Heather Shea:

Hello and welcome to student affairs. Now I am your host. Heather Shea today’s episode is about promoting resiliency, amid campus crises and conflict. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find our growing archives at Student Affairs Now.com. Today’s episode was sponsored by Stylus publishing. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor for the Student Affairs Now podcast. Browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at Styluspub.com. Use the promo code SANOW for 30% off all books plus free shipping. And you can find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter at StylusPub.

Heather Shea:

As I mentioned, I’m your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers and I’m broadcasting today from East Lansing, Michigan near the campus of Michigan State University. MSU occupies the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Peoples. This episode features a conversation I recorded on Thursday, January 14th for the professional development seminar that I teach in the student affairs administration master’s program at Michigan State University Students in the class were invited to submit questions for our two guests, Dr. Kathy Adams Riester and Dr. Glenn DeGuzman. And I organized those questions around three themes; resiliency, campus crisis, and conflict. The conversation was recorded so that students who couldn’t attend the live zoom session could tune in later and watch it at their leisure. And after it was over, I was like, this would be a great podcast episode. And so with everyone’s permission, I’m bringing this conversation to Student Affairs Now, because I believe this conversation filled with wisdom and practical tips will resonate with graduate students, student affairs educators, and frankly, anyone who is managing conflict and crises on campus right now, or dealing with a global pandemic, which is pretty much all of us. So here’s today’s conversation.

Heather Shea:

Thank you, Glenn and Kathy so much for being here today. I really am appreciative of both of you. I’ve known both of you for over two decades. And so it’s kind of unbelievable that we all are aware we are now, but it’s fun to be able to be back in this space. And as I was thinking about this topic today, I was like, I need people who are in on the ground in the weeds leadership, administrative leadership, and who have had some significant time and experience in those roles. So I instantly thought of you two because both have ranges of experiences. And so you’ll hear a little bit about that background here in a moment, but as you know, our topic today is around resiliency, campus crisis and conflict. I posed that as the, as the topic well before all of the uprising and insurrection was happening just last week.

Heather Shea:

So but this topic obviously extremely appropriate today and probably maybe more, more than ever. But of course we’ve been living in kind of a state of perpetual crisis maybe, you know, for decades and in fact and so I thought we would begin today by just each of you giving a brief version of your student affairs journey. You know, where did you go to graduate school? Where did you work? Post-grad kind of functional areas in which you focused your career. And then as you respond to the questions you can go into kind of more tangible examples related to your current experience. So Glenn, how can we start with you? And then we’ll go to Kathy for the first question.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Sure. Hi everyone. Again, my name is Glenn DeGuzman. I use he him pronouns. I’m going to camera’s this way. Y’all on my right. I’m going to use he him pronouns. I’m the Associate Dean of students at UC Berkeley. I’m also concurrently the Director of Residential Life. Let’s see my professional journey. I did my undergraduate at University of California – Santa Barbara go Gauchos. I did my masters program at Colorado State University Go Rams. And then I did my doctorate at the University of Laverne in Southern California go Leopards. And so really I’ve been in the field for about 20 goodness gracious, 26 years. I stopped counting. So around that amount I’ve been I’ve worked at four different institutions from community colleges to to four-year institutions for all, all private all public except for Laverne which is a private let’s see, 25 years.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Most of my career actually last year I passed a mark where I’ve worked at one institution longer than all the other combined. So now I’ve been at UC Berkeley now for a very long time. My functional areas really started in res life way back, actually, I would say multicultural affairs. I did work in an advocacy office and then I went to residential life and I’ve been in conference services, student activities, leadership development, conduct offices. I’ve really taken this. I don’t know if this is a term you all still use, but a generalist approach and it just really just kinda worked my way up through the the field and found myself in my current position at UC Berkeley, where you know, I, which I enjoy, I enjoy being at Berkeley. That’s my journey,

Heather Shea:

And Glenn and I crossed paths at Colorado State. I was a first year in the SAHE program and Glenn was a second year. And we recently reconnected because we’re part of the, the group of people who are now hosting Student Affairs Now the podcast. So Glenn and I now get to see each other every single week. And Kathy and I go back to my time when I started working at the University of Arizona in 2001. And Kathy, tell us a little bit about your journey.

Kathy Adams Riester:

Sure. So good afternoon, everyone. As Heather said that my name is Kathy Adams Riester, and I am the Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and Executive Associate Dean of Students at Indiana University in Bloomington and my pronouns are she, her, hers. So I did kind of similar to Glenn I’ve had, I feel like I’ve had a very generalist path. I started out in residence life, probably similar to a lot of you as an RA. I was at the University of Arizona as an undergraduate Go Wildcast. I born and raised in Arizona. So I have an affinity for Southern California in particular, especially San Diego. So it was exciting to hear some of some West coast people out here in Indiana. So my during my undergrad, I was an RA and then I actually was a hall director, an undergrad hall director when they were really grad positions at Arizona.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And and then went from there to Indiana University to do my master’s degree in what was then they’re College Student Personnel Administration program. Now, today it’s called HESA their Higher Education Student Affairs program. And so I did my undergrad there, and then I worked for one year at in the Northern Arizona University, after that I’m in back in housing, but I had worked with Greek students when I was at IU as part of my practicum and discovered I really liked that. So my goal was to be doing some work in Greek life. So at Northern Arizona I, as I said, I was there for a year, but I did some work with the Greek community there just kind of as a, kind of a postgraduate practicum. And then took a position back at the University of Arizona back in Tucson.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And I was at the university of Arizona for 23 years post-master’s degree, which is quite a long time to be at one institution, but, and I never thought I would be there that long, but I kept having really great opportunities to do new and different things. So while I started out as a hall director I then went on to have an interim position working in advising the Panhellenic association and the fraternity and sorority office there, which turned it into a permanent position. And in that office, I was able to work with Greek life, student activities, some of the leadership program development, the HR practices and procedures for the whole student union as part of that. So I really advanced a lot of my career and skill building at that time. That’s also where Heather and I got to be good friends as part of that.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And in that time I eventually was the assistant director of the office. And when the director left, I applied for the job, I did not get it. And as part of that I, you know, was, you know, hopeful and thoughtful that maybe this, you know, I had something to learn from the new person that was coming in and I stayed about a year and decided it just wasn’t a good fit for me anymore at that point in time and had an opportunity to go back into residence life as an area coordinator. So I did that and I did that for a few years. And then my ultimate goal was the Dean of Students office. And there was an opportunity to move into the Dean of Students office working with parent and family programs. And it was funny at the time I was like, are you kidding me?

Kathy Adams Riester:

Like, I don’t want to work with parents. All they do is yell at you about things, which was really my experience from Greek life and residence life. And Keith Humphrey, who’s one of our ACPA presidents, was the person at the time I would be working with. And he said, you know, in this role, you really get to be the good person about this because you’re helping the parents who like either coming to you first for a problem or last for a problem. And you really get to to do good work with them. And for the most part, that was true. So I loved the job working with parent family programs. I was also able to grow my role in the Dean of Students office, working with Greek programs again, which I had done in the center for student involvement and leadership, and then also working with like conduct boards hearing boards doing some code, hearing cases, all that kind of stuff.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And then I got my doctorate along the way. I have an EdD from Northern Arizona University, so go Lumberjacks from there. And then I while I was finishing up my, I was in my dissertation semester my last semester dissertation, I actually took a new position at Indiana University in the role that I’m in now. I’m excited. I oversee all of our student services areas. So a lot of areas that I’ve worked with in the past, I feel like I’ve kind of come together with some new ones. So it’s a great opportunity.

Heather Shea:

Awesome. So good to have you both here. And I love that pathway hearing those stories is so fun, especially the parts where our lives kind of intersected. So as we talked about the topic today is around resiliency. And so I wanted to start with that. I had two students kind of ask really great questions about resiliency. Nadir asked what makes a university resilient. And is it more about actions of administrators or is it more about student actions, but then Ernesto asked, do you all think that the term resiliency is overused? He talked about from experiences that he has had throughout undergrad when administration, the word resiliency after every single incident, it seemed like it had been overused. So is there a way to encourage students to have a better outlook without using that word resilience? So Kathy, do you want to start and then pass it to Glenn just generally, what is resiliency and how do you see it on your, in your role on your campus?

Kathy Adams Riester:

Yeah, thanks. So I, I think Nadir’s question was really interesting, cause I guess, I think when I think of resiliency in that term, I think it really first comes from individuals because to me it means that you have individuals who face challenges and develop skills that help them overcome those challenges. And then that helps them as they face the next challenge. So it’s kind of a skill set that you build, how to overcome those things that are, that are problematic. So while an institution maybe could have that, I think we really try and help people develop those skills. And some students come with them because their path to getting to college has been more challenging. And I think then they’re better able to deal with those challenges as they come up in college. It doesn’t mean they deal with them perfectly, but they have some skills to rely on and some students have had a really easy path and they may not have built up those skills as well. So I think part of our goal is to do that. And I do think maybe it’s overused, although I have to say during COVID like resiliency is so important. So I think, you know, if there’s any time to talk about it, it’s probably now because, you know, get just getting through, you know, day-to-day activities sometimes takes having some of those skills.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Wow. Great points. Let me see if I can kind of cover other aspects as well. I think I is one of the questions I’m looking at here is, is resiliency, overused by institution. I think yes. But I’d also point out that as, as a student affairs professional and what we do you gotta get used to repetition. So when we hear something for the hundredth time, the students may be hearing it for the first or second time. And then I think the other part of the question that I, I picked up on I’m looking at the question right now is what can we encourage? I believe you know, what can we encourage to help? I think there’s a couple of things. One is that we need to have and continue. And really honestly, the best solution is conversation.

Glenn DeGuzman:

It’s really getting to understand what the student experiences are when we talk about resiliency, we’re really talking about and I think it’s let me actually step back and let me make sure we’re on the same page in how I define and understand resiliency. I think when I think about resiliency, I think about like us as student affairs professionals, first, I think about what burns us out. You know, we already are professionals who, who are, who care. So we already are utilizing a lot of emotional labor. We’re already experiencing a lot of secondary trauma because we care and we’re empathetic. We really want to help students discover and really pinpoint the the stressors that they’re experiencing. And that’s you, you understand that through these conversations, right? And when we’re all chronically stressed and we are in, when students are chronically stressed, it’s harder to be resilient.

