manager of cost accounting for the plastics department of GE. So we moved to Decatur when I was going into sixth grade and we lived there then until the middle of my freshman year of high school. When GE made the decision, believe it or not, to get out of the plastics business, but they later--by the way--went back into it, but at that point, he was transferred back east to Bridgeport, Connecticut and we lived in Stratford next to Bridgeport. And I spent the last half of my freshman year and my sophomore in Stratford and the summer before my junior year of highschool we moved to Auburn, New York in the Finger Lakes area, which was his last assignment for GE. He eventually became manager of finance for the rectifier components department of GE. So, I finished high school in Auburn, New York. We lived right on one of the Finger Lakes, actually literally our front yard was the lake. It was a great place to live and I had a buddy whose brother went to the University of Rochester and I would sometimes ride along as they took him back from a weekend visit, and I fell in love with the University of Rochester. And applied early admission there and got admitted to the U of R, but if you look back at my adolescent years from eleven through fifteen, in that range, moving three times in five years. At the time, I think for an adolescent boy that was a challenge. But in retrospect, looking back, it’s probably one of the best things that ever happened to me because I learned how to be assertive, how to walk into new environments, how to meet new people. Which helped me immensely later in life. It was particularly difficult on my sister, that first move from Massachusetts to Illinois, because she was going into her senior year of high school and she says that was tough. But she met her husband in Decatur and lives in Decatur till this day. They’re divorced but she has two grown daughters, my nieces. But she’s still there.
00:04:11Tamara: Did your father go to college?
00:04:13Edward: No he didn’t. And it was really interesting because he was the last manager of finance in the General Electric Company without a college degree. So when he retired from GE, it was the end of an era.
00:04:27Tamara: You went to University of Rochester, what was your experiences in undergraduate like?
00:04:36Edward: Rochester is a beautiful place, it’s even more beautiful today than it was then too. It’s a very competitive school with very prestigious medical and dental school as well, and the Eastman School of Music is the music school of the university. It was a very vibrant city to be in in those days, it’s also headquarters for Kodak and Xerox and Bausch + Lomb. So a lot of corporate involvement with the university, too. I started off as a pre-med general sciences major and that sounds a bit rinky-dink at first, except that to get a general science degree you had to have three years of one science, two years of two others, and one year of a fourth. So it was pretty intensive degree. But second semester of sophomore year, I took Introductory Psychology and absolutely fell in love with psychology and took all my psych courses during my junior and senior years, changed my major, and wound up getting a degree in psychology. I had gotten also very involved in student government, student activities. I pledged to fraternity, became vice president of that fraternity, was president of the sophomore class, member of the college cabinet which is the Student Government Association, chairman of freshmen week, all kinds of stuff. In addition to that, I had a really strong interest in medicine, obviously I was pre-med. I had worked one summer in psychical therapy, two summers as an operating room technician, and really loved it. I thought, well you know what I really ought to do is combine my interest in medicine with working with students and going to medical school administration work. So as I went off to med school, that’s what I was thinking about. After I got there I realized, you know, my calling is really working with college students. I did not care for the medical students [chuckles], my fellow students. I didn’t care for faculty. I was concerned about the future of medicine. Turned out to be a good concern.
00:06:57Tamara: Concerned in what way?
00:06:58Edward: Of what was going to happen to medicine in the United States. What the future of it was going to be like. I was at the University of Buffalo for med school. We had the opportunity to go to Canada to see socialized medicine in place, and this was way back in the fall of 1967. I felt, you know, the United States needs to get on board here and look at other ways of delivering medical services. But anyway, I thought, I’m gonna get this M.D., I’m never going to use it for what it was intended for and have all these other concerns, and I feel called to work with college students. Mainly undergraduate students. So I thought, I know what I need to do. I need to get out of here, I need to get a master’s in Student Affairs Administration to begin a career. So I dropped out in January after I had survived most of gross anatomy, neuroanatomy, psychiatry, the cell course, all that kind of thing. Picked up a job teaching sixth grade as the only male teacher in a Catholic school in Seneca Falls, New York. Then went off to Syracuse University in the fall of 1968 for a master’s in Student Personnel Administration in Higher Education. Because in those days, late ‘60s, if you wanted to go somewhere in student affairs you either went to Syracuse or Indiana. One of the two. Syracuse was twenty-five miles away from Auburn, and that turned out to be very convenient. So went off to Syracuse, was on the staff that opened a brand new residence hall that fall. In fact when the RA staff moved in, the first day we had no power, we had no water, we had no curtains, we had part of our furniture.
00:08:35Tamara: You mean you were an RA yourself?
00:08:37Edward: Yes, a graduate RA.
00:08:38Tamara: Oh okay.
00:08:40Edward: And I was on the eighth floor of this men’s tower and then a woman who was in my graduate program, starting the program also, was in the female tower in the building. They shared a common connecting lounge and office. So we got very close and long story short, she became my wife and we were married in the chapel at Syracuse University on May 30th, 1970. So I was on the staff of that residence hall for both of my years at Syracuse. First as the graduate RA and then as the assistant hall director and then at the end, the hall director for the complex.
00:09:43Tamara: And when you were the hall director, you were still a graduate student?
00:09:46Edward: Still a graduate student.
00:09:47Tamara: I see, I see. Just to back up, I had a few other earlier questions if you don’t mind.
00:09:53Edward: Sure, sure go ahead.
00:09:56Tamara: Did you live in the dorms yourself when you were a student?
00:09:58Edward: I did. And I should back up and say my senior year I was at Rochester, I was an undergraduate RA in an all freshman men’s hall. So I had that experience, and then when I went to Syracuse as the graduate student, I was a graduate RA on the floors with undergraduates in an all male tower of a co-ed complex.
00:10:20Tamara: So you started thinking about housing and student life quite early, actually.
00:10:26Edward: Oh yeah.
00:10:27Tamara: You said you were involved in student government as well.
00:10:30Edward: Mm-hmm.
00:10:32Tamara: What do you recall what issues were under consideration at that time?
00:10:39Edward: Well as I teach students in the courses I taught, going to college during the ‘60s was not a quiet time. We were very much in the midst of the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, organizations like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee we’re getting going, the Freedom Riders and some of my friends became riders out on the buses, in Alabama. I never got down there myself. But human rights from perspective, particularly for women’s rights, civil rights, were very very big issues. The Vietnam War was keying up. A good friend of mine who was a year ahead of me at Rochester graduated in ROTC and went off to Vietnam and during my senior year, suddenly there he was in Vietnam on the front page of the New York Times, and two days later he was dead.
00:11:44Tamara: Oh no… Jeez.
00:11:49Edward: So there are moments like that… But it was not a quiet time. Some of the other issues were some of the in loco parentis regulations that were very strong. Curfews, for example, only single-sex residence halls. Those were the main issues that I recall coming up. While I was there at Rochester, the school actually opened its first co-educational residence hall called the Towers. Which is a suite design residence hall. I was also there for the great power blackout of the Northeast. I don’t know whether you remember anything or have heard anything about that, but in 19… I think it was 1965. There was a major power failure and all of the power in New York, parts of New England, New Jersey, just went. And I was in the middle--believe it or not--of taking an hourly exam in statistics in one of the auditoriums at Rochester that’s very similar to McBryde Hall here. And [chuckles] I’ll never forget this. Students were actually lighting up matches--
00:12:39Tamara: [Laughs]
00:12:40Edward: Holding to create light to finish--
00:12:42Tamara: To write their answer! Oh my goodness!
00:12:45Edward: And I also remember a number of students started cheating on the exam and the whole exam was null and voided afterwards, because of all of this.
00:12:59Tamara: Wow.
00:13:01Edward: So quite an experience.
00:13:02Tamara: How long was the power off?
00:13:05Edward: In Rochester, let’s see. I think it was about five or six hours in Rochester, if I remember right. Just thinking about from there I went over to visit friends in this towers residence hall complex. Of course, elevators weren’t working so you had to go up stairwells and all that. But I think it was about four or five hours.
00:13:28Tamara: You were named Outstanding Senior Man in 1967. Why did you get that honor?
00:13:37Edward: Well, it’s called the Percy B. Dutton Award--
00:13:42Tamara: It’s called the what?
00:13:43Edward: Percy B. Dutton. It’s named after--
00:13:45Tamara: Oh I see!
00:13:47Edward: An earlier student. It’s awarded to the graduating male who, if I can remember the wording, “who has exceeded all of his male classmates in wholesome, unselfish, and helpful influence among the student body”. So, somehow they felt I deserved that award.
00:14:07Tamara: For just all around, and maybe you were involved in several--
00:14:11Edward: So many different activities.
00:14:12Tamara: So many different activities, yeah. Now we got you to Syracuse, and then you were named an Outstanding Young Men of America in ‘79 ‘81 as well. Was that, could you comment on that or how that came up?
00:14:37Edward: That was early years of my career. I started my professional career in 1970 at Delaware. After Norrine, my wife and I graduated from Syracuse with our master’s degrees, we of course were going job hunting. It was a wild spring. May 1970. The Kent State Massacre. Blowing up a little bit. We applied to jobs around the country and each of us had several offers, but anti-nepotism was very strong in those days and no one would hire us together.
00:15:15Tamara: Oh really?
00:15:18Edward: So we decided to take the offer at Delaware, which was an offer for me at the University of Delaware, as the Assistant Director of Residence Life. And the university declined to hire Norrine, and she had actually accepted a teaching job at Newark High School in Delaware. Two weeks after we got there, they changed their mind and offered her a job. So we both started working for the university in August of 1970. I started as an assistant director of residence life and she started as program director of the student center. Among her job responsibilities were hosting visiting speakers and guests and dignitaries. So we got to spend an evening with Margaret Mead, Peter Solinger, Senator Sam Ervin, Bill Moyers, John Carey, Joe Biden, all kinds of people. So it was a tremendous experience. I continued on in residence life, I started out with this assistant director of residence life position, and that was a live out position, so we were no longer living in the residence halls at that point. But I had eighteen hall directors reporting to me as this fresh out of graduate school, master’s guy. And among the eighteen hall directors, there were some very sophisticated undergraduate seniors who were some of the hall directors that were graduate students like I had been at Syracuse. Vietnam veterans who had come back and literally, literally some little ladies in tennis shoes who were raised a family and back as house mother. And you can imagine the staff meetings [laughing], of my eighteen hall directors. So it was really quite an experience. Norrine meanwhile was in the student center with all the programming speakers. Then I got asked to go into the main housing office to take on the room assignment administration public relations aspect of the housing program. Then Norrine got spotted by the provost office folks and they asked her to become assistant director of summer and winter session for the university. They have very active winter session as well as summer session, and the joke was people used to call her Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring. So she moved over into the academic area and I stayed in student affairs and then she eventually, around ‘77, ‘78 was literally asked to apply to be associate dean in the College of Business at the University of Delaware. She just had a master’s degree, as did I at that point. I decided, I took my time, I decided I really wanted to go back to psychology to get my PhD and social psychology was what I was interested in. And I was able to do it at Delaware part-time, while working full-time. Literally I’d be working, I left for a class, walk back to the role as the professional. Had a year off at half salary to mainly do my dissertation research. So I did all that. Norrine continued on her position and knew she wanted to get a doctorate but wasn’t ready to do it at that point. I really got interested in social psych and literally I got interested in the different genders and personality types, and how they reacted to high-density living situations. Crowding, triple-doubles, floor lounges, that kind of thing. Because I was now in the main office doing room assignments pairing, and I would have a guy who was in a triple-double or something, he come in and says, get me out of the damned room, I can’t stand it anymore! And the next guy would say, don’t you dare move me out of this room. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I thought, there’s something about people here that’s going on. So I got interested in crowding behavior and how the different genders and different personality types react to high-density living. And that was a bowl. That then formed the basis for my dissertation for my PhD. So I did the PhD work from 1977 to 1981, part-time with one of those years being a full-time year.
