Raechele Pope:
And I knew I had found my professional home after I graduated. Back when the earth was still cooling, I moved to my first professional role out in the Midwest at Illinois State University. And I worked in an amazing residence hall life program. And again, I was struck by the professional development. In fact, that’s what sold me, right. We would get professional development every Thursday for about two hours. And then the following Tuesday, we were supposed to deliver a shortened version of that professional development for our RAs. And I was in heaven. I was learning so much and also learning how to train. So I was there for a while. Seven or eight years decided I needed to go back and get my doctorate because I wanted to be a vice president of student affairs. And I wanted to make a difference in the lives of students.

Heather Shea:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Heather Shea. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and our restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Today, I am super excited to be revealing a new member of the student affairs. Now host team in a moment. We’ll welcome her to the show, but first I need to give a short introduction to our sponsor for this bonus episode.

Heather Shea:
This episode is sponsored by Colorado State University ONLINE, now offering a fully online Master of Science in Student Affairs. This program will help you gain the professional competencies, knowledge, and experience to succeed as a higher education administrator. You will earn the same master’s degree and learn from the same FACULTY as CSU’s on-campus students. Learn more at online.colostate.edu.

Heather Shea:
As I mentioned, I am your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers and I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan near the campus of Michigan State University, where I work in the division of student affairs and teach in the student affairs administration MBA program. MSU occupies the ancestral Homeland of the international Bay three fires, Confederacy of Ojibuay, Ottawa, and Pottawatomie peoples. So now let’s get to the conversation for today. I am thrilled to welcome to student affairs. Now, a scholar, an author, and a student affairs educator who truly needs no introduction, the newest member of our host team, Dr. Raechele Pope. Welcome Raechele.

Raechele Pope:
Hi there. Thanks for having me on Student Affairs Now. Yes. As you said, my name is Raechele Pope. My pronouns are she her hers, and currently I’m the associate Dean for faculty and student affairs and the chief diversity officer for the graduate school of education at the University of Buffalo. I’m also an associate professor in the higher ed and student affairs program. The University of Buffalo is on the unceded land of the Haude and the Shawnee people.

Heather Shea:
Well, I am so excited to talk with you today. Learn more about you, your pathway into and through the field, and also hear a little bit about the different episodes that you have in the works and all the ways that your contribution will to be felt in the profession as, as a new host on Student Affairs Now. So tell us a little bit about kind of, you know, what has been your pathway into and through student affairs. And talk a little bit about, you know, kind of what you’ve been up to recently, but then go back and tell us a little bit about your journey too.

Raechele Pope:
Well, having been in the field this long, my origin story, so to speak is a rather long one. It started when I became an RA, like so many of us in student affairs. And one thing that was different about me than my peers is I think I really resonated with the training and the professional development that I received in that role. I really loved how we were learning, how people grow and develop. I thought it made sense. I even liked icebreakers, right? So say I totally do does right, but me, I loved them later. I remember I think it was my senior year. I was shocked to realize that people did this as a profession that student affairs could be a career. So I applied to the graduate program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and that’s where I had done my undergraduate.

Raechele Pope:
And I knew I had found my professional home after I graduated. Back when the earth was still cooling, I moved to my first professional role out in the Midwest at Illinois State University. And I worked in an amazing residence hall life program. And again, I was struck by the professional development. In fact, that’s what sold me, right. We would get professional development every Thursday for about two hours. And then the following Tuesday, we were supposed to deliver a shortened version of that professional development for our RAs. And I was in heaven. I was learning so much and also learning how to train. So I was there for a while. Seven or eight years decided I needed to go back and get my doctorate because I wanted to be a vice president of student affairs. And I wanted to make a difference in the lives of students.

Raechele Pope:
And at this campus, we were already committed to what we’re now calling DEI issues, diversity equity and inclusion issues. And in fact, at Illinois State University, they tied it to our performance appraisals. And I thought that was jaw dropping. Nobody else was doing that. We were just talking about how, what a good idea it was. So I looked around at programs and UMass Amherst had a program that wasn’t in higher ed or student affairs. It was actually in organization development or multicultural organization development. And that’s where I decided to go because I thought I could use my student affairs background my professional background and my master’s degree and really crafted. And so it was there that I decided I wanted to be a professor. You know, I thought as a vice-president, I could make a difference on the campus that I worked as a faculty member.

