Helena Gardner
Hello and welcome to here’s the story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experience of those who are shaping the field every day as part of the Student Affairs now family, we’re dedicated to serving and furthering people who walk the walk, talk the talk, and carry the rock in higher education. We hope you’ll sit with us every Wednesday, where we’ll laugh, reminisce, commiserate, maybe even cry a little, but always celebrate our own little corner of the college experience. You can find us at studentaffairsnow.com or directly at studentaffairsnow.com/heresthestory, or on YouTube and anywhere you enjoy podcast, we like to thank today’s sponsors evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience. I’m your host. Helena Gardner, my pronouns are she, her, hers, and I serve as the Director of Residence, education and housing services at Michigan State University. I live as a mom, a sister, a daughter, a friend and a mentor. I’m with you today from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinabe, three fires, confederacy of Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi peoples. The University resides on land, seated in the 1819, treaty of Saginaw, home to Michigan State University. And I’m here with my co host.

Neil E. Golemo
My name is Neil E. Golemo. I use the he, him, series of pronouns. I’m blessed to serve as the Director of Campus living and learning here on Galveston at Texas University’s Galveston campus. I come to you from the lands where once roamed, place where they prayed, thrived, were born, built lives and left their legacies.

Helena Gardner
I spend some time with my co host friends, and I love it, because what we get to do is it is really take advantage of a missed opportunity, to really center humanity in this work, and I get to do it with these great people, and so JT is gonna take it away. Tell us a story today.

J.T. Snipes
Well, I am so honored to follow up and be the third story in this series, this ongoing series around storytelling and transformation, as my co host has mentioned, my name is J.T. Snipes. My pronouns are he, him, his. I serve as the Associate Professor and Chair of our educational leadership department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Try saying that three times fast, and I’m just trying my best to live as a free black man in a world that would have me live otherwise. I’m coming to you all today from the ancestral lands of the llinois Confederacy. The university resides on land seated in 1819 treaty in Edwardsville, which is now home to Southern Illinois University. Edwardsville. And are you guys ready for a story?

Helena Gardner
I’m ready for a story.

J.T. Snipes
All right, so, so my story begins in the fall of 2018 it was my first year on the tenure track teaching, and I found myself nervously pacing in front of an empty classroom in less than 15 minutes, students attending SIUE would come into my classroom full of hopes and fears that accompany them into the new academic year, and I was a new professor in the department, and a few students actually in the spring, had come and sat in on my teaching demonstration. So they had a little idea of how I was as a faculty member, but not really. And to be completely honest, none of them knew what to expect for me, and honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from me either. I. Um, see, I never intended to become a faculty member, but my dissertation chair, Lori Patton Davis, who is an amazing scholar and supporter and advocator of my work and me as a human being, advised me to take the leap into faculty life the previous year, in the previous academic year, in the spring of 2018 I had called her. I was on a trip to Atlanta with my wife and wonderful partner, Gloria. We’d taken a little trip. It was a work trip for me, and kind of a vacation trip for for us. And on the trip I had I had already applied to SIUE, and they had offered me an on campus interview, but I was actually thinking about declining the campus interview because you know, it was just fine, right? Like, it wasn’t anything that that was mind blowing or amazing, it was just okay. And I thought, I don’t want to waste these people’s time, so I’m just gonna pull out of the process. And my wife, who’s my fiance, at the time, she encouraged me. She was like, You need to take you need to take more chances in your life. You need to take more risk. So I ended up calling Dr Patton Davis, and you, you know it’s like, I don’t know, trying to figure out if this is what I want to do. I’m not sure. And she said, Now JT, in that traditional black mama voice where, you know, like, oh, I may be in trouble.

Helena Gardner
She said, Listen. She

J.T. Snipes
says, Now, why wouldn’t you take the interview? Like, what would prevent you from doing this? I said, I don’t, I don’t know. I just really, I’m not feeling it. And she, in her gracious way, began to tell me a story about being at Iowa State and how she was in a similar position. She was on the market. She’d had an interview and wasn’t really convinced. And her dissertation chair, Mary Howard Hamilton, shared the same thing and said, Hey, go and check it out. Don’t, don’t write them off before you see the space. And long story short, she ended up on campus and loved it for her. She realized when she set foot on campus that that’s where she was supposed to be. So I took her advice, accepted the interview and visit campus. And sure enough, Lori was absolutely correct. When I set foot on campus, I feel in love. Those of you who haven’t been to SIUE. It is a beautiful campus. There are rolling hills, lush green spaces and majestic trees that line the entry to campus. It kind of feels like you’re in a secluded retreat center in the woods coming up to campus. And of course, you know, there’s wildlife everywhere. There are deers all across campus. So it just makes it just feels like a retreat. I don’t have the, I have the words to properly name it, but it just feels different. So did my interview. Had a wonderful exchange with students, love the campus, love the people that I needed. And when they offered the position, of course, I took it, but I was still not sure if I was ready to take on the pressures of a tenure track position. And the fact of the matter is, I wasn’t ready. I struggled adjusting to a new city, balancing my teaching responsibilities and trying to get a research agenda off the ground and dealing with university required service.