00:20:25Tamara: What was your PhD?
00:20:27Edward: Social psych.
00:20:28Tamara: I mean, what was the title of it?
00:20:30Edward: Oh my dissertation?
00:20:32Tamara: Oh your dissertation, I’m sorry.
00:20:33Edward: The interaction of sex… interpersonal needs, and social density in a university living environment.
00:20:42Tamara: Okay, and did you say triple-doubles?
00:20:44Tamara: Now what are triple doubles?
00:20:44Edward: Mm-hmm.
00:20:46Edward: Sometimes when a university has too many people that it has to house, they’ll take a double room and convert it to a triple. Or they’ll take a study lounge and convert it to a student room, that kind of thing. That’s how that all came about, it was all very intertwined with my work and my research was helping the university, it was a great situation. Well meanwhile, in the Outstanding Men of America, I’m sorry to have a very long answer to your question. That came at about that time as I was doing all this stuff. Then, let’s see. What came next? I started out in the residence life area, went to the administration public relations area and then the position as associate director for housing facilities came open and they said, Ed, we’d really like you to consider that. And I thought, oh dear. I’m not sure I really want to do that. That was really not my interest, but okay. It’s a different area, I’ll pick up the experience.
00:21:58Tamara: For housing facilities.
00:21:59Edward: Right, that’s like housekeeping, maintenance, keys, inventory control, all that kind of stuff. Well what that did, I’m not sure I consciously thought about all this at the time, but it meant that I had experience in every part of housing and residence life.
00:22:17Tamara: Right, from the ground up.
00:22:19Edward: Right, literally. And then I had a PhD in social psychology. Well, Virginia Tech came after me. They were doing some restructuring and they wanted a director of housing residence life who had had experience ideally in all these areas and had a PhD and so. Well I must tell you, I had never heard of Virginia Tech, and then somebody said to me, oh it’s VPI. Oh VPI! I know VPI. VMI you have VPI, the whole bit. So, I agreed to come down for an interview and I think that was August of 1982, and I just thought the place was just so beautiful. And somebody had said to me, you know Blacksburg. It’s about four hours away from anywhere you might possibly want to be [laughter]. I thought, oh dear. So I realized it was a fairly isolated place, but it was a beautiful place and the opportunities, I thought, were immense of what might lie ahead. I was a little concerned, and maybe I should stop there and let you ask other questions before we start talking about Virginia Tech.
00:23:09Tamara: No go ahead!
00:23:10Edward: Go ahead? Okay. Well initially I was very concerned because the residence halls had no live-in professional staff at all. Here is one of the biggest housing programs in the country, it was run entirely by undergraduate students. Undergraduate RAs, undergraduate head residents, who reported to live-off master’s degree professionals. That was scary, I knew that was going to need to be changed. We were going to have to start investing money in the program to improve staffing, to improve facilities that were in desperate need of a lot of attention. At that point, they were about to start the next year co-ed residence halls and our first graduate housing. So here was a program that was, I felt, could really take off. I thought this is a really good opportunity, but what does Norrine want to do? So they offer me the job and I said, well, let’s have Norrine and I come down. So we flew down and it was, as I recall, it was Labor Day weekend, this was when Virginia Tech was on the quarter system. So fall classes didn’t start until late September, so at that point it was the break between summer school and fall. Well it was one of these glorious Blacksburg days, the clear blue skies and the Hokie Stone against it. Yeah, just a beautiful place, and Norrine fell in love with the place, and she said, I think we should go. She said, you know, I’ll quit my job, and I want to get my doctorate and I can get it there [laughs].
00:25:17Tamara: Wow! That was big.
00:25:19Edward: She was interested in educational evaluation and research and it was an ideal PhD program here for that. Although I should back up because initially she thought about the CPAP program, the Center for Public Administration Policy and she did start her very first quarter in that program but she realized that wasn’t the match for her and she switched to educational evaluation research. So we agreed to come, that was September 1982. We both had some major commitments at Delaware that fall and in fact, I was teaching for the College of Business where she was an administrator because they like to hire social psychologists to teach in their courses. So the agreement for me to come was but not until January 1st. We came January 1st, 1983. We made I think about three trips down that fall to get acquainted with people, to participate in some significant meetings and that kind of thing. So that’s how that all came about. So we left Delaware which is a very tiny state and everybody knows everybody else. Everybody knows their state legislature, everybody knows the governor. Interestingly the governor now, Jack Markell, is the son of the fellow who was head of the Department of Accounting in the College of Business who was a close friend of ours. So we knew Jack Markell when he was growing up. When we moved to Delaware, he was about ten or eleven years old. It was funny the other day there was a picture of Governor Jack, sitting next to President Obama at the White House and it was his profile picture, and I thought, oh my goodness! I can see both of his parents on the profile, it’s neat. So we made the move to Delaware to Virginia Tech, and you want to continue on that?
00:27:28Tamara: Just one other questions before, did you personally have a person who was a mentor for you?
00:27:34Edward: Well, I think I had a number of mentors growing up, as I said my mother died when I was very very young. And there was this school teacher who lived diagonally across the street from us, whose name was Sylvia Kimball. I called her Kimball, by her last name [chuckles], which resulted in all her friends calling her Kimball. But she became sort of a surrogate mother for me. Because, you have to understand, my father is very busy with GE, he has to travel a lot, we have these housekeepers. So she became a lot of the stability for me. She was an early on mentor. I had an aunt, my biological mother’s half sister who was a very bright woman who was really into education. And I think she inspired in me and in several of my cousins to go into education. There’s an incredible number of teachers and administrators in the field of education in my family. So my aunt Gertrude was a real inspiration and a bit of a mentor. I had wonderful high school teachers who were great mentors. The couple people from the student activities, dean of students staff at Rochester. Ron Jackson, who was the Dean of Students, and Vicki Schwartz who was Director of Student Activities, were mentors. Then when I went to graduate school at Syracuse, the head of the master’s program was a woman named Mary Evelyn Dewey who is one of the most incredibly well read women I have ever met, who was a real mentor as well. My first boss at Delaware for my first professional job in 1970 was a fellow named Stuart Sharkey, who eventually became Vice President for Student Affairs at Delaware. He was very much a mentor. And actually, the vice president for student affairs at Delaware at that time is a fellow named John Worthen who went on to become president of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and eventually president of Ball State University. Was very much a mentor and I’m still very close to both of them. Sandra Sullivan, who hired me here as vice president for student affairs. I was director of housing life when she was vice president for student affairs, was another, and still is, another mentor to me. And then Tom Goodale, who’s another one of my predecessors as vice president, was very much and still is very much a mentor. So I had a lot of them.
00:30:51Tamara: Okay. I read something that said both you and Norrine felt very strongly about the power of education, and I wondered if you wanted to comment on that.
00:31:03Edward: Yeah we were both first generation college students. None of our parents went to college. But I think all of our parents, my father, my step-mother, her mom and dad were very strong, making sure we had the opportunities they didn’t really have. I think with a lot of encouragement from them and other people like Mrs. Kimball and my aunt Gertrude that the pressure to do that was there. The other thing in my family, my sister, and I just have the one sibling, turned down an offer for a scholarship at Northwestern and decided not to go to college.
00:31:50Tamara: Wow.
00:31:51Edward: She became a bank president secretary and eventually a school secretary and retired from that career. But she never went on to college, so I think everything was invested in me, that I would go on to college. And it was tough on my dad and step-mother when I decided to drop out of med school. Because initially that’s disappointing that my son was going to be the doctor. I think in the long run they were fine with it and they got to live long enough to see me succeed.
00:32:31Tamara: Now where we got to Virginia Tech, now you’re here, how did you approach the situation where you saw the problems, you were aware and you had experience coming from somewhere else. So how did you approach the problems you saw here when you came?
00:32:54Edward: Well we had to work on an issue at a time. When I came January 1st, of ‘83, the housing office, which we renamed Housing and Residence Life, was being relocated from Patton Hall to East Eggleston Hall. And they had gone into East Eggleston, which used to be a residence hall, and they had gutted the whole first floor out to create this office space, but the plan, the design, was with office landscaping. So nobody had any full walls in the whole office suite. The only place you could go with full walls was the bathroom. Well you can imagine the confidential conversations that have to go on in the main office of Housing and Residence Life, and I said, this has got to change. There’s no way. Nice that the university architect thought this was a nice idea, but this is not the place to do it. Maybe the accounting department or something like that. So I had to take a very strong stand with that having to be redone, which it did. Then we had RAs, lived in double rooms. They had a roommate. Well again, the poor roommate and the RA having to deal with being there when difficult conversations had to take place, and confidential conversations take place, would you please leave the room? So we had to eventually move RAs into single rooms to get rid of the fact that they would have a roommate. And then, it was clear that we had some very committed undergraduate head RAs, they were the cream of the crop. To be an undergraduate head RA was a high honor. So we had really good ones, but as time went on, the kinds of issues we were having to deal with were just very very difficult, as students brought more and more issues like I call, baggage, with them when they come to campus. Then we had to move to a plan to add live in area coordinators. We started with some professional hall directors in the big buildings first. In fact, the first live-in professional came in 1990 when we opened Phase II of the Special Purpose Housing: Greek Housing area and there’s separate little house which I call the “gate house” where the area coordinator still lives. We added that one-
00:35:38Tamara: The “gate house”?
00:35:39Edward: Yeah the “gate house”, it’s sort of the gateway to that community. Then we added a professional hall director for Pritchard Hall, which is one of our biggest residence halls and one and on.
00:35:53Tamara: And this would be a person who--
00:35:54Edward: Had a master’s degree, full-time professional.
00:35:58Tamara: A master’s degree in psychology or sociology, something like that?
00:36:01Edward: Student affairs. Right. Counseling, administration. So we gradually added those, so big buildings, we went for professional hall directors. The groupings of smaller buildings, we’d have a live-in area coordinator for the several small halls in that area. Meanwhile, they had made the decision, the decisions were in place before I came, that we would convert Hillcrest to our first graduate housing in the fall of 1983. Right after I came. So that was set in place, so during my first year we opened Hillcrest as first graduate housing, it had been the athletes residence hall. Then in the fall of ‘83, Cochrane hall was opening and we shifted athletic housing to Cochrane and opened Hillcrest converted to graduate housing. Also that fall, the first phase of Special Purpose Housing: Greek Housing opened, with our first three Greek houses. It’s called Oaklane Community.
