Keith Edwards:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs.Now. I’m your host Keith Edwards. Today is a special treat. As I get to interview one of my student affairs, mentors and heroes, Dr. Susan Komives, we’ll learn about her career, her thinking, and her predictions for the future. I’m so excited you agreed to do this Susan. 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’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find us at studentaffairsnow.com or on Twitter.

Keith Edwards:
We also have our first sponsor today. Stylus Publishing is proud to be a sponsor for the Student Affairs NOW podcast. Browse Stylus’s student affairs, diversity, and professional development titles at stylispub.com. Use their promo code SANOW for 30% off all books plus free shipping. You can find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter at Styluspub.

Keith Edwards:
As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards/ My pronouns are he, him. his. I’m a speaker, consultant, and coach. You can find out lots more about me KeithEdwards.com I’m hosting this conversation today from Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is the ancestral home of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples.

Keith Edwards:
Now onto today’s conversation. Susan, you are a student affairs legend. I know that you’re a student affairs legends because one of my student affairs claims to fame was that I was in the backseat of your car the very first time you got pulled over for a speeding ticket, I believe. Is that true?

Susan Komives:
That’s true. That is true.

Keith Edwards:
I was so elated. I was so sorry you got pulled over, but I, when I found out it was the first time in your life, I thought this is the story I’ll get to tell introducing Susan at some point. And I believe this is the second time I’ve gotten a chance to do that. So thank you.

Susan Komives:
We have many other stories Keith!

Keith Edwards:
Yes, we’ll get to some of those, but this is, this is a fun one for me to kick things off with. But, but you are a legend in student affairs. You got your undergraduate from Florida State University and a year later you had your masters. And four years later at the age of 27, you had your EdD from the University of Tennessee Knoxville all while working in residence life and getting promoted twice. You then worked at Denison University and then four years after finishing your doctorate you were already a VP at Stephens College in Missouri, and then later you were the VP at the University of Tampa. I’m just, I’m impressed, and a little envious at this very quick push through both education and professional career at the same time. And also given the time in our culture, I imagine that was quite complicated. What was it like for you to rise so quickly through both your education and institutional leadership and student affairs at that time?

Susan Komives:
It was exciting and complicated as you have alluded to. Let me start though and say my pronouns are she, her, and hers, and I am just living outside of Tampa in the ancestral area for Topopago and Pohoy Indians that I knew nothing about. I grew up in Florida and did not know their history. Later these became Seminole Indian regions, and we did know that history. So it’s, it’s nice to see the depth of those histories and the lands that were in.

Keith Edwards:
Thank you for offering that.

Susan Komives:
And you used the word legend. You know, I think of legend is like Liberty Valance or I don’t know… folklore and, and ballads that people sing. And then I realized, you know, don’t if you’ve been around for a long time. This is my 51st year in doing student affairs work in some form or other, although I’m now retired.

Susan Komives:
But it’s been an exciting career and it sure got a jumpstart in those times. And the times made a lot of difference being involved so early meant a lot happened quickly. I’m the oldest of the baby boomer generation. So we were this big group of college students in 1964 coming out of high school and going off to college. And I mean, massive numbers of people that hadn’t happened in a big way since the GI bill, probably up to that point. And so and society then was changing very quickly major cultural changes in the sixties and early seventies, the Black Power movement, all the civil rights changes, the Vietnam War, challenges to gender roles, the women’s movement happening. And it was really exciting to be alive and experiencing as well as working toward much of that kind of change.

Susan Komives:
I have to say, too, when I, when you make me think back to the Florida State college years, there’s no doubt about it. That for me, the big difference for me in those years was having grown up with such supportive parents. My mom and dad were phenomenally supportive and made sure I was highly engaged in high school. They never went to college. They were both in the Navy during World War II. And my mother even got a medical discharge to have me. So this role they played and know how important education was. And somehow even for, for young women, for girls in that era, the need for self-confidence. I always assumed even through high school, that I was where I was supposed to be there wherever therethat was, and that my voice should be heard. And that I had something to say.

Susan Komives:
And I mean, my parents did that with dining room conversations at the dinner table. And those things matter a lot to families, of course, all the time, but I was very, very privileged to have my mom and dad both encouraging that and to make sure that we were my brother and I were active parts of the communities that we were in, that we had a responsibility to try to make things better, at least at some point. So I benefited a lot from the societal changes because people were looking to give women more role and more visibility and more equity. And I was there at a time with good degrees and interested in being involved and that happened. I, I think for me professionally probably several threads started to roll together for me. One was that I really love learning and Melvene Hardee’s master’s program was an exciting place to be.

Susan Komives:
She was a mover and shaker, and we learned from how she was as well as what we learned from her. But it’s interesting that that summer that I graduated and started my first job as an area coordinator at Tennessee was when Chickering came out with Education and Identity. So we never even had that book in grad school, if you, and I realized very quickly, if you were going to stay learning, you’d have to – that’s the way you would keep up with the field and eventually, maybe even shape a field. But at that point it was, Oh, we better be bringing this book into the hall director professional development program, because we’re all going to want to know these vectors and look how that’s changed our professional world and our professional life shortly after that Lee Knefelkamp and Carol Widick and others wrote a book that advanced Bill Perry’s work on moral, ethical and cognitive development, and we gobble that up.

Susan Komives:
And so I decided I really wanted to get my doctorate early on. And that’s enrolling at Tennessee in that doctoral program, which I then I was able to complete, but that love of learning and new literature coming out, new scholarship, that guided where that learning should go made a huge difference for me. I think another difference that got made for me was the opportunities to be involved in real change in that first three or four years of work which is a phenomenal thing to think about. I mean, change is always around us. We’ve got a lot of it happening right now and in another week, maybe even more of it one way or another happening, but in that three or four years, 18 year olds got the right to vote. So that meant those of us in housing no longer had a fiduciary responsibility only with our students, but it had to be something else.

Susan Komives:
So it became contractual. So we were creating housing contracts and you’d go to ACUHO with figuring out how are you writing your contracts this year and what did you need to put in them? And we had Title IX happening of the Civil Rights Act, and that led to statements about gender discrimination and honor societies and all kinds of student organizations went co-ed. And that gave us a chance to build a whole new way of co-education in organizations that didn’t always exist FERPA and the Buckley amendment section 504 of the vocational rehabilitation act. I learned lots about learning disabilities that I had never known before. So all of those things led to lots of administrative expansion administrations were growing rapidly in that era because you had to oversee regulations as well as expand services. And so that was a big thread that started to wrap together.

Susan Komives:
And then the third of these was professional involvement. I got involved in ACPA in 1970 at my first convention. And, and fairly shortly after that, Phyllis Mable got me active in the commission on residence, life residents education. We called it commissioned three, and I also started trying to pursue some interest in student leadership. I was always interested in how leadership developed. It became my dissertation topic in 1973. So right from that early era, I was reading leadership books and I was looking at leadership but it also taught me in that era that if you want to get things changed in a profession, you go through associations. So the associational involvement of ACPA later, NASPA, CAS, and some other things made a huge difference. So those things came together in that era in a way that were really exciting, that there was more to learn and literature was coming out and I love learning and that there was real change we could make and that associations and getting involved to make a difference really mattered.

Keith Edwards:
Well, I know that you love learning. And I just remember, I have so many memories