Glenn DeGuzman:

So that through conversation, you’re really trying to identify those one or two things, and you’re really trying to connect them to resources. And I think what happens on both sides, cause I’m in my brain stuck because from a student perspective, we just need to help them with that one issue to help them to kind of, you know, to kind of continue to move forward and, and really find that solution or at least find, to find a bit more balanced or trying to overcome like the low points. I think the hard thing is for student affairs professionals, because we may be hearing that one student, but you might be thinking that’s like the 10th time a student has experienced it. So we’re all of a sudden experiencing this idea of secondary trauma. This is what makes the resiliency so hard. We’re constantly doing this over and over and again. And so, so I think that it does leads to this idea of can the, you know, the university talks about resiliency all the time. Yeah. And, and I think that’s what makes their frontline staff particularly a burnout position.

Heather Shea:

Yeah. I’m really struck, I mentioned this to Glenn earlier today, there’s an article in The Chronicle today called They’re Called #TeamNoSleep, I’ll stick it in our, in our D2L chat. The pandemic has piled new demands on student affairs staffers. They’re burning out and see no end in sight. So I do want to kind of turn towards the pandemic a little bit, like how has managing all the, all the complications and dimensions of COVID on your respective campuses, challenged your sense of resiliency. And I think Kathy’s point specifically, I think is really good because we’re also really disconnected, right? Like, I know we’re all dialing into this today, not from a shared space or a shared classroom where we normally have class, but from our own respective locations. And in some ways it makes it really awesome. Cause we have this ability to have guest speakers from all over the country, but how do we promote resiliency in an environment that feels so disconnected right now in COVID during COVID Glenn? Do you wanna start with that?

Glenn DeGuzman:

How do we, how do I promote resiliency? I look at it on multiple levels from a staff perspective. I think that when I’m working with my teams, I’m when I’m working with my teams, you’re working with this student. So like resident directors, coordinators, and whatnot. I think the first thing is making sure that they have a clear understanding of what we’re expecting from them. And really making sure that we’re paying attention to their workload and when they’re, and we need them to separate work from your own personal space meaning that when you are not at work helping them find spaces, helping them find and talk about things that they’re going to do to find relief from the chaos that literally is happening at work in their personal lives, what’s happening in our nation.

Glenn DeGuzman:

There’s just so much coming in that it’s very difficult sometimes for even professionals to you know, some like me, like, how do I find balance and how do I find wellness for myself, right? I have to also establish resiliency. So that’s from a staff perspective. So it’s, it’s messy. Each staff is very different. And, and as a supervisor, you have to have those conversations with each and every single one of them. And you need to just check in more than before from an administration perspective, the best way to promote resiliency in my in my opinion is be real and, and constantly communicate and be concise with your communication. So in California, public health guidance changes periodically. We’ve had to evolve our internal policies, how we do tests and compliance, how we’ve screwed up.

Glenn DeGuzman:

And so we’ve had to go back and re-communicate and explain. But I think as leaders, the way we promote it is you have to just be timely with information. I think there is a struggle sometimes about like, let’s get our information right before we communicate it. And every time we delay that just creates more anxiety on staff because they’re trying to do their jobs. So we want to make sure that we get information up front quickly, and then ask for grace when we screw up, or we’re saying like, there’s been a shift. And then again, going back to that personal level, Hey, what do we need? I know that’s a tough situation. We had to, we had to pivot, we had to make a change. How can we support you? And we’ve had to do different things like RAs didn’t have to do, like our residents didn’t have to do move out check-In. We had professional staff and professionals have volunteers coming in just to alleviate some of that pressure. So you’re constantly in the situational leadership mode.

Heather Shea:

That really resonates with me. Kathy, what about you? How has COVID challenged your sense of resiliency?

Kathy Adams Riester:

So I think it has been incredibly challenging and I think there are a couple of factors there. One, I think in higher education, you know, with crisis management, I mean, we’re are a lot of institutions are really good about planning for crisis, but I don’t think any of us anticipated how long this crisis would be. And it was a new crisis. So while we’ve had other types of emergencies or crisis situations, we haven’t had a pandemic that has hit this length and depth. It’s a worldwide issue. It’s not just a campus issue. And so I think, I think those two factors have made it incredibly challenging to deal with this type of crisis and to maintain any type of resiliency as part of that.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So I think that some of the things I try to focus on I, I definitely echo Glenn’s comments on communication because I think one of the things that stresses staff out and students and parents and other constituents is when you don’t know information and COVID has had such rapidly changing information. So I think that we went with we added some new meetings to our calendar, so I have – it was happening daily in the fall, but now it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, like a senior leadership team. Check-In because we were having like daily emergencies where we would need to schedule meetings to talk about stuff, and it just was impossible. So we just set them up, you know, for every day of the week for the fall. We also went to having deans and directors, so to communicate out through our larger group every other week.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And then I did a direct reports meeting that I added to have on those in-between weeks, so that I was making sure, like, if there’s stuff that happened that week, like my larger group was also hearing about it. So part of it was adding some meetings for communication and communicating what we could via email, but a lot of the COVID questions also came with, you know, we would say something, but then there was also lots of follow-up questions. So we, we tried to really hit that and, and help with the communication aspect of the other thing that I thought that I think is really important is talking with my staff about self-care. So I, I mean, I supervise like associate deans and directors as, as part of my role. And so for me to talk with them about what does it mean to take care of yourself and mindfulness and do some activities with them that they could turn around and I could give to them and they could do with their staffs to really talk about that.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And part of it is, I think we get so busy trying to help other people and solve issues that then we don’t take care of ourselves. So part of my role, I feel like as a supervisor is to help give them some tools, not only for themselves, but then something that they can go and share with their staffs to be able to kind of check in on how they’re doing, because I know they’re incredibly stressed. I mean, I hear that really frequently and I can see it on their faces too, on, on how much they have going on. So I think part of that, and then try myself to say, here’s things I’m working on. And I also do think that being vulnerable about it. So when I’m having a rough day being able to share that with them, but I’ve had a rough day because everyone is having them right now, you know, so being authentic in that and being able to say, you know, well, you know, I know your directors and the people above you are also being challenged by this, whether it’s something that happened at work with a decision or something you’re having to do, or it’s, you know, a personal issue in your family.