00:37:17Tamara: Yeah, so those opened that first year.
00:37:19Edward: The first three houses opened fall of ‘83, the second seven opened in the fall of 1990. That’s the Phase II.
00:37:26Tamara: Could you explain a little bit why they decided to have this Oaklane Community which is kind of separate from the rest?
00:37:34Edward: Sure, yeah it’s part of the campus, but in some ways it’s not part of campus, there’s some separatism to it. The university really wanted to support the growth of fraternities and sororities. We’ve always thought, and the research indicates, it’s a wonderful way to develop community. To develop loyalty to the university. To have undergraduates to look back on their college experience as a tremendous one. And yes, frankly. They’re the best givers. Greeks are the best givers as alums, and we really want to do the whole thing and foster that environment. So again, the first three houses in 1983, and the second seven, which took us up to ten houses in 1990. And then the Phase III houses which added eight more, which took us up to eighteen houses, was fall of 2001, as I recall. And now, right now, in 2012, we’re about to open the first Phase IV house, the Sigma Phi Epsilon house.
00:38:44Tamara: I read about that, so it wasn’t necessarily an issue of town and gown, in the sense you had these fraternity or sorority houses and there’s the neighbors didn’t like that. That wasn’t really it’s more--
00:39:01Edward: That’s not so much from the university’s perspective, although that’s an added advantage to get them onto campus, to be together on campus. But I think very much from the town’s perspective, that’s what it was for. To get them off of town areas and onto the campus. The town gown partnership really appreciates what we have done there, in fact after we had opened the first Phase I houses, the town council passed a resolution congratulating the university on this and encouraging the university to do more of it, which we have been.
00:39:36Tamara: But it was more of fostering a community that was really the thought behind the Oaklane.
00:39:42Edward: Right, foster the community and provide the environment that fraternities and sororities need to thrive. Provide these students with even better residential experience than they might have had if they were just living in the residence halls. And yes, very openly. Yeah to give them a great experience so that as alumni they’ll want to give back to the university.
00:40:06Tamara: Okay, this is really a general thing, but I just wondered about the landscape of student life, how it’s changed since you first came here. If you could comment on that.
00:40:19Edward: You know a student asked me the other day, is everything better? Did we change everything for the better? And I thought that’s an interesting question. And I thought for a moment, and I said, I think everything is better except one thing. And I said to him, you know what that is? And he said, state funding. I said, right. Exactly.
00:40:46Tamara: Ah, yeah.
00:40:47Edward: Because when I first came, I think about 73 percent of our education budget came from the Commonwealth of Virginia. And now we’re down to about 20, 21 percent from the commonwealth. And sadly when I first came, support for higher education in Virginia ranked us among the top of the states. And you always used to look at those that were down at the bottom of the fifty, and typically Arkansas and Mississippi and states like that. Now that’s where we are. But think about changes in student life, the opening of the first co-ed residence halls. The Corps had became co-ed and really the first co-ed residence hall would be the Corps of Cadets.
00:41:35Tamara: That would be ‘73?
00:41:36Edward: That was in the ‘70s sometimes.
00:41:38Tamara: I think that’s when the L Squadron came.
00:41:40Edward: But the first civilian co-ed resident was East AJ, East Ambler Johnston in the fall of 1983. There had been practically no visitation hours in the residence halls, very limited visitation where men and women could visit each other in resident hall rooms. That we changed gradually to the point where most places now have twenty four hours, seven days a week visitation. More involvement of students in the governance process, the whole governance system itself, which changed greatly under Jim McComas’ leadership during his presidency. The emphasis on quality of student life that Jim McComas brought with him and his vice president that he brought with him Tom Goodale, which is why McComas Hall is named for Jim McComas. Because of quality student life. The Counseling Center, the Health Center, the rec sports. All that whole area. Improvement in the physical facilities. When I came, not a single residence hall was air conditioned. We didn’t have our first air conditioned residence hall until we opened Payne Hall. And that would’ve been around, I’ll have to look it up I don’t know, it’s around 1992 or something like that. In fact when I came there were very few buildings that were air conditioned. The dining program is the other huge change that I’ve seen.
00:42:59Tamara: Yeah I want to ask you about the dining program because that was really out of the charge from President McComas to turn the dining program around. So how did you do it?
00:43:13Edward: [Chuckles] well, in my early years here students used to describe the dining program as early elementary school cafeteria [laughs]. And in fact, they were probably right. The dining halls were just cafeterias, they looked like school cafeterias with long tables and plastic chairs. There was very limited choice in meal plans, I think initially there was only one dining plan that was it. They bought all processed meats, nothing was really done on-site, and the emphasis was on keeping costs low. Well, after Jim McComas had been here for just a few months, he and Tom Goodale, the Vice President for Student Affairs, had a discussion and decided it would be good to change dining services’ place in the administrative structure from business affairs to student affairs, with an emphasis on quality of student life. So I can still remember Jim McComas saying to me, Ed, can we turn it around into something we could be proud of? Well--[laughs], a piece of this was and, Ed by the way, would you please take it over? I had no experience in dining at all, but it was a charge from the president and the vice president and they had confidence in me and I thought, Jim, we’ll try. I had a situation when I took it over that Howard King, who had been the director of dining services for something like thirty-four years at Virginia Tech was retiring. I convinced him to stay on a little while so we could make some transition and I decided I really needed a consultant who could look where we were at and where we needed to go and what needed to happen. So I started to talk to one of the major food processing equipment manufacturers about the kind of person I needed and he said, you know, there’s this retired guy out in California who was the first Dean of the Culinary Institute of America when it started--the other CIA--when it started out in Newhaven, Connecticut. He said, he went out to the University of the Pacific and he retired out there, but he’s a bundle of energy, he may be just what you need. And I said, would you mind testing the waters with him a little bit. He said, sure I’ll talk to him. Well within an hour [chuckles], this guy calls me back, his name is Paul Fairbrook, and he is everybody’s Jewish grandfather and survived the Holocaust with his family and all. So he calls me, understand you’re looking for a consultant! I said, yeah. He said, I’ll tell you what. I’ll take the red-eye to Washington from San Francisco over the weekend, I’ll visit my niece, and I’ll see you Monday morning. And I thought, oh my lord. What am I getting into? And I thought, well I’m gonna give it a try. John Burchville has confidence in this guy. So anyway the Monday morning was the Monday in March after Spring Break, and the dining halls had reopened from after Spring Break on Sunday night. And he had gone around looking at everything Sunday night, and when he arrived [laughing] at my office, Monday morning, he had a memo. With everything that was wrong [laughter] and where we needed to change. I thought, oh!
00:47:21Tamara: Oh wow.
00:47:23Edward: Well the neat thing about Paul is that not only is he just wonderfully assertive and people love him and as I said, he’s everybody’s Jewish grandfather. They just loved him but he was so bright and he just knew his stuff. I would say Paul was the spark that we really needed to get things going, and he just inspired people. He agreed he’d stay for six or eight months, and he did. His wife Peg joined him for part of the time, then it was time to find a permanent director of what we were calling ‘culinary services’ at that point. I should back up, I had been director of Housing Residence Life and then when dining got merged with all of that, we changed to Residential and Dining Program. So I became Director of Residential and Dining Programs. Still in the university you’ll hear RDP, that’s where it came from: Residential and Dining Program.
00:48:29Tamara: And they merged about when?
00:48:30Edward: That was spring of 1989 and I do have some historical things about that to give you to that may be helpful. So I said to Paul, you got to find a really good director to get this program moving and he helped get some good candidates and we chose John Engstrom who was up at the Washington Hospital Center as director of their dining programs and had been with some other firms like Bon Appetit, which is a private providers of dining services to colleges and universities. Long story short we hired John Engstrom as our first real permanent director of culinary services, which is a division of residential and dining programs. And John was a master merchandiser and marketeer. Just really knew his stuff. And under his leadership we did the first renovation of the Hokie Grill and we were getting started on Owens banquet room--sorry Owens banquet room had been done, then we did the Hokie Grill and the Owens Food Court was the next project. John was with us for a few years, moved on actually, went back with Bon Appetite and we needed to find a successor to him and we found Rick Johnson who became the second director of culinary services as we were calling it in those days. He joined us having been the director of dining services for the University of Alaska, Longwood, Greensboro, one other place in Texas as I recall, so he’d been around a lot. And he had worked for one of the private providers of dining services. He was making the transition to being the director of dining at a public university in a self-operated program. Big distinction in the dining industry between self-op programs and contracted programs. Basically, the remaining self-operated programs are the big ones that afford to do it more inexpensively themselves rather than contract out. We have always been at Virginia Tech a self-op. Rick came on board, another genius. Rick’s real genius was when he looked at where we needed to go, he didn’t look at different colleges and universities. He looked at the private sector and what was happening with other restaurants and institutions out in the private sector. Where were things going? And one of the neat things he did was charter the Hokie bird to fly out to Chicago with staff and with some students to take a look at a water tower place in Chicago which has this marketplace food life. That’s where the idea for West End Market came from. Not from another college or university.
00:51:48Tamara: From the water tower place.
00:51:49Edward: Under Rick’s leadership we finished Owens Food Court, we did Deet’s Place, the first renovation of Dietrick upstairs, we added the Express Shop in Dietrick, we renovated Cochrane Dining Hall to become West End Market. We renovated Schultz, and even under Rick’s leadership we went all the way into the construction of Turner Place, so all of that was done under Rick’s leadership. They brought back these ideas from Food Life and West End Market was designed from that, and students just loved it. We went from early elementary school cafeteria to the most sophisticated dining program in the United States and we were attracting a lot of attention. We’d get thirty and forty schools a year that’d come to visit us to see what we were doing, because everybody had heard about Virginia Tech. In recent years we have expanded West End Market and opened Turner Place. What happened as we’re doing all this stuff, and I said students loved it, well they got spoiled as an on campus student and when they moved off they continued to buy dining plans. Well, for about ten or twelve years in a row now, each fall we would be selling four hundred to five hundred more off campus dining plans than we did the year before, to the point that now the dining program sells about, I think they’re up to about 9,800 off-campus dining plans and the required 9,400 dining plans. So we sell more optional dining plans to students living off campus than we do required plans to students living on campus. When you talk to people they’ll say, okay no way it can’t be, there’s no way. Well it’s true. We’re the victim of our own success too, because the dining halls are very crowded because of that and students have to learn to eat at odd times to avoid the lines, and they do. But they stand in line a long time too, I’m just amazed that they love the food so much. Another classic story about that, when we were designing Phase IV of Greek housing, Oaklane Housing. The first pioneer group are the Sig Eps, the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, and they were working with us to design their house. I’ll come back to how that works in a moment. But they were thinking about having their own commercial kitchen and their own board plans so all the guys would eat together at the house. Which is a great thing, I had that as an undergraduate myself, it’s just a great bonding experience. Problem is it’s very expensive to build a commercial kitchen.
