00:00:00Tamara: It's December 3rd, 2013, and I'm Tamara Kennelly, and I'm here with Dr. Edward F. D. Spencer, and this is our second interview. There used to be a very popular dining room that was in the former CEC used mainly by faculty, and this was closed when the CEC changed into the Graduate Life Center, but nothing ever quite equivalent took its place. I just wondered, was it stopped because it wasn't cost effective? I mean, people really loved it, in a way.
00:00:40Edward: Well, that was part of the old Continued Education division of the University, and when the new Inn at Virginia Tech was built and that whole operation moved there, the former Donaldson Brown Center came over to Student Affairs, to Housing and Dining Programs. You're right, it was not cost effective to continue that kind of operation in there, but also there was a need for that to be programmatic space for the Graduate Center. So it became what's called, I think, the multi-purpose room in the Donaldson Brown Center. I know there have been discussions at various times about could something be done to the University Club and convert that into a faculty-staff dining area. My understanding is the challenge of that is a lot of expenses. That building is not even air-conditioned to begin with. It's not very accessible. So it would require a lot of major work. The building is a private club built on university land, so that building doesn't belong to the university. So there's all kinds of hurdles of what's to be done there. I think, at the same time, the attitude of the university has been that we really, instead of isolating faculty and staff off dining to themselves that we really wanted to integrate them more into the university community with students. And now, you know you have a number of faculty who purchase dining plans from the university, and who do eat on a cash or credit card basis, or declining balance card basis in the dining centers. So you see a lot of that kind of interaction going on out there, and I think that's really a very positive thing. I think, also there are so many places downtown that are so accessible for people who really want to be in a more private setting or something they might have enjoyed at the old Donaldson Brown Center. So I think times have changed; the culture's changed.
00:02:52Tamara: I was just wondering kind of generally, does the dining program pay for itself, or does it make money?
00:03:00Edward: Well, the dining program is one of the many auxiliaries of the university. So, those are known as "tubs on their own bottom" in the sense that they have to generate all the money they need to support all the expenses they have. And their expenses are everything about the dining program. Plus, an auxiliary like dining pays a fee to the university for the services it gets from the university. So they are self-supporting. The university doesn't really view them in any way as profit centers. Some years there's a surplus; some years there may be a deficit. But any surplus goes into, for example the dining programs into the Housing/Dining Reserve and can only be used for Housing and Dining purposes. Likewise, if they ever run a deficit in a given year that deficit has to be balanced by withdrawal from the reserve to bottom-line zero. The Dining Program has been fortunate for many years in a row now to really generate a surplus which is then reinvested in the dining program. For instance, if you go back to the 1990s, the early/mid-1990s when we were starting to do so much with the dining program more and more off-campus students chose to purchase a dining plan that was not budgeted into the revenue and expenses for the year, so all of this revenue was starting to flow into the dining program. Which then we took and invested in the facilities to create all the renovations that occurred with Hokie Grill, the Banquet Room, Dietrick, Deet's Place, the West End Market, and on and on. There was a period of time there for about, I think it was about twelve years in a row where each year the sales of dining plans increased by three and four hundred more than we had sold the year before. To the point where I think as we maybe talked about in the earlier interview, the university now sells more optional dining programs to students living off-campus than it does required plans to students living on-campus. And that's a real statement about the quality of the dining program, but it's been how well the staff has delivered a dining program that has appealed to students, and others (faculty/staff) that's inspired them to invest in the program and purchase dining plans. But, you know that's a very long answer to your question, but like all auxiliaries Dining Programs has to generate its own revenue and pay all of its own expenses.
00:05:43Tamara: It's interesting to understand how it works. I have a few questions that are kind of follow-ups to last time. One is if you could please explain the difference between the Threat Assessment Team and the Care Team. I think you said those teams kind of split off from what was originally the Care Team.
00:06:03Edward: Right, right. The Care Team started back in about 1989 when the Dean of Students Office was established. It was set up, actually by Tom Goodale when he was Vice President for Student Affairs. And it was designed, initially, as a very informal group that would meet, ideally weekly, to review what had happened the week before: what students we thought we needed to be concerned about for whatever reason. Were they in student conduct trouble? Had they had a death of a parent? Had they had an argument with a roommate? All that kind of thing. And it has always been an effort to bring together the offices who might logically deal with such a student together to work as a team to talk about who needs to do what to work well with this student. So initially that team had members, representatives from the Dean of Students Office, Housing and Residence Life, the Counseling Center, the Health Center--those were the main initial areas that were involved. Over the years it began to involve some additional offices as well, such as Services for Students with Disabilities. That office would be involved because often a student of concern was a student who had some kind of a disability that had been registered with that office. About the time of April 16th, the committee had gotten much more formal in its membership, much more deliberate I might say. And post-April 16th, we realized there was a need, really for two different teams. There was a need for the Care Team that would talk individually about students, come together as a team as I was describing but continue to work in somewhat informal but very cooperative kinds of ways. And people could refer a student for review by the Care Team in many different ways, R.A.s because of incident reports in the Residence Halls, a call from a parent or concerned citizen, or whatever. But the focus of the Care Team is the individual student, what needs to happen with the individual student. The Threat Assessment Team was actually put together as a result of April 16th as a more formal, very structured team, to analyze whether or not there is any threat to an individual or individuals from some behavior. That behavior might be from a student; it might be from a faculty member--it has been sometimes. Staff, alumnus, visitor, parent, whatever. So the Threat Assessment Team, we had put together soon after April 16th, and later on that, in the January of '08 the General Assembly, they passed legislation requiring campuses to have Threat Assessment Teams. But we had actually developed ours and had ours in place before that legislation was passed. And, in fact the legislation was modeled very much on what Virginia Tech had done in terms of establishing a Threat Assessment Team. So that team is chaired by a representative from the police department, initially that was the Chief of Police, Wendell Flinchum. Now I think the Deputy Chief, Gene Deisinger is chairing the committee. And it has representatives from Dean of Students Office, the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, Housing and Residence Life, the Counseling Center, Health Center, Virginia Tech Police, obviously, the University Legal Council, Human Resources because often, not often but sometimes there are employees who are involved and are being looked at as a possible threat. And I may have missed one or two offices--well there's someone represented from the faculty as well, to represent Academic Affairs. And I think those are the main representatives. So they meet weekly and analyze any information that's come in about anything. They meet upon demand because sometimes there's an emergency situation where they need to be called in to analyze. And they are really authorized to make some decisions on the part of the university or recommendations to the policy group of what needs to be done in a given situation. And what needs to be done can vary from, you know watchful waiting that doesn't seem to be an immediate, direct threat, to removal of the person from the environment that they're in or anything in between.
00:11:38Tamara: According to the panel report, issues regarding Seung-Hui Cho came up before the Care Team, and I wondered how this case, I don't know if it's confidential, but I wondered how it was assessed at the time that they were originally brought up?