Neil E. Golemo
What were you doing at the time? Where were you

J.T. Snipes
at? SIUE, SIU, Oh, before I was at SIUE, oh, I was, I was working for a non profit, the Interfaith Youth Corps, okay, in Chicago, so, oh, I was there at that organization, finishing up my dissertation, trying to figure out what the next move was going to be for me. So left the nonprofit to come to another type of nonprofit that felt familiar, that.

Helena Gardner
Our job, yeah, well,

J.T. Snipes
you know nonprofits, nonprofits don’t like to pay either so, but to be fair to Interfaith Youth Core, if anybody from now interfaith America is listening, they they do pay, pay handsomely. So

Neil E. Golemo
wait until you left, though. Okay. I mean,

J.T. Snipes
yes, well, maybe people were getting paid good then, I don’t know. I ain’t asking about folks out. So I was struggling y’all, yeah, it not just with school stuff, but also in my personal life. I had Gloria had proposed to me. Maybe I’ll tell the story about her proposal in a different episode. But yes, please. We were engaged, and we had just moved and we were planning our wedding in Austin, Texas. Oh, and it was a lot so in order to just survive my first semester, I simplified my goals. Initially, when I became a faculty member, I thought I was going to be super productive. I’m going to publish all of these things. I’m going to do all the important university service. I will be the best husband that Gloria ever could imagine, right? But I had to whittle those things down to to just one thing is that I’m going to focus on being the best instructor that I could be. Oh, so in terms of my professional work, right? Yeah, the personal never goes away. So I spend a lot of my professional time thinking about my teaching, trying to improve my teaching, but I don’t know if you’ve done lesson planning and preparing for teaching. You can spend forever and a day, and I’m here to tell you I was spending forever and a day trying to develop my lessons. And if I’m honest, they weren’t very good,

Helena Gardner
like your opinion or students told you this,

J.T. Snipes
oh, we’re getting there. Good foreshadowing. I was not very good, so I took all of the professional development I could. There was some backwards design, planning, writing, learning outcomes and developing classroom evaluations was the thing that was really important. So around the eighth week of the semester, I put some of this professional development into practice, and I put together my own midpoint evaluation. It was a small survey, five five questions that just asked students what I was doing well and what could be improved on at the time, five of my 20 students responded. They provided some encouraging feedback and a couple of lists of things that I could do. They said, less lecture, more explanation, more activities, more discussion. So, right? I had an idea of what I needed to do, so taking student feedback, I tried my best to incorporate it, and I remember what felt like the perfect class, right? So I’m sitting with students work. How can I make this more engaging? How can I put in more activities that will resonate with students? So the lecture was about interviewing, and I put in clips of Jimmy Fallon, and we analyzed some of the clips that Jimmy Fallon did to say, what are some of the things he does in the interview to make this work more engaging? I felt like I was in my bag, right? Like, oh, yeah, it’s a good activity. I shared some of my dissertation work with students so they could see, oh, here’s what, here’s here’s what I did to prepare for interviews. And then I had students interview each other, because they’ve been working on their own interview protocols. So they interviewed each other in class. I’m like, check, check, check, all the things that y’all asked me to do, I’m doing it. And that one class, I felt like students were locked in and completely engaged, yeah, little light bulbs flickering on right? We’re in it. But that was one class out of 16. It. So a few weeks later, we’re wrapping up the semester, and while I knew I had improved a little, if I’m honest, my students never fully warmed up to me, and that became apparent on the. Last day of class, as students left, only a handful of students said anything to me, like acknowledged me, and there was a rush out of the door and leaving. And normally, I wouldn’t have thought anything of that, except the previous night, my office is across the hall, so I could see students when they leave, and I saw them leaving one of my colleagues classes. They were hugging each other, they were talking to the professor. It was just like, it was just a beautiful sort of community, and I and I was clearly on the outside of it. So after that night, I remember thinking to myself, if my evaluations didn’t improve, maybe this teaching thing isn’t for me. I had given my whole semester to doing this thing, and maybe I should do something else. So when an email came in late December, I remember opening it up, and it included the notifications for the course evaluations, and I took a deep breath, and for a moment I was like, Yo remember that night you knocked it out of the park. You got this right? No, I did not have it. So student evaluations, in and of themselves are brutal. These felt particularly heinous to me. Students said things like Dr saints was unorganized. I learned absolutely nothing in this class. He is terrible at explaining things. One student said he is the worst professor I’ve ever had in my life. So those words lingered in the classroom, my tiny faculty office, and at that point, I just remember a single tear breaking through, and then the water works came, and I just cried in my office and thought about the semester, and it was at that point I was like, I don’t I don’t think I should teach anymore. I packed up my stuff and prepared to leave my office, possibly for the last time. Wow. And as I was leaving the building, a strange thing happened. I was I saw a small family of deers and a book was less than like five yards away from me. Now, I don’t know if y’all have seen a deer up close in real life. I had not them. Things are huge.