00:55:07Tamara: But you ate at your fraternity house.
00:55:08Edward: Right, yes. It’s very expensive to build a commercial kitchen and do your own board plan. And they said, there’s another problem. We just realized this. And I said, what’s that? Said, these guys are going to be so spoiled by Virginia Tech’s dining plan [laughing], there’s no way that we can keep up with. I said, you know, you’re probably right. Why don’t you build a catering kitchen and dining services catering division can cater a meal or two a week out there, and not invest so much in the big kitchen. So that’s what they built. As an aside, the Phase IV Greek housing is a little different from the other phases. The first three phases are built essentially the same way any residence hall would be built with revenue bonds supported by room fees. The buildings are owned by the universities and leased to the fraternities and sororities. They have no real financial investment in the house. The house is provided as essentially a residence hall. They lease it. Each student that lives there has a room and board contract with the university and the organization pays an eleven thousand dollar fee each academic year for the public areas. Phase IV is different; Phase IV started out that the house corporations were interested in a model that’s been used on other campuses where the university owns the land and leases it to house corporations to build their own house at their own expense. They were originally going to do that but then they realized, we are a fairly young Greek system. Fraternities were not recognized here and brought into the mainframe of student organizations until the early ‘70s. 1970s. And you have to remember there are institutions that have had fraternities and sororities since the 1870s and before that. Relatively we’re a fairly young Greek system.
00:57:07Tamara: But there were fraternities here before the 1970s.
00:57:09Edward: Well, when the university first started there were fraternities. But the board of visitors outlawed them soon thereafter. So they were officially outlawed, not allowed to be student organizations until the early 1970s. If you think about that, they don’t have even today a whole lot of very old established, wealthy alumni. They quickly realized there’s no way to afford these houses themselves and they’re talking about, well the SigEp house is a four million dollar house. So they came up with a proposal and said, what if house corporations came up with a third of the funds to build the house they want to have built, would the university cover the other two thirds? And that’s what we agreed to do. The Phase IV houses, SigEp being the first one, are still owned by the university, but the house corporations helped fund them, contributing a third of the cost. Well what they get in return is a fifty year lease renewable once, so a hundred year use of the building. They got built the house they wanted to have built at only a third of the cost of what it would cost them to build it themselves, and they got tax deductions because the house belongs to the university and their contributions, the one third, were to the Virginia Tech Foundation. Whereas if they tried to build the house themselves at their expense, their contributions would not have been tax deductible.
00:58:53Tamara: Oh I see.
00:58:53Edward: So it’s a win-win. It cost the university only two thirds of what it would have cost them, so it’s a win-win situation for everybody. Phase IV has seventeen lots out there. So lot one is taken so far and we’re going to see how this goes probably over a long period of time, because it’s going to take a while for all the fraternities and sororities to have the kinds of resources the SigEp’s chapter has. The SigEps are fortunate they have three or four very wealthy alumni who really led the campaign to raise the funds and contributed a significant portion of the funds themselves.
00:59:30Tamara: Isn’t their plan eventually to have an actual dining center out there?
00:59:36Edward: The master plan shows eventually Phase IV would have seventeen houses, and also out there would be another student recreation facility, student center, partial dining facility, meeting space. Sort of a student commons kind of place. Then also out there, the university will be relocating all the ag facilities that are on the university side of 460 to the other side of 460 and out to the Kentland Farms area. If you’re familiar with the horse farm, the equine farm that’s out there that goes all the way out to the Oak Lane Community, that will eventually become a rural fields, student recreational areas. Then this commons building would serve that as part of the coming together, the dining, the meeting space adjacent to it.
00:00:32Tamara: So 460 goes across and Oak Lane is on this side.
00:00:37Edward: Right, and the rec fields will be on this side.
00:00:39Tamara: On the same side as Oak Lane.
00:00:42Edward: Right.
00:00:43Tamara: They’re not going to go across the other side.
00:00:44Edward: No, that’s where the horses are going.
00:00:46Tamara: The horses are going over there.
00:00:48Edward: Yeah, yeah.
00:00:49Tamara: I live out in that neighborhood so [laughs].
00:00:52Edward: Yeah and some of the other stuff like the Dairy Facility and the sheep facility are going out to the Kentland Farms area. Farther out.
00:01:07Tamara: Back to the dining, you’ve gotten several awards for the dining.
00:01:20Edward: We have been very fortunate. A lot of people want to say, is Ed Spencer a transformer? Well I was a leader, I had that responsibility, but I had a wonderful staff. Incredible job. The Princeton Review gives awards each year to the best campus food and they give a lot of awards, best academics and all that kind of stuff. And we’ve won the best dining facility, the best dining program, number one, number two, or number three every year now for many years in a row. The National Association of College and University Food Services, NACUF presents the Loyal Horton Awards, named after a former president of their organization. We’ve won so many awards from them, best food, best menu, catering event, best special meal, best program and all that. And then the Ivy Award that used to be presented by Restaurants at Institutions Magazine. We won that which is, what can I say? Sort of equivalent to an academy award.
00:02:32Tamara: Wow. Could you comment on your management style? You’ve mentioned that the staff was very important in doing this. But I wondered what the kind of management style you used to get things so successfully done.
00:02:48Edward: Well I always tell people I hire people to do their jobs, I don’t want to do their job. I try and I think I’ve always found really competent, good people. Who I have confidence in that will do an outstanding job. Then I try to get out of their way. But I try to stand behind them and help them and give them the kinds of resources and advice and assistance that they need. I’m not a micromanager. If I feel strongly about something, I’ll let them know. If I think I have an idea in my head that I think will be helpful I’ll let them know. But I’m not a dictatorial kind of person, and I think staff that worked with me over all the years would probably say that too. I think I’m also the kind of person that if something is not working I want to fix it. So, if I think I put a round peg in a round hole, but it turns out to be a square peg in a round hole, then I want to find a square hole to put the square peg into. I want people to succeed. I think when I see also the people are not succeeding over the years, I’ve counseled them out of the position and suggested that we ought to find a different thing for them or they move on. But fortunately I’ve not had to do that very often. I think our search processes have been such that we’ve found really good people, and I think the example of Paul Fairbrook helping us out to find our first director of dining services, and to give us some advice even as we were looking for the second director after John Engstrom left. There are hard working people in the dining services area. If you think about it, those folks are preparing thousands of meals every day, day after day after day. Millions of meals each year. And one of the proudest things that I have looking back during all my years here on having a responsibility for the dining program, we never had a single verified case of food poisoning. No verified foodborne illnesses. Some people say, ohhh I had food poisoning from Owens-- That was never verified in any case. Their standards are just so high. They work with things called serve pro in case to avoid any kind of foodborne illness and they’ve been very very successful at that. I’ve always just admired their determination, their dedication and what they produce.
00:05:51Tamara: You were named Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs in 1996 under Landrom Cross and then Associate Vice President for Student Affairs in 2004 and still under Landrom Cross. Was there a particular emphasis in your work under Dr. Cross?
00:06:13Edward: Well what was happening, the institution was growing, the division was growing, the sophistication division was growing. And up until that point, the people who reported to the Vice President were directors, so I was Director of Residential and Dining Program. Some other people, Dave Ostroth was Director of University Unions and Student Activities, etc.. Well it was clear that we needed to add a level of AVPs: assistant and associate vice presidents, to manage what was going on because the vice president could no longer have these fifteen, sixteen directors reporting directly to him. We had it divided up into pieces. So at that point, I guess that was about ‘96 when I became assistant vice president. We were beginning to divide up some offices too. The dean of students office that had been created in 1989 under Tom Goodale, the same time that dining was brought to Student Affairs, had become very large and a piece of their responsibility was the student judicial system, now called Student Conduct. The Dean of Students office found itself in a position of being advocate for students, which is their primary mission. To be the advocate for students, but they also had to be the disciplinary. And the caseload was growing so much as the student body grew, so we made the decision to move Student Judicial Affairs out of the Dean of Students Office to be a separate department. It’s now called Student Conduct, but that department began reporting to me. That’s when the assistant VP title got added and changed from simply Director of Residential Dining Programs.
Then when Dave Ostroth left the university and I became associate vice president, at that point we had also moved fraternity and sorority life out of the student activities office to be its own separate department, again, part of the effort to foster the development of fraternities and sororities, to focus more attention to them. Well that began reporting to me also. And when Dave left, Lanny Cross asked if I would temporarily take on Dave’s departments and I became the associate vice president, Dave had been the associate before me. The number two person. I became the number two when he left and I wound up then not only with Housing and Dining and Residence Life and Student Conduct, but then I added University Unions, Student Activities, the Cranwell International Center, the multicultural programs, the portfolios growing. The other reason Lanny asked me to do that is he knew he was going to be stepping down from the vice presidency in another year and he didn’t want to select another AVP. He thought the new vice president ought to do that. So I agreed to do that temporarily. I wound up doing it for almost three years because of the time it took to get a new vice president and for her, Zenobia Hikes, to make some decisions about what she wanted to do.
And related to that, as you may know when Dr. Hikes was selected to succeed Lanny Cross, I was one of the three finalists for the position. So she came in, she was chosen and came in in the summer of 2005. I was her number two, her associate vice president which was a little awkward initially that one of the finalists is sitting there as your number two. It was I think difficult for us initially, but what worked out so well is she and I just, tended to think exactly alike about things. It was not unusual for us to be at a meeting and go back to our office and send each other the same note, saying the same things about the meeting. So we had this real synergy that developed between the two of us. So we worked together from August of 2005 until her very unexpected death in October of 2008. She had gone in for some required heart surgery up at Johns Hopkins and some complications developed during the surgery and was in cardiac intensive care for almost three weeks. Finally the family had to make a decision to disconnect the support systems. So Mark MacNamee, the provost, asked if I would step into the vice president’s role. I think, as I understand it from him and others, they wanted someone they had a whole lot of confidence in, someone who had been here for the tragedy of April 16th, 2007, because it was not long after that all these things were happening, in terms of Dr. Hikes’ death. And I think they thought that they could have easily offered me the position when they offered it to her too, so. He said would you take it as a three year term appointment? I said, oh yes, because that’s when I want to retire.
00:11:58Tamara: You already knew that’s how much time you wanted.
00:12:03Edward: Yeah. So I wound up in the vice presidency for my last three and a half years. I thought I would retire as associate vice president, so I never expected that would happen to end my career. To be the vice president. So when you become the vice president, you have all fifteen departments of the division and over a hundred million dollars in budget responsibility and twenty-six hundred employees. I always said to people what my job is like, I said, I can tell you there’s never a dull moment in my life [chuckles]. Some things are always happening. In a nutshell, that’s what all happened.
00:12:47Tamara: I just wondered if you had any other comments on working with Dr. Hikes. Any special emphasis during her time when she was vice president? I think I read somewhere that you were both dedicated to Principles of Community, that was a really important part, was there anything else you wanted to mention?