00:11:55Edward: Well, he was the subject of discussion in Care Team meetings as I recall, but the information that we had at that time was he was a very unusual person because of the evidently disorder that he had. But the people who had worked with him, largely in the English Department, had finally reported back to the Dean of Students Office that they were satisfied with actions that had been taken and didn't feel that we needed to do anything else at that time. You know, when you are Monday morning quarterbacking, when you analyze post-April 16th, everything--there are various pieces of the puzzle that suddenly fall into place when you know what happens. When you're in advance of that point, those pieces are not clear. For instance, let me give you the Residence Hall information that would be helpful there. He lived with one set of suitemates in Harper Hall in the '05--'06 academic year who never expressed any kind of concern about him other than he was odd. And then in the '06--'07 academic year he lived with another, different set of suitemates including one roommate who shared the room with him who never indicated to us, other than an initial report in December of '06, that he seemed a little suicidal. He was examined for that, and we all know, I think, what happened from that in terms of orders from that. But then they lived with him from January on to April and did not express any further concern to us. So I think maybe that helps someone understand at the time we weren't really getting any kind of serious, distressing information about this fellow, other than he was odd. But in retrospect, when you can put the pieces together because you know this terrible thing that occurred on April 16th, yeah, you can then, okay there are all these pieces here and now it makes sense that he was a very troubled person. But at the time, before April 16th, that really wasn't clear at all, other than the fact that he was odd, as people kept saying.
00:14:32Tamara: He had been sort of stalking a few women students, hadn't he?
00:14:36Edward: Yes, and uh, cyber-stalking in many ways, but that kind of behavior, as we know these days, is not very unusual. We have a lot of that that goes on. When those students were asked whether or not they wanted to bring any charges against him they declined to do so. So, again, in advance everything seems like he's just a little strange, but in retrospect, afterwards that's when the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. And people are quick to pass judgment and condemn the university for not putting the pieces of the puzzle together. I think if you presented a case study on this to someone who knew nothing of April 16th, they'd probably come to the same conclusion we did if they weren't given the information about April 16th. I suspect, once they were given the information about April 16th, they'd think, oh, now I realize this was a serious problem.
00:15:42Tamara: You were able to identify Ryan Clark when you went over to West AJ, and I don't know who notified his mother, but to see that his mother was notified in a, it seems like a pretty quick manner. And from the panel report it states that even though the police knew the identity of Emily Hilscher once her roommate arrived, her parents were not informed that their daughter was a victim and did not even know which hospital she was taken to, and they actually found out from the mother of her boyfriend that she was a victim. And I just wondered why there was that problem with notification?
00:16:28Edward: Sure, that's a good question, and it allows me to explain the difference between a death on-campus and a death off-campus. Ryan died immediately, on campus, and we knew that, and once you have a death on campus, certain mechanisms fall into place including parental notification by the university because it occurred at the university, so the Virginia Tech police are in charge of that. In Emily's case, she actually died en route to the Roanoke Hospital in the ambulance, and so that was a death off-campus. And an off-campus death is managed by the police agency who has authority over the area where this occurred. So presumably that probably would have been the state police who had that authority. They do work with the local hospitals in terms of notification. But that's why we needed to notify Ryan's family right away because we knew we had a death on-campus. In Emily's case, she was still alive, and her death did not occur for a little while afterwards until she was en route to the hospital then that becomes an off-campus matter to deal with.
00:17:42Tamara: Wouldn't the parent be notified just so they could even if their child was still a victim and not a fatal victim?
00:17:51Edward: I think what was happening is things were unfolding so quickly people started to be aware of things before the state police and the hospital had time to notify Emily's family. So I think that's what the difference is. In Ryan's case we knew we had that. It was our responsibility, Virginia Tech police's responsibility, to notify him. And in his case, I realized that his admissions application would contain the information about where parents worked and, sure enough, the Registrar's Office, I knew that's who would have the old admissions file, was able to give me his mother's name and address and work phone number and so forth. I then handed that to the Virginia Tech police then what they do, they called the police in her area, and police in her area go to find her to relay the information to her.
00:18:56Tamara: So there's not, for us, let's say just for any student living in the dorm there's not like an "in case of accident, notify so and so" that they give?
00:19:07Edward: There is now. As our student records system has gotten more and more sophisticated, we now have space for emergency notification. Who should the University notify in the case of an emergency? And in most cases, students, well some students don't fill that out, but in most cases, they'll indicate a parent's name. In some cases they want a guardian, an aunt or an uncle, sometimes a girlfriend or boyfriend as the person who's notified.
00:19:38Tamara: So is that a change that came after April 16th?
00:19:42Edward: You know, I'm not positive about that. I think at the time we had sort of a forerunner of that in place, but students weren't filling it out very much. We had to resort now to every semester when a student goes to register for classes, a screen comes up and reminds them of various things they need to do such as, they haven't filed a local address, they haven't filed an emergency notification. There's a reminder about how they have to report any arrests to the university that have occurred, that kind of thing. So as things have gotten more and more sophisticated we've been able to really make use of that very well.
00:20:24Tamara: Well, I just wondered what changes were made at the university after April 16th?
00:20:35Edward: Well, certainly the creation of the Threat Assessment as a separate team, breaking down Care Team into the two separate teams was certainly one. I think we stepped up notification procedures so that a faculty member who has a concern about someone can go online with the student records system and submit, just a note, "I'm very concerned about such and such who's been doing this in my class" and when they submit that it immediately goes off to the Dean of Students' Office, and they're monitoring that every day. And that kind of thing from a faculty member can trigger a Care Team review or a Threat Assessment Team review depending upon circumstances. I think another change was the expansion of the Threat Assessment Team to even more offices than what we initially set up has come about. I think offices working together very much as a team has come about. Academic Affairs representatives working with Student Affairs and police representatives on the team is something that certainly has happened. You know, all the advancements we did in terms of physical facilities such as doing away with panic bars that could be chained shut, those no longer exist at the University, now it's the kind that pushes out. Um, the electronic bulletin boards in classrooms that can transmit emergency messages. The VT Alerts system which, by the way, was already in its beginning stages when April 16th occurred. We were in the process, actually, of hearing presentations from companies who would provide such a system. So it actually didn't exist at the time of April 16th the way it is today, but we were underway to make it exist. The investment that has been made in the emergency and notification systems, the expansion of the police department with more and more officers, expansion of the counseling center with more counselors, with case management personnel in the counseling center and Dean of Students Office and in the HR, Human Resources Office. Those have all been added since. Case managers are really critical because it takes so much time and attention to detail to monitor these cases when they come up that that really became necessary. It has become a model for other campuses and, in fact, there's now an annual conference meeting of case managers in colleges and universities and we really were the initial leaders of that group along with, I think the University of Tennessee if I remember right. So those are some immediate things that occurred to me of changes that happened after April 16th.
00:23:42Tamara: Was there any changes as far as dorm security? I mean I don't know if there's that much you can do but I wondered if there would be.
00:23:49Edward: Absolutely, I forgot that one because it was so obvious. When April 16th occurred the residence halls were generally unlocked during the day, they were not locked until the evening hours through the night. Once April 16th occurred, we changed the system to lock the residence halls 24 hours a day and that's the way it's been ever since. And so now everyone, with their Hokie Passport has to swipe their card to get access to the residence halls, so if you live in a given residence hall you come to the door, swipe your card and it says , oh yes, John Doe lives in this building, and it unlocks the door for whoever. So that has happened along with the change in the panic bars I talked about. The logistics of making that happen in the residence halls have been really tough because our residence halls were never built with that kind of system in mind. So we had to define which doors, how many doors in a given building would have a card reader on them. And then you have to be able to get into a lobby area to be able to call someone on the emergency phone or something. Well the place where you put the locks and the card readers varies by building depending upon the architecture of the building. For some buildings it's very easy, for others it's very complicated. For example, you take the residential colleges in Ambler Johnston right now, there are a lot of people who need access to the public areas of that building because there are faculty offices there, there are meeting rooms, conference rooms, all that kind of thing. So you have to have some areas that are accessible during the day without any kind of card swipe and for guests to walk in, sure like prospective students who are going to be in the Honors program who are taking a tour, that kind of thing.
