Neil E. Golemo: 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 Dr. Neil E. Golemo. I am your host and the luckiest guy I know. I’m blessed to serve as the Director of Campus Living and Learning here on Texas A&M’s sunny Galveston campus. I’m a father, husband, and a son over here. Just trying to do my best to do a little good or just get caught trying. I’m here with my co-host, J.T..

J.T. Snipes: Hey Neil. Hey y’all listeners, J.T. Snipes. My pronouns are he, him, his, I serve as associate professor and chair of the educational leadership department at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and I’m just trying my best to live as a free black man in a world that would have me live otherwise.

Neil E. Golemo: Thank you for being here, J.T.. And also thank pleasure and also thank you to our sponsor. Evolve. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education. Today I want to introduce you to my friend Craig.

Craig. And I can’t introduce you like you need it. Tell us about yourself and tell us your story.

Craig Allen: I’m happy to join the podcast today. My name is Craig Allen. I’m the executive director for housing and fraternity and sorority life at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been in the doing the student affairs housing res life and a little fraternity sorority life thing for.

For about 30 plus years now. And what started out as something that I had told people was gonna just be a pit stop on my way to figuring out my real job has become my career. And it is something I’m also a husband and a father. I work dabbled as a hobby in public education as a school board member, but.

Truly my love is working with college students and I think it keeps me young and I have fun doing it and I’m excited to share a story with y’all today.

J.T. Snipes: Yeah, that’s awesome. So you got a story. I would love to

Craig Allen: hear your story, Craig. Okay, so my story starts in those. Times that we all thought would never happen in a pandemic.

So it’s the fall of 2020 here at TCU and all over the country good friends and colleagues are trying to figure out how do we do what we do in this COVID environment. And of course, we learned that. Regionally and all over the country, different institutions took very different approach. At TCU, our chancellor made this broad po, this bold proclamation In July.

He said, we will be fully open and students are gonna come to campus, and that’s what we’re gonna do at TCU. So we all scrambled to think, how are we gonna do this? What if people are sick? How are we gonna do isolation, housing and quarantine, and contact tracing, all the things. Meanwhile the faculty said, we’re not so keen on this.

We’re gonna do remote class teaching. And gradually 50% and 60 70, close to 80% of all classes became online classes. And yet the decision to open residence halls remained intact. So we welcomed students back. We were 94% occupied. We had a small percentage. We were used to being a hundred percent. We had a small group of students that said we’re not so sure about this.

We’ll do the online classes from home or wherever else. We have a two year residency requirement about 5,400 resident students. And we were pretty full. So as happened in the fall of 20 when students started returning to college campuses, COVID started spreading like crazy and. One by one institutions around the country said this isn’t working.

We’re gonna send students home. And at TCU we had our, what we called our dashboard, and we all monitored every day. And the students would pay attention that were in yellow, and yellow meant we had this many quarantine beds available. Then we would inch closer and closer to red. And it was frustrating because we tried to get them to wear masks.

We tried to, we socially distanced them in the dining halls. And it came down to this one Thursday night and I went home and I told my wife, she’s what’s wrong? She could tell something wasn’t right. And I said, I just don’t think we’re gonna make it through the weekend. I don’t.

We’re gonna run outta space. We’re gonna end up closing and send everybody home. And I, we were two to three weeks into the school year and I was bothered by that. And so I decided to go to campus. It was like 9 30, 10 o’clock, and I said I just need to go to campus. So I drove to campus, slapped my mask on, and I just started walking around campus hall to hall.

Talking to students, and as I introduced myself and they saw my name tag, they’re like, oh, you’re the housing guy. And they would say, don’t send us home. Please don’t. Are you gonna send us home? We heard you’re sending us home on Monday. And I said, no, we’re not sending you home. And. I got to this one particular building, Shirley Hall, and there was a group of students in the front steps talking and they were debating where the best burgers in town were, and they saw me and they said, don’t send us home.

We wanna explore Fort Worth. We don’t want to go home. And I said I’ll make you a deal. I go, you help us get through this. I’ll buy you, I’ll show you the best burger when it comes to the end of the school year. He said, but you gotta wear your masks. You gotta do this for us. And they said, we’ll do it.

We’ll do it. And that led to us trying to figure out, what would we do and how was it that it was spreading? And one of the things I also learned when I was here on campus late at night is that there was nothing else for students to do, but hang out with each other in the residence halls.