Raechele Pope:
I could make a difference on a lot of campuses because the students who graduated from my program would go off and do their things on other campuses. And so I did my coursework there and moved to Iowa to write my dissertation because that’s where my partner was living. And I completed it, got a position at Teacher’s College, Columbia University teaching in their student affairs program, that storied program that Esther Lloyd Jones started. And after several years I left there to be at the University of Buffalo where I was a faculty member and then moved into the position that I’m in now.

Heather Shea:
Well, I so first of all, I love how many parallel components there are to so many people, right. But specifically the RA to loving icebreakers pathway. That totally resonated for me. I also love that you had all this and experience because I think one of the things, and we can talk about this, you know, now is like, what is what is professional preparation like today and how do faculty who have had that background and experience working as a resident director, others you know, what do they bring to the profession? Definitely. But that, that will be a topic in just a few minutes, perhaps. I am really curious about, you know, why Student Affairs Now you have so many different ways that you can make an influence or make an impact, whether it’s through ACPA and or through other professional associations through writing. Why did you why were you interested? Why did you come to me and be like, Hey, I’m thinking about this. What do you think?

Raechele Pope:
You know I, at some level it was just dumb luck, right? I didn’t know what I was entering, but I watched over and over some of the podcasts from Student Affairs Now, but also some of your podcasts on your other video cast student affairs live, and that’s not that you and Keith were doing and you were doing it. And I thought about, Oh, I really wanted to do this. And then after you interviewed me and Amy Reynolds for our book that we were that we put out at the time, I thought I definitely love this serendipitously on my campus. I had been asked for these big major talks that we bring in, you know, Angela Davis or Bettina love, I’d been asked to do. Most recently, I’d been asked to host and then allow them to speak and then do the question and answer afterwards.

Raechele Pope:
And I really liked it. I got a lot of good feedback from it. And the most recent one, well, the two most recent ones were video because they happened within this year. And so I thought, you know, this is sort of fun. And I decided I was just going to put it out there and ask you, you know, I think I have some things to offer. Do you folks have room for me? Are you looking for another host? And I was thinking about this for a long time. My daughter says, mom, we need to just put out into the atmosphere, what we want. And your job is to ask it’s somebody else’s job to say yes or no. So I did it. And you folks are so gracious.

Heather Shea:
Oh, we were like, I mean, you, we told you a little bit about this in the interview process, which was really more of a, let’s just talk to her and make sure we’re not like putting her on this pedestal and you know, all of that. But honestly, we were like, Raechele Pope was to be in our club, like we should be wanting to be in her club. Right. so we were so honored and we’re, so, I mean, this is an amazing opportunity for all of us to, to continue to learn from you. And I think so far, hopefully so far, you’ve already found that this community to be one that everybody is like, we’re all in it, right? Like we all bring our whole hearts to this to this podcast. So I have no doubt you are going to contribute so much in our conversations. Even in our host meetings on Thursdays have been so rich and generative, and I know you have so many cool ideas kind of percolating, even from the very beginning, you’re like, I could do this and I can think about this and dah, dah, dah. So give us a little bit of a preview of what kinds of things, topics, areas you want to explore.

Raechele Pope:
Sure. You know, some of the things that I just want to say, one thing, I think this medium is so important too. And so this is the right medium at the right time for so many people, you know, there are people who are multitasking nonstop. And so to be able to learn as they’re jogging or learn as they’re filing in their office, I think is really amazing. And my students always love the opportunity to, they want to read the material, but they also want to hear people talk about it. And this gives that opportunity. I’m really excited about the first episodes that I’m getting to do, which is on racial healing on campuses. I find that in higher education, well, it’s probably true in all of society. We’ve been engaging in these incomplete and short-sighted conversations about race and racism for decades. So many campuses are really starting to really talk about how to combat racism or how to become anti-racist as if that’s the final goal.