00:25:53Tamara: Or if a student's friend was coming for a visit.
00:25:54Edward: Sure, sure. But then you have other areas you want available only to some people, for instance some of us serve as faculty fellows in the Honors Residential College and we have need to go up to the faculty principal's apartment for socials and meetings that take place. So our Hokie Passports are actually coded so that it will let us into that part of the building for those kinds of things. The electronics are wonderful in terms of determining who can have access to where during what hours, but they can be a bit of a nightmare to design in the first place in terms of how they're going to work, where the various card readers need to be placed.
00:26:39Tamara: Are you serving as a fellow for the Honors College?
00:26:45Edward: I am.
00:26:46Tamara: And what does that involve?
00:26:48Edward: Well, the Honors College has a group of senior fellows who have been asked or who've volunteered to serve as sort of mentors, role models, advisors, consultants, active participants in the residential college. And it's composed of some faculty members, department heads, deans, vice presidents, former vice presidents, some townspeople in fact, and I forget there's a group of, I think around twenty-five or thirty of us who are serving in that capacity. And then all of the students who live in the Honors College are called Junior Fellows. So you have the Senior Fellows and the Junior Fellows. And then you have the Faculty Principal and the Assistant Faculty Principal who live there and are really the chief academic officer for the Residential College.
00:27:47Tamara: How has that experience been?
00:27:49Edward: Well it's been great. I have not had as much time to devote to it as I would like to because of other things that I have taken on. I've been particularly absent this semester, this fall because I've really been involved in some other things. But it's been a great opportunity to get to know these Junior Fellows, these students because they're so bright, and they're so motivated, and they're so interesting to work with. And they also value the time of having the opportunity to work with you as a Senior Fellow as well, so it's really been a very nice opportunity.
00:28:28Tamara: So it sounds like a successful program, the way it's working out.
00:28:33Edward: It is, yeah. Very successful.
00:28:41Tamara: I wondered if you could comment on how we were changed as a community by April 16th, by the events and by the aftermath?
00:28:54Edward: You know, I've said to people that a community doesn't suddenly change overnight, there's something descriptive about a community to begin with that perhaps becomes more obvious and more intense as a result of an incident. I think that there was a very strong sense of community at Virginia Tech and in Blacksburg and the surrounding community even before April 16th happened. I think April 16th magnified that and allowed the world to have a very clear glimpse of what Virginia Tech and the community are really like. I do think the April 16th experience intensified the bond that exists between the university and the community and vice versa. I think it showed how vital we all are as members of that community, including townspeople, people from the surrounding area. I think it really focused on the word and the concept of community itself, of coming together. To get through a crisis together, to rise above it, and, as Nikki Giovanni would say, to prevail afterwards. So, I think I really sense that. I think if we were a large, urban environment that didn't have that kind of feel to it, we might have had a different experience. You think about the terrible tragedies that occur in some urban environments on a daily basis, that things just move on and you forget about or don't hear more about incidents. I think when it happens in a small, close-knit community like Virginia Tech and Blacksburg, you never forget what happened and you learn from that experience, you bond from that experience. And I see that time and time again in terms of anything that is tragic in our community that occurs after April 16th. You just feel that intensity, that real sense of community.
00:31:33Tamara: You say you learned from that experience, could you talk about what we've learned from that experience as a community or as an institution?
00:31:44Edward: I think one thing everyone learned is that we need to watch out for each other. You know, in many ways we are brothers' and sisters' keepers. When you're concerned about someone, don't be silent, you know. Share. When you realize someone needs help and needs a friend, needs some back up, jump in. I think those have become clear to people. I think another thing we learned is, we were all victims. There were people who lost their life, clearly, who were the primary victims from April 16th, There are secondary victims of people who were injured, either physically or psychologically from the experience, but I think in many ways there are tertiary victims, and we all fall into that category because we all were impacted and continue to be impacted by what happened. And we talked, many times, on the Student Affairs staff about when we were trying to help others, when we were serving as family liaisons and that kind of thing, in many ways we had victims helping victims in retrospect. And, you know I think that, if I remember right, that's something that Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine High School said to us afterwards that you'll realize after a while that you are victims helping victims. And there's no way around that when, suddenly you find yourself immersed in such a tragedy, and you hope that never happens again, but you are there and, yes you're a victim, but you know you need to pitch in and do your share of the teamwork that's required in the aftermath.
00:33:46Tamara: Because if you don't do it, then who will.
00:33:48Edward: Well, that's right. Now we had a, in fairness we had a lot of volunteers from the outside. You know that Monday when we resumed classes on April 23rd, I guess it was, we had something like five hundred counselors on campus who had volunteered time, private counselors, counselors from other schools, and so forth, so that we were able to have at least one counselor in every classroom where a primary or secondary victim had a class so that we could be there for the faculty and help out and be ready for the presumed consequences and the unexpected consequences that might come that day. And I think that made a great deal of difference. Those people came from far and wide to help out. And I don't know what Chris Flynn and his staff would have done in the Counseling Center without their help. It just, it made a big difference.
00:34:56Tamara: Did most of those people come for that week, do you know? Or I guess it depends on the individual.
00:35:05Edward: Yeah, it depends on the individual. Some people came in right away and just never left. Some people were local and were able to do that kind of thing. Other people I think specifically came in to help us to be here for them on Monday, the 23rd.
00:35:19Tamara: Transition.
00:35:20Edward: Yes.
00:35:28Tamara: Just as a more general beyond April 16th, but are there changes that you would like to see at Virginia Tech?
00:35:41Edward: About anything? [Laughter]
00:35:43Tamara: Yeah, anything, are there things that would be, you know having served the University for many years and having been a Vice President you get another perspective so I just wondered if there were things you would like to see changed? I guess that's a broad one.
