What A Semester It Has Been

It is really, really difficult for me to believe that this semester is very quickly coming to a close. In fact, our class on Thursday is my last little bit of this semester that I have left. It is even crazier to me that I am halfway done with my master's degree. Man, time flies. But it definitely has been fun.

Without question the best class I have taken this semester has been this one. And I'm not just saying that. I have learned so much from the real life applications that this class has provided me. That, and Sparky's anecdotes.

Today I spent some time looking back through my old blog entries. The variation of topics is really pretty staggering. I first wrote about the college student today, where I found lots of facts and figures from NASPA that helped me figure out more about who we serve as student affairs professionals. I then wrote about free speech, followed by school shootings. I still remember to this day the effect the UAH shooting had on me personally. Then I wrote about restorative justice, student protest, and spirituality - where I found out students are a lot more spiritual than we thought. After a huge change of gears, I wrote about sex on a college campus, an eco-friendly college campus, and student unions. We pretty much covered the gamut of topics in this class, and because of that, I learned so much.

I will take away many things from this class. First, I kind of feel like we all got to learn at the foot of the master - Sparky has been doing this now for such a long time that if you don't listen to his words of wisdom and pieces of advice, you're really foolish. I enjoyed class most when Sparky just told stories. Secondly, I really liked interacting with the other students in the class. I think we can all say we learned at least one thing from one another. We all come from such a varied set of backgrounds that we all had something to teach one another. Finally, I liked the way the course was set up. We didn't have to fiddle with textbooks or lectures. We just talked to one another. That is actually how I learn the best. We just came in, sat down, and talked. Each one of us got our turn, and we all learned something along the way.

I seriously doubt I will have a class this great again. It will be hard to top. I really need to say thank you for the learning experience. I have learned not only more about our profession but about myself, and the type of professional that I want to be.

Sparky asked in class the other day "are y'all sure you want to do this?" I think he was kidding - he had had a long day of meetings - but in all seriousness, this class has reinforced my belief that yes, I do want to do this, and I am excited to spend my life in this profession.

Thank you for a great semester.

Student Unions Matter

If I had a dollar for every time I heard one of my beloved co-workers - namely you, Sparky! - say that we need a new Student Union (always said in a funnier way than that) than I would probably have enough money to break ground and start construction on the dang building.

The long and short of it is that student unions matter, and most if not all people I have spoken with at Ole Miss think ours is an eyesore.

Shoot, I was even in a meeting with Chancellor Jones today in Room 404 of the Union - a room where the carpet is particularly disturbing - and he mentioned right then and there that we needed a new Student Union. Another dollar in my pocket!

A friend and I love to visit college campuses, and this semester alone we have visited UGA, Auburn, and Mississippi State. (I visited Alabama by myself this semester so I'll count that in there too.) Whenever we visit a college campus we always, always make sure to stop by the Student Union and compare it to ours. All four of the Student Unions at the campuses I just mentioned have been renovated in the past five years, some of them as recently as 2009. I must say, State's Union - and I know how much we all dislike State - puts us at Ole Miss absolutely to shame. It was renovated in 2007 and is truly beautiful and state-of-the-art. At the end of the day, visitors come to Student Unions, not to mention students, faculty, and staff - so yes, Student Unions matter.

A good, functioning Student Union should be the vibrant center and hub of life and activity on any college campus. Student organizations should want to meet there, events should be held there, and people should just want to come there and hang out - it should be a melting pot of students from all different walks. It should be a gathering place, a place of congregation, where both business and fun can be had. Above almost all other buildings on campus, I feel a Student Union should be technologically up-to-date and should be the bright shining beacon on any campus.

Well, as I said before, ours is not.

I truly feel that we need a new Student Union, and I know Sparky feels the same way. To be honest with you, as much as I love our Student Union (these days I might as well be paying rent for as much time as I spend there), we are lacking and it is a bit of an embarrassment. I know the Chancellor and Sparky know this - two of the most powerful men on campus, if not the two most powerful men on campus - so I know it's on their radar.

Let's hope we can get a new Union soon. Until then, I'll keep a little jar for dollar bills every time I hear that we need a new Union. I expect it to fill up pretty soon :)

The Environmentally-Friendly College Campus

Well, apparently, sustainability on college campuses is on the rise, according to an article I read this week called "College Campuses are Going Green" (you can see the link here - http://www.seattlepi.com/local/282232_greencampus23.html).

Now, that said, I have been pretty impressed with Ole Miss' "green" effort since I arrived here in August. One of the first things I did as a part of my job with Greek Life was to plan a Fall Leadership Summit, and one of the speakers on the docket was a man by the name of Jim Morrison with Greeks Going Green. He spoke to our entire group about green efforts, and I was impressed. Now, as I walk out of the Union every day this week, I see a huge banner reading "Red, Blue, and Green Week." It seems as though, at least to my eyes, we care about the environment on this campus.