Raechele Pope:
That’s the destination. I think that’s a step along the way, because we have to be something in addition to what we’re not right. So we’re not racist, but what are we going to be? And we haven’t explored those conversations. And we never think about really what happens next or how to center racial healing or liberation in our work. And I think that has two parts. One is we talk about wanting to change structures and change systems, but until we do that internal work and do our own healing, I don’t think that can happen until we really get in there and examine our histories and our experiences and for people of color, there’s a different healing process then for white folks around this, but it has to happen. We have to be able to talk about it. So then we can identify those systems and structures we want to change.

Raechele Pope:
So in the process of having these thoughts, I ran across Anneliese Singh’s book. Anneliese Singh is a psychologist, and she was the past president of division 17 of APA. And my partner, Amy Reynolds worked closely with her when she was the president of that division. And Amy’s going to be the president now. So they work together. Please want a book on racial, the racial healing handbook. And it’s really a handbook where people get to read something, think about it. Like let’s say, they’re reading about identity development, racial identity development, and then write about it. What were those first memories? How do those memories come into today? And I am so excited to talk to her about this book and this process, and we’re doing some work with this, with my own faculty in my program. We decided to use this book as a beginning for us to start talking about these things. So I’m really excited about that one. I have a second one that I’m really excited about is Kris Renn and, and Bob Reason, you know two rockstars in student affairs, right to serious scholars and their new book is coming out on college students in the US characteristics, experiences and outcomes. And I have an opportunity to talk with them. So those will be the first two episodes that I do. And I’m just thrilled to be able to sit with these folks.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. I can’t tell you how excited I am about both of those and both, you know, for similar and different reasons, right. And the applicability to both of those topics, to both our current context in this moment, you know, in our institutions, we are struggling. I think speaking from Michigan State University, really struggling with what are the tools and how can we bring about that healing and liberation, but also I think wrestling with what do our students need and how do we both do that work individually, but also knowing more about what college students are, you know, addressing today. So Chris and Bob’s book I have no doubt will be used in many classrooms, right? So like that would be perfect kind of parallel episode to, to compliment that. One of the things that I particularly love about Student Affairs Now, and the way that we explore topics is the ways that they can be, you know, paired with curriculum or paired with a professional development experience that faculty and staff or students grad students are participating in. And I see both of those, but I know you’ve talked about other ideas around kind of what are, what do we need to provide to supplement kind of the classroom experience. And so I don’t know if you have other topics that you’re kind of like, it would be really interesting if we could do a top conversation around something curricular right up, right.

Raechele Pope:
I mean, if we think about the classes that are taught in every student affairs program, across the nation, it’d be really nice to identify some of those issues, this little pickup place that someone can grab a 30 or 45 minute session to say, okay, let’s expand this. We’ve talked about this, we’ve read about it. Now let’s use this book to do that. And I think the Kris Renn and Bob Reason book will be a perfect opportunity to do that. And then to ask those critical questions, you know, we’re talking about characteristics of college students. We’ve been talking about it all the time, but the campus hasn’t changed really, right. You know, the same campus, but we keep saying, Oh, these students are going to really change the campus. Well, it hasn’t happened yet. What will it take? What do we need to know? And so those are some of the conversations we can have from it. I’d love to, as a faculty member, continue talking with faculty and here have them tell us, this is a piece that I could really use a discussion on. And then we’d go out and say, let’s see if we can help make that happen to spark discussion in the classroom. I know you haven’t had the same experience in your, you’re always looking for things to, to make it more real or to achieve a different voice than our own voices in there talking.

Heather Shea:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I feel like sometimes when you have these names on front of books, you just don’t really know the person behind. Right. And so it’s fascinating. I think one of the episodes that I did on student affairs live was the student development theory book. And the authors of that, and it was fascinating conversation. One because each of those individuals also Kris Renn, but Stephen, John Quaye and Lori Patton Davis like when, when I was talking with them, I was like, Oh my gosh, these individuals themselves are so interesting. And so for students to be able to kind of strip away some of that mystique makes it feel a little bit more like you’re a real person. So I have to warn you when people see you on student affairs. Now they’re going to be like, at conferences, go, you know, all of a sudden you’ll have this like visible recognition and you know, kind of thing. Oh, I seen her in places. So that’s one of the kind of cool side effects, I guess, of being a host on/