00:36:05Edward: That is a really broad question. I get concerned sometimes that as a land-grant university we may be moving away from our mission to be the university of the people. I say that because we have wonderful students at Virginia Tech, and I've said that many, many times and they are very, very bright students, but we are turning away a whole lot of students who could succeed here very, very well. We've gotten to the point where it's a major land-grant university, but it's pretty tough to get into. I mean, we're dealing with high school averages on a 5 point scale, a 3.99 as our entering freshman average, with verbal and math SAT scores in the 1250 range. I would not have gotten into Virginia Tech with my grades when I went off to college and I know there's been some grade inflation, you have to adjust for that. But I worry that, not just Virginia Tech but nearly all schools, are placing more and more emphasis on grades. I wish we could do a better analysis of the total person and project what this person would be like and what they would really contribute to the institution. I think we try and get at that, in some ways, based on some of the questions we ask them on the admissions application now, but I'm not sure we've gotten to the point where we have a really valid and reliable way of doing that. At the same time, you know we do admit some very bright students who become problem-people for us in terms of their behavior and the student conduct system, be that from alcohol or drugs or theft, dishonesty, assault, you know whatever. And I've often said to people, the people who get involved in student misconduct are usually among our best and brightest, they just make some very poor decisions and make some very poor judgments along the way. It always bothers me when I used to deal with such a situation with a student knowing some other applicants who didn't get in here who I know would have never gotten involved with the behavior that that student did. So, I wish there were a way around that. I wish we could, on a second maybe subject of that I would say, I wish there was a way that we could do things in smarter, less expensive ways. I think our costs have gotten very, very high here as they have at many other institutions. Now, some of that is by necessity because we've lost so much state funding, and we had to raise tuition to balance the budget. I hope that we'll get it moved back to better state funding, but I'm not sure we will ever get back to the levels where we were before. So what that says to me is that we need to find ways to cut our expenses. You know, how can we deliver a quality education at less cost? Do we need to consider more things, like hybrid courses of some in person live and some parts of it are online? We are doing some of that now at Virginia Tech. I think that may be the way of the future. Do we need to develop more online courses? I think yes, and you know the read I get on that from my own experiences in talking to students and faculty, online courses work very well for some areas, for some subjects, for some courses. They don't work so well for others. I think, you know, we need to be selective about that. The other spinoff from that, maybe this takes me to a third answer to your question, I am afraid that as we have more and more students and we have more and more online courses and things become much more, let me say computerized, that we'll lose that personal touch. I'm a social psychologist by background. I get concerned about our moving away from intrapersonal interaction and the chance for students and faculty and staff to spend quality time together and a chance for students to spend quality time with each other as well. I think you have to watch out for that in this era of social media, that we should never do away with the opportunity for strong, interpersonal interactions in our environment. I think that's the heart of an institution. But it's tempting to move into a more rogue computerized kind of approach to things. You've got to balance it, that may be cheaper but will it be better? And trying to adjust those two things is not easy. But I think that's something that we really need to watch out for.
00:41:45Tamara: Yeah it seems like those, like the Residential Colleges, say, the people who are in these special, where they're a Junior Fellow, and where they really get to have that interaction, that solves it. But for the mass of the students, just the kid who comes in here not even really understanding that, maybe not even thinking to apply to something like that, I can see what you're saying.
00:42:12Edward: Yeah exactly, and it actually reminds me of another concern related to that is as we have concentrated these very contributing, bright, interesting students in the Residential Colleges, we've taken them out of the other residence halls. And are we losing some really good role models in those other residence halls? I've not seen any studies done on that concept yet but I think that's an area that's ripe for research. Like, how the environment in the other residence halls, how has that changed as we have begun to move to a more residential college model? Now, maybe that will eventually argue that everything ought to be a residential college, you know. So be it, that would be great. I don't know if we can afford that because the residential college costs a lot more money than typical residence halls, but I think that is something that we're going to need to watch out for.
00:43:14Tamara: Last time we talked about the Phase IV Greek housing that was going to start with the Sigma Phi Epsilon, and since then there's been an unfortunate incident where the national organization pulled the fraternity's charter and they had to move out of their brand-new, $5.1 million house. So I wondered if you had comments on that situation and also on the concept of the Greek housing, you know where it's going to be?
00:43:42Edward: Well, first of all, I don't think we ought to move away from the Phase IV concept, and I hope that that will be our way of the future. I think the Sigma Phi Epsilon example is a terribly sad example of how a small number of individuals can bring down a chapter. And let me explain. The Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity was off campus on Clay Street for many years, and the house was getting more and more run down, and a lot of their alumni leaders saw that the future of this Greek system really was a residential, on-campus future. And there was a split in the fraternity over the years with some of the older alumni wanting to move in that direction, some of the students and young alumni not wanting to move in that direction and, eventually, the pendulum swung within that group that wanted to be a part of the future on campus. So the house corporation, the alumni association there, did make the decision that they would pursue the on-campus housing model, Phase IV. They also decided to do what's called a chapter review which is essentially coming in and looking at the current undergraduate membership of a chapter and making some decisions about whether those men are living up to the standards of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. And they did that, and they removed a number of undergraduates from the chapter. In retrospect, they may not have gone deep enough in removing some folks. Or at least there were a handful of individuals who probably should have been removed who weren't. The Sigma Phi Epsilon alumni were tremendously dedicated to this project. I mean you, no one could've asked for more from them both all the way from their money that they invested to their time and personal commitment that they invested. And they spent a lot of time with the undergraduates in very serious meetings. Some of them like John Lawson, the former director of our board, came in here several times himself, met with the group himself. They tried to do all they could to ensure that this would be a successful project. But in the end, despite all their efforts, there was this small handful of undergraduates who, I think, were determined that this was not going to succeed, that they were going to have their way, that this never should have moved on campus sort of thing. And it brought them down, you know their national, even before the university got to it, decided to remove their charter. When you have cases like this where a chapter just, as we put it, doesn't get it and brings the chapter down, it shows you the power of just a small number of individuals. But it also causes you, in retrospect to think, would you have been better off just shutting down the chapter for a few years and starting over. And, in fact, I had dinner recently with one of the alums from Sig Eps and he said "Yeah, Ed, you know in retrospect that's probably what we should have done. We probably should have done more than cleaning house. We should have just shut the house down, throw everybody out, and start over with such a beautiful place." So there's powerful lessons about how powerful a small group can be. And there's powerful lessons about sometimes you just have to start over, the membership review may not be enough. I think when Sig Ep comes back to the campus, in a couple years or whenever they might come back, that you'll find an extremely strong group that will start, and it will be that way from day one, and we won't have these kinds of problems again. But what a terrible, terrible example those men made of themselves. So sad. You know, now it's allowed this Innovative group to occupy the house and do this innovation project which I think is really neat, and I hope that that will expand because there's going to come a day when Sig Ep comes back and the way the lease reads, because they invested a third of the funds, is they'll get the house back when they're ready and they have the members to do it, and the Innovative group will obviously have to move somewhere else. But that somewhere else might be, you know, in one of the residence halls, as part of a theme housing program in one of the residence halls too. But they're going to be spoiled in the meantime, living in that facility. [Laughter]
00:48:48Tamara: Well the next one, you've talked about some of these already but I'll just go ahead. Virginia Tech will be moving forward under a new administration once a new president is found and I wondered if you had reflections on directions you would like to see for Virginia Tech as it moves forward?