But could we do better?

Well, of course. We can always do better in everything we do as a university. Nothing's perfect. So that said, if I had to make three environmentally-friendly changes to our university, this is what I would do:

1. Ban smoking on campus. Smoking pollutes the environment, plus smoke is just gross and it gets on my clothes and stuck in my nose and makes me feel like I am at a bar.
2. Install more recycle bins on campus. I think our recycling efforts could be really upped.
3. Keep campus beautiful by not littering. Maybe even make a litter fine for those who are caught. Ole Miss prides itself on being one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation, and we need to keep it that way.

These are just a few ideas of many to help our "green" efforts. While we are not leading the pack by any means, we are definitely running with the bunch and keeping up a good pace. All it takes is a few small changes to set Ole Miss apart as a frontrunner for being an environmentally-friendly campus.

Let's Talk About Sex

I have got to admit this to you - this is a difficult, and slightly awkward, blog for me to write.

I am the type of person who doesn't really discuss sex with anyone - unless they're my close friends. So when it came time to write this blog, I just had no idea where to begin.

And then I realized where I worked, and how I had college students at my disposal all the time in the Greek Life Office. So to write this blog about sex on a college campus, I decided to talk to some college students about the topic - to go straight to the source.

We talked about so much in our conversation, but one topic stood out to me as especially pertinent, especially for women - and especially in the South. Women are expected to be pure, virginal, and wholesome on the outside to appease other women, but have sex behind closed doors to appease men. It is a consistent and constant double standard that is impossible for Southern women to live up to, these students say. The worst offense is to be known as "promiscuous," but the combination of college-aged desires and the hope of pleasing members of the opposite sex lead women to lead a double life that is impossible to keep up.

A student I spoke to said that sex at another SEC school was spoken about freely, but at Ole Miss, sex was never discussed, as it was considered taboo. This student said sex was criticized on our campus and that "everyone does it - but no one talks about it." It is another example of how students at Ole Miss and other schools in the South lead a bit of a double life about sex.

It is a difficult predicament to be in. Other than practicing abstinence (which is, quite honestly, difficult to do if a college-aged woman hopes to keep most college-aged men but is completely acceptable and admirable if a student chooses to do so), it is hard to practice sex on a college campus without dealing with potential social repercussions.

For women especially, the double bind of having sex in college and trying to maintain a reputation is difficult, according to the students I spoke to. It is just one more pressure added to the list of the many pressures college students already face.

I am just happy that I got the chance to talk to college students who really know the score about what is going on with sex on a college campus. It provided me with good insight, which is always needed as a student affairs professional.

Who Knew?

Recent data from UCLA "suggests not only that undergraduates are far more spiritual than was widely believed, but also that they're seeking help with their seeking from their colleges - mostly in vain," according to an article called "Adding Spirituality" by Elizabeth Redden from one of my favorite websites, insidehighered.com.

Who knew?

In a country that I see more and more turning away from God and from spirituality, it came as quite a shock to me to come across this article, which suggests that college students are becoming more spiritual and looking to us, as student affairs professionals, to help them cultivate that part of themselves. If you would have asked me the last age group I thought would be turning more towards spirituality, I probably would have said college students. I guess you learn something new every day.

I am a woman of faith, and at my undergraduate institution (which I hate to keep bringing up, but it is a very interesting point of reference to life at Ole Miss) spirituality was never discussed on campus. In fact, it was taboo. KU is so incredibly "separation between church and state (aka college)" driven that you never, ever would hear student affairs professionals discussing their faith with a student, and there is just no way you would ever open a meeting in prayer. Not that I agreed with the way spirituality was dealt with at KU - but that's just the way that it was. There were not many religious or spiritual organizations at KU, and most people just didn't discuss their faith in everyday conversation. Now, this is by no means saying KU was an athiest campus or anything. Quite the opposite, I'm sure, but it just never really came up. KU was such a liberal campus - which is ironic, because it is in such a conservative state.

Since I have been at Ole Miss, I have been impressed and amazed really at how strong my faith has grown. At one meeting I attend weekly, we open in prayer. I talk about my faith almost every day, either with students or with fellow staff members. I don't know if it is just Ole Miss or if it is the South, but God is very present on this campus, anywhere from daily conversation to student organizations. If I would have read the insidehighered.com article while still at KU, I would have never believed it. But now, I can see the gist of that article being true.

Responding to the data UCLA found, the lead researchers for the Spirituality in Higher Education Project "invited representatives from 10 non-sectarian institutions to Los Angeles in November to develop individual plans to better address matters of spirituality on campus." Check out the article for what schools like Carnegie Mellon, Florida State, and Miami are doing to help students with spirituality issues - http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/08/spirituality

We tend to often forget that when we work with students, we are working with the student as a whole, not as the sum of his or her parts. To many students - and, according to this article, apparently even more than we thought - spirituality is important, and anything that is important to students is something we as student affairs professionals need to know much about. Therefore, being able to handle issues of spirituality is crucial. As the article says, we need not be priests or pastors or rabbis - but we do need to know how to handle issues of spirituality with our students.