00:13:14Edward: Definitely Principles of Community and I think the way that she expanded multicultural programs and services in partnership with the equity inclusionary and the university is a piece of that. She placed a high value on working with disenfranchised students, minority students, LGBT students, she started with a number of us the Safe Zone Program for LGBT students. She really had a keen sensitivity to marginalized students and I think helped foster that awareness and support throughout the division. Interestingly she was a Delaware person is. I am, and my successor Patty Perillo is also a Delaware person. Very interesting. Zenobia got her doctorate at Delaware, as did I, but in different programs at different times. Patty Perillo was an undergraduate at Delaware, then came back to Delaware to get her master’s degree, and then went on to Maryland and got her doctorate there. But all three of us in a row have a Delaware connection. It’s really interesting, especially because it’s such a small state.
00:14:53Tamara: Yeah really! Well, I’d like to talk about 4-16th.
00:14:59Edward: Okay.
00:15:00Tamara: If you’re willing.
00:15:01Edward: Sure.
00:15:01Tamara: And if you’d just go back to the morning of April 16th and tell how your day unfolded.
00:15:07Edward: Sure. Monday April 16th, 2007. It was a terribly windy snowy day in Blacksburg, pretty late in April for something like that to be going on. My office was in East Eggleston Hall, I was the associate VP. I normally came into work, got to my office around 7:30, 7:40 something like that. Was sitting at my desk, drinking a cup of coffee and Margie Lawrence, who was the assistant director for housekeeping in the residence halls, came in with Sam Camden who was our Human Resource officer, whose office was a couple doors away from me. And she said, Dr. Spencer I’ve just gotten a call from the housekeeping staff in Ambler Johnston and one of our RAs has been murdered. And that was what she said to me. And I thought, oh my god. I assumed it was true, I said, Margie, thank you I’m leaving for AJ right now. So I took off walking up to West AJ, not knowing what I was going to find because who was it? Did it happen over the weekend and somebody’s found a body? What is this? Maybe it’s not true, maybe it’s a hoax. Well I got to West AJ and there were these police cars marked and unmarked all over the place, and I thought, well some things were true. I got to the main door and the police recognized me and directed me up to the fourth floor. And it was now probably a few minutes before eight o’clock and Wendell Flinchum, the chief of police, had arrived at about the same time I had… And I learned initially that our male RA had been shot. I did not know for a little while that there had been a second person, another student shot. And so the facts gradually became, were emerging to me.
As soon as I got there and verified that there had in fact been a murder, I called Dr. Hikes on her cell phone. She was on her way to work and she said, okay I’ll come to AJ rather than go to Burruss. As it turned out, she subsequently got a cell phone call from the president’s office that the emergency group of the campus was being called into a meeting, so she never got to AJ. She went to Burruss for that meeting. Well I was the only non-police officer up on the floor with the police and I became the liaison of what needed to be done, who we needed to contact, what we needed to find out, that kind of thing. My tasks for example, they needed to get in touch with Ryan Clark’s mother, who was the male RA who had been murdered. And I thought, the admissions application has that on it where they work. And I thought, mmm the registrar is the keeper of those applications after they’re admitted and enrolled, so I called Wanda Dean on her cell phone who’s the university registrar and she got me the working address and phone number of Ryan’s mother. And that’s how the police down there, in Georgia, got in touch with her. Because then we could identify who she was and where she worked.
The police were asking me other things like, could you stop the collection of trash in and around the building? Because there might be evidence in some of the trash cans so we stopped all that. We’re monitoring people at the doors. I was on my cell phone talking downstairs to student affairs staff who were gathering in the office downstairs. This continued on, and then I was standing between Wendell Flinchum and the chief of the Blacksburg Department, Kim Kranis, when all of a sudden the phone calls from Norris started to come. The emergency and 911s. I think all of our jaws were just dropping at that point, because there had been the theory that this was a domestic issue between this female student and her boyfriend who was the person of interest, and that Ryan Clark probably got shot when he heard gunfire from next door. So this was a total surprise of what was happening in Norris, like what was going on, on this strange Monday morning? So most of the police left AJ.
00:20:06Tamara: But, you knew Ryan Clark.
00:20:08Edward: I did, I happened to know him. He was one of our RAs.
00:20:13Tamara: And so you knew that he was gay.
00:20:15Edward: I did, and I did say to Wendell, when they told me who it was, I said Wendell, well I know him, He’s an outstanding RA and I happen to know he’s a pretty active member of the LGBT community. I said, I don’t know if that’s gonna have anything to do with the investigation Wendell, but you ought to know that. So that’s how that came about. So most of the police life for Norris at that point. Vince Houston from the police and I and a couple other officers stayed in AJ. Stayed put because we didn’t know what was going on at that point. I was hearing all the police radios that Vince had. I distinctly remember the one call, shooter is down. Shooter is down. [Pause] I’m sorry. So we monitored the phone calls and Vince explained to me what appeared to be happening and that they were identifying what the weapons were, I said, what kind of a weapon is that? [Pause]. So I stayed up on the fourth floor of AJ with the police that were still there because it was unclear what was happening, whether we really ought to come down or not. And then finally, I think it was around 10:30 or 11, we received word about what had appeared to happen. Shooter indeed was down.
So I then went downstairs with some of the police officers to the area office in AJ where a lot of the staff had gathered and I mean, people like Rick Ferraro who’s an assistant vice president. Chris Flynn who’s the Director of the Counseling Center, Rick Johnson who then Director of Housing and Dining at that point. Gil Kirby who was the interim Director of Residence Life. Some of the staff from AJ. And Dr. Hikes and I had been on the phone with each other, cell to cell a lot, and then we were on the phone when I was down that office and we agreed to meet as an executive staff, I think it was one o’clock was the established meeting time that Monday afternoon. So I left AJ, I grabbed something to eat from the Hokie Grill, went back to the office, and tried to reassure people. Of course by then, emails were just skyrocketing and phone calls and all that. Media were all over the place. I went to the one o’clock meeting in Burruss, where we really checked on what each other was doing. What had been attended to, what needed to be attended to. We made plans for the convocation that would be held the next day.
00:23:32Tamara: Who was at this meeting?
00:23:34Edward: The Executive Staff of Student Affairs, so it’d be all the people that report to the vice president. Essentially the AVPs like Tom Brown, Dean of Students. We were tasked with putting a convocation together, which we did, which Zenobia wound up being the MC for. I remember she said, we need somebody inspirational to close this. Tom Brown and I [laughing] looked at each other and said Nikki Giovanni, I can still remember that. So we put all that together. Then most of us, if not all of us, left for the Inn at Virginia Tech at that point, because we heard that things were getting out of control there and the media and families were arriving. We thought, oh God what a mess. So we went over and helped out, which meant directing the media to one location, which was the auditorium in the Holtzman Center, trying to keep them away from families. Desperate families who were arriving to figure out whether or not their child was among the victims. And we couldn’t release any identities because we didn’t know them for sure, and the person who had the verify really sat down with them was the coroner, the medical examiner in Roanoke, and it was becoming obvious to people that probably their child was among the victims, because they couldn’t find them anywhere. Just difficult, difficult times.
And I don’t know, that night I got home. It was probably ten, eleven o’clock at night and by then, Norrine had been taking a lot of calls and she had not been home for part of the day. So there were phone messages on our messaging machine. One of the many messages was a message from Jim Rattigan, who had been at the time of a tragedy at Wichita State University he had been their Dean of Students as I recall and he actually because Vice President of their National Organization. He was the Dean there when their football team was wiped out in an airline crash, very similar to the Marshall University plane crash. He said, Ed, I’m very sorry for what happened. I do have some advice and tips from my own experience. So I thought, hmm. Why don’t I return this call [laughs]. So I did, and he tipped off for me this list of eleven or twelve tips for me. He said, create a direct line to the president for each of the families. Assign somebody from the university as a liaison to each family. Send high-ranking university officials to all of the memorial services. And the list went on and on, and it was really interesting because we agreed as the student affairs staff that we would meet again. I think it was the next morning on Tuesday morning, and I realized when I brought those suggestions to the meeting we had already put in place, most of them. And we did put the rest of them in place. The idea of the family liaisons came from Jim.
00:27:15Tamara: Did the families have direct contact with the president?
00:27:18Edward: They did, but of course, now in Jim’s day, it was telephone. But in our day, a direct email to the president. So that’s how we did it. Let’s see, we had another staff meeting Tuesday morning, we checked on what all was happening, we need to put family liaisons in place, we probably need to do that by tomorrow, by Wednesday after the convocation. We went off to convocation Tuesday afternoon, and I remember Zenobia was remarkably calm. I walked with her and Cynthia Bonery, who’s the Chief of Staff, walked together to the convocation. She was remarkably calm. And by then we knew the identity of the shooter. And facts were starting to emerge about him and that he had been in Nikki’s class, and here Nikki was gonna close the convocation. And Nikki, who is a wonderful person and a very liberal person, I remember saying to her, I said, Nikki, did you ever think you’d be sharing a speaker platform with President Bush? She said, I had never imagined that, but only under these conditions, I remember her telling me that.
That convocation was a very healing experience I think for everyone. And Zenobia had… a lot of ministerial qualities about her. And she was really the perfect MC for the convocation. Wednesday morning was assignment of family liaisons and Tom Brown had been tasked with doing that because his office was starting to be the central office for people. He had done a tentative draft of families and liaisons, meanwhile those of us who were willing to take this on had knowledge we were gonna do that. I became the liaison to the Read family. [Pause]. Whose daughter Mary [Karen] Read had been one of the victims. She was a freshman… Interdisciplinary Studies and had planned to become a teacher. Her parents are both career military folks, they subsequently both retired, but they were both--I think actually her father had retired from the military by the time this happened, but her mom was still in the military. Now they both retired. They had other children and have since had another baby after the tragedy as well. I spent… a lot of time with them. Including on the phone and email and in person. And of course when they came to commencement that spring, when the posthumous degrees were awarded, that we housed all the families together in New Residence West. And Norrine and I hosted the family for the weekend, and went with them to commencement and to the departmental commencement and got to know the family very well.
00:31:42Tamara: That must have been tough.
00:31:43Edward: Mm-hmm. And they had all the children with them, little children. The oldest Stephen, at the time, was probably just eleven, I think.
00:31:55Tamara: Wow.
00:31:57Edward: I think that’s right. Then the other squirts were younger. So we became very close, we’re still in touch. They actually came down to the memorial service for my wife. [Pause]. So the family liaisons were a great idea. The challenge we had was some families felt they had better relationships with their liaisons than other families did.
00:32:38Tamara: Which, in the nature of things, was probably true.
00:32:42Edward: Right, it was functional, the interaction with the personnel. I think some liaisons were well prepared to do these kinds of things and others were not. We had authorized money to be spent for coffins, get family members airline tickets to get to the service that was getting held for, just all kinds of things. We had to work with the family with the wording they wanted for the memorial scholarship in Mary’s name. So we were doing things as a student affairs professional that you never ever anticipated that you would be doing. And people ask, how did you ever cope with all that? You’re trained to deal with student death, and we have on the average of ten to twelve student deaths a year for all the various causes. Of course, you don’t normally have thirty-three deaths at once. I think that’s why dividing up with each family having a liasons really helped. Eventually we realized that we needed the Office of Recovery and Support and that’s what was established.
