Neil E. Golemo
Howdy. Welcome to Here’s the Story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experiences of those who are shaping the field every day. My name is Neil E. Golemo. I use the he, him, he, him, series of proton pronouns, and I’m blessed to serve as the Director of Campus living and learning on Texas A and M University. I’m a father, husband and a son over here, just trying to do my best, to do a little good, or get caught trying. And I’m here with my co host.

J.T. Snipes
I’m J.T. snipes. My pronouns are he? Him his? I am an Associate Professor and Chair of the educational leadership department at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and I’m here trying my best to live as a free black man in a world that would have me live otherwise.

Neil E. Golemo
And real quick, we’d like to thank our sponsor, Evolve. Evolve help senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience. Today, I am so excited to introduce my friend Ardell Sanders, who serves as the AVP for student engagement and experience, Indiana State and beautiful Terre Haute. J.T., I know you meet people every once in a while where you just kind of vibe, like right off the bat, like you’ve only talked a couple times, but it feels like you’ve known each other forever. I have to say, that is how I felt with Ardell. And then we got paired up together, and I think we spend more time, just like, chit chatting, than actually working, and I’m not even sorry about it. So

J.T. Snipes
Ardell, awesome. Where did you guys meet?

Neil E. Golemo
We met in through ICA, the Institute for the curricular approach through ACPA. And our Dell has been an OG with that forever. And I’m new I’m new money right now, hey, well,

J.T. Snipes
I’m excited to hear this story from new fast friends.

Neil E. Golemo
Ardell, come on.

Ardell Sanders
Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me here. I appreciate being here. But J.T., do not let Neil fool you into thinking that he’s like some brand new, fresh out of the box, like just coming into onto the scene? No, no, no. He has provided great, great, great experience knowledge, and is not afraid to speak up. And that’s what we’ve always needed on faculty for the Institute on the curricular approach.

J.T. Snipes
How much did he pay you to say that?

Ardell Sanders
Nothing. I’m still waiting on the check. Hopefully it shows up in a

Neil E. Golemo
minute. But that’s a really nice way of saying he won’t shut up. But yeah, I’ll take it absolutely not about not at all.