Raechele Pope:
You know, we’re reading about Susan Komives or, or oh, his name Don Kramer or whoever was for reading at the time, and then you’d see them in the conference or in the elevator and you see their name and you’re like flip, Oh my God, it just wasn’t there. And I found myself go, and I am such a geek. I found myself going conference sessions that they were presenting, who are they? What does their voice sound like? And I find myself in what I’m reading about someone who’s put out a book, whether it’s in student affairs or whatever, I’m constantly Googling them because we can now, so I can see who they are. See if I can find a video that they’ve done. I think it tells me something about what I’m reading. So I hope students are doing that. I hope professionals who are also using these to advance their own development and education are using it too.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about that, cause I know you and Amy and John Mueller published a book, we talked about this prior on on a previous episode of then Student Affairs Now around multicultural competence and student affairs. Do you have any, any other writing projects that you’re working on these days or, or articles that you’ve just recently done that you kind of are also kind of, I know you’re engaged in scholarship in lots of different ways. So talk to me about other kinds of topics that you’re interested in exploring.

Raechele Pope:
It’s really funny. I’ll tell you about two different things I’m doing, but it’s funny because I never remember the names of things that I wrote. So in fact, if we’re doing stuff, if we’re covering something in my class about something that I wrote, I have to reread it because I just, the hold onto it, I guess, in a room in there. I wrote a couple of these, there’s a piece coming out on sort of like race and racial identity and reframing race and racial identity in a book. That’s an edited book by Charmaine on, and it’s really about what race and racial identity and all of that means in this moment, how was it drafted and changing? So I did that one with Amy and then, Oh, and one of my doctoral students, Chad Robinson, Chad Robinson was also an author on that piece and really brought some important stuff to that chapter.

Raechele Pope:
And then Amy, John, and I did something in a more recent issue of college student development about changing structures in higher education, sort of an OD approach, a multicultural relation development approach, changing paradigms, but the piece I’m working on now, we’re doing some research. Amy and I are doing this research, one of her doctoral students in counseling psychology. And again, Chad Robinson, who’s in student affairs in higher education. We’re doing a study where we’re looking at the people who are doing DEI work on college campuses in student affairs and in broader higher ed on the campus and looking at racial battle fatigue And burnout and trying to understand we can rejuvenate how we can continue. And especially during this period, this last year has been just really rough on people in those roles. So we’re in the process of doing collecting data on that right now. So that’s just a fascinating piece for us right now.

Heather Shea:
That would be really interesting. I took a class during my doc program where we read a bunch of Sarah Ahmed her work on being included. And then I just, I just felt like she really spoke to some of those experiences I had as a diversity, as a diversity worker, she calls. And yeah, I, so that sounds like a really fascinating project. I like how many different frames you’re approaching conversations from, right? So it’s like the lens of, and then also from this other vantage point and the applicability of this work, I think is really important. It also seems like you have kind of this amazing learning community and this like generative scholar practitioner space. And, and some of that I know like transforms over time. One of the things that I, I know I am particularly excited about you joining our team is kind of our ability to kind of glean on to that learning community a little bit, continue to learn from you. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how you fostered those relationships over time, how you’ve created kind of that the mutually, you know, collaborative writing projects or research projects, or, and I know you and Amy and John of course have a, have a longstanding relationship together and writing together, but I’d be curious your thoughts on that.

Raechele Pope:
Yeah. I sometimes don’t think it’s quite open enough and it’s purely out of a time process. I, I can speak to Amy and John in shorthand. I can know how they’re going to write something at this point in our relationship and know what editing it may or may not need. I can count on that. And with our lives being so busy, that’s so important to me. So every once in a while someone will ask me to write a chapter in a book that they’re doing and then say, Oh, we want you to write with this person. And it just makes my heart sink. And it has nothing to do with that person has, I don’t have time to learn someone else’s style or or to bypass the shorthand and I have to get myself out of that. So sometimes I feel really badly about that. I look at other people who do that so easily, and I think I lose opportunities to learn from other people. But I’ve always tried to be really good about providing opportunities for my students to write with me when they can’t. In fact, sometimes folks would ask to write I’d give a call or an email from a journal saying, would you do a book review for us? And I, my response was often, no,