00:34:01Tamara: Sort of out of the individual liaisons.
00:34:04Edward: Right, our liaison responsibilities I think ended in maybe August, that summer, as this office was born. And they took over all the functions. The liaisons have really been serving, but as you can see some of the relationships continued, like in my case. But I backed up because there are official liaisons for the Office of Recovery and Support and now we’re more friends rather than victims’ families and liaisons. So the Office of Recovery and Support was established, took on these responsibilities, and it phased down over the years and the Alumni Association really through Debby Day is what remains of the Office of Recovery and Support. They now handle all that, which is appropriate. They’re all alumnus, their children received a posthumous degree, and every single injured student came back and finished their degree. And some of them went on and got a graduate degree also.
00:35:22Tamara: I wondered about, I read that you spoke with Frank DiAngelis, the Principal of Columbine High School, who contacted, and I wondered what kind of advice he had.
00:35:37Edward: He was so good. He called into Zenobia’s office, I think on that Tuesday. Said who he was and offered to be helpful. And we said, you know, we need to talk to him. So it was either that Tuesday exec staff meeting, or the Wednesday meeting we got him on speaker phone. And he was so helpful. Among them, things I remember him saying is: you’ve got to understand that what you do for one person will not be received--even if it’s received well--will not be received well for another person. One family will like it, another family won’t like it. And that played out in things we saw. Experienced. He said get ready for the fact that little things will set people off. Get ready for the fact that stimuli a year later, two years later, three years later, will suddenly set someone off. Get ready for the fact that your memorial, wherever it winds up being, whatever it winds up being, will become a tourist attraction. And it has. Get ready for families who handle things amazingly well and courageous, inspirational kinds of ways. And other families that will never forgive you “and who will want to blame you”. Then he came and spent, I think it was the next year, he came and spent a couple days with us. It was very very good. I think he interacted with Northern Illinois University people after their tragedy as well.
And then, as another side story, when the Fort Hood shootings took place. That day I came home from being on campus late, it was about seven o’clock when I got home and the phone was ringing. It was the former head of the Army ROTC unit here and he said, Ed there’s a general at the Pentagon that wants to talk to you. [Breathes] And I said, damn okay. He said, here’s the number you call him, they’re going to be expecting your call. I called back to speak to General Hernandez at the Pentagon who wanted to tap my brain because they wanted somebody who had been here for the shootings, how could we be helpful. And gosh, he and I had several conversations back and forth that evening as I gave them some advice and all. And then we were playing a football game that evening. I had the TV on but I was also going back and forth with CNN, and then I learned their shooter had gotten his undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech. Which none of us knew. So when we had an eventual conversation, another conversation, that evening I said, General, I’m so sorry that this… He said it’s alright, it has nothing to do with and that’s not why I called you in the first place. Then he said, we’d like to send a helicopter down there to get you and bring you up here [laughs]. I said, well. I don’t want to refuse you General, but how about we got a teleconference call together in the morning with your staff at the Pentagon and our staff at Virginia Tech and we try to help. And we did that. I think by noon or one the next day we had this teleconference. By then, we had the president and vice presidents and the police chief and Gene Deisinger who’s the deputy police chief. A lot of us had been through this together. So we’re all gathered over in this teleconference room. Interestingly, the general had this powerpoint.
00:39:48Tamara: You were gathered in a teleconference room in the Pentagon?
00:39:51Edward: No, no in Burruss. So we’re going back and forth. By the time we start the General has this PowerPoint all organized with all these points and people are looking, how’d he get all that information? I said, ohhh okay. So we had this great conversation. Then actually, Gene Deisinger wound up going down to Fort Hood to help them out afterwards also. There’s a sad community among those of us who experience tragedy and we tend to help each other. And Gene was able to help them out a whole out, as we were able to help out the Northern Illinois people, as well.
00:40:40Tamara: Did you actually work with the Northern Illinois people? I know students from here and other people had gone.
00:40:46Edward: Yes, we sent some of our staff out there. We hosted some of them here after the tragedies as well. We’ve always been in touch with them ever since. Interestingly, Zenobia was a good friend of Brian [Hemphill], I forget his last name, he was the Vice President for Student Affairs at Northern Illinois and he subsequently become the president of a college in West Virginia.
00:41:20Tamara: Lots of connections.
00:41:21Edward: Yup.
00:41:22Tamara: I noticed back in 1992 you presented the Care Team Approach to Students in Crisis and I wondered if this was an approach you used with Virginia Tech students after 4-16?
00:41:41Edward: Well back in Tom Goodale’s Administration as Vice President he created this thing called the Care Team.
00:41:48Tamara: Oh okay so that was created then.
00:41:49Edward: Uh-huh.
00:41:50Tamara: Could you explain what that is?
00:41:51Edward: The Care Team was started as an informal group that would come together to talk about students of concern, that we’d heard about through the residence hall system or in the Dean of Students office, or the faculty, whatever. The Care Team became a weekly meeting of the logical offices involved. Housing and Residence Life, Dean of Students, Health Center, Counseling Center. So that structure, which was pretty much an informal one, had existed for a long time. Long before the April 16th tragedy.
00:42:28Tamara: I see. Was that used then after the April 16th?
00:42:36Edward: Yes and eventually that group broke down into two groups, the Care Team that I think continues to this day that meets every Monday and processes cases that come from any of the offices, and the Care Team’s been expanded over the years to include the police. Representatives from the police, from the academic areas, one of the associate deans, that kind of thing. It was in the summer of ‘07, we also created a separate Threat Assessment Team, separate from the Care Team. What the Threat Assessment Team has on it, the associate vice president for student affairs, that was me initially. I went from Care Team to Threat Assessment Team. Chris Flynn the director of the Cook Counseling Center, Rick Ferraro the Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs, and Tom Brown the Dean of Students, and then Gene Deisinger from the police, Kay Heidbreder from the Legal Counsel Office, a representative from HR from Human Resources, and I may be missing one. But essentially that’s what the Threat Assessment Team is still like today.
00:44:05Tamara: In an article in Roanoke Times Greg Sagsetter mentioned you were very helpful to student leaders who planned several events for Hokies United such as the picnic on the Drillfield, here’s a quote, “he would take the time to make the phone calls, get the answers, make the connections.” And he also said, “he held up an ideal of what students needs, and he sticks by it” and so I wondered about that working with Hokies United students. Scott Cheetam is another person I’ve talked to, and although he didn’t mention anyone by name, he just said, we had the cell phone numbers of these people, when we needed them they really backed us up. There was feeling of very strong support for the students and their plans .
00:44:53Edward: I think there was. I think we all came together in the Hokie Spirit and in the sense of community. Of working this together. I thought the students who really were Hokies United, were just very inspirational in the way they went about things. Hokies United really started with 9-11, and sprung into action whenever there was some kind of tragedy, be it local or international. And that’s why it started with 9-11, and then certainly with the tsunami when that occurred and the earthquake and our own, April 16th, tragedy And tragedies elsewhere since. Hokies United always resurfaces and we’ve had interesting discussions over the years about whether or not the informal group or formal group. It’s now sort of informal, but it needed some formal coordination, because one of the problems it developed was it got too confused with SGA itself. And SGA couldn’t do everything and it really was not SGA, it was a lot of student leaders. So now, it’s called into action by either the Dean of Students Office or the Student Center and Activities Office. They coordinate things. But it’s really students who do the leg-work when something happens.
00:46:28Tamara: So it would be called into action by the administrative, rather than by the--
00:46:35Edward: Yeah we as the administrators want to make sure we can get to people and get it organized, because students come and go and who’s in charge? When the apparent thing becomes the issue.
00:46:47Tamara: There’s no catastrophes for a while--
00:46:49Edward: When I was vice president we actually put that in place to formalize that in the sense that somebody wants to talk to Hokies United and get it going, who do they go to? They go to the Dean of Students, they go to the center of activities.
00:47:06Tamara: Would it be accurate to say that you really value empowering students?
00:47:11Edward: Absolutely It reflects back on my philosophy about working with staff too. That you want to empower them to do their jobs, likewise you want to empower students to do their jobs. You want to support them, you want to back them up. But part of a life lesson is learning when you’re a university student how you need to conduct the rest of your life.
00:47:35Tamara: That’s a big lesson.
00:47:36Edward: Yes.
00:47:39Tamara: Okay with all the condolence items that poured into the university, were you involved with handling those items, or was that staff that was--?
00:47:54Edward: Not directly, the Dean of Students Office was sort of the collection point for that, and for instance, they would often get thirty two of something.
00:48:06Tamara: Right.
00:48:07Edward: Thirty-two crosses, thirty-two prayers, thirty-two statues, thirty-two dolls. When the spring commencement came in May of ‘07, each of the family liaisons went with their families to where these items were. And they made the decision which of those items they wanted for themselves. Because frankly some of the items were very precious, like the portraits. Some of them were tacky, but we wanted… we wanted the families to make that decision. And as you know, we eventually had to get help from National Archives people and the Smithsonian people to catalog all this.
00:49:09Tamara: It was pretty amazing that the response came, not just locally, not just nationally, but from around the world. That there was not just the lady Samules at the library with a plate of cookies. But people setting things. Do you have any reflections on what was happening with that? That people were grieving with us from around the world, that it elicited such a huge response.
00:49:48Edward: It really did. I remember very very well, Monday was April 16th, and Friday the 20th was declared a Hokie Spirit Day by the governor. And Norrine and I participated in the Relay of Life on that Friday night, but we had agreed--I should back up a little bit. A cousin by marriage of hers was dying from cancer, kidney cancer, metastasized kidney cancer and was in the hospital.
00:50:36Tamara: Oh that’s terrible.
00:50:37Edward: He died on Tuesday the 17th.
00:50:41Tamara: I’m sorry.
00:50:44Edward: [Pause] Well one of the last things he was conscious of before he died was… that she and I were okay. And he passed away on Tuesday, but anyway [getting emotional]. We wanted to go to his funeral service in Pennsylvania, and that funeral service was on Saturday the 21st, so we drove part way up Friday night after participating in the survivors lap of Relay, and stayed up in the Harrisonburg area somewhere that night. What made an impression on me was everywhere we stopped for gas and food and lodging, people had maroon and orange on [chuckles]. It was great. It was… such a showing of support. Anyway we then got to his funeral Saturday, and she had to be at a conference of admissions people up in Maryland starting on Sunday. So after the funeral, I dropped her off in Maryland for a conference and drove back to Virginia Tech on that Sunday. And realized as I drove back, that a whole lot of other Virginia Tech folks, particularly students, were driving. I remember, Greg Esposito wrote about that, the article that I have a license plate people recognize [chuckles].
00:52:47Tamara: What does it say?
00:52:48Edward: Well it used to be V-T-E-S, I now have E-F-D-S, people would recognize and honk their horns.
00:52:57Tamara: So it was another kind of joining.