Kathy Adams Riester:

I mean, everyone’s having challenges right now. And so part of it is how do we support each other to get through them?

Glenn DeGuzman:

Can I add something quickly to that because Kathy brought up something really powerful when we’re talking about the tools that we provide. I think it’s also really important to continuously adapt. Like we talk about, and then our field, we talk about feedback loops all the time. Right. And usually we try to do it like over a period of a year. We’re trying to be more quickly we’re trying to do this more quickly. And, and just taking risks and trying to do something different. Like, for example, after the fall semester, we realized that we said, okay, our RAs, we’re going to continue to do our Bear chats where these one-on-one communications, we, we normally require at least one, but now we were like, Oh, let’s try and do three. And then an interesting thing we learned at the end and we’re like, you know what, sometimes students don’t connect with the RAs or they don’t connect with others.

Glenn DeGuzman:

So how do we come up with something different? So we decided to survey all incoming students for this upcoming spring to say, Hey, when the, when the going gets tough and stuffs, when things are going bad, who do you check in with? And we, we just collect the information. So when the RAs go and talk and they’re finding, they’re not there, they’re able to bridge or connect, they can say, Hey, have you checked in with X or Y or Z, like giving them a different way to find an outlet. So you just got to constantly be nimble and you gotta constantly just keep an eye on some new, innovative ways to, to talk to students more than anything just to connect because they’re nice relation anyways, they’re all by themselves.

Heather Shea:

Yeah. I, I have really thought about that a lot in terms of checking in and, and knowing that that kind of check in is so important, because again, back to that kind of feeling really disconnected Kathy, you, you made a comment about the fact that this is a crisis, right? And this is a crisis that’s lasted for a really long time. And that we do a decent job of planning for other types of campus crisis. And I remember sitting at table top exercises around active shooters on campus, or were other types of emergencies. And this type of crisis had challenged us in different ways. Certainly what happened at the Capitol last week as also challenging our campuses and in kind of an existential way and in a very real way, if you’re in a capital. And then also the twin pandemic of racism on our campuses, I think is the other piece that has certainly becoming a rising crisis as we seek to address DEI issues broadly.

Heather Shea:

So I want to switch to talking a little bit about campus crisis, you know, beyond the pandemic as well. But Kathy was one of the founding chairs of the ACPA Commission for Campus Safety and Emergency preparedness. And so she’s worked really closely. In fact, one of the authors of one of the chapter that we’re reading for this week Mahauganee Shaw was I think a colleague or was on that board with you at some point, Kathy. So when you think about campus crisis and we had several great questions that related to this, so Kirstin asked during a crisis, what are your priorities? How do you decide upon a course of action? May asked about information flow. So back to that kind of communication piece, what is the big announcement and development takes place? Like, how do you respond? And then Elizabeth asked specifically, like, how has crisis management and emergency preparedness changed on your campus as a result of the pandemic.

Heather Shea:

And I guess I would add to that, like, and in what ways will it be permanently changed? Right. Like, have we created, I know on our campus, we have these COVID look ahead planning teams or LAPTs that we’re meeting regularly to both manage and then create operational plans around what the future’s going to hold. So I think going forward that mode of operation will be pretty common. So Kathy, I’ll turn to you first and then go to Glenn. Talk to us about campus crisis. And what are some of the priorities? How do you deal with information? And then in general, what do you see for the future of campus safety?

Kathy Adams Riester:

I think that those are a lot of questions in one, so I may, I may not get to all of them. So I think during a campus crisis I’m going to speak kind of in general. So I’ve, I’ve been at two institutions and pretty been pretty involved in the crisis planning. I think some of the things that have been developed that are helpful during COVID, or that might be new is really some of the teams that Heather was talking about, bringing together setting up teams with institutional knowledge to address the type of crisis that you’re having has been really important. So we have like Indiana has like a restart committee. We have a campus unit kind of response team that I’m on that meets regularly to talk about kind of where we are with issues isolation, quarantine, outbreak numbers Greek housing and, and exposure there.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So there’s, there’s a lot of different metrics and committees that have been set up as part of that, which I think have really helped. And I think one of the things that was most important in that is some thoughtfulness of the campus leaders. So like the provost and the president looking at the institutional resources to pull those committees together. So we have like infectious disease specialists, we have public health specialists, and we’re lucky to have a medical center that, you know, brings in some of those specialties. So I think that, that the forming of those teams was pretty important. And I think that that is one of the things that I would hope that would be retained in the future. So depending on the type of crisis, looking at your campus experts and your community experts, if you need them.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So I never thought I would be on the phone regularly with our health department, talking with them about how do we address COVID in communal living situations for fraternities and sororities. And literally I’ve been on multiple health board calls, talk with them about what, you know, kind of what we’re seeing on campus with policies and, and working with the health department on formulating policies around that type of housing. So, so I think the relationships with your local community experts are also super important as part of that prioritization. I think it depends on the of crisis and, and where you are role in the institution. So a lot of times your priorities can be handed to you because the president needs this, or the provost needs that, or your boss, like my, I boss, the vice provost needs this thing that he’s been asked for.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So, so depending on the type of crisis, it really depends on, on what you need to do and put together. I mean, there’s some basic safety and kind of follow up and support that come into it. But it really differs depending on the type of incidents that you have. And if you go into an incident command model where you have multiple supporting areas, it’s, it’s really nice because then you have like people with communication, helping people with operations, helping with whatever operations you need. You have the student affairs people that often respond on the support side for students. So it kind of makes a nice way to divide up some of the heavy lifting in the work. And so that multiple priorities can get addressed at different times as part of that. And I’ve only worked at large public institutions. So I don’t, I can’t really speak to how a smaller institution would handle all of this as part of it.

Glenn DeGuzman:

I worked at a community college with about 10,000 students and there, there, wasn’t a very robust incident response protocol. If something happened, you escalated up and then it’s all hands on deck and they, you try to figure it out from that perspective. At UC Berkeley. You know, I think what Kathy provided was very similar. I mean, there was just so many things that can, I could resonate. I think that crisis response over the years has become, or maybe it’s because I’ve just climbed higher in the position, but it’s extremely robust. It’s extremely complicated. And the best way for me to talk about it for this audience would be what happens at higher levels and what happens on the ground, you know, obviously on the ground what happens if it is a, if a situation occurs, the first thing that I always care about more is the the safety of the person who’s escalating, because usually in, in housing, for example, I’m working with a lot of younger professional staff.

Glenn DeGuzman:

We, we provide them with a training. We give them, we give them scripts, we give them the, you know, they got their to do’s. But when something happened at two in the morning or three in the morning, which at UC Berkeley seems to be very common. I mean, like, just that even just in the past year, we’ve had a fire, a flood, a pandemic, deaths of students, death of staff. We’ve had, you know, and it’s just constantly responding. And then obviously everything associated with our political climate, there’s just a lot of stuff happening. So you’re, you want to check in with the person escalating because you know their heart’s racing I would want to find out about we, we make sure they understand to make sure, ask them about the student.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Have they contacted folks? We just want to make sure that they’re following the protocol to help them just alleviate some of the pressure, the feeling like they have to be the only person responding. There’s more flow of communication, y’all know that’s going to happen. So that’s going to be like afterwards, and obviously you want to debrief it later on. I think from a leadership perspective and from administration perspective, I think one of the biggest things that I think about, or what we have to think about is situations that I would describe as exceptional. And these are the big operational disruptions to the campus. And are those are things like, will it track media attention because I mean, UC Berkeley, it always attracts media attention. Is there potential for risk liability a litigation, right? Because for, you know, one thing that always shocked me is how many lawsuits are pending at UC Berkeley against the university re ranging from just the student, living in the halls all the way to the faculty, you know, there, there’s just lots of litigation to the campuses.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Really. We pay attention to that because we wanna make sure that we’re, we’re minimizing our risks and doing everything we can to minimize all those pieces. And then I think the other part is how many stakeholders are ours are so involved because oftentimes with crisis a university, isn’t at least at UC Berkeley, isn’t an isolation. At UC Berkeley, we work, I work very closely with the city of Albany, the city of Berkeley. And so we’re constantly in meetings to kind of figure out like if the earthquake hits, because I don’t know what, you know, UC Berkeley is built on a fault line. You know how do we support one another? And how do we make sure that we can share resources or get resources to each other if necessary? So these are some of the things that we think about, you know, I think about, like, for example, this literally happened two nights ago.

Glenn DeGuzman:

We had a situation where there was a high speed chase that ended up in our family graduate living quarters. I swear, it’s like a movie. This car was hitting, you know, like going through the streets person jumped out, running, had a gun pocket, gun discharge shot himself. Right? So imagine that happening. How does a university respond to that? You want to get, you want to get the media under control. You want to make sure that the community is safe. You have to get messaging out to them immediately. You got to do all these things. And it involves like so many different folks on campus – media, police, your staff who were on scene. So it’s, it’s a very disruptive, but it’s a very it’s a very complicated thing, which is why it’s really important to to make sure that you have standard operating procedures and people know their role in it.