Raechele Pope:
I’m too busy that, you know, like in that rank so low on faculty things, even though I’m writing get all kinds of reviews to my students and stuff. But then I started telling my doctoral students, if you want a writing opportunity at a first year doctoral student or a final year master’s student, if you want a writing opportunity, let me know. And then I w when I got one of those, I would involve a student in that process. I look at some of my colleagues, some of the people that I really feel are my mentors, you know they might be younger than me and they’re my mentors. And I see how many people they write with and how they include so many people. I really see that as a growth edge for me. You know, I look at Susan Jones that way. I look at Lori Patton Davis. I mean, every time I look at an article, Lori is writing with somebody else and I’m thinking I have got to open up more to make that possible. And I, and I can’t be any busier than Lori Patton Davis. Right. So I’m looking at all of these people that do this, and I welcome opportunities to be included and I want to include them.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that so much. And I have been really fortunate to have a faculty member, my faculty advisor, Kris Renn, who is a bit like the Kris Renn fan club here to also invite me to coauthor. And it was such an fascinating and important learning experience for me as a writer, but also the ability for her to add, add me to, you know, as a, as a voice to some of the work that she’s, that she’s been asked to contribute to. So I think that that’s a fun project to do, but I can imagine, right? Like I’m not on the other side of that, but like learning how other peoples can construct their work and you know, what their thought processes are writing in a group is hard. And it’s in fact at five o’clock today, I have a coauthor, we have a book chapter that we’re trying to finish up and we’ve been working on a couple of things around co-curricular stuff. And so that’s, that’s my later, after we finished talking, I’m going to be talking to coauthors about a shared project, so.

Raechele Pope:
Well your scholarship, and what’s just written to think about it. I have no problems presenting with it.

Heather Shea:
Yeah.

Raechele Pope:
That is absolute scholarship. We need to talk about these kinds of public scholarship that we’re doing. So there’s other ways it’s just in the writing, because that is such an arduous process for me.

Heather Shea:
It is tedious.

Raechele Pope:
I realize how empowering it is to be included. And so I just need to do that more.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. Early. So I, this is a funny story. I don’t know that I shared this with you. I was working on, I was working on a presentation for, I think our prevention, outreach and education office on campus. And it was all about how we need to use the social change model of leadership development to you know, to construct our prevention initiatives and think about it, the individual group. So I’m like, I should pull open that original document. And then I’m like looking through it. It was like right at the time where we were talking with you and I’m like, she got the ensemble. I like tell, talk a talk about that experience. I’m just really curious about, cause that, I mean, that document is one of those like foundational pieces. And you know, the social change model, it’s like, you know, Harry and all of the things that kind of came out of that. What was that like

Raechele Pope:
An amazing experience? That was one of those opportunities that, you know, Susan Komivez has been one of my mentors forever. I was never a student of Susan Komivez. I met Susan Komivez because we were bringing in a speaker for some conference when I was a second year grad student master’s student at IUP and Susan was going to be our keynote speaker. And I picked her up at the airport and I got to know her and she was just amazing. I mean, I thought, Oh, this is student affairs. Well, every year at the conference, since then, she always stopped and talked to me and made a point of engaging with me in these really powerful ways. And she has been a mentor in so many ways, and I owe so much to her well in this Susan Komivez fashion, Sandy Alexander Aston and Helen Aston were putting together this thing about a social change model.

Raechele Pope:
They didn’t have a title for it yet, but we needed to do leadership differently. And Susan was one of the people they were going to involve and they asked her, who else should we be involved? And I was one of those names that came out of her mouth because of that. I got to meet Sandy Aston. I got to engage with Helen Aston, and, and the other, all of these other folks that were on this group, we came together in right outside of LA and worked for like this weekend period doing this work they brought us all in. We came back and it was just, it got the name of an ensemble because of how we talked about these topics and how we all joined in and followed the same melody and theme. It was just an amazing experience. And then the work that continues to grow from that, I’m just always so stunned.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. So when I mentioned that this is a funny kind of parallel piece, you know, in terms of alternative universes, right. So then we’re having this side conversation with the other hosts about, you know, we have this potential new host joining student affairs now. And Glenn DeGuzman, one of the other hosts on Student Affairs Now wrote his dissertation about the social change. So he was like wow!