00:53:01Edward: Absolutely, coming back together. And the other thing, we all received just incredible notes of support from all over the world. Reunited with people, I did an interview with NPR that was obviously broadcasted all over the world, and friends that used to live near us in Delaware heard it and they are in New Zealand, and we had lost track of them. You get things like that that happen also.
00:53:41Tamara: I wonder if that’s available.
00:53:43Edward: I don’t know, and coordinated and participated in some of the press conferences too and I remember that one the next day, that Monday when classes resumed, I remember doing one of the press conferences. They want to know what the mood was like in the residence halls. But the mood was like amongst students out in the residence halls that had come back or stayed. I remember saying to them, you have people that are mourning, who are shocked, who are doing well, who are not doing so well, and that’s exactly what you would expect after multiple deaths.
00:54:24Tamara: I recall there were signs put up in the Student Center asking the press not to come in, to respect the--
00:54:30Edward: To respect our space.
00:54:32Tamara: Need a space you can go.
00:54:35Edward: We had some difficult experiences with the press. We had one national person who disguised herself as a physician at the hospital in an attempt to interview survivors at the hospital.
00:54:50Tamara: Oh jeez.
00:54:51Edward: Many of them were very kind and did the right thing. Others were not very kind and did the wrong things.
00:55:02Tamara: Yeah very difficult. How did you personally deal with the stress of the situation?
00:55:14Edward: Your adrenaline just gets going and you realize you have to be strong for other people. Now I have tears now looking back on it, I tried to not have tears at the time. To be strong. There were certainly times I had tears with my assigned family, for example. But you know, I recently was interviewed for the newsletter of my undergraduate fraternity chapter about my retirement and they asked, what had I learned [chuckles]? And the fraternity that prepared me for this, I said, well you learn how to be calm under pressure. You learn to have compassion for others. You learn how to be assertive and take leadership. You learn that you can count on other people for help. And I said, really, those lessons learned in that undergraduate fraternity has really stayed with me for life.
00:56:37Tamara: Those are good lessons, strong.
00:56:41Edward: That’s gonna be available on the web soon, I’ll send it to you once they have it up.
00:56:48Tamara: Great, that’ll be very good. You’ve spoken on tragedy and recovery and I wonder what are the ideas that you share when you’re speaking about it.
00:57:04Edward: I’ve sort of woven together my personal experiences here and going through it, some with Jim Rattigan’s tips are woven into that presentation. A lot of it is reflection on what we experienced afterwards and over the years in the five years since the tragedy. Jim’s thing about get ready for the fact of what will be appealing to one family will be appalling to another, I’ll give you an example of that. The university gave to each of the families a piece of Hokie Stone to resemble their child’s marker at the memorial. And this really nice piece of Hokie Stone was in a very beautiful mahogany box. Most families said, oh that is so wonderful to have that. That’s great. There’s a couple who said, how can you be so insensitive? It looks like a coffin. Get ready for the fact that some families will handle one thing well and think that’s great, and others will be appalled. A good example. I think also the presentations I’ve said to people, you can never be totally prepared, every situation is different, you got to make decisions on the fly as some of these things go, but you can prepare yourself as well as possible for the what-ifs. So threat assessment training and that kind of thing becomes very very important. So those are some of the lessons learned, I think along the way.
00:58:58Tamara: And what changes have been made that you were involved in making since.
00:59:05Edward: Well splitting down the Care Team into the two teams, the Threat Assessment, very formal training for members of Care Team and Threat Assessment Team. Teaching particularly all of us on the Threat Assessment Team on what our job is, what you need to look out for, what does this mean? What does this probably mean? Because you never know for sure. Sensitizing people to look out for other people. Sensitizing students to look out for each other, which we do. There’s the letter from the vice president that goes out encouraging people to watch out for each other. Care for each other. Care about each other. If you’re uncomfortable and you see something strange, talk to somebody about it. Even if it’s just your RA in the resident hall. I think the whole campus has gotten much more sensitized. Occasionally I’ll see something that makes me scratch my head, I’ll give you an example. A student I know fairly well decided to change his profile on Facebook, and his new profile picture had him holding a gun.
00:00:23Tamara: Oh [gasp].
00:00:24Edward: With a trigger. I called him and I said, Tom.
00:00:32Tamara: [Gasp]
00:00:34Edward: Did you think about that? What do you mean? I said, Tom this is Virginia Tech. What do you think people might think if they see that profile? I said, oh I hadn’t thought about that. He took it down, changed it. Occasionally you’ll run into something where people really didn’t think through how something might be viewed. But the tragedy just has shown time and time again what a strong community Virginia Tech really is. And what a present is all about, and helping out each other. The recent thing was Justin Graves and his friends carrying him up to the Cascades. I can’t think of a better example [laughing] of what ut prosim is all about. In fact, when I saw they were organizing, I almost signed up to help carry him. I thought, no I don’t want to detract attention from him and the students. I was tempted to.
00:01:49Tamara: Participate because--
00:01:50Edward: Yeah.
00:01:50Tamara: He’s such an outstanding person.
00:01:54Edward: Absolutely, and a good friend.
00:01:58Tamara: Let’s see… were there changes made in communications that you were involved with?
00:02:13Edward: Well there’s certainly a lot of training and discussion about how to communicate with each other. Particularly with faculty who were spotting things in a class. In the division, we had Chris Flynn from the Counseling Center and Tom Brown Dean of Students do some training programs for faculties and departments for how to spot people who are disturbed or disturbing. I said to them, you’re doing so many of these presentations, why don’t you actually video it and get it up on the webpage so that people can actually watch it at any point in time. Because many faculty say, oh I’ll never have to worry about this, but suddenly in their classroom, this guy is acting really strange, now what do I do? Well being able to go onto the webpage and look at the tape, because they don’t think about it until they’re suddenly faced with it, I think. It’s true for a lot of us.
00:03:12Tamara: So there’s actually a tape available?
00:03:14Edward: A video. Also, sensitizing departments to communicate with other departments, when there doesn’t seem to be something quite right. We also created a centralized database in the Dean of Students Office so that office can have access to student conduct reports, incident reports out of the residence halls, memos that have come in from faculty expressing concern, that kind of thing. That’s monitored carefully in the Dean of Students Office now. If you remember the Governor’s Commission Report, it said, there needs to be someplace to connect the dots. And the Dean of Students Office is the place where the dots are now connected. You get so much Monday morning quarter back, why didn’t you guys spot it and all kinds of things. In retrospect looking back, yeah you can connect the dots and it will all make sense. But in advance as something that might be transpiring, that’s not obvious. That’s not always so obvious as people think it is. It’s afterwards when you can put the pieces together. But we’re trying through all these new systems to connect the dots as much as we can.
00:04:44Tamara: Then if there is something to respond, I suppose, something that’s not as… Going on a different note, I was wondering about the Living Learning Communities. Did those start under your watch?
00:05:01Edward: They did. We didn’t have any Living Learning Communities at all when I Came here and we gradually added them. Initially we had the programs the Wing, the Well, and the World, the Ws. The Wing was housed in freshman wing in Slusher Wing, and it was an attempt at a university one-on-one course for students coming in as freshmen. How do you navigate the university? How do you take advantage of its services? How do you develop as a student? That kind of thing. The WELL stood for, Wellness, Environment, Living, and Learning, which was designed as a healthy lifestyle place and it was housed in West AJ, as a matter of fact. And the World was housed in Newman Hall. It was an attempt to bring together domestic students and international students to learn from each other. Along the way other things developed with diversity of oriented programs, with women in engineering, and now with men in engineering. And now that’s going on to students in the STEM areas who are living together. Then we developed the residential colleges, first in East AJ. The Honors Residential College, and now they just opened a few months ago, the residential college for all students in West AJ and I think the university is going to see how this all goes and whether we want to add more of them, if we can afford more of them, if we like it, et cetera.
00:06:54Tamara: I noticed with the East AJ, it opened in fall of 2011, I think there are approximately 325 students, first-year and the second one opened this year with eight hundred students. What has been the student response to these various living learning and this kind of program as well?
00:07:22Edward: It’s been a very excited, spirited response. The Honors Residential College had one year by themselves first because they share all this common area with the West AJ other residential college. So they had a spoiling first year where they had all these common areas just to themselves. Now since this past fall, the other residential college opened and sharing the space. The dynamics of that shifted. The purpose to me is to integrate classroom and out of classroom learning, and to make learning with living, a twenty-four hour experience. The honors model was limited to honors students and has a very intense living learning program. The other residential college in West AJ is divided down by house, and there’s four “houses”. And each house is named after a tree that is native to Virginia. There’s a locust, hickory… They, I think my perception, have a more informal structure as a living learning program, compared to the East AJ people who have a very formal living learning structure.
00:08:51Tamara: How do you mean formal?
00:08:53Edward: Classes organized around a theme for your group. Seminars taking place in the building, that kind of thing.
00:09:05Tamara: What kind of common spaces do they have that you were mentioning?
00:09:09Edward: East and West AJ have a connector wing, and in that connector wing you have offices for some of the faculty, the faculty principles of each building, and some of the honors faculty. You have a fitness room, you have a big community kitchen, you have a common gathering room for meetings and seminars and presentations. You have a movie theater.
00:09:35Tamara: So you’d notice it if you were sharing it with eight hundred more people.
00:09:38Edward: That’s what I said to them when I was leaving the office, when I was returning. I said, you guys got spoiled this year, and you’re going to have some people that will join you next year who are going to outnumber you. So it’s probably going to change the dynamics of your groups.
00:10:03Tamara: You taught a course, American College Student and the College Environment, and I wondered if you could comment a bit about that, or talk a bit about the things you were dealing with in that course.
00:10:18Edward: Well, I taught the course for a number of years because probably I was ideal to do that, my master’s is Student Affairs Administration, my doctorate was Social Psychology, it’s a required course for our master’s students in the higher ed program. The first part of the course focuses on the student and all the various ways students may vary, by sex, by personality, by background, all that. The second part of the course focuses on the environments student experience in the residence halls, in the classrooms, in their student organizations, in their off campus apartments and all that. Then, the last part of the course focuses on the interaction. What happens when you put a rural guy from Grundy, Virginia in a room with a roommate from Manhattan. What happens when you bring together a student who has gone to an all White high school, with a group of African American students, or an African American roommate? How do they learn? What are the conflicts? What are the possibilities? What are the opportunities? So that’s what the focus is on. Pretty broad.
00:11:56Tamara: The VPI is in Student Forums, I saw on the web where students have a neutral place, how did that work out?
00:12:11Edward: I thought it was great. I did it initially because students used to be used to coming to Burruss Hall, because years ago, all the offices were there. Registrars, Financial Aid, Admissions was all in Burruss Hall. Now there’s not much reason for students to come to Burruss Hall unless they were coming to see the Vice President or something like that. I thought, you know, you need to reach out more and go out where students are. I was talking with the SGA when I first went into the office and they just said, why don’t you come to our office and do a thing there? So I went about once a month, is what it averaged out, and just helped to open office hours in the SGA office, and students would come there and sometimes they’d come and they’d have something very specific on their mind they wanted to talk about. Some would come because they wanted to listen in on the conversation. Some would come because they didn’t have anything particular to talk about, they wanted to figure out who this guy was who’s vice president. And then tt emerged from there that the Graduate Students Association said, why don’t you come to the Graduate Life Center, in our territory. I said, okay I’ll do one there each semester. How about going out to where students are, rather than offices? I said, okay where? They said, Deet’s Place. I said, okay. So we got into a routine of one was in the SGA office, one was over at the Graduate Life Center, and one was up at Deet’s Place.