00:49:10Edward: Well I think, first of all, I think Dr. Steger has done a tremendous job in his, what will be probably nearly fourteen years as president. It will actually be a little over fourteen years assuming he serves until the summer sometime. I think he has transformed this institution into a major player on the international scene and in the research programs of the university. And in terms of facilities and programs and you name it, whoever comes into this role as President is going to have to have a great situation because of all that has been done here. I think, also, the timing is such that a number of us in the baby boomer era have been retiring and others are going to be, Jim Weaver's a good example of that as Director of Athletics. I think we will probably see some others who will choose to retire at the time that Charles moves out. That's another great opportunity for an incoming President to choose the people they want on their staff. So I think in many ways, building on what's been accomplished by Dr. Steger and others is going to be a theme for a new President, if maybe taking it to a next level of where we can go from here. I think Dr. Steger had a very strong research agenda, I mean he talked about that in his inaugural address, he was able to carry out so much of that. I don't think he was able to take us as far as he really wanted to in terms of research rankings, and I think many of us would say the goal that he had for that was really too much of a stretch goal, It was really not possible to get that far. But he's certainly taken us well in that direction. I think, combining this with some of the answers I gave to you earlier, it's going to be a challenge for a new President with what our expenses and our tuition are like these days of how much can we do and how do we set priorities and how do we balance this personal touch with computerization if I can use that term again. I think, probably, it will be an opportunity for a president to assess where we are with the restructuring of the colleges that occurred a number of years ago under Dr. McNamee's leadership. Are we where we wanted to be? Is there any other realignment that we need to think about for the future? I think, also, a new President will need to focus on can we be all things to all people or do we need to think about being some things to some people? You know you like, because of the term university, to think you can have all, you know, huge numbers of majors and research projects et cetera, et cetera but there comes a time when I think you have to make decisions on what do you do best and where do you invest the money. And is it too much of a stretch to start some new programs? Do you need to consolidate more? Do you need to think about how we can build upon our strengths? I think those are some issues for a new President. I think another issue is, when you think about the buildings on this campus, a lot of them are very old. We have a lot of aging facilities that are going to need renovations, upgrades, demolitions, reconstructions. I've seen a lot of that going on already, I mean think about the Upper Quad project for the cadets with the demolition of Rasche, think about what's happening to Davidson Hall, you know, right now. But we have a lot more to go when you think about some of our buildings. And one reflection of that, if you think back on the history of the University, and Dr. Hahn's years as President when he made the, took the leadership to change the Corps of Cadets to being optional and then everything began to grow and grow in enrollment and buildings after that. Well, that was 1964 and on, so mid-'60s to mid, late-'70s is when you're having, you know this massive growth in University buildings. Well, how old are those buildings now, they're getting to be fifty years old or more. And you get fifty-year-old buildings, they need a lot of work. Sometimes simply bringing things up to code, installing new systems like access controls and fire alarm systems and all that, but some of it is the hidden kinds of things. You know, when you do a facilities' conditions study you hire firms to come in to look at everything from top to bottom, and they tell you, oh, by the way you may not have known it, but all the pumps in this building are about to give out, and they're sort of hidden and you don't think about those things. You do see the roof that's starting to fall off but you don't see the things in the attic and the basement that maybe need some attention. So I think there are real challenges of cost, containing costs, trying to determine what our real strengths are and what we should build upon, determining maybe what we need to phase out, and determining how best to use our technology, and how do we meet the stem needs that are out there in terms of students graduating in our majors. So, although a new President I think is going to inherit a wonderful situation, she or he is going to inherit some real challenges at the same time. And many of those challenges are not unique to Virginia Tech. I mean, that's true of many universities. But it certainly becomes very obvious when you're sitting here thinking about all the buildings and the opportunities at Virginia Tech.
00:56:03Tamara: This one you've already addressed as well but, well, the next two are sort of more follow-ups on that, important issues that the university confronts which you talked about.
00:56:24Edward: I think another area we haven't really spoken about is diversity. I think we've made a great deal of progress in that area but, you know, we continue to struggle particularly with African American enrollment. When you look at what's happened, our growth in minorities, in underrepresented populations, tends to have been in other areas than African Americans. If you look back at the history over the past twenty years or so, our African American enrollment is always 4-5 percent. It never seems to vary from that, and I think that's an area that we're going to continue to really need to work on. How do we attract more African Americans to this campus? Some of it, as people say, is urban environments and they're more attracted to urban environments, they're used to urban environments, and this is a very isolated, rural environment to them. Some of it may be past history of the institution, past baggage. I don't know, we've always tried to put our finger on it and another is costs and expense and lack of scholarships. I know that when the Admissions Office and some of the other offices have done research on African American students who were offered admission but didn't accept it here, the primary thing that shows up is they got a much greater scholarship to go somewhere else. For example, there are other states, like South Carolina, who are permitted to offer in-state tuition to some out-of-state students in order to attract them. We can't do that in Virginia. that is a roadblock. You look at UVA has significant more endowment and scholarship funds than we do and are able to offer much more competitive scholarships than we can in the area. But, again, that's always the primary thing that shows up is they got a better offer somewhere else. So I think that is an area where we really need to continue to work. I wish we knew all of the reasons, but we certainly know that is one of the primary reasons.
00:59:01Tamara: And that seems to be a problem not just with the students but with the faculty and staff too. In fact a lot of people that I know during my time here have gone for one reason or another, and it's not like there's been more people coming on board sort of as faculty and staff. There's a few but not many.
00:59:22Edward: In the end, I think in many ways you have to get to a point where you have a critical mass of African American students and faculty and staff so that it's comfortable for an African American to be here, but getting over that hump, you know to build that critical mass has been our real challenge.
00:59:40Tamara: Yea, it's been really flat.
00:59:42Edward: It really has. Now, on the other hand, if you look at Asians, for example, now that's gone up and up and up and up.
00:59:53Tamara: So my next question was about challenges which you've also addressed. Pretty much if you come up with anything else you'll have to add.
00:00:05Edward: Yeah, I'll let you know, but I think we've covered a number of those.
00:00:09Tamara: I wondered if you'd tell me about your family, your own family, your children.
00:00:13Edward: Okay, right, well I met my wife when we were Graduate students together at Syracuse, getting Masters degrees there during the 1968-1970 years. She came from Lewiston, Pennsylvania, did her undergraduate work at Susquehanna University and then got the masters at Syracuse. So we met in the same program and were married, actually, in the Syracuse Chapel, May 30, 1970. And so then we were off job-hunting together in May of 1970 in an era where anti-nepotism was very strong, and we each had our own individual job offers, but no one wanted to hire us together. And, eventually, we decided to take a job offer at the University of Delaware which happened to be a job for me in Residence Life. And two weeks after we got there the University changed their mind and hired her as the Program Director of the Student Center and as I think I told you in an earlier interview about her responsibilities and having the chance to spend the evenings with amazing people. Actually during the last years we were at Delaware, we were there from 1970 to the end of 1982, Chris Christie and his wife Mary Pat Foster came in as students, and I think when we left they were ending their sophomore year, if I remember right, so it was interesting to know them then as student leaders and to know him now as the Governor of New Jersey. And, of course, Joe Biden is an alum of the University of Delaware. He left there before we ever got there but some of us are speculating it would be interesting if the 2016 Presidential race is Christie vs. Biden, two Delaware alums. Anyway, we spent from 1970-1982 there, and Noreen started out in Student Affairs. She was spotted and asked to move to Academic Affairs in the summer and winter session office, so she was the Assistant Director of summer and winter session which earned her the nickname Princess Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring, if you remember the old Howdy Doody Show. And then she was spotted by the Dean of the College of Business and was asked to become the Assistant Dean of the College of Business at Delaware. So that was her career there. We adopted our son, Andy, Andrew, in 1979 while we were at Delaware, and he came to us when he was seven years old. He was part of a group of children who were taken from their parents who were simply not capable of taking care of the kids. And a foster family agreed to keep him for as long as it would take until he could be free for adoption. A distant relative filed suit against the state of Delaware for custody of the children, and it's a case that eventually went to the United States Supreme Court before the kids were eligible to be officially adopted, and so, eventually that happened and he became officially our son. Delaware's interesting, they actually go back and change birth certificates. I don't know whether other states do that or not, but you will find in the records of the state of Delaware that Andrew Bailey-Spencer was born April 8, 1972 to Noreen Bailey-Spencer and Edward Spencer. It caused us to look in our calendars to see where we were at the time [laughter] and we were actually on a train coming back from a wedding in D.C., so that's funny. So Andy was in second grade when he came to us in Delaware, and then when we left Delaware at the end of 1982, he was in the middle of fifth grade.