Ardell Sanders
This has been a phenomenal connection and really happy to be here. And you know, for me, one of the things when I think about telling a story. That’s one of the things that actually Neil and I work together on in helping people figure out how to craft that, how to tell that their story. And I had to think back on what story I wanted to tell and the story that I came up with. All it kept coming back to leadership. And so I’m going to put a quick warning out there for anybody that may have any type of feelings around you know, the the events that happen in 2020 well, really 2019 going into 2020 so if that’s how you’re feeling, then just be ready, because imma talk a little bit about that. But when I go back to I’m going to go all the way back to January of 2020 and we have been hearing probably for about a month at that point, if you were paying attention, some people probably weren’t paying attention, but I wasn’t paying attention, and listening to this, this, they called it a disease, they called it a virus. They called it a bunch of different things. And we, you know, we talked about COVID, and what that was, it didn’t have that name in the beginning. It was the Coronavirus coming out of somewhere in China is what we what we thought and what we believe we knew. Um, but what I was figuring out is that it left China and they had now been in different parts of the world. We didn’t know where would land or how big it was going to get, but we started to see that people were dying as a result of of this virus, and for me, I didn’t have a natural fear of it, because it wasn’t at my doorstep yet. But I said, I think just in case, we probably need to be ready, just in case something pops up. I had no idea or and could not have even fathomed that it would turn into the the pandemic that it became. And so in January of 2020, I started looking at any literature, any research, anything that was out there about this novel Coronavirus, and trying to figure out what that was. All about. I’m watching what the symptoms were. I’m watching how many people got sick from it. I’m watching how many people die from it. Now, all of these stats, I don’t know how accurate they are, because they’re coming out of different countries. At this point in the United States, there have been no first case just at that point, at least, that we knew about. And then eventually the first case came out, and we had a confirmed case of COVID 19 right here in the United States, and coincidentally, South Korea also had their first case same day. And so, like I’m I’m trying to watch these things. And I said, let me get information coming from South Korea. Imma, get as much information here in the United States. I’m watching the World Health Organization. I’m watching what we were doing with the CDC, and trying to just figure it out. And I never thought that this would be the biggest learning tool for me in the entirety of my career. And what I mean by that is, fast forward a few months. Fast forward a couple months March. We kind of find out from the world, the whole country is shutting down, but now most of the rest of the world is shutting down, and we go into a lockdown. Well, I didn’t stop working at that point on what this was going to be, because I said at some point we’re going to come back, and we’re being told to remember, at this point, there are people who are afraid that if you see somebody with COVID, you’re going to spontaneously combust and die. And everyone’s afraid of this thing at this point, and so I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to reconcile. Reconcile that we’re asking students 18 to 22 and beyond to come back to a campus where we don’t know if we can keep them safe. So even though we send everyone home at some point, we start coming back into the office, and we’re making all these plans, and we have all the best examples and things that we’re trying to pull together and working on all of this and just hoping that we don’t get our first case. Well, in June of 2020, we got our first case, and when that happened, it shook me a little bit, because the reality set in that here’s this disease that we know that people were getting very sick from, and in some cases, dying from. I have a student that is now potentially infected and this, knock on wood. Thank God that person did not have COVID at that at that point, but they have been contact, traced and told that they were a close contact, to be honest, in the beginning, I didn’t even I didn’t even know what that meant. So looking at all of the material, trying to figure out what’s going on, how are we supposed to figure out how to protect these students? And after that first student, there were more students, and this is all over the summer, my view. So these are folks who are on campus, close contacts, or have they’re symptomatic, and then eventually we get our first actual confirmed case. We decided we’re going to separate people, and there was a very strategic decision that I kind of forced our folks to do. There were not a lot of people who were interested in working the front lines of COVID just I’ll be honest. And so from my first day on it, I was in it for 48 straight days, no days off. I’ve worked from sun up to sun down every day. There were times where I may have gotten two to three hours of sleep, because when I’m saying that it was full service, it was full service and that we put people into a space. So I would go and get the van that we transported them in which we called the COVID, pardon the pun, pardon the pun. But that’s what it was, the COVID. And I would transport, I would transport people from whichever residence hall or apartment they were in to the location where we had students that were going to be in either quarantine or isolation. And we define quarantine as those students who were close contacts, but not symptomatic. And then when we define isolation as they were confirmed case of COVID, whether symptomatic or not or they were just symptomatic, and we put all of those folks in a different location. So in doing this, what I figured out is that it was going to take a lot of labor to do it so but I couldn’t have it fall on the people who were taking care of the rest of the people. And for me, that was the important piece. And so when we have people that signed up for these jobs, they did not sign up to become hospital workers, they did. They signed up to try to do student development. They signed up to take care of students in a variety of other ways. And so I did not want to put them in a position unless they were looking to volunteer. We we asked, we asked if folks want to volunteer, and very few people raise their hands. Eventually, I got some relief. And and two of my colleagues, Katie you dick and Jason Johnson, they jumped in and prayed with me, and they were on the front lines with me every day. And obviously COVID stuck around for a very long time. Eventually, we got a good handle on it. We put a system in place, but we stuck with the model of being full service for at the very least the first year, year and a half, until we were able to we’re till, until the world kind of figure out people who had COVID we can manage without it being a death sentence. There were. Were other things that came in, obviously the vaccine. There were other treatments and different ways of people taking care of themselves so but we shifted every time the CDC shifted every time something else happened. We went from 14 days of quarantine down to like 10 days, and then down to five days. And we shifted every single time. But the lessons that I learned were huge, and there were some big ones. And one of the ones is, how do you take care of those people that are in your child? And for me, that decision to not put our folks on the front lines and have it be our senior leadership folks that did that, because we also have behind the scenes. We have people putting together packets of things that would be available for students in their in their living space that we were putting them in, because we’re asking them to to go into a room or an apartment and stay there, and that that was very hard. How are we protecting students? From a mental health standpoint, we have folks who were calling and making those phone calls from behind the scene, doing check ins on them. We’re having folks that during those check ins, someone would say, you know, I kind of have a little bit of a fever. Alright, we’re going to get you some aspirin up there. We’ll bring whatever it takes to, you know, whatever we needed to do. So when I say full service, we did this. And so we were able to incorporate more members of our team without putting them in harm’s way. So there were only a handful of us that were in those spaces, and ironically, only two of the three of us at the time actually got COVID. Now, I’m a four time COVID Loser at this point, but that’s okay. That’s okay. You know, it was, it was the it was part of the payment to take care of my people. And so that was one of the biggest, most important lessons that I remembered coming out of, like, everything related to COVID. A couple other things is, you know, protecting the frontline staffing was important for me to do that because I believe that transparency and how we do work that helps build trust. So that helped us on the back end, our people did also did not get furloughed, and so then we kept many of our team both at the live in staff level, and then later at our central staff level, we kept a lot of those folks. I figured out that how, you know, being adaptable was essential. I had to be able to adapt. I didn’t know how to build this thing out. And so as we built it together, our team that put it together was was phenomenal and but we had to make some shifts along the way, and so all of those things were great for us, but I would say that the the biggest lesson that I took out of all of this, like out of everything related to COVID, was that