Student Protest On College Campuses

When I was an undergraduate, I can remember absolutely dreading the days that the Students for Life were going to be protesting on campus. Though personally I am pro-life, I absolutely, completely, and totally dreaded the days that the Students for Life - the pro-life group on campus - would hit campus and inevitably spark a firestorm of controversy.

I worked in the Student Involvement and Leadership Center all four of my years on campus at the University of Kansas, and that was the office at KU that housed the University Events Committee. The University Events Committee had to approve any event that any of KU's 500 plus clubs or organizations wanted to put on, and no event could take place on campus without UEC's approval. This often caused a lot of headaches for our office, because it was UEC's duty to regulate any event - including protests - that happened on campus. As a right of the first amendment and the right of free speech, we had to let students protest - but it didn't mean we enjoyed it.

The Students for Life's protest was absolutely the worst one. Once a semester, the group would descend like hawks on campus, armed with picket signs with offensive messages and large, billboard-like posters with dead or dying fetuses on them, showing exactly what happened to the unborn child in the process of an abortion. These posters were so large that they were almost as tall of some of our campus buildings. This means, basically, that you could not avoid seeing bloody and disfigured fetuses as you walked to class on the days when they were protesting. It was, in a word, disgusting. The last image I wanted to see as I trudged up the hill to class at eight o'clock in the morning was that. I could hardly stand it.

Members of Students for Life were mulling about on days that they were protesting, holding picket signs and passing out pamphlets on the topic of pro-life issues. As disturbing as those images were to see while I was just minding my own business on campus - and as disturbing as some of the words spoken by the protesters were to innocent bystanders walking on campus - I had to keep continually reminding myself that these students had the right to do this.

Student protest is a tricky issue. It can sometimes be a huge headache and a huge hassle, but we as student affairs professionals have to remember that these students have a Constitutional right to do this. As much as I dreaded the days when Students for Life were on campus, I had to remember - as did all members of UEC - that if I wanted to protest an issue, I had the right to just as much as they did.

One of the best parts about our country is that we are allowed to have whatever opinion we want about whatever we want. We have to respect that and allow that to be true on our college campuses. We can dictate time, place, and manner but we cannot dictate what student protesters are protesting about. This may be frustrating at times, but the roots of this issue go as deep as our fundamental American beliefs.

I know that I will have to deal with this issue as a student affairs professional, and thankfully I am ready for it because of my prior experience with UEC. I have to continually and constantly keep in mind that everyone deserves a fair shake, and I will give all students that as a student affairs professional.

Restorative Justice - A Little Bit Late

I went on vacation last week and had little to no access to E-mail while I was gone. By the time I finally checked my E-mail and found our blog topic there, Thursday's class had long gone by and the weekend was nearly over. Even though I didn't get the opportunity to talk about this week's blog topic in class, I would still like to say a couple of words about the topic, restorative justice.

Restorative justice has been the buzzword around the Dean of Students' Judicial Affairs Office for the last few weeks. Last month, the three staff members of the Judicial Affairs Office attended a conference where restorative justice was an agenda item. Since returning back to Ole Miss, they have been talking about embarking on a philosophical shift in their office to implement aspects of restorative justice into the office's everyday workings. I am particularly close to one Judicial Affairs staff member, and he has spoken to me numerous times about how much he is in favor of this philosophical shift to restorative justice and how good it could potentially be for the university.

I myself am in love with the concept of restorative justice. Slapping sanctions on students who do wrong on college campuses are just allowing them to do the bare minimum of what they need to do to clear their record, without teaching them that what they did was fundamentally wrong and without showing them who their actions hurt. If students can see who they affected by their actions - can really see who they hurt - their actions will become more real and they will be less likely to repeat them. In my opinion, an apology goes a long way, and restoring justice to those who justice was taken from is the perfect way to make up for the crime committed.

Let's say a student steals a composite from a fraternity house. (This is a situation that happens quite frequently, by the way.) Instead of sanctioning the student to ten hours of community service - which they will begrudgingly do and learn nothing from - it would be so much better for the student and for the members of the fraternity that student stole from if the student in trouble could publicly apologize to the chapter, express his remorse, return the composite, and then do something to better the fraternity. This could be anything as simple as taking care of the fraternity's lawn for a month to putting on a leadership program for new members of the chapter. Wouldn't that be so much better for all parties involved - the perpetrator and the victims - if everyone could learn something from the mistake?

So, in short, I am a proponent of restorative justice and I am excited to see Ole Miss hopefully implement it in our Judicial Affairs Office.