Kathy Adams Riester:

And I would add to that, that a lot, a lot of campuses have some type of on-call system that can kind of loop in and get things caught up. So for example, you know, we have a Dean on call where the deans and directors at IU are on call. So if something happens in RPS, that that is a big issue that needs to be escalated, it’s escalated there. Or if something police come across something, they’ll call the Dean on call. And then it’s kinda that they, my staff will then call me and say, okay, Kathy, I need to tell you this thing happened. And and then I can loop it in kind of the upper level people. So if we need to enact something like our upper-level protocol and procedures, then we’re able to do that. So the nice thing is that if there’s some good systems in place you’re able to do that. And if there aren’t, I mean, that’s one of the things that campuses are working on to help build. As part of that I know is with our commission work. That’s one of the things we talked a lot about it, of how do we help campuses who are starting down this road to build these processes and systems and the standard operating procedures that you need to address crisis. Cause it, something will happen.

Glenn DeGuzman:

That’s awesome. I just want to add something to Kathy’s point because we like similar tracks. We do have an administrator on call and going back to your question, Heather, about like innovative ways, just two things that we just recently pivoted on because of COVID and this, again, talks about a university’s willingness to adapt and, or quite frankly, I’ll just make the decision because it’s in my scope. Right. and I don’t need to tell people above me for example, the administrator on call, we have that as well, but we were burning out, I’m an administrator on call. Right. And so we decided we have folks in our Dean of Students portfolio, who, who are now learning how to be administrators on call. So we’re alleviating some of that pressure. We can push and push more support downward to the frontline staff.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Another way is communications, like normally when there’s a campus messaging that goes out, it’s just sent out. We’ve involved -so our RDs, our resident directors are literally getting communication while it’s in draft mode, right. When it’s about to release to the students. And when it’s releasing students, what does that mean? More email, but what does it mean? You find out about information in advance? So when you’re thinking, wait a second, my residents going to ask me a question about this, how do you get the answer in advance? So you’re not like caught off guard and like, say, Hey, student, I’ll get back to you. And you, you know, that time will create more stress. So we have to constantly think about different ways. And leadership has to be willing to say, do I need to check in with anybody above me No, just make the damn decision. And if you feel like it’s for the right reason and that you feel like, you know, you know, if they’re gonna slap me on the wrist later on, they get stuck in the rest of the way around. All I care about is making sure we get and, and do everything we possibly can to reduce the trauma on our staff.

Heather Shea:

Yeah, yeah. Indecision paralysis, right? Like it just like you can’t do, you can’t move forward. I want to shift gears. I know we’re running a little closer on time, but I want to shift gears really quickly to talking about conflict. Because I’m super interested in it. This goes way back to kind of some early conflict inventories, like how people manage conflict. And one of the assignments for this class is to have the students take an inventory. The US peace initiative has a conflict management inventory. And to talk about like how, how you manage conflict could indicate like how you might work within this field to try to resolve issues of difference. And so one of the kind of threads among many of the student questions had to do with supporting students with differing and conflicting ideologies.

Heather Shea:

And that could be around first amendment issues, free speech issues balancing kind of opportunities for learning versus harm caused. And I know this could be a topic in and of itself because it’s a really, really big topic to pivot to. But I wanted to link it a little bit because I do think, you know, we’re gonna, we’re going to butt up against different people’s crisis management styles too. And that in and of itself can cause conflict on top of so what thoughts do you have about campus conflicts and how you operationalize some of those skillsets when you’re dealing with your colleagues when you’re working with students and when you’re trying to address speech issues?

Glenn DeGuzman:

Oh my gosh. Okay. So conflict. So yeah, I was looking at all the questions and there’s questions that conflict at the high level conflict at the ground level. So there’s a lot of different ways we can go with this. I’ll let me hit and talk about how conflict can look like at a high level for me. And maybe we’ll just jump around Kathy. I’m not exactly sure how to go about this one is there’s a big question. I think organizational context is extremely important to pay attention to because how, how conflict is managed at higher levels can really either alienate you as a professional, or you might like be proud of your institution because some institutions like to bury things. And if you don’t like things getting buried, you will not be happy. At UC Berkeley, something happened in the sixties and that, you know, something called the free speech movement.

Glenn DeGuzman:

And so it’s the first one, obviously in the U S on a college campus. And that drives how we lead. We have the value statements that we all work on, right? This is why we probably entered the field of student affairs, the principles of community statements on how we are to behave. What is our foundation we’re talking about? You know, the documents that ACPA NASPA, we all work and contribute to what it means to be in our field, but at UC Berkeley free speech comes first. It’s the number one thing. And we have to massage and talk about how we integrate our values into that. Our values will say something like where a just community and discrimination and hate will not be tolerated. And we respect for personal, our personal interactions, civility, and respect for our personal interactions.

Glenn DeGuzman:

That isn’t fair, but it cannot cannot trump free speech. And in most of the time it works, but then you get those situations where it’s like oil and water and, and speech can be interpreted and be very hurtful for our students, for our staff, for faculty, it just cuts across cuts across everyone. I think the thing that makes us very hard is that the campus is always gonna look at it from a risk and liability perspective, right? Because obviously violating the first free speech is a big deal. There’s a lot of issues that they concerned about. So, so what we have to do is, and we have to as student affairs professionals, we play this very hard role following with students, with communities who are impacted and making sure that we can provide them some support to overcome some of those stressors.