Ardell Sanders
it was never about Me. And one of the things that I figured out is that if it was about me, I would have left this job back when they first came up. I would have left at that time. If I wanted to make it about me, I would have never worked to try to put try to protect other people and take it. And so what I realized about leadership, at least my brand of leadership, is that the second I make it about me, I’m doing a bad job, even if I get good results. And so it can never be about me first. It always has to be about those that I serve and those in my charge. And I will take the results on that every single time, because the motive behind it is pure. And so those are just some of the lessons that I took away from COVID. So

Neil E. Golemo
you you did that, and you didn’t give that job to anybody else. Like, was because, like, you could tell yourself to do that, but had trouble saying that to anybody else.

Ardell Sanders
There were a couple things, so I’ll say and to try to protect people. So my supervisor wanted to be on the front lines, but at the time, there were some health challenges that made my supervisor more at risk than me, and we knew at the time which co morbidities were more higher risk for COVID, and what, what it’s danger could be to those folks. And so I chose to not allow her to be in that space, and fought hard against that. And so she did yeoman’s work on making sure that I have all the other resources I needed from behind the scenes. So when it came to having PPE when it came to having getting the van, when it came to making sure that we got meals that were delivered to the building so we can deliver them to the rooms. She did all of that structured work. I just told her what I needed, and she handled all of those things, ordering supplies and doing I didn’t have to worry about those pieces, because I was able to take care of the people. So it fit right into my leadership philosophy. If I’m on the front lines, then I need you to protect me and take care of me by getting me the things that I need. And she did that part of the job. I did it for the next levels, all the way through.

Neil E. Golemo
Man, you know, I I totally memory hold like the. Delivering meals and and, you know, all the things that you you learn really quickly, all the things it takes for a person to be a person, when you are trying to provide for every single need. That is, my chest is getting tight from thinking about it again.

Ardell Sanders
Yeah, and it is that right when you when you think about someone’s humanity, and how do you help them maintain some level of true humanity when you’ve taken away part of their independence, part of their freedom, um, asking someone to sit and quarantine when they feel perfectly healthy for two weeks. That is a tall task. That’s a tall task. And then we’re talking young people who they’re used to being out and about. And so there were lots of tears and lots of things that went into this, but it was for their protection at the time, based off of the information that we had available to us.

Neil E. Golemo
Did you have a lot of problems with folks? Because I remember, you know, we all talk about how it was a dark time, and, you know, it was, but also it doesn’t, you don’t have to dig too deep for me, at least, to get the stories. I mean, we have, we have students who, you worry about them being able to not prop their doors or, you know, sneak their significant others in after hours. And like, how are we going to get them to wear masks? But I’ll tell you, they did, and they did go into isolation when they needed to. And honestly, I mean, it’s Toki, but that’s an act of love. Like, you don’t do that because you feel like it, yep,

Ardell Sanders
no. And we did. We had, we had a few challenges. Not a lot, the vast majority of our students that went into quarantine and isolation housing, they toughed it out like they went through. They did what they what they were asked to do, and they stuck it out because we gave them kind of the narrative on the front end that this is as much for other people’s protection as it is for yours, but it’s also for you, and we don’t want to be the ones that have to tell like a loved one of yours that you’re in a hospital. Now, because we we allowed something to happen to you, and so we need you here so that we can help monitor, help you check ins, all of those things, but we had a few. We had the ones who, they would sneak someone in late at night, or they would, essentially, they snuck out themselves where they were ordered DoorDash, and they would go down and pick up the order themselves when they weren’t supposed to, you know, things like that that we were like, okay, we can provide assistance in A lot of these ways. And it’s just we had a few of those, but I don’t think we had too many that were only one that was really kind of egregious. You know, I won’t go into the details, because it is a student’s narrative, but, but like, really left the housing and it went back to their original room and and put other people at risk. And so we, we had one of those that we knew of