00:13:38Tamara: Oh I didn’t realize that they moved all around. I think there’s maybe six, seven, eight available on the web. Were there more than that?
00:13:48Edward: That’s about what there were, because I had held the office just for three and a half years. That’s what we did in those years. If I had the time, I’d write a follow-up article in the Collegiate Times just to educate the community on what’s on the students minds. What their questions were and what their suggestions were. It was also a way of answering their questions so other people would hear the answer, rather than just those who were there that day.
00:14:16Tamara: You figure those few people, if they’re expressing that, there’s bound to be a bigger…
00:14:19Edward: Yeah.
00:14:22Tamara: Well I think you said you were once introduced as the student’s vice president and I think you were quite pleased with that. That’s quite a tribute isn’t it?
00:14:32Edward: Yeah it was. It was neat. I was introduced that way when I spoke at the forum the day the admissions has at spring to get people to accept their offer of admission. Justin Graves introduced me.
00:14:49Tamara: Ah!
00:14:51Edward: [Chuckles] as the student’s vice president.
00:14:54Tamara: Very nice.
00:14:57Edward: That’s where it came from.
00:14:59Tamara: But it must have really come from, that you were reaching out to students.
00:15:04Edward: Yeah I think so. Students said that I had a good reputation, really caring about that.
00:15:11Tamara: You were supposed to be approachable, through the VPI people could actually come, any student could come and tell you whatever problem they thought there was going on.
00:15:25Edward: And I still get lots of contact with students. I’ll have dinner with a student ontight. Yesterday I served as an advisor to a student who was charged in a student conduct offense. And he asked if I’d be there as his advisor. I said, yeah I’ll do it.
00:15:42Tamara: Wow. I wondered the question of alcohol use and I wonder how that’s been approached.
00:16:02Edward: I’ll tell you I think that is the most difficult problem that student affairs people deal with on college campuses. I think if you ask other vice presidents around the country they’d tell you the same thing. When I went to college the drinking age was eighteen, this was in New York City. Most of us had learned to drink responsibly at home before we ever went off to college, so you seldom saw someone who passed out, vomited, had to go to the emergency room because of too much alcohol. That was the exception, once in a while you’d see it and people would look at that person and say, what’s wrong with you? Sadly I think ever since the drinking age changed to twenty-one, we’ve had the opposite situation. Students never learned to drink responsibly at home, they come to a college campus, they go wild, they never had a role model with them to learn how to drink responsibly in many ways. It’s the thing to get away with, underage drinking. The norm almost has become drinking irresponsibly. Most of the studies of alcohol use around the country somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of college students engage regularly in high-risk drinking.
00:17:24Tamara: Wow.
00:17:24Edward: So now, passing out, having to go to the emergency room, vomiting, engaging in unwanted, unprotected, or regretted sex, has become almost the norm. At my understanding from students, is the peer pressure is such that: if you don’t do it, what’s wrong with you? That you’re not joining us. I think that’s sad. Added to that, is what some of us have called the hookup culture. Sort of the disengagement of romantic liking and love from sexual activities. So people engaging in various sexual activities who barely know each other, maybe just met each other that night. I heard a student telling his buddies recently about this latest hookup he had, how fast they went at it, and the evening ended with the student saying, oh by the way my name is Joe. Then when you put those two cultures together, the alcohol culture and the hookup culture, you have a terrible combination of people making foolish decisions. So I’m now doing this blog for Psychology Today and I just wrote this week about the alcohol culture and the hookup culture. On my entry for the week was on what I perceive as this alcohol and what I perceive as this hookup culture and the consequences of all that. So I tried to stimulate people to think about, what are the causes? And what are the solutions to all this?
00:19:17Tamara: In the solution, what can a university do for that problem?
00:19:24Edward: Right. I don’t have easy answers. When the drinking age was changed to twenty-one back in the ‘80s I was one of the people that said, this is a mistake. This is going to result in some kind of alcohol culture. Which it did. But changing it back is sort of like being against motherhood and apple pie. People will quote statistics about how much safer the highway has become as a result of this, but that’s correlational data, not causal data. People forget that the required use of seatbelts, safer cars, and so forth have come forth in the interim. I think we’ve sadly gotten to a point that’s almost out of control. If I thought there were easy answers, I’d be a millionaire probably. By all the consulting I’d be able to do. This is going to take a slow cultural shift, and combined work of everyone to bring this about.
00:20:44Tamara: I also wondered about non-traditional students, let’s say returning vets.
00:20:50Edward: Mm-hmm
00:20:51Tamara: Is there anything done specially here to make that transition to college life, to help them with that?
00:20:59Edward: During the last couple years the university has brought together several offices that are the likely ones involved in working with veterans such as admissions, financial aid, registrar, Dean of Students, all of that, to provide a more coordinated way to provide to veteran services. I suspect there will probably be a separate designated office for veterans affairs on campus. I think that’s what is going to happen. The problem you have when a need like that arises, as it has with all these returning vets, is funding. There’s generally not new funding available, how do you restructure, reorganize elsewhere to come up with the funds to support such a program.
00:21:51Tamara: You’ve gotten honorary membership from the German Club.
00:21:59Edward: Yeah that was quite a surprise.
00:22:00Tamara: Apparently this is very rarely done.
00:22:03Edward: It is.
00:22:07Tamara: Would you comment on why you were given this award?
00:22:10Edward: [Chuckles] I think you oughta ask them. One of them, John, the fellow who really proposed to the German Club that this be done, is a student called John Waters, who is the homecoming king this year. He’s here as a fifth year senior this year. He was in the Corps, he now lives off campus so he’s finishing up. One time last early spring, he said, you know we haven’t had dinner in a while, let’s go out for dinner. I said, okay let’s go out. So we had dinner at the Cellar with Kyle Pride who graduated last year from the German Club and we had this great social dinner. He said, by the way, he said, would you accept honorary membership to the German Club if it were offered to you? I said, oh my goodness. I said, yeah, but I never expected something like that. He said later in an interview that he felt that I exemplified what German stands for.
00:23:21Tamara: Yeah, I read each letter of the word German.
00:23:28Edward: Of course, most people who are not associated with Virginia Tech think, German Club? What’s that have to do with Germany and German courses? It has nothing to do with Germany and the German language. But people who are associated with Virginia Tech know very well what that means. I was very honored.
00:23:47Tamara: And you also got the first Zenobia Hikes award. Which was given by a student--
00:23:52Edward: By the SGA.
00:23:54Tamara: Yeah so it’s coming from the students. That seemed to be another…
00:23:58Edward: That’s very meaningful and very satisfying. Then when they chose me to be their commencement speaker… That was the same.
00:24:18Tamara: This might be too big of a question, you’ve served in various questions under four university presidents here. Presidents Lavery, Torgerson, McComas, and Steger. And I just wondered if you had any comment on how their management styles were different. Or how it was different serving in those different administrations.
00:24:43Edward: Well Bill Lavery was just a very approachable, friendly, caring kind of guy. Who took a very personal approach to everything and was real interested in people. I’ll give you an example, when my father died, my father lived to be ninety-eight and retired, he had a thirty-four year retirement on top of his career, and when he died, Bill called and said, he heard and he said very caring kind of guy. It was neat because at one of the last meetings of the commemorative tributes committee. Which is the committee that recommends to the Board of Visitors the naming of facilities and approves all markers on campus. We had this discussion about Bill and I made the motion to name the new building Lavery Hall. That was very fulfilling to be able to do that. Jim McComas was just a very special guy. I think my commitment to students and serving them well, really came from Jim and Tom. Goodale, the vice president. Real emphasis on quality of student life. Jim was… an interesting guy. The first thing he did when we came to the campus was to arrange luncheons with all the departmental secretaries. Cause he wanted to know what was really going on. And he was just a good. He had this sparkle in his eye and that’s when I can still remember that sparkle when he said, hey can we turn this dining program into something we can be proud of? And he just inspired. That was a heck of a risk for me to try and do this. Especially not knowing anything about dining.
00:27:03Tamara: Right!
00:27:07Edward: Paul Torgerson, shoot from the hip guy. Great guy, unassuming, everybody’s friend, walked around the campus, would stop in to see RAs at residence halls in the days when he could walk in the residence halls. Now you can’t get in. He’d show up to somebody’s doctoral dissertation defense because he cared about them. So Paul was just this walk around guy, everybody’s friend. Always kept the door to his office open, that was his style. Charles was a brilliant guy, lots of great ideas who’s done wonderful things with the university. Charles in many ways, people don’t believe it, is really an introvert. Despite having been Vice President for Development and President. I think he has to work hard at social occasions, quite frankly. So behind the scenes, I think he’s much more introverted than people might think. But very supportive, I think the way he has withstood all the criticism from the April 16th tragedy has been a wonderful lesson in leadership for everybody. Very intelligent, one of only architects in the country who’s a university president. And is an architect in his thinking, as he analyzes problems. Issues and challenges. So each has had a different style, each has done great things fro Virginia Tech. Each has placed their emphasis in different ways. Jim was quality of student life, clearly. Charles has been the research agenda. I think Bill Lavery was very much bringing people together. I think Paul’s theme was, if I would pick one, is probably more of commonsense leadership. My perceptions.
00:29:36Tamara: Interesting, yeah. Is there anything else I haven’t asked you that you wanted to mention?
00:29:45Edward: I think… You asked about mentors earlier and I remember my father is many ways a mentor for me as a very courageous person. I learned about courage from him. Because he had the courage for leaving the state of Rhode Island, the only one of his family who left, venturing out on his own, starting this career two years before the Depression, my mother dies, and he’s left with these young children. He survived stomach cancer, heart attack, benign brain tumor, double cataract surgery. Just all kinds of things, he was really a model of courage for me. And my wife was too, because she had an eleven and a half year struggle with cancer and people used to call her the Energizer bunny, just kept on going. Survived the initial breast cancer, the metastasized breast cancer, then her oncologist finally persuaded her to retire on disability about a year and a half before she died. But she was driving the grandchildren around up until about a week before she died. She just kept going, wouldn’t give up. I think each of them, I will always remember for their lessons and courageous leadership.
00:31:22Tamara: Thank you. Thanks so much for the interview.
00:31:25Edward: Sorry you have so many tears [laughs]. Maybe that happens with other people too.
00:31:30Tamara: Well it’s emotional, most of the things. Now let’s see, does this stop?
00:31:36Edward: No we’ve got to stop it.
00:31:37Tamara: That’s pause, this is stop.
00:31:39Edward: You want to go to the stop. Is that it?
00:31:41Tamara: Yeah it says stop. I guess I’ll dare to press it.
[End of interview] NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END