00:04:26Tamara: Did he have siblings?
00:04:28Edward: He has biological siblings, yes. Which he's chosen not to have contact with, and we always let him make a decision about that, and he toyed with meeting the biological father who wanted to have contact at one point and meeting the siblings, and he decided he didn't want to do that. So be it. So when we moved here he was in the middle of fifth grade, and he started out at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School at that point. Noreen had made the decision when the job offer came to me from Virginia Tech that she really wanted to quit the job at Delaware and get her doctorate here, as I got my doctorate at Delaware. So when we came, she started working on her doctoral degree and then a strange coincidence occurred. This is really an interesting story. When we moved here, Noreen was on the Board of Trustees of her alma mater which is Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania and, interestingly, it's the only other school in the country that has orange and maroon as their colors, and they had it before we did. But anyway, when she was on the board shortly after we moved here, they got a huge gift to start a business school and as it turns out their prime candidate to be Dean of their new business school was the Associate Dean of the College of Business at Virginia Tech. And the President of Susquehanna called her and said, Noreen, you've got to take him to lunch and convince him to accept the offer to come to Susquehanna. Which she dutifully did as a good trustee of her alma mater, and lo and behold he did go there and he was Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies and…
00:06:24Tamara: Now, who was this? What was his name?
00:06:26Edward: Um, Carl, I'm blocking on the last name, I can't think of his name. But he left to go to Susquehanna. Hap Bonham who had been Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in the College of Business here, moved into Carl's position as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies. Suddenly Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Business opens up, which had been Noreen's position at Delaware. And so they asked if she would become the Associate Dean here, which she did. Now, of course, meanwhile she's working on her doctorate, which she had started full-time when we first came and eventually cut back to part-time. So she, while she was Associate Dean, finished her doctorate in Educational Research and Evaluation, similar to my finishing my doctorate in Social Psychology while working full-time at Delaware. And then she served as the Associate Dean of the College of Business from that summer of 1983 until the summer of 2004, and, at that point, she was asked to come to Burruss Hall as Associate Provost and Director of Undergraduate Admissions. So, for her last four years, she served in that admissions roll for the university. And then she developed breast cancer, first diagnosed in 1998 and went through lumpectomy, lumpectomy radiation, chemotherapy, five years of tamoxifen, and so forth. And, by then, you know normally it's gone and that's it, if you're surviving five years. But, eight years later, in 2006, after she had become the Director of Admissions, long story short, it showed up that it had metastasized into her liver and lungs. And she went through chemotherapy, again. And I continued working, drove herself to and from chemotherapy, and was able to work until her oncologist persuaded her in the spring of 2008 that she really needed to retire on disability, medical disability, which she did. But she continued to, I mean you'd never know it, because people were always calling her the "Energizer Bunny" because she'd just keep going and going. She continued to be in apparent good health, people would never know this unless they knew the situation, and was literally, you know, spending time with the grandkids, driving them around until the last week or two of her life. She died on September 23, 2009. So, um, that was her background. She was an only child and, and as I said, came from Lewistown, Pennsylvania. Our son, Andy, started out at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School and then went to the old Blacksburg Middle School and then to the old Blacksburg High School where he graduated in 1990. And then he spent a post-graduate year at the Christ Church School over in the Northern Neck area in Virginia and got his post-graduate certificate from them in the spring of '91 and then started at Ferrum College in the fall of '91 and stayed for just the fall semester and decided he just didn't want to do that. And I've often wondered whether the pressure of growing up in a family of two PhD's was too oppressive or what, but he decided to withdraw and he came back home and picked up some part-time jobs in Blacksburg and decided to enlist in the Army, and he enlisted on Veteran's Day of 1992. He went into the Army Corps of Engineers, into combat engineering, did his basic and advanced training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, fondly known as "the Fort lost in the woods''. And had his first assignment, he was deployed to Germany immediately upon finishing, and he was stationed in Friedberg, Germany, initially which was where Elvis Presley was stationed--in fact, they ate at the Elvis Presley Mess Hall. But his specialty became mine detonation and demolition for which, as I understand it from him, you have to take an exam that has one hundred questions in which you have to identify a particular mine, where it came from, how to disarm it, and you may not miss a single question [laughs]. So, that was his initial area, was mine detonation and demolition, this was during the Bosnia War in Europe. He wound up teaching the former warring factions in Bosnia how to disarm their own mines or the mines of other factions, through an interpreter. And he had some very challenging experiences when he was in Bosnia, because he was there when the mass grave was found in Srebrenica and he observed all that, he saw a leg blown off of a soldier in front of him, and he had to shoot and kill a fourteen-year-old Bosnian boy who was about to shoot and kill him. So, he's had some post-traumatic stress problems, disorder problems, he's had challenges with since that have really begun to emerge more in recent years than they did initially. But anyway, he was in that area initially. He started to have a lot of ankle and knee problems when he was in the Army, required a number of surgeries. He eventually moved from the combat engineering area to administrative and legal affairs, and so he was the person who had to work with spouses left behind when his unit was deployed to various areas so, you know, dealing with things like, my husband left me no money, and what do I do? And that kinds of thing--very challenging. So he was in Germany, in Friedberg, and then eventually in Giessen, Germany, both of those bases are now closed as the U.S. has reduced forces in those areas. His last assignment was Fort Polk, Louisiana from 2000 until he left the Army in 2004, December 2004. So he had mainly administrative and legal work there when he was transferred to Fort Polk. Well, the Army doesn't like you when you're not deployable, and so they eventually worked with him and he has an Honorable Discharge on partial medical disability because of the problems with his ankles and knees. So, by then, our two grandchildren had been born in Louisiana, in Shreveport, Louisiana at the LSU Med Center there after their mother had an emergency ride on a Blackhawk helicopter to the hospital. So amazing.
00:14:15Tamara: And she's a U.S. citizen--?