Neil E. Golemo
for sure. So how many, I wanna put that in perspective there, but you had one, because I’m trying to think we might have had a couple that were, you know, out there, but I mean, one out of how many students do you think kind of went through

Ardell Sanders
that? Yeah, a few 100. A few 100 for sure. Because in our time, and it may have been over, may have been over 1000 I, you know, I try not to back on how many people we had in those spaces, but we there were a lot, and there were some returns, like return folks, and so it’s interesting. But yeah, out of that, I think the the one scenario that was pretty egregious was that one. We did have a couple, because our options were like, if you can’t, if you don’t want to be here, then you always have the option to go home, right? I mean, they could go somewhere else, but oftentimes, then they’re putting someone who may be, who may have co morbidities, or somebody who may have, like me, maybe elderly or a higher risk person. They may be putting someone else at risk. And so we just ask them, like we have the space, please stay here. But if you’re going to stay here, then we’re going to need you to stick to what we’re asking. And so we only had the one that we know of. Again, it could some of them have gotten over on the shore, but the one that we know of that was fairly egregious in terms of the actions behind it.

Neil E. Golemo
That’s incredible. Yep, that’s incredible.

J.T. Snipes
So Ardell, I’m curious what, what made you want to tell this story? Now,

Ardell Sanders
that’s a great question. Part of it is I’ve been looking at, kind of my own journey. I’m looking at where higher education is in this moment, and when we think about all of the threats to higher education itself, and I’m not calling the individual people or anybody’s ideology around politics, that that’s not my concern, but my concern is, I don’t care what side of an aisle some someone falls in politically, if there is a particular you. Person, group of people, state, the federal government, that is attacking the value of what a college experience can bring to me that’s a threat. That is a threat to higher education. And being in the middle of that, and seeing right now, being in a state that has had to make some budget cuts to education across the board, being in a country where there are direct attacks on institutions of higher education, because if, if Harvard University can become a target, then what makes anyone else think that they can’t be a target? And so I’m when I’m looking at it from that standpoint, I’m looking at this and saying it is going to take courageous leadership in these moments right now to stand in the gap, be willing to take whatever hits that we have to take as leaders if we truly call ourselves leaders and withstand whatever this is, because this too shall pass. Yeah, higher ed won’t go anywhere long term, it may be forever changed by some things that take place right now, but if the right leaders stand up and we take care again, take care of the people in our charge, if we do that part of this work, then I think we will survive this. But it was, it’s very similar to, for me, to what we did during COVID, because there were options, and we had to figure it out on the fly. How do we build this thing and so that it doesn’t destroy higher education? I

Neil E. Golemo
mean, it goes back to kind of why we’re doing this whole podcast, honestly, is it’s so easy to overlook and set aside and take for granted, like all the things that were done, all the incredible work and and and sacrifice. I had my first panic attack the summer before students came back and for fall of 2020, and I’m telling you, it was 100% just overwhelm. And how are we going to keep our students safe? And I think, you know, you and I have kind of talked about this, Ardell, about how, like I read, has kind of gotten a little bit lazy and telling the story like we just take for granted that everybody’s going to appreciate we wear our funny robes. Look at us. Look how all the pomp and circumstance. Yeah, I think that that somewhere along the line, we stopped making the case for all the things that we’re doing. And so I’m so glad that you’re telling the

Ardell Sanders
story. Yeah, and it comes down to for me, it’s the helping current, previous, current and future students understand not just the value of the education, but that there are people in this fight that are only in this fight, in most cases, to be there when you show up like that. To me, is a very, very powerful thing that higher ed has, that I don’t know that so many other industries have, right? There’s a different philosophy. We’re not here for the money. Because anybody who’s been in this game long enough knows that there’s not a lot of money in this so you there has to be another purpose, right? So it has to be for some greater good, and that’s why I’ve always said that in this field, I believe that it’s in any field, but in this field, in particular, if your leadership is about you, you’re doing a bad job, right? You are doing a bad job if your leadership is about you, and that’s even if you get good results, because it has to be about the people that you serve.