Glenn DeGuzman:

And as a student affairs professional, I always think, man, can’t the university change it. And the university is not going to shift. They’re not going to, I mean, at least UC Berkeley, they’re not going to shift on free speech. We’ve had Anne Coulture come on campus and, and y’all know Berkeley. It’s pretty progressive. We’ve had Milo, Oh my gosh, Ben Shapiro. These are folks who show up. We are very we build a lot of process to make sure that safety, security are there, but we will allow them to speak their mind and make sure they’re safe. Do I value it on a personal level? No, but it’s my professional obligation to make sure that they’re getting that and the amount of money that we have to spend on these types of things are quite expensive. You know, and but the campus will have to always hold that at its highest standard I’ll stop there.

Kathy Adams Riester:

Yeah. And I think Glenn said a lot of kind of really great things that I agree with. And I think as public institutions, that’s one of our challenges is that free speech is very highly held things that traditionally happen around speech and IU also prizes itself on free speech. We don’t have quite the long as, as detailed of a history as Berkeley, but it’s there. So I think that’s the big challenge. And I think I think someone said in their questions students need opportunities to experience and process moments of dissonance. And I think free speech is a great place for that to happen. I think the challenge is what happens when someone is speech is going against the values of the institution and what they might hold. And just because it does doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to say it.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So I find myself saying a lot of times and talking as we talk through conflicts of, well, you can say free speech, you can say what you want to say, but that doesn’t mean words don’t have consequences to them and that they don’t have impact. So talking about what’s that impact. I do think it will be interesting to see what happens. There are some higher education institutions where public institutions that have, have suspended expelled students for some of what they’re saying was speech. So I’m up the road here, kind of our big kind of rivalry for you is Purdue and Mitch Daniels at Purdue removed a student for some of the social media content that he posted back in probably sometime in summer, July, August. So I think it’s going to be interesting to see as things proceed what might happen.

Kathy Adams Riester:

But I also think that I don’t have any great answers for this, but our ability to bring people together, to talk about these things and to realize that, you know, if you have a student who supports what’s going on with the kind of insurrection writing at the Capitol, they’re still our students. And we can’t kick them out because they believe that. So how do we kind of bring people together and really provide education and be, you know, the, you know, as we’re supposed to be the place to discuss these types of things. And so part of it is working with students on how do we have those types of discussions in a civil manner and help hopefully take away some skills as part of that. But it’s, it’s super challenging dealing, especially with that level of conflict.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Yeah. I’m looking at some of the questions and it really even speaks to like the next generation of student affairs leaders. Like that’s all of you and thinking about how social media is a big part of your life and your world and the things you say, you put your value because that is a place where I, I put a lot more, my family values. I tend to try to stay away from work, but I know that’s not the case for, for everyone. And I think about like, this was very public. I don’t know if y’all familiar with the situation with Jamie Riley former colleague of mine who used to just put lots of information on Twitter about his, his values and whatnot. And he, as he climbed the field of student affairs, you know, he kept moving up. He ended up at a at an institution whose values did not align and students yanked his tweet, put it online, and he was no longer working at the university.

Glenn DeGuzman:

So these are some of the consequences and things that you have to think about because as a student affairs professional, you are being asked to be serving all students, right? Your job is our job. Our professional job is to serve and help with this, the student experience. But it’s all student experience, not just the ones who share your values with you. And I think then it becomes, I think for like, for examples, for me where diversity equity inclusion was a big, it’s probably why enter student affairs as a profession to begin with, because that’s really how I entered the field. I was in, you know, in 19, what was it? Goodness gracious. I’m going to age myself. When I was, when was it in college, 93, early nineties. I don’t know why, you know, I was, I was the student protesting.

Glenn DeGuzman:

I was, you know, pushing against prop 209, 187. Those were my, that me off. But when I became an administrator, I realized that there has to be a different way of of engaging and creating change, but maintaining professional standards of expectations, right? This is, I think what’s hard for a lot of younger professionals because now you have to also then learn skills of, if you possess, let’s say a good awareness knowledge, good skill sets, competencies around, let’s say diversity inclusion issues. I saw some questions on like mis-gendering folks, right? How do you have a conversation with students who might not be at that same level of competency than you, without you being on a soap box? Just preaching, because if you’re preaching, if you know, like y’all study student development, how do you not get them to just back away and go into defense mode, have them stare at you, blankly, nod their head.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Like they agree with you, but then they’re not there. They’re going to fear you. They’re not going to listen to you. And you’re a blip in their life. You’re a short period of time where they’re going to where, where eventually they’re going to move on, go somewhere else. And you’re never going to have that impact. So while you have that time with them, how do you create awareness for them and help them take baby steps if they get it, that’s the easiest student to work with, but if they don’t get it, how do you get them to move forward one step at a time, help create awareness first, give a little bit of knowledge, let them make the decision to come to you to learn more. I do it by basically by being very open about where I screwed up. Here’s my learning. Here’s where I messed up. I find students who, who, who see me as more humanized willing to ask me. So when you messed up on that, how did you overcome that? That is, I think one of the things that one of the skillsets that I encourage you to pick up, especially as you’re managing conflicts, you know, in your, in your your spaces

Heather Shea:

Really, really well said we’re getting close to the end of time. But I wanted to put out there those folks who are watching the recording, if you have questions I’ve seen a couple of things go into the chat just unmute yourself and ask.