00:14:17Edward: No, she's a German citizen. They met in Germany and so the kids were born in Shreveport and then, when he left the Army he decided to bring his family back to Blacksburg and raise the family here. So he came, they came in December of 2004, and he initially worked on various jobs, part-time jobs and eventually got a salary job at the Inn at Virginia Tech, and his wife got a salaried position, she's a housekeeper in the Residence Halls at Virginia Tech. So he worked at the Inn from 2004 until this fall, actually. He was a front desk clerk and eventually Coordinator of Group Reservations and Revenue and then Coordinator of, what they call Transient Reservations which are the day-to-day reservations. So he had a great deal of experience in the hospitality industry. But he grew disillusioned there and decided to resign from the Inn and he is now working, actually, for Krogers in various capacity. And trying his hand in working a whole different industry. So that's, in a nutshell, his background. He's, you know, I told you he had the ankle and knee challenges, he also had to have a spinal fusion done of a couple lumbar vertebrae about three years ago and had to have a plate in his cervical vertebrae recently, too. So he's had a lot of medical and psychological issues over the years. I mean he's able to function very well, but you know when you're dealing with post traumatic stress disorder it is a real problem. And I didn't even know about some of these things until recently, you know, when he got into a program to help him deal with the issues, he never told me about having to kill a person, for example. So Melanie, his wife, is a German citizen and has lived in the States since 2000, when they came to Fort Polk. The two grandchildren, Courtney was born first, and she was born May 4th, 2003 in Shreveport, and she's now a fifth grader at Kips Elementary School and Brandon was born October 1st, 2004 and he is a third grader at Kips Elementary School. And they have sort of opposite personalities. Courtney's more the artistic, contemplative, serious student. Brandon is [chuckles] high-energy, ADHD-diagnosed, a sweet guy but it can be a handful for people to try to manage sometimes, particularly when he's not had his meds. But they're a lot of fun, and I enjoy spending time with them, that consumes some of my time.
00:17:38Tamara: Are they bilingual?
00:17:40Edward: No, not very much. They, I think, speak some elementary German, but Melanie has chosen not to do that.
00:17:53Tamara: I wondered if you have any observations about Blacksburg as a place to live or your life in this community, just thinking about the town, if there are any things that…
00:18:09Edward: Well, I think it's a very different place now than it was when I came.
00:18:12Tamara: Yeah, how has it changed?
00:18:14Edward: Well, you know we were at the University of Delaware which is, you know an hour from Baltimore, an hour from Philly, two from New York, two from Washington, right on 95, right on that route. And I mean you can get to places quickly, and you're in the middle of everything. I tell this story to people, when I was considering the offer to come here, someone said to me who had been here, and he said, Blacksburg, it's about four hours away from anywhere you might possibly want to be [chuckles]. Which, in some ways, is true. So, initially it was a real shock to us because it was so isolated. And we went through a, and I say this to people, an adjustment year the first year of did we really make the right decision, you know? But, you then begin to realize what a wonderful place it is to live in terms of quality of life, beauty of life, outdoor opportunities, the nature of the institution, the students, the faculty and staff. But it's an adjustment. And, of course, when we first came here there were some strong blue laws in effect. You couldn't shop at Belk's on Sunday; they weren't permitted to open on Sunday. It was basically grocery stores and drug stores were the only things that could be opened on Sundays. Anybody would look at me and say, really? And I'd say, yeah! It's really true! Well, things are dramatically different now, you know, and I mean our road system, the bypass to Christiansburg, the shopping centers that are out there now, the New River Valley Mall Marketplace were all built on what used to be pastures and orchards, back when we came that's what it was. The only traffic light in that direction, well there wasn't any traffic light where there is now at the New River Mall, it was very different. But you didn't have the major cross-traffic coming through. You know, things like the paths on the Drillfield, some of them were, well, I don't know if all of them but some of them weren't paved, you know that's an example of that kind of thing. Most of the university buildings were not air-conditioned. That's only been in recent years that things have begun to be air-conditioned. For example, our first air-conditioned residence hall was Payne Hall, which I think was built around 1988 to '91, in that era. The access to Roanoke even is much better than what it used to be because of the bypass near Christiansburg. I can't imagine what it would be like today if we had not built that bypass. I mean the traffic would just be incredible. I think we've gotten more shopping opportunities, you know, through the shopping centers, through First and Main, places like that. My feeling is you can get most anything you need in this area or in Roanoke. You don't really have to travel to the major cities like Richmond or Charlotte, unless you want to go to an Ikea outlet or something like that in Charlotte. Do I wish we had a Trader Joe's or something like that? Yeah, I would love to see in Blacksburg a Kohl's department store, I think that something like that is needed in the town. We didn't need the Walmart, but I could see a Kohl's would do very, very well here, actually.
00:21:53Tamara: Yeah, there used to be that Rose's, that had some basic things.
00:21:55Edward: Right, right. Without having to run out to the mall.
00:22:01Tamara: Maybe a good restaurant.
00:22:02Edward: Blacksburg is very fickle in restaurants, they come and go so much. And I don't know what it is. I've never quite figured that out, whether people just get impatient here, and they want something else for a change and then that restaurant loses business or what. Some might argue the Dining Program has taken away all their business and, no not really. I mean I still, even after the Dining Program got so strong, you still see restaurants coming and going.
00:22:34Tamara: Well, you can't go to the Dining Program after seven o'clock, I think, because I stopped there after Faculty Senate and it was closed, I was like, oh!
00:22:43Edward: Yeah, some of them are, depends on where you go. I think something like West End is open until about eight o'clock. Deet's Place is open until about midnight, I think. And then there's the Express shop in Dietrick is open until about 2 a.m. in the morning.
00:22:56Tamara: Oh, I thought Turner Place maybe wouldn't be so crowded now or…
00:23:01Edward: The problem with Turner Place is, it's a great place, but it's expensive to run, and if you don't have the volume of business to support it you just can't afford to do that.
00:23:12Tamara: Are there things you'd like to see in Blacksburg? Or changes you think would help the community to be a better place to live?
00:23:18Edward: Well, I've mentioned Kohl's and Trader Joe's [laughter], I think some things like that would be great. Um, I worry, as do many people, that there's not much for low-income housing in Blacksburg. You know, a lot of our front-line staff just can't afford to live in Blacksburg because of that. I think a joint study between the university and the town really needs to be done of what the housing needs are for students. When the recent proposal for the Retreat on Prices Fork came about, um, I was asked for some input and advice about that and I said, my concern is, I don't know how much need there is for more student housing. And I said, for example, in the '11-'12 academic year we closed West Ambler Johnston for like a fifteen month period and West Ambler Johnston holds about eight-hundred students. Well, we suddenly deleted eight-hundred beds out of the University system which meant eight-hundred people who would have lived in Residence Halls have to be living out there in the community somewhere. And we never heard a peep from anybody that they had any problem finding housing. Now, to me, that's a warning to be careful. You know, you may be getting an over-built situation. And I worry about getting to an over-built situation because somebody is going to have vacancies as a result of that if that, in fact, is the case. And where are those vacancies probably going to occur? My theory is you're always going to fill up the cheap housing because some students really need to look for very inexpensive housing, that's all they can afford. And you're going to fill up the high-end housing with all the amenities by wealthy students and their families who can afford it. And the vacancies are going to be in the middle. Well, who's going to get caught in the middle? My guess is, if that happened, it would be complexes like Foxridge and Terrace View who have been around for a while, who's facilities are aging. And they've done a lot to keep them up, but there's only so much you can do. And they don't have the amenities that some high-end ones have. Well, if they don't have the occupancy, if they start losing business, they're not going to be able to afford to do more. And I'm afraid that those units would begin to deteriorate. So, my suggestion when I was asked was I think, a study really needs to be done as a joint study by the town and the university to figure out, where are we? Really. Let's make sure we know where we are and where we need to be rather than make assumptions about what we need.
00:26:19Tamara: That's a good idea. Earlier you mentioned that you retired in…
00:26:26Edward: At the end of June of 2012.
00:26:28Tamara: Yes. And it sounds like you've been keeping quite busy.