Heather Shea:
The moment again, where we were like, wow, this is going to be such a phenomenal experience. But when I think about communities and the way that student affairs is, it’s both small. And also it’s, there’s so much changing and growing and, you know, as somebody who’s a new faculty member I’ve been in the, as a professional for many years, but finished my PhD and now teach in our master’s program. I’m really thinking about like, what is this field becoming? And how, as a faculty member, have you kind of thought a little bit about you know, how do we prepare new professionals, new student affairs educators to wade, into difficult topics, do their own kind of identity work to think a little bit about the organizations that they’re going to be joining because these are not, you know, these are not all millennials, right. Or the multi-generational environments. I’d love to hear a little bit about how you think of your role as a preparer of the next generation.

Raechele Pope:
Yeah. You know, had you asked me this a week ago? I think my response would have been a little different. I was just so moved by an event that I just attended. This past Saturday, there was a gathering for Susan Jones’ retirement from Ohio State. So she retired and these people came from all over. It was a virtual thing and did a tribute to her work. I think it’s called, Oh, I can’t think of the words that it is fed shift or something like that. I have a book that actually talks about what it is to, and I was struck by one thing in particular, her very first RA supervisor was at this meeting and she talked, so we started with the beginning. Right. And she talked about Susan and that RA staff, she remembered that staff. Now, what was fascinating to me about that was 50% of that RA staff went into the field of student affairs.

Raechele Pope:
Wow. And then so many of them are in these, you know, there’s a president of a college, there’s a VP or two or whatever. And then there’s, you know, the esteem, Susan Jones, of course. So all of this, and I’m thinking, you know, what do we even talk about student affairs enough? And this field enough to help students make the connection that we all made at some point that, wow, this is a profession that something that she was doing was showing these folks that this was a valuable profession to enter. Now, the reason that change struck me so much. I mean, just aside from the fact that it was 50% well, I’m hearing, you know, cause you can see it so much. A lot of folks who are frustrated with student affairs and there’s a lot of negative. And, you know, from that group that comes in and leaves fairly quickly that their needs and goals and expectations aren’t being met.

Raechele Pope:
And I want to do more to find out why, because I think that that’s a small piece of what you asked about how we’re changing, but what aren’t we doing? What are we showing? And I think right now that we’ve gotten so invested in the mechanics of what we do, the administration of what we do, that we forgot about the things that we’re really about making a difference. One of my colleagues, Nate Donbarnett, who’s our department chair and he’s a member of the higher ed program. He always says, what difference? This is a student, the question he asks all of our students, what difference do you want to make? And I think we are so far from that question, that that’s how we have to really change and start thinking about that, that this is a field that makes a difference. Now we all know it, but I think somehow between the beginning of entering the profession or thinking about the profession to the middle, we somehow lose and help students, we don’t help students realize that that’s important. So I hope that’s one thing we get back to. I think that that’s something unique.

Heather Shea:
I just want to say one thing about that. Cause I’ve thought about this a lot as our campus, you know, and part of it is very performative, right? Like all of our work is now within these little boxes on our screens. And I think about the, you know, the work, what is the work, you know, is it showing up in these spaces and having these performative meetings? And I call, I’ll put all that under the bucket of like, administrivia right. Like you just have to do all of these things that show up and all that. But early in my career, I adopted the phrase, like if I have one good one good conversation with a student in a day, that’s been a great day of work. Right. So like having one good conversation, like, okay, I, that I can’t discount that the importance of those building those relationships and connecting with students around what their needs are.

Heather Shea:
And I know as our roles change, like we move maybe into positions that have less student contact. Now I have more contact with master’s students, which I have the same kind of feeling about. But I do think that that’s part of we are really bogged down by the administrivia and all of the pieces and boxes we have to check. And I feel a little bit like the K-12 classroom movement, right. Where we’re like, look thinking about test preparation and standards and all of that, like this isn’t what student affairs is, was meant to be. Right. Right. So, yeah,

Raechele Pope:
Emphasizing that, I think because it’s quantifiable, did you get the paper right? Did you not. As opposed to what are those differences? And I believe it’s an emphasis change. It’s how do we make, for me it’s like with multicultural competence, you know, we’ve stopped using the language of diversity and jumped to social justice without really having people say, do I have the skills, the knowledge, the ability, the action to really make social change possible? No, but I’ve got all the language, right. That we’ve got all this work that we’re doing, but we’re really not focused on and helping people make that difference.