Student::

Hi everyone, Glenn and Kathy, thanks so much for all of your great insights today. One question I had for both of you when we were talking about conflict, like we were talking about how organizational context matters and it can be alienating, or it can make us proud as someone that’s about to start an intense job search for my first real big girl, student affairs job. One thing I’m wondering is what kind of questions do you think that I can be asking in interviews to kind of gauge the approaches to conflict at an institution?

Kathy Adams Riester:

So I would say so one, I think your research on that institution is hugely important. I will go on, look at the website if they have a student newspaper or something of that sort look at it. You know, if they have some social media outlets now, you know, looking at some of those to get a sense of what the issues might be and then how they’re being addressed by the administration. And especially if there’s something concerning that you see there, I think saying, Oh, you know, I saw that this has been a big issue on campus. You know, how do you think the institutional responses are, you know, being able to ask some thoughtful questions around that is important. And then also I think being able to, especially with with students and maybe with, depending on low-level colleagues, you’re talking to being able to ask, you know, what have been some of the biggest issues and challenges for the university, or, you know, kind of getting around some of those bigger institutional questions.

Kathy Adams Riester:

I think it’s harder to tell sometimes certainly if you would know someone at the institution having, you know, making a call just to check and see, you know, what are, if some of those big things been as well. But then I think based on your research, putting in some thoughtful questions around that, and if you have some like no-go issues for yourself, I think really doing some probing around that. So when I was coming out of grad school interviewing for my first job I was a hall director and I went to USD, which is a private Catholic institution in, in San Diego. And they were having a full-time hall director for the first time with a master’s degree. And my big question is how did they do education around sex education and pregnancy prevention and things like that. And so I kind of worked that into like, am I going to be censored that I can’t talk about this at all, because it’s a of the institution.

Kathy Adams Riester:

So working into those questions was important. The other thing is they accidentally ran me into another candidate that they had there, who was a nun and out of the order of that school. So I knew probably right at that moment that this probably wasn’t the right job because I am not. And no, I I’m pretty liberal. And, you know, I was like a Planned Parenthood sex educator, you know, cause I thought I wanted to be an obstetrician gynecologist. I, I am far from a nun. So so I knew that that might not be a good institutional fit for me. So I think that research and then asking questions that are super important to you on that are, are key.

Heather Shea:

Glenn, if you have a thought to share.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Yeah, I love what Kathy said. I’m going to and, and I agree with that. I think the thing is that I don’t know if there’s a question that you can ask in an interview where you’re unless it’s, it’s really subjective, unless that person’s really willing to share like honestly and genuinely the situation. So the way I would I believe with as Kathy said, you have to do your research, but here’s how I would do the research. I would look at an institution and look at their track record over like five years. What major changes have they made? Because we talk all the time, our field is evolving. So look at the institution. Are they evolving? If you can’t do it in five years, then you’re at an institution. That’s going to be very slow. Look at it at a campus level, look at it at a department level.

Glenn DeGuzman:

You want to know how I operate, look at my decisions. Or the last five years, that’ll tell you how innovative or how willing the leaders are in your department to make changes. This, the questions that I get the most from my staff are going to be tied to diversity, equity, inclusion, and professional development. So then you have to look at my decisions, how am I supporting that? How I’m making decisions on that. That’s how you judge that. And you’re not going to get it from an interview because I’m going to tell you what you want to hear, because I want you to come and work for me. What you need to do is you need to ask other people for preferably associations, because I’ve been in this field for 25 years, you can call Heather and say, Heather, tell me more about Glenn, right? Because if you have a relationship with Heather, she’ll tell you I’m crazy. I’m sure she will. But she also tell you, this is what I value because I’ve been doing it since I’ve been a graduate school, right? So these are the types of things that you need to find out. And it is it’s research that sometimes you have to look around and not necessarily asking the source itself cause you’re, you might not get a straight answer.

Heather Shea:

That’s where the network is so critical and important. And it is a really small field. I think that’s the one thing that I’ve learned over over my career is that like I so appreciate everybody’s time today. And Glenn and Kathy, it was so useful to have you all sharing your experiences. Thank you so much for your time. And thanks to all the students who joined in today, I was expecting it to just be Kathy and Glenn and I. So you all are awesome. Thanks for taking time.

All:

Thank you. Great. Thank you everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. Good luck this semester.

Glenn DeGuzman:

Kathy, I think I met you at one of the commissions for safety at a conference. That’s probably where I saw you at.

Kathy Adams Riester:

That would make sense.

Heather Shea:

I love our small world. It makes me, it makes me so happy. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it. And have a good rest of your day.

Heather Shea:

Thank you so much for listening today. I am so grateful to Kathy and Glenn, as well as the students in EAD 893 for granting permission to promote this conversation today on Student Affairs Now. Thanks also to our sponsors Stylus Publishing. You can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to our Student affairs Now newsletter, which is located on our website at StudentAffairsNow.com where you will also find our growing archives. Please subscribe whether it’s on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, invite others to subscribe, share on social or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this one, reach more folks and build a community so we can continue to make this free and accessible for everyone in the field. Again, I’m Heather Shea, thanks to our fabulous guests and for everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.