00:26:32Edward: [Laughter] Yes, people warned me about that.
00:26:35Tamara: So, what have you been doing? If you don't mind sharing.
00:26:39Edward: Sure, I'd be happy to. As I was retiring, and shortly after I retired, I got approached by ten non-profit boards about coming on their boards. And a number of retired people had said to me, don't accept anything for six months, until you readjust and decide what you want to do and have time to do. So I did follow that advice and I waited until January of 2013 and, at that point, I accepted three local boards and two national boards. So the three local boards are the Warm Hearth Retirement Community called Warm Hearth, Inc.--incorporated--the Sojourn Center, which plans to build a hospice house, a residential hospice for people who cannot die at home for whatever reason…
00:27:31Tamara: And they plan to build that in Blacksburg?
00:27:33Edward: In the New River Valley somewhere, probably, ideally in Blacksburg, but we're not sure yet where it will be. And then the third local board is my church governing board, the session of Blacksburg Presbyterian Church. The two national boards are both part of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. I now serve on the Leadership Training Board which is the board that oversees all, obviously, leadership programs, pledge education, individual development programs, and so forth. So we have responsibility for the annual leadership workshop that brings in two thousand Sigma Chi officers from all over the country. We have a program called Horizons which is for men who have at least two years left in their chapter. It's done out at Snowbird, Utah in the mountains in the summer. We have the Journey Program, which I head, that has developed retreats, workshops to take out to the chapters, we train alumni to facilitate these workshops and then go out to a chapter and conduct this workshop, on a variety of topics like strategic planning, recruiting to the standard of the fraternity, chapter revolution, responsibility, and accountability, risk management, all that kind of thing. So, I'm in charge of that Journey Program, and I have my own operating board who works with that program, putting all those programs together. So if you head one of these boards, like the Horizons board or the Journey board, you also sit on the Leadership Training board. So that's why there's two boards I'm involved with in Sigma Chi. So that Leadership Training board has to approve everything that goes on in the individual boards.
00:29:18Tamara: And so, that involves some traveling?
00:29:20Edward: Some traveling, a lot of telephone and conference call time, a lot of individual time working at home. I developed, for example, the workshop on Responsibility and Accountability and we're about to pilot that in the chapters this spring semester. So that, that one took a lot of my time to develop.
00:29:43Tamara: Seems like one that might be, do your chapters share? I mean, like you're working for Sigma Chi, do they share with other…
00:29:52Edward: Other fraternities?
00:29:53Tamara: Yeah.
00:29:54Edward: To some extent. Um, I think there's more a feeling of proprietary ownership than there really ought to be, among the fraternities. But, um, some of the other fraternities have some programs parallel to what we're doing. For instance, we've, um, in the Responsibility and Accountability journey that I was telling you about, we've given credit to and, essentially, plagiarized some things from a couple of the other fraternities because we felt they did such a great job of putting some of the things together. One of them is, Confrontation Skills for Fraternity Brothers, how do you confront your brother about something that's really bad, that needs to be attended to? Well, the Farm House Fraternity had done a great job with that and so we're using their material and giving them appropriate credit as part of this, for the workshop. But, I think it's, it's an exciting way to go because it's a way of taking out to Chapter-land what they would have experienced if we had been able to afford to bring them all together, you know at a conference together. And it allows the chapter to choose a specific workshop that's really best for their situation.
00:31:02Tamara: I see. Are you still doing a, I think you were doing a blog as well?
00:31:07Edward: I did, initially, a blog for Psychology Today Magazine on college students and their parents today. And, um, I did it for a while and I found that there's so much out there already that people didn't really have a need for this to duplicate it. So I haven't posted in that blog for months, you know, as a result. I'll probably just let it go away. Um, I do share on my own Facebook page a lot of some things that I think are worthwhile for people taking a look at. For example, just this morning, the Today Show did an excellent piece, I thought, on teenagers today and the pressures and environments that they're experiencing and all that. And I posted that on my Facebook page today so it's, you know like a five-minute thing that Jenna Bush-Hager did with a group of teenagers, but I thought it was very concise and it really hit the major points and I thought this was worth sharing with people, so I'll do a lot of that. And I do get a lot of feedback of, you know, I really like what you post on your Facebook page.
00:32:11Tamara: Oh, interesting. Like, sort of use that.
00:32:14Edward: And then other things I get asked for a lot of advice, consultation with other schools, recommendation letters, reference letters, phone calls saying, you know, can you please explain how this ever developed this way? And, a classic example, the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office got in touch with me because the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity that used to be here wants to re-colonize and start over. So they got out their file, in the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office, and they couldn't figure out the circumstances under which they left. And they could see that the Fraternity wound up on a deferred suspension status with the University. But they couldn't see anything where the University terminated them, or their national terminated them. So they said, do you, can you recall anything? And I said, sure. Um, they got to a point with very, they were one of the first fraternities, one of the first two fraternities chosen for Oak Lane but they got to a point…
00:33:19Tamara: Chosen for?
00:33:21Edward: Chosen for Oak Lane. But they got to a point where their membership started to dwindle, and they had some brothers who were into drugs and other things, and they wound up in trouble with the University. And I said, I remember saying to them one day, guys, your numbers are so low, you're hanging by a string with this deferred suspension status. If I were you, I would surrender your charter and dissolve yourselves so that you don't have a record of the University suspending you. And that's what they did.
00:33:51Tamara: Oh, easier to start up again.
00:33:53 Edward: And, that's what they did. So, when I wrote back to the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office, when I get those kinds of questions these days I tend to copy, like, my successor, Dr. Perillo, and other people, Dr. Shushok, and others in Student Affairs who need to know, so that the corporate memory isn't lost and I can share with them, you know, what the history is here.
00:34:13Tamara: Because it might not have been written down, actually.
00:34:16Edward: And it wasn't, they couldn't figure it out. So, that, you get a lot of that kind of thing, of asking for, how did this come about, what's the history here, what should I know, what are the landmines I need to watch out for, you know, that kind of thing.
00:34:34Tamara: Do you feel pretty much committed to being here? Like, this town and this place?
00:34:38Edward: Oh, absolutely. There's no reason to go anywhere else. You know, when you have your family here and, um, I can't imagine starting over somewhere else at my age, you know trying to meet new people and when you have such a great support system here, not just family but lots of friends and alums and…
00:34:58Tamara: And you're active in your church, as well.
00:34:59Edward: Right, right. And I get a lot of, you know alums are coming back in town and, you know, can we have lunch? Can we have dinner? That kind of thing. One of the fulfilling things about looking back on a career like this is now, particularly with Facebook, you can see so much about what's happened to the students that you worked with, and you see their family pictures coming up on Facebook, and they've had another baby, they've taken another job, you know, all that kind of thing. You're able to follow people, and, you know, you get lots of, as you can imagine, notes, hey, you've made such a difference in my life. You know, that kind of stuff.
00:35:39Tamara: Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that means a lot. Is there anything you'd like to talk about, that I haven't asked you about?
00:35:47Edward: Well, we've covered a lot of territory in these two interviews. [Laughter] Oh gosh, there's nothing that jumps out at me, I don't think.
00:36:01Tamara: Well, thank you very much.
Oh, you are welcome. Thanks for asking.
[End of interview] NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END