J.T. Snipes
I want to go back, Neil, I’m going to push back against the the industry being lazy. Because I don’t think, I don’t think we’ve, we’re, we’re working hard. All institutions are working very hard to tell a narrative about who the institution is. So when I think about our office of Enrollment Management, right, they’re spending literally millions of dollars to shape a narrative about who the institution is. I think the issue is no one listens and no one cares. Like we have people literally lobbying the state. I’m at SIUE. We have people lobbying the state to get more money right so that we can provide essential functions to our students. And we’re at a we’re in an era where the government literally devalues higher education is we have a an administrative state that is attacking what we do, and this has been happening for a while, right, like the universities, at least state institutions, when I look at our appropriations for. The past 20 years, it is declined precipitously, right? And and I think there is an air of questioning, and I’ll name it from the right, like there’s a there’s a spirit, not a spirit, but a an attack of what higher education has become too liberal. It no longer serves us, and it promotes a sort of anti intellectual sentiment in American life, in public. So I I just had to push back a little bit. No, we not lazy. Pushing back,

Neil E. Golemo
pushing back. Let me explain what I mean by that. I first, I’m talking about, you know, the royal we of higher ed, right? And, and really, what, you know, what I’m talking about is, like, this idea of prestige, right? That we run on prestige, you know, Texas A and M. Is Texas A and M, you know, it is a flagship institution. And, of course, you would want to go there, and, of course, and you know, we all know that a lot of stuff happened here in the 80s, right, when we made that switch as a country to decide that higher education is more of a private good versus a public good, and that’s why we’re funded that way, right? I mean, I don’t think I’m saying anything, and what, really, what I’m thinking and what I’m talking about is just this idea of, like, I don’t know that we are always the greatest messengers when it comes to talking about the nuts and bolts and, like, the specifics about why we need a higher education. We don’t have the reds out there. You know that we have to have a at the fight, and we need all the scientists like higher education so much more than that, like higher education is where you become an adult in many ways. And like, sometimes it’s credential, yeah, absolutely. Sometimes what you get from a degree is that you are the type of person who can go to the work to complete a degree, but it’s so much more than that. And honestly, the fact that I do this for a living, and I’m still kind of struggling sometimes like that shouldn’t be that shouldn’t be we should be able to tell people should know the story, and also say, especially like in student affairs, but I definitely like in Residence Life, like, we’re kind of built to be taken for granted. Everybody assumes that the AC is going to be cold and the heat’s going to be hot and the water’s going to run, and you tend to only notice when things go awry. And you have to constantly be telling the story of like, this is all the things that we did, you know, we kept this disaster from becoming a fiasco, and that’s why I love the story, Ardell, that you’re telling, because it’s really, really easy to just take that for granted.

J.T. Snipes
Yeah, I’m with you. Thanks for clarifying. Neil,

Neil E. Golemo
all right, I guess, man, I’m so grateful for your time going with this. I have a hard time thinking anybody could listen to you talk and not be better for it. So I want to thank you so much for coming and speaking. I also want to thank our sponsor, Evolve. Are you a higher ed senior leader who is knowledgeable and deeply committed to transformational leadership, yet find yourself unsure and not as effective as you could be? Evolve, led by our own Dr, Keith Edwards, along with doctors Brian araio and Don Lee, are offering evolve to help leaders like you release that fear, gain courage and take transformation, transformative action to unleash your leadership for social change. Evolve is a three month virtual experience, combining on demand modules, personalized coaching and powerful group sessions. Visit evolve to learn how you could be a part of the next cohort. Or talk with us about evolve for your senior leadership team. This has been here’s the story part of the Student Affairs NOW family, we are so glad you joined us to laugh, cry, learn, sometimes commiserate and always celebrate being part of the Student Affairs experience. If you have a story, and we all have a story, please consider sharing with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice voice file at studentaffairsnow.com/heresthestory. Every story is welcome and every earnest perspective is worthy. And even if you don’t feel like sharing yours, you can still find ours and others at Student Affairs. Dot student affairs now.com or on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode has been edited by Nat Ambrosey, Nat, thank you for making a sound better than we have any business sounding. Everybody, we hope this has fed your flame a little bit, because your light matters. Keep using it to make the world a brighter place. Until next time this has been here’s the story. Peace.

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