Heather Shea:
Well, I know I, for all of the folks who will listen to episodes that you’re a part of, we are going to learn so much from you and I already am so grateful for the time that we’ve been able to spend today, but also just in the conversations that we’ve had. It will be amazing to introduce you. So now as of today, right, when this episode drops that will be official.

Heather Shea:
And so we can start kind of thinking more broadly. I, I know that we end every episode with this question, so I’m going to jump to that, but we can, you know, go in whatever direction you’d like when we thought of this podcast, we really thought about this idea of timeliness. And so the podcast is called Student Affairs Now. And we always ask our panelists, our guests what are you pondering questioning troubling thinking about now? Either as a result of our conversation or just broadly based on world events local events things you’re reading. Yeah. I’ll put that out there.

Raechele Pope:
I love this question. I also love your generosity and the generosity of, of Glenn and Keith and Susanain opening this space. I have never felt more welcomed, you know, so we just need to bottle this and this is how we do this. Yeah. For other people, you know.

Raechele Pope:
I can’t stop pondering, you know, all that’s going on and what’s happening around us is affecting us so much. You know, I’m living through these two pandemics right now. COVID and racism, you know racism not being new, but still being a pandemic. And COVID really trying to hold on and all kinds of interesting ways. And so I’m really struck by what that means for us in the future. What happens after we’ve ended the COVID pandemic? You know, there’s a lot of questions about what we go back to normal. Well, normal didn’t always work, so where do we want to go? What can we do? Will we squander this opportunity to be different, will we squander this opportunity to think differently to do our work differently? I hope not. And so those are some of the questions that, that keep me up at night, you know, how do we, so we’re not in zoom anymore. Yeah. That, that shouldn’t be the end of our conversation about this. It should be the beginning of our conversations about this.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the episode that Keith hosted about restore, evolve, transform just really spoke to me to this need, to not question everything. Cause we certainly do need to restore some things, but like truly, I think our institutions have a moment where, you know, of things have been unhinged or unbroken, you know, like we’re unstuck for this like period of time where we might be able to nudge you know, our institutions in a slightly different direction, I think for the better of, and for a more equitable environment learning environment for students is my hope. Yeah, it’s, that’s definitely an ongoing conversation. Our campus is certainly exploring, like, what does it look like for students to return? What happens if students aren’t vaccinated? What happens if we have, you know, further complications? Yeah, it’s going to be something I think that we continue to ponder think about, I think at the end of the day.

Heather Shea:
And I think when Keith and Glenn and Susana and I, and, and now you kind of think about like, what does student affairs contribute to our campus environment? And then what does this podcast kind of do in terms of restoring that hope that we have, that we really do student affairs as a function on our campus, but also as a mindset and as a profession, it’s it matters. And so I am really grateful that you are taking the time out of your busy schedule and putting energy and emotional labor and all of the things that are required to be a part of this you know, broadly, as well as the mini lit reviews that you do for every single episode. I am so grateful for you doing that and for offering to join us. Cause it’s been, it’s going to be a fun collaboration over the next, over the next, who knows how long, maybe forever. So

Raechele Pope:
I am thrilled, absolutely thrilled and cannot wait to, to be able to contribute and to, you know, to what you folks have already done to contribute to this conversation is so powerful. And to be able to add just a little bit to that, to join you in the conversation is a real gift. Thank you.

Heather Shea:
Well, thank you so much, Raechele. Thank you to everybody who’s watching today. I hope that when you listened to this episode, you’ll check out all of the things that are in our archives. Certainly we dropped names of several different episodes that we’ve featured already, including a fabulous conversation with Susan Komivez which I think picked up on several of the things that you mentioned as well. you can find those episodes on our websites. Do you know, fairs now.com and you can receive reminders about this and all of our other episodes by subscribing to our newsletter. if you are a podcast listener, if you subscribe share on social or even leave a five-star review, I think we have 12, five star reviews at this point. So somebody is listening to our, our pitch. thank you. It really helps us bring these conversations to you and build our learning community. again, I’m Heather Shea, thanks again to Raechele. so excited for you to be joining us and for everybody watching and listening, make account everybody.

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