Helena Gardner
They’re not they’re not little sweet Bambi, they’re not Bambi.

J.T. Snipes
They’re not Bambi. Buck, massive, massive buck, like, super muscular, huge horns staring me in the face, and I’m thinking, Lord, I’m about to die. Like, like, do deer attack? Am I okay? Am I safe? Like I just didn’t move. The deer looked at me. I looked at him for what felt like hours. It’s probably like, probably like five to 10 seconds, deer looks at me, it and walks away. Family scurries away into the forest, and I ran to my car, yes, hopped in the car, locked the doors, and thought, oh, wow, what is what is going on? So after my blood pressure came down a little, drove home from my home to campus is about 30 minutes. So I had 30 minutes to sort of replay the events of my mind. And in a strange way, I faced a fear that I didn’t even know I had. And I think staring down the deer not running, not cowering. Shifted something in me, and I can’t really explain it, but I think it, it helped me understand a couple of things. One, that the world is much bigger than me. Right? There’s a whole world out there, and I’m just a small, a small piece of it. And it made me remember that I have something to contribute. And the second thing is that whether this was a life or death situation, it felt like a life or death situation. And I think death has a way of putting things into sharp relief. I think it’s critical for us to know what matters and what’s important to us, and what was important to me on my drive home, was not giving up, was continuing to think about my teaching and continuing to improve, right? So I didn’t quit. I kept my commitment, kept improving my teaching, learned how to better listen to students and learn from them. And one of the things that I’ve continued to take in my teaching career is to not think about feedback as final or condemnation, but to think about feedback as love. So that’s my story. What I have is a little bit of love. And the universe always brings us what we need exactly when we need it.

Helena Gardner
Have you seen those deers again? Yeah,

J.T. Snipes
I have not seen the deer again. See, that’s not the only time I’ve been that close to a deer. So

Neil E. Golemo
I mean, they have this way of like, they won’t look at you. They look like through you. So I mean, I grew up hunting deer, so, so that’s I get it like I get it, but I did not have that on my bingo card that you

Helena Gardner
Nope. And so I didn’t, I didn’t grow up hunting deer. I grew older being like deer. Like, why is that here? And I just, I wrote down sharp relief in this, because it the symbolism of staring down your fear thinking it was this. Was it? It just as it’s awesome to know that to your point, something, something will talk to you, something’s going to come to you and say, here’s what you need to do. And I kind of want to hear a little bit more about what you learned from the students, because I I’m curious to how they became that book that kind of stared you down, but you could hear him differently after the stare down, because that was

Neil E. Golemo
real well, I mean, I think forever, like, How long you been in school? Like, five minutes. I’ve had professors like, stop coming to class like I’ve had that before, so

