J.T. Snipes: 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. I’m your host, JT Snipes. My pronouns are he, him, his, I serve as associate professor and chair of educational leadership at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and I am trying my best to live as a free black man.

In a world that would have me live otherwise. And I’m here as always with my favorite co-host. Neil, introduce yourself to the people.

Neil E. Golemo: Oh yeah, don’t worry. I will. Dr. Neil imo, and I’m the luckiest guy I know. I’m blessed to serve Texas a and m University, sunny Galveston campus. I’m a father, son, husband, and I’m over here just trying to do my best.

Let’s do a little good, or at least get caught trying.

J.T. Snipes: We’d like to thank our sponsor today. Evolve. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education. And today on, here’s the story I want to introduce my friend Jonathan.

Who has an amazing story to tell. But before he starts, Neil, I got a question for you. Okay. What do you do with failure? Is it something that you load? Do you like push through it? Are you zen? Talk to me about how you manage or deal with failure.

Neil E. Golemo: Yeah, failure. Wow. I think with a face like mine, I try to see failure as the last step before success.

If you only failed when you quit so yeah, my dad somewhere in smile.

J.T. Snipes: So failure as a halfway point

Neil E. Golemo: maybe. Yeah.

J.T. Snipes: Half or the, or almost getting to success. That’s interesting. I’m excited to have Jonathan Manns, who has a wonderful story he’s gonna share about his experiences in graduate school and how he’s managed failure.

But before Jonathan shares his story, I want to tell you a little bit about him. Jonathan Manns is the inaugural director of the first year experience at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. With a PhD in higher education and a career spanning public, private, large, and small institutions, Jonathan has a comprehensive view of the student journey.

His expertise covers the full spectrum of student affairs from orientation and advising to housing and residence life. Jonathan is a passionate advocate for building effective partnerships between academic and student affairs. And he is most energized by the work of enhancing student wellbeing and persistence.

We are grateful, Jonathan, to have you here and invite you to share your story with us.

Jonathan Manz: Great. JT Neil, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here. So I’m going to set the stage and my story takes place as you’re alluding to JT back in graduate school when I was pursuing my PhD. And if you’ve been through those kind of programs, there’s typically some kind of preliminary exam or qualifying exam that typically happens near the end of your coursework.

But before we get into the dissertation phase, and so at my in my program, at my institution. This exam sent around four categories. You had policy, research methods, legal issues, and organizational theory. And you had the first part was a written part and it was two questions, two days. You have eight hours per day to work on it.

No notes. You just brought in your laptop, honor system that you weren’t actually getting online or anything, and you just got the two questions in that morning and you had all day to write and submit it by five o’clock you can come and go as you please get lunch or whatnot. But that was, that was your time.

You had to work on it. And then about six weeks later or so, you have a two hour oral defense with your committee. So again, four people on the committee, each one wrote one of those questions. And you explain your answers. You may be edit your answers if you want, but you’re essentially defending what you wrote earlier.

And so that’s the, those exams are at the beginning of each semester. It’s only twice a year that you have the opportunity to do that. So as you can imagine. We’re preparing for months if not longer than that. So I had signed up to take the exam in August after I completed three years, get most of my coursework.

And it’s not uncommon the closer we get to that time because we sign up, months and months in advance. People are maybe aren’t feeling comfortable or haven’t prepared as much as you want, and you start seeing some people drop off. So what maybe it was eight people was four people or three people by the time I actually took the exam is people starting to to pour off, drop off, but so here we are, we’re in a this is an old residence hall converted into classrooms. You can still see the closets and stuff. So I think we’re in the, an old lounge with old kitchen sink off to the side for two days, taking these you’re writing these up. Had lots of coffee with us and, I remember going through those two days. I just completely spent, it was lead into Labor Day weekend. I just veg out and watched football for three days to it was completely spent from that. And then I had my oral exam roughly the middle of October. And I remember, doing a lot of prep.

But going into it I felt, I definitely felt nervous, but I felt pretty good about it. So we’re in a same residence hall, converted to classes, but now we’re just in a room with a little table around it. And so there’s the four faculty, and then there’s me on the other side, and it’s just this go through your questions.

Okay, you said this. Tell me more about why you said that. Things like. Further explain to me why this specific legal case you mentioned is related to academic freedom, or, tell me why you’re choosing this type of quantitative analysis for this specific research question. But the, as I would explain, there was very little feedback.

It wasn’t like, oh yeah, I totally agree, or don’t you think you could look at this differently? It would just be like a neutral face, maybe a little bit nodding. And so again, it was really hard to decipher was I doing well? Was I not doing well? I, again, I felt pretty good, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was done.

Two hours wraps up and they dismiss me so I can deliberate again. Imagine you’re in this residence hall. They didn’t want me sitting right outside of the door ’cause you could hear, so it was all the way at the other end of the hall at the one chair at the end of the hallway. And I’m sitting there for about 10 minutes or so, just hoping things are going well.

And then I see down the end of the hallway, the door opens up to that room, and I see three of my committee members walk out that door, but then head out the opposite direction. Like I, that’s weird. I’m pretty sure I’m just gonna deliberate with all my entire committee. And then my chair pops out and she weighs me down.

Okay, so I go in and she closes the door and she tells me that I failed the exam. And in that moment like I’m reliving it right now, like my heart sinks. I think things get a little blurry, which is probably a combination of maybe feel a little lightheaded, and then there’s like the teary-eyed forming up and and then my chair looks at me and says, you’ve got some options. You can switch your degree program to a non doctoral degree program. You can transfer to another institution and try a different doctoral degree program, a different institution. Or if you want, you can, you’re allowed to take this exam one more time and so I left if the failing of the exam wasn’t already devastating enough.

It was twofold in that I’m perceiving my chair as having zero confidence. And I was not feeling great needless to say. And just having, completely felt rocked by this whole situation. So by, it was scheduled for two hours. At I, my wife was waiting for me outside the building.

So I leave, she’s there to pick me up. She’s pregnant at the time with our second, she’s got a 3-year-old son with a 3-year-old at the time with us. In the back of the car is a cake that’s, that had scribbled congratulations on there. And I see her and I just break down like I couldn’t hold it together anymore.

And like you just have all these thoughts running through, or I have all these thoughts running through, like I picked up my family and moved. Across the country to that particular place for that program. She changed the jobs so I could do this program full-time. She proudly points out that she was the sugar mama providing insurance and all that stuff too.

Which she was right. She was again, we were expecting kid to, and so I was just yeah. Beside myself. That evening she found a babysitter, which was great, and she took me out. Just let me let you know, just was the best listener you can imagine. I just got it all out. And she just listened and we just spent the night together and that was really nice.

And I also reached out to I think a mutual friend of ours Frank Schock, who’s been a long time mentor of mine. He was at the institution. I was actually his GA there at that time. And and if you all know Frank. The guy he was a high level, he was a vice president then. He is a president now at another institution.

He’s very busy. But one of the things I really appreciate about him, but when he’s really needed, he’ll find that time. And so it was that evening and I reached out. I was like, this is what happened. I really need to talk to you. And he said, ma’am, my schedule’s terrible, but can you meet me at seven tomorrow morning for breakfast?

Absolutely, let’s do, so we go have breakfast the next morning he asks me how I’m doing. I tell him the story and then when I’m done,

J.T. Snipes: take your time.

Jonathan Manz: When I’m done, he sits there, looks in my eyes and said, you came here to get this degree, so that’s exactly what you’re gonna do.

J.T. Snipes: Oh, yeah.

Jonathan Manz: And. Again on that, my most vulnerable, what I needed to hear was exactly, I just needed someone to, who knew me, to recognize okay, I have the ability, I have the competency to do this.

I am gonna work through this. I’m gonna get this done, and I need that person to come alongside and believe in me like that. And so between my wife’s support and that encouragement, that really helped start to pivot. How I was going through this situation. And I’m, I had to point back to you like just grateful for my own upbringing of my parents in building some ency skills in as a kid.

But I started to look at what’s the way forward? Who are my support group, I’ve started to share with my local friends ’cause they course knew I was taking it and they started rallying behind me. My mother-in-law’s just like this bundle of positivity. And so from a distance, she’s on the other side of the country, but she made some like these bracelets for encouragement.

And so it was just this group that I was kinda shocked, like I don’t know why, but they are like, yeah, we’re behind you. We’ve got this, as I started to process this, I had, I on a side note, I had co-taught a class with Frank about college learning environments. And at that institution, the architecture school had some slogan, and I don’t remember if it exactly said that, but essentially said, fail faster.

But they wanted their students to, to fail so they can learn, okay, this didn’t work, so now let’s find a different way. One door shut, let’s find another way. And so that, that resonated a lot with me about there is there’s things I can learn from this situation. To get ready, I created a practice committee of people who had already completed the exam or other administrators.

They gave me four new questions. I did the whole process again on my own, outside of the actual program to end the semester, just to get more experience, did the whole world offense with them again, and then had the next, in January, did the exam again. Took the written exam in January. My daughter’s born a few weeks later, a few weeks after that.

At the end of February, I take my oral exam and the mood is just different. I’m answering questions real well. The faculty start getting into a tangent and going off on their own conversation, which I learned later on is a great sign for any kind of defense. And at the end. There’s no more suspense.

I’m barely out in the hallway. Everyone’s still in the room. When I come back in and my faculty says, you pass, he said, but I wanna share something with you. Who was a different chair, but he was in the committee. The first time he said, usually when people don’t pass the first time, they come in and we’ll see ’em succeed, but they just squeak by.

He said, the difference we saw was amazing from barely from failing to completely blowing it out the water. And so it. That’s not as important as the fact of just persistence and learning through failure. But I do hold a degree. It was in my bio two. I did successfully pass and then I got through to dissertation and finished that.

I was actually the first one in my cohort to actually finish the program. But it was quite a rollercoaster of emotions spanned out over, from the first time I started preparing until I finally passed, probably a 12 to 14 month process.

J.T. Snipes: Wow. Wow.

Wonderful story, man. You almost got me for a second. You almost

Jonathan Manz: got me. You, me. I wasn’t expecting it.

J.T. Snipes: That was such a powerful story, man. That’s such a vulnerable story. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Jonathan Manz: Absolutely.

J.T. Snipes: The question I always like to lead off with is. Why did you wanna tell us this story at this time?

Jonathan Manz: That’s, that’s a really good question and I’ve been thinking about that a bit. And it is, I think even though in student affairs particularly, I think we really do a, generally do a good job about focusing on students’ learning and we think about conduct, like how can there be that be a learning moment and not just a punitive moment,

I don’t find ourselves as professionals, as educators that we share that openly about our failures. And I think it’s, it is healthy to talk about that, that we can still be really successful in what we do. It because we fail and sometimes we’re even better at what we do because we failed. I’ve hit some tough moments and this, that’s not the, that was not the first time.

It’s certainly not the last time since I failed. It’s one of the most significant times. But when I’ve had some really hard obstacles. One, I know like I can work through challenging situations, and two, I’ve learned some things along the way that helped me better through it. And so I think if anything I wanna share, just say to other people can feel a little more comfortable maybe to say, you know what I feel too, and this is how I got through it, or This is who helped me through it.

J.T. Snipes: Yeah. It’s, it is really powerful. I feel like I’ve mentioned this before, but a couple of years ago. I went to a workshop on storytelling, and in the workshop on storytelling, they talked about in storytelling, vulnerability begets vulnerability, right? So if you are open and honest, it invites openness and honesty in the space.

Sure. So I’m really grateful and that’s helpful to me at the beginning of the semester as I’m thinking about. How am I showing up for students in the classroom? Am I creating spaces of vulnerability or am I closing those opportunities off? Because I often I often want to feel, I want students to think I have my life together, even when I don’t.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah.

J.T. Snipes: But I think there’s some real power in allowing, in inviting students into doing this work, even when I’m not perfect.

Because that rarely happens. So I just love that about your story. My hope is to be able to share this episode with some of my students who may be struggling,

Jonathan Manz: sure, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Neil E. Golemo: Honestly, I agree, especially, the field we work in where we’re supposed to be role models and we are always telling our students, failure is a teacher, but. How true does that ring if we’re not willing to admit that ourselves? And so I honestly, I’m so proud of you for because honest it, it takes a strong belief in yourself and your core

Jonathan Manz: yeah.

Neil E. Golemo: To show like this didn’t define you. And the story here to me is that you didn’t quit. And that’s the only real failure. Especially man, I, it resonates a lot because. I feel like right now we, we live through social media and these very curated

Ideas of who we are and presentations of who we are. People don’t go in and put look at all my zits. They don’t put that on insta usually. Usually. I don’t know. Depends on your algorithm, but I think that this time where like we have such perfectionism, perfectionism is armor and,

Jonathan Manz: we

Neil E. Golemo: don’t have a lot of use for that, but this, something like this it resonates, man.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah.

Neil E. Golemo: Thank you so much.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah. What if, we, how many times do we see you? We read a, a very flattering bio, just even about myself at the start of this show.

How many times do we have a guest presenter and. This person’s done this and they oversee this portfolio and they’ve accomplished this. What if we threw in there and they really blew it at that last institution? They tried this new program, it didn’t work, but here’s what, here’s where they grew from it.

Of course you don’t do that, but I would actually, Neill, to your point, I would almost get a lot more out of that to hear like how they really blew it, but then they learned from it and how that impacted or informed the next thing that was a success. Yeah. Again, taking a little bit, some healthy risk taking.

Absolutely.

J.T. Snipes: Yeah. I’m curious, how does this story factor into your professional journey? What lessons have you taken from this experience, either implicitly or explicitly in your work as a institutional leader?

Jonathan Manz: Yeah, I think well going back to a little bit of a comment I just made, there’s a little more open to taking a risk, let’s say, a calculated or healthy risk, not recklessly, especially when you’re using a lot of financial resources, but to try something new that’s not been seen before to campus.

And see if that, if there’s evidence to suggest it may work. To try that. And sometimes that works out really well and sometimes it doesn’t. And more often than not, if it’s not working out well from the get go, it’s, we can learn from it and make an adjustment. It’s not necessarily a complete failure.

So I think one, I would say just taking some risks with some initiatives. And two, it’s just, a little easier, or you could be more human with students. I think jt, you’re talking a little bit about when you think about your own students, but just in conversation with students about their own academic journey or personal journey or even mistakes they made while at college that aren’t necessarily academic related.

But again, you mentioned conduct earlier. Maybe they made some choices that they might go back and, take back if they could. And just helping them understand that’s not gonna define you for the rest of your life. What are you gonna learn from that? And I think that, yeah it makes it a more human conversation.

Neil E. Golemo: Absolutely. How do you feel like this is, what lessons do you feel like this taught you, especially as the inaugural director of the first year experience? Like, how does that affect you there? There’s guts right there.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah. It’s, I think going back to, to, to launching some new things at our college that we haven’t seen before and not really knowing, doing a mentoring program that I have is going well now.

But when you’re pitching this new concept to students, they have no framework for what it is. It can be really challenging to recruit them. Go, I really need 30 strong students. Can I find 30 strong students who are willing to sign up and try this thing that. They’ve never seen, I’ve actually never seen play out at our institution.

And so helping feel comfortable. ’cause the easy thing would’ve been like, play it, let’s play it super conservative and let’s just make really incremental steps. But three and a half years later we wouldn’t have the program launched in going as well as it is now. Not to say the first year was amazing, it was good.

But year three much better. Having willing to take all their risks and not play it super conservative was I think it is helped it is helped me in this role that where I have no playbook, right? Because it didn’t exist and it, as a brand new initiative didn’t exist. There’s no playbook and go, oh, let me take this and just make some tweaks to it.

No, I gotta write the playbook and then edit it as we go.

J.T. Snipes: Jonathan I’m gonna go back for a second because in our. In our conversations prior to the recording, you mentioned something that has been sticking with me, and I don’t think I have the language to articulate it yet, but I do wanna revisit this notion of not glossing over failure.

Because I think there’s a way that your story can be read where this traditional arc of experience failure. Fast forward through all of the messiness, right? Because there’s a lot of messiness that your story doesn’t completely unpack. I appreciate the vulnerability on some level, but we still end in a space of oh, this thing works out.

And I wonder if there’s any wisdom, and I know in our conversation you mentioned not rushing through failure, and I’m wondering if you could take us back to some of those moments. Of not rushing through it and what wisdom you can share with our audience.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah. Yeah, for this, for the sake of the story and the time constraints there, I didn’t get into as much about the, but for the moment of failing that oral exam in October and the moving forward, like moving, creating a plan to move forward.

There was a long stretch of time where I had to sit to sit in the funk and I didn’t. I think in our society at least in our American culture, we try to get through discomfort right away. We, someone passes away, we immediately linking to a celebration of life instead of mourning that person and how the world is gonna be different ’cause their presence is not physically here anymore.