Movie theaters were closed, restaurants were closed. Fraternity and sororities weren’t having parties off campus. There were no organized events. We would like a lot of institutions, we said, let’s try a virtual game night. And 14 people logged into Zoom and did it, and we all patted ourselves on the back.

But what we learned was they all wanted to be with each other. And at Shirley Hall. It became the place to be. And as I stood there at midnight, one in the morning and just watched around the corner from the other buildings, as these throngs of students were coming, I was like, what is happening here? And over the course we managed to stay open.

Our chancellor rented us a hotel. We used it for quarantine, and we got through the bubble. At some point in the fall semester things settled down as far as quarantine, but things didn’t settle down In Shirley Hall, it became the place to be On Friday and Saturday nights, the RA staff were getting frustrated.

The hall directors were getting frustrated, and we kept telling ’em and they were like, we need to document people and we need to crack down on masks and we need to do more mandatory testing. And I said, no, let’s just talk to students. ’cause I found that when I was walking around and talking to them, they wanted to help us.

We just needed to talk to ’em. So we tried to do that and we made it through till the end of the semester. We closed up a Thanksgiving break, sent everybody home for an extended break, and started having discussions. RAs wanted to quit. Shirley Hall, hall director was worn out. So we had some meetings and we talked and we said we’ve gotta do something.

And so I had been doing, early in the semester was doing those tours and walking around. And so I thought I’m gonna start coming in on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights 10, 11 o’clock, and I’m just gonna camp myself there. And I’m gonna show them how to do it. We can do this. And so when we started this semester, I started doing it and I got some of my leadership team to help me out.

They would, they saw what I was doing and they’re like, Craig, can we help you? And so I would get some of them to come to the buildings with me and they’d do a shift. But I was here Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights in January as we started this semester. Wow. And lo and behold, it was pretty crazy.

It was a party scene. As it turns out, the students like to call it. Shit show Shirley. They had a name for it. There was a lot of alcohol, there was a lot of damage in the buildings. There were parties on every floor. And as we got to later into January, I was doing this for several weeks, I was like.

We’ve gotta change the narrative.

And so I came in on a Saturday and it was RA selection. We were doing interviews virtually and I told some of the staff, I said, I think I got it. Said it’s gonna be ship shape. Shirley. And we’re gonna tell ’em they’ve gotta get on board. And people kinda looked at me and I said, we’re gonna, we’re gonna brand this.

We’re, it’s not shit show. We gotta give them ship shape. And we, and I said, I’m gonna make t-shirts. So I found a logo, I sent it off to our local swag vendor. And he’s yeah, a few weeks I can get you shirts. So then I took the design that they gave me and I took it to the RA staff.

They said it’s cool, Craig, but you have to put something on it that says, uncle Craig says, get on board. And I looked at ’em and I’m like, what? What is this Uncle Craig? And they’re like, that’s what the students call you. And I’m like, what? And they’re like, yes. Every time when you show up, they all tell each other Uncle Craig’s here.

I was like, ah. And they’re like, no, you have to put that on the shirt. I said, okay, we’ll put it on the shirt. So the shirts came in and I came in and we would get pizza, we’d get chicken wings, whatever. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, we’d start about 10 30, 11, and food would usually show up at midnight.

We just engaged students and we said, here, you want, and the word got out, it’s ship shaped, surely now. And if you come down and you talk with me and I would talk with students and say, here’s the deal. You gotta wear your mask. You gotta be respectful of the RAs. You need to tone down the partying a little bit and stop breaking stuff.

And if they said yes, we’ll do it. They got a ship shaped Shirley t-shirt and so they had to agree. They had to say, yep, we’re on board, and if they were on board we gave ’em a shirt. And so along the way I mentioned Ava and Sophia, who I met that night and told ’em I’d buy ’em burgers. They were some of my big fans.

They’d come down, they’d bring friends. Craig. Craig, we brought some people and I’d give them their shirts. Then there was my buddy J.T.. J.T. lived on the second floor. J.T. was partying pretty hardy, I’m sure. And he loved to. He used to, yeah, he used to come up to me. Sorry, not no relation to this, J.T.. Oh, okay.

Nevermind. He’d come up and he’d be like Craig, how’s it looking tonight? And I think he thought, I couldn’t tell he’d been drinking, but of course he, I could tell, but he was really social. He knew everybody. He’s like, where are we? What do I need to talk to? And I’d say, you might wanna swing up and tell Gavin I’m coming up, ’cause Gavin on the third floor changed his name to protect the students.

But Gavin was a frequent flyer when I would come by. He knew I was coming, but by gum. He had 15, 20 people in his room and they were cranking the tunes hanging out. But eventually, Gavin got to know me and he’d come by and he’d say, yeah, I’m on board. I get, I got it. And and so all the students, and the good news is the RAs saw it working and eventually, some of the vandalism, the holes in the wall stopped.

The RAs said, Hey, they are treating us better now. The students were wearing their t-shirts. And so I gradually stopped coming by Spring break. I weaned myself down to maybe one night, a week, a weekend. And then after spring break they were on their own and we finished out the year strong and really turned the shit show into a ship shape community full of fun.

And let me end with one, one note that. In the fall of 2024, I met a young woman. I was a chapter coach for her sorority, and we were about done with our coaching. She was gonna transition off her presidents out of the presidency, and she said, Craig, all this time, she’s do you remember me from freshman year?

I said, no, and she’s. I lived in Shirley Hall and I was like, oh. She goes, I have my ship shaped Shirley shirt. And she said, I still have the GroupMe message. And I looked at her and I’m like, the GroupMe? And she said, yeah, the Uncle Craig’s kids group me. And she showed me on her phone, the Uncle Craig’s kids.

And that’s how they all knew that I was in the building. They put it out in the GroupMe, ship shaped Shirley.

Neil E. Golemo: So your staff wasn’t lying to you to just.

Craig Allen: They weren’t lying. Uncle Craig was the real thing, the real deal. I went along with it, but yeah, apparently it was in the GroupMe.

Neil E. Golemo: Wow.

Craig Allen: Thanks J.T..

Yeah, wherever he is today, you guys would love each other. He’s graduated. Moved on.

J.T. Snipes: That’s great.

I’ll kick us off. I have, I always have questions. My favorite question to ask is, what made you want to tell this story? And share it with our audience.

Craig Allen: Aside from the fact Neil asked very nicely. But in, in addition to that, this one I think this one just resonates with me, honestly, all the way back to when I started in this field.

One of the first buildings I worked in as a full-time professional was this building that had this reputation is. A nightmare. And no one wanted to work there. And I thought to myself, these are college students. They’re here to have fun and we’re here to build community. How can this be a bad thing?

It was rough. And I, a couple months in I was like, oh, I get it now. But. What I also learned was when you develop those authentic relationships with students and you connect with them and you don’t judge them, and you ask them to try to behave in the way that we want them to behave more or less they’ll get on board.

And so I think this story for me is one. That I like to tell new staff, new hall directors, and even to RAs as a way to reinforce that. Sometimes, the hammer isn’t the solution. And in this case, and, really truly trying to just hang out and get to know each other and make things better was the way to do it.

And I like telling a story for that reason.

Neil E. Golemo: So when you tell that story now, like what do you think the takeaway is that your staff takes? What specifically are you looking for?

Craig Allen: I think what they take away, or at least I hope they take away from it, is the importance of knowing our students and being able to connect to them and.

Learn their lingo and hang out and talk with them in their spaces sometimes at the time that, that they wanna talk. And yeah, I think that the importance of relationships building that trust, building that sense of, Hey, listen, I care about you. You may make a mistake. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean, I have to be at odds with you.

You’re still my resident and I care about you. And I think we institutionally have that and as a department that’s in our DNA and it’s who we, what we do. Yeah. As a program in residence life. And I think as we continue to have you. The constant turnover that we have to keep reinforcing that culture.

And so this story in some ways helps reinforce the culture of who we are and what we do in TCU Housing and Residence Life.

Neil E. Golemo: Something I think is really neat is like you, we don’t get a whole lot of everybody has COVID stories, right? Yeah. But I don’t think we get a whole lot that are like happy.

And I think that is, I really like that and yeah, I’m just curious is it still ship shaped, surely, or?

Craig Allen: So the interesting thing about that is there were a couple things at play that we also discovered. One was in a student self-selection mode, this building had a reputation as a party spot.

Now COVID completely exasperated that to the end level because they had nothing else to do. And so they were coming quite literally. It was like you were watching people line up for the club. They were, the sidewalks would fill. And I was like, what is happening here? So it wasn’t just the residents, it was everybody.

We have since learned that as we do assignments that. Not everybody from Southern California needs to live in this building, and so we can spread students out a little differently, and I think that has helped. So no, it doesn’t have that reputation at all. It still has a reputation as one of the places to be.

And I’m happy to say that the hall staff now embrace that much like we did in Ship-Shape. Surely they embrace that it’s the place to be. They love that they’re building is a popular spot and they. You use that as a way to say, Hey, we’re fun, we’re popular. But we also don’t break stuff. We also are respectful of each other.

And they’ve maintained the level of getting to know students right from the beginning. And again, I, the ra the hall directors, I understand where they were coming from. It was such. This extreme pressure at the, in that fall semester of fall 20, that they just couldn’t see that this strategy would work.

Not to mention the fact we were supposed to be socially distanced. So they’re like, Craig, how’s this gonna work? We can’t have people come have pizza. And I’m like we’re gonna do that. And I understood where they were coming from and their frustration, which is part of why I said, Hey, I’m the director of the department, but you’re gonna see me Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights from like midnight to two in the morning.

I’m gonna, I’ll be here with you and I will show you this can work and it will work. And they all swore that when I left it wouldn’t, but it did.

J.T. Snipes: So what, I’m curious, what made you think it would work? Because it sounds because if we go back to 2020, there were no clear guidelines on how things would pan out.

So I’m curious what gave you faith that it would work. I see. Because I would’ve been like your students, I’d have been like, man, you try to bring folks together now. Yeah. Nah, you wear J.T., this ain’t gonna work.

Craig Allen: Yeah. I think now. COVID clearly complicating factor, and when we handed out pizza, it was.

We didn’t linger, we didn’t cluster together. It was, if you were gonna eat, we spread people out. Now you eat your pizza so you’re not, ’cause when you’re eating and whatnot and of course, I don’t want to, nobody likes to debate the CDC and what, who was right and what was wrong.

And we don’t know. What we knew is kids were getting sick, it was spreading rapidly, so we didn’t wanna do things. To undermine our effort. But at the same time, the reality was if we weren’t there, they were together. When we were there, they were together, but they were at least a little bit safer, right?

So what I said is, if we can make it a little safer, and we know if we’re not, if I’m not there. They’re still gonna all be hanging out together and they won’t be wearing masks, but if I am there, they might actually put them on and then they’ll still hang out and they won’t break stuff and it’ll calm the building down.

And so I think some of it was a leap of faith. But I will say that hall that I worked in my very first year, yeah, it had a bad reputation and we turned it around and the way we turned it around was by my RA staff and myself. We. We’re just we ratcheted up our level of visibility. We decided we were gonna make anything that they liked to do at times of the day, that wasn’t a good thing.

We offered things to do at that time of the day that were fun things to do. And we said and it worked. And my second. Job that I had professionally was in a first and second year, mostly first year community. And similarly, I, we had keg parties in our buildings and I was like, oof, we gotta get a handle on this.

And the way you get a handle on it is you had to find other ways to make it fun that were more in line with what we wanted them to do. And so I had faith that it could work because I believed I’d done it in the past. And I also. Walking around that very first night and meeting the students, I could see and hear that they so badly wanted to be here with each other, that they were gonna be willing to listen at least a little bit.

And I think that we have to remember that the power of, and I think Neil and I talked about this, if we had any doubt. Before as housing professionals, that students living together is something that, that they crave and they want, I think we now know the answer to that, right?

We did the experiment that no one was ever gonna do, say what would happen if we just closed all our buildings for a year. But what we know is it would be really bad, students would feel isolated, they’d feel lonely, they would feel they don’t belong. They would lose connection to each other. So we, we learned that.

And and I think that. This, what I did was rooted a lot also in this idea that I know they all so badly want to be together, that I think they’ll be willing to start to change their behavior a little bit if we tell ’em that’s the key to staying together. I

Neil E. Golemo: have an old faculty member who used to say that.

Students are a lot like people and I think about that a lot because honestly, they’re not stupid. They’re not they’re pretty smart and if you, they may not read their emails. So if you show ’em the way, like they will, this resonates really hard with me because like I had that.

I remember my first move in day. We have a dry campus, which of course means don’t spill. But I remember my first like move in day having to explain to somebody how like you can’t bring that keg in. I’m sorry, I know you already bought it, but you can’t. And, we kind just did the same thing, how do we eat an elephant, one bite at a time?

And we just kept plugging away. And I don’t know. I think something that’s wild about this is, having students gather and interact and, showing up for pizza parties and t-shirts, it’s all so cliche, but in the context of COVID is daring and, revolutionary and I don’t know.

I feel like I just need to take a moment to like, has wild, like that is wild. I don’t know if we’ll ever have anything that like that again.

Craig Allen: Oh, let’s hope we don’t. As rewarding as it was, by about the time I. Said, okay, I can’t do this anymore. My wife was like, are you gonna stop doing this at some point?

I was spending as much time in that building as I used to do as a hall director, and, she made a deal with me many years ago that, that had that part of my life had to wind down. And but I also will say this I really did like it. It was, I had a lot of fun doing it.

It was tiring. I had to get used to it a bit, but but it reminded me of why I love doing this work. So

J.T. Snipes: J.T., do you miss it? I do not. I’m glad and that’s fair. Listen, it is not for everybody. I am curious though. I do think. My observation of undergraduate students and just society in general.

We, we talk about the lack of third spaces and spaces that aren’t work or home that students can and just people in society can gather. And I’d be curious, working 30 years in, in housing, what are, what is the optimistic read, because I have a pessimistic read of the future, is that AI will further accelerate this sort of loneliness epidemic that, that some students and people in society are experiencing by not having to meaningfully engage with people am I wrong for being optimistic or are there some things that you could point to that.

Our signs of hope.

Craig Allen: I, I think, yeah, I, I understand where you’re coming from and to your earlier comment, you were right. This is not for everybody. I love doing it. We have hall directors who’ve come and worked here for a bit and said, nah, you guys are doing, I don’t wanna do that. And that’s fine.

There are institutions that don’t do this and have different approach. I do think there’s a reason to be optimistic. What I’ve seen and what we do at TCU and our model for housing is focused on. Relationships is the foundation and this idea that society is a system of positive relationships, of mutually beneficial or not beneficial, mutually enhancing relationships.

And that when a society is built on the idea that we care about our neighbors and people around us. And that we’re willing to do things for each other. And if you can reinforce that, that, that will lead to great things. Now the challenge to that model and that thinking is that those relationships don’t happen by accident.

They have to be cultivated intentionally and systematically and systemically. And so what we have done in our model is to say we’re gonna build relationships, but it isn’t something you check a box and say, okay, I know my neighbor now check. You have to keep. Knowing your neighbor and connecting to your neighbor.

And that when, and what we hope, what I hope is that if we can teach our students to do that and then send them out and they can do that that it can spread. We base our model on, on a guy, former TCU person who was a pastor and works in Shreveport, Louisiana, he’s formed a organization called Community Renewal International.

And he likes to say that if we can learn how to clean one molecule of water and we can clean an entire swimming pool. And so all we have to do is know how to build. If the three of us can build relationships where we care about each other and we look out for one another, if we can do that and just keep replicating it, we can clean, or in this case, we can change society.

So that’s my hope. It sounds daunting, but I believe it can be done. And I think ship-shape surely is an example of it being done. And but it has to be done intentionally and it has to. It can’t just, it isn’t something you get to a point and you say, okay, that’s done and you move on. But, and look, the proof is always is in the t-shirt.

Neil E. Golemo: Ah, there, it’s,

Craig Allen: that is ship shaped Shirley. And at the very bottom, uncle Craig. Says get on board

Neil E. Golemo: to our listener out there. Craig just held up this shirt’s the truth that it exists. So Mom, that’s what

Craig Allen: happened. Forgot this isn’t visual,

Neil E. Golemo: right?

Craig Allen: I held up the shirt.

Neil E. Golemo: Craig, I think that’s such a great message.

Thank you so much for sharing it. Just talking about how we can’t. Stay the same. Like we have to keep moving and evolving. And speaking of evolve. I wanna thank our sponsor leaders. I, J.T. is just hates me right now. That’s awesome. Evolve is our sponsor. Higher education leaders are facing unprecedented challenges.

We need courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly. That’s right. At Evolve Institute, we are empowering a new generation of leaders with the capacity to turn these challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them. At Evolve, we help leaders develop the capacity to lead with clarity, confidence, and courage.

We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders focus on executive leaders, emerging executives, emerging leaders, and those leading for equality. 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, but always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs experience.

If you have a story and we all have a story, please consider sharing with us by leading a two minute pitch via a voice file at studentaffairsnow.com slash Here’s the story. 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@studentaffairsnow.com, on YouTube, and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This episode will be. Edited by Nat Ambrosey. Thank you, Nat, for making us look and sound better than we have any business looking and sounding. Y’all, I hope this 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.