J.T. Snipes
and I think, I mean, I think some students, when I came into the program, it was important for me to to raise A standard of academic rigor. And I think some students knew that that was a way to, like, dig at me, because I made them work hard, and they knew I cared. Yeah, so I don’t think, in retrospect, I don’t think they actually meant it. I think folks were tired, I did things that that actually wasn’t good for them because of information I didn’t have. I didn’t really listen to students. So one of the things that just as an example, so our program, we have classes in the evening. The class I taught was the second of a back to back. So they had a five to seven class and then a 715 to 915 class. And there were some nights that I kept them for an extra 15 minutes, not knowing that some of our students had to drive an hour home into campus. So like, if I had really been listening to students, if I cared as much as I said, as much as I thought I did, then I could have heard that in a different way. And actually, what shifted my hearing was the pandemic. I didn’t include this in my story, but. Like, the biggest piece was the pandemic. It gave me a chance to reset. I was like, I guess, 18 months into my teaching career, and everything locked down, and I had colleagues that were experimenting with their pedagogy in a way that wasn’t just talking about caring, but like demonstrating caring. So I got to see like, Oh no, no, this is actually what caring looks like. It’s not just saying these things. It’s about being with students, right? It’s about to students, the things that I’m sure both of you do really well, that that’s what shifted, or you, or maybe you did at some point in your career, like, you

Helena Gardner
know, it’s it’s that I think we all think we’re doing it really well, until they gently tap us on the shoulder and remind us that either, like, what we were doing, we need to do something else, like, it’s a very gentle tap, but I think at any point, you know, we think we’re doing our very best, and then something shifts in the universe and it’s no longer in and by the time we catch up, or We realize, or we shift, if we can, yeah, that the evaluations right have already told us about ourselves.

Neil E. Golemo
I think, I think sometimes it’s not a tap, sometimes it is a slap, you know, and slap, I mean, if you’re trying it all, you know, if you’re, you know, if you’re not. I mean, theory, if you’re setting good targets for yourself, you should hit it 50% of the time, right? Yeah. And I think I just love like, the essence of like, I just, I feel like sometimes, especially with assessment. It’s so easy to, like, look at it as a report card. And, you know, like, you shouldn’t have been shocked. Honestly, like, this work that take people spend their entire careers honing. Yeah, you had one semester you hadn’t figured it all out. You know, like, that’s your standard. That’s not realistic. But, oh yeah, you know, it takes a lot of, I mean, you gotta let a little bit of your ego die a bit. And, yeah, I love that. Like, I love that. And, I mean, that’s, that’s a JT, I know. Like, no Bumble and not assuming. And, yeah, man, I because I don’t if you’re trying at all, you’re going to fail if you really are, and you got to see it, you really had nothing but to use to get better, right?

Helena Gardner
Yeah. And I think you, what I heard in your story is that you hold a space of self reflection, so that when you need the mirror, you saw it. And I just love how you entered it with the retreat. And seeing the deer was significant. You know, you’re, in my mind, you’re driving through this windy road. It’s probably not that windy, but it’s windy, and it’s this cool ambiance. And you’re like, Oh, dear. And then the next time you see a deer, it’s, it’s the deer, the buck, the family. It’s like, I love how you said, like your your personal life would always remain, and you had a little personal life a family. Just say to you, what you doing? What are you doing? You like it here. You like it here. And it felt scary to like it here, and that is wild to me. That’s just wild to me, that it had to feel scary for you to stay you reflect it. So I’m curious, what do they say now? Walk out.

J.T. Snipes
Well, well, I mean, I think, I think an important takeaway that that your reflections bring up with me is like, where’s your family, right? I think that’s, that’s the deeper question, how are you how? And that’s the question that it continues to if I were to encounter the buck again, it’s like, where are you being rooted, right? Like, I’m with my I’m with my family, right? We’re here together. How are you continuing to root yourself within family and community? I think is something that I will continue to carry with me and continue to think about,

Neil E. Golemo
there’s a phrase that another podcast I listen to, they get, but they exist, I guess. But there’s one that’s like, you gotta win your clunkers, you know. And like, you’re gonna have clunkers. And, you know, by taking it and use. It. I mean, that’s, that’s it. Learning is important, can’t they’re learning. Results are going to come and go, but the learning and getting better, that’s, that’s brave. Yeah. So glad you shared that

J.T. Snipes
I also buried the lead. Well, not burying the lead, but one of the important things I left out is that I won, you know, teaching instructor of the year two years ago. So, like, there was a continued commitment to prove it and craft. But like, that’s not the most important thing to me, right? Yeah, I think there is a moment that I wanted to capture my story about continuing to stay committed, not knowing, right, like not knowing what the future is going to be, not knowing if success is guaranteed, but being clear about what my commitments are and sticking to them, I think is one of the most important things to me.

Neil E. Golemo
Every class is a new class, too. Like, I mean, I don’t know, you might teach more than one section or whatever, more than one course, but I mean, you’re starting to scratch every time. And better, worse, so.