I think in moments of failure it’s gets easier to to rely on platitudes. Things will be better tomorrow or you’ll learn from this, or it’s all part of a plan. And I don’t I, I have hard times with platitudes. And I understand when people go through grief and other tough things, sometimes those things just help them process.

But I think if we can sit in that for a little bit in. Check in with who we are, what are we growing through that after we’ve gone through it, can we reflect backwards and how we’ve grown through that process? I think all that is important. And that’s where again I keep, I talked about Lindsay, my wife a lot.

We would have multiple conversations and I would reflect to her. She would reflect back to me. She would let me know a little, a little bit of how she’s feeling through all this too. Okay. Because she was a, a partner through, through throughout actually gave her a mockup of my diploma to her after I finished the program that she had because she was so much part of my journey.

And so she earned, she needed something hang on her wall too, but so it wasn’t a okay, I had that breakfast with Frank and then the next day. I’m ready to go. It was weeks of processing it. Lots of my fellow students wanted to hear about my experience partially, so I didn’t necessarily repeat my mistakes, but hear about it.

And so it wasn’t until like month or so later where I was really starting to feel energized to succeed that, to strive for success the next time. And in putting myself out there with that whole practice group that I alluded to or I mentioned as well. It put me right back in that situation.

And so instead of taking the second time, I was really taking it a third time and get there. And but I felt like I had to go through that to help process what had happened and to help better learn from it.

Neil E. Golemo: I wonder I definitely hear what you’re saying about how we human beings are really good at avoiding discomfort and avoiding pain. Absolutely. I feel like there’s a little bit of tension there between, treating each failure as like your next step. I, what did Edison say? He said, I didn’t fail 700 times.

I succeeded in finding 700 ways that won’t work. And

Jonathan Manz: Yeah.

Neil E. Golemo: So where’s the tension there? Between that and then also letting failure push you. Like you can’t I always wonder for my students, especially like I worry about the ones who never screw up. ’cause like, how do you know what your outer limit is?

Jonathan Manz: Don’t

Neil E. Golemo: push a little too hard. If you don’t get that humbling experience, but also you don’t get to crystallize like the core, and this is who I am. I could be my own hero in this moment.

Jonathan Manz: Yeah, I think the, Neil, maybe what I was starting to think about too is you’re saying that he is, and this is where other people, your community, your support group can speak into.

You mean you think there’s that infamous story of Michael Jordan getting caught what his JV first or second year in high school and that really drove him. He is, obviously really successful. You. If I’m spending the same amount of time practicing basketball as he was, I’m still not gonna make my high school team, let alone college.

NBA. There are certain talents that I lack and qualities I lack. However, probably similar, if you were asking him to sit down and be an amazing student affairs practitioner, he may lack some of those empathy skills, for example. So

J.T. Snipes: we’ve seen them as a GA or gm, so

Jonathan Manz: yeah.

J.T. Snipes: Think you might be right,

Jonathan Manz: Exactly. But that’s where I have people like my wife who knew me well, like Frank and some other support group, like they recognized the abilities I had. Now, maybe I needed to harness them better. To perform well in a testing environment, but they recognized it. So that’s where that they knew I had not reached my limit yet in terms of talent in this particular realm where, I wasn’t completely out of my off base by being, like trying to be an NBA player, which clearly is not my my, my athletic, my lack of athletic skills do not lend itself to being any kind of professional athlete.

Certainly not in basketball.

J.T. Snipes: Jonathan I hate that we are out of time. But thank you again for sharing your story with us. And I also want to thank our sponsor. Evolve Higher Education Needs Courageous Leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly. At Evolve Institute, we are empowering leaders with the capacity to.

To turn challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them with clarity, confidence, and courage. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders. Visit evolve institute.com to learn more. This has been, here’s the story, part of the Student Affairs Now family, and we are so glad that you joined us to laugh, cry, learn, sometimes commiserate.

Always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs experience. If you have a story and we all have a story, please consider sharing it with us by leaving a two minute pitch voice. Be a 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 your story. You can find ours and others@studentaffairsnow.com. Please subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode has been edited by Nat Ambrosey. Thank you for making us look and sound as good as we do. We hope this has fed your flame a little bit because your light indeed matters.

Keep using it to make the world a brighter place. Until next time, this has been, here’s the story. I’m jt.

And thanks Jonathan. We’ll see you. Thanks.

Neil E. Golemo: Peace.