Helena Gardner
So much message in that for me on this day. How many messages I just I love that, because I’ll tell you what. Imagine some of those students were like, this is it’s my faculty, and they know everything.They know everything. And so the grace that they had to offer is minimum, because they just think, you know everything, and here you are trying. It’s like, I’m always going to do this. I think where I say my friend Neil see, is the get caught trying, because, essentially, that’s, that’s, it’s so symbolic, I think, though, because that’s what it is, you got, literally, got caught by a buck, trying, trying to do it, trying not to do it, yeah, but, um, you didn’t stop.

Neil E. Golemo
Now I’m wondering, like, how many like, what have I put on my evaluations? I think I’ve always thought I’m that person who I was. Said, I’m going to fire bomb this person, and then I don’t super improvement here, like, like, I’m convinced they’re going to know that it was me.

J.T. Snipes
So I will say confidently, we do. It’s not a mystery, like we’re having the same experience, experience. We’re part of it. So,

Neil E. Golemo
19 analogies in one paragraph, Neil that it was you.

J.T. Snipes
That’s the beautiful thing, though. I mean, the thing that I’ve been trying to cultivate over the last couple of years is just like, if there is the campus can be a lonely, isolating, hard space. And I teach graduate students, especially for our graduate students, yeah, who may be a little bit younger, who didn’t come from this institution, right? Yeah, but now they’re here and trying to figure out the culture again. So I what I want for my students, my classroom, I want it to kind of feel like, cheers, right? This is, yeah, everybody knows you, like, I know you, I see you, and you’re, you’re, I’m definitely going to challenge you to learn some things, but the most important thing for me is that you feel grounded and stable here and known.

Helena Gardner
Um, so let me shoot that back at you on that day that you walked out, you didn’t feel grounded or stable. You were known. People knew who they were providing feedback to are you feeling grounded? Are you feeling stable?

J.T. Snipes
I am.

J.T. Snipes
I am feeling grounded. I am not feeling stable because the institutions themselves, like higher ed is not okay,

Helena Gardner
yeah, and I think that’s what we’ve we’ve kind of gained post COVID, right? Like, you got some glory out of COVID where it is. But the reality is, a lot of things came to our attention. Yeah,

J.T. Snipes
so, I mean, I think the work that I’m doing as department chair, it is work to ground the folks in my immediate space. Like, what can I do to be an anchor? There’s a really great book. Book called let this right, let this radicalize you, right? And in in chapter two of the book, Miriam specific, I think the title of the book is really important too, in this chapter, right, the chapter is refusing to not refusing abandonment. But I forgot the name now, but the in the second chapter, the concept is about refusing to concede to misanthropy, right where we don’t love humanity, and I think we’re in a moment where it is very easy to be misanthropic, but what they remind us to do is to anchor ourselves in each other. Community is the thing that anchors us right. And I’ve been able to work hard to create a community of folks that stabilize and anchor me. We are anchored in each other, and even though the university is unhinged, right, like my department, we’re still a little unhinged, but we are anchoring ourselves in each other. And I think it’s, it’s mitigating some of the harder storms we face.

Neil E. Golemo
I think being unhinged is a little ungraded. I like, I like things a little crazy and, and you’re right. I mean, higher ed, you know, we’re having a moment. We’ve been having a moment, but to me, you know that just means we got work to do. Yep, it’s hard for me to be in a space people like you, both of you, and not feel optimistic. Yeah, we’re playing the long game.

Helena Gardner
JT, I can listen to you talk all day. Thank you for sharing that story with us. We’ll take a moment and thank our sponsors. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for belonging and transformational leadership. Our own doctor, Keith Edwards, along with doctors, Brian arriel and Dawn Lee, offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change. This has been Here’s the Story part of the Student Affairs NOW family, please join us on Wednesdays to laugh, pride, learn and always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs. Now experience if you have a story, and we all have a story to tell, please consider sharing with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice file atstudentaffairsnow.com Every story is what and every earnest perspective is worthy. And even if you don’t feel like sharing yours, you can still find ours in others at studentaffairsnow.com, on YouTube, smash that subscribe button. This episode, thankfully, has been edited by Nat Ambrosey. Thank you for making us look good and sound as good as we do. I’m Helena Gardner, I’m Neil E. Golemo, and we hope this fed your flame a little bit, because your life matters. Keep using it to make the world a better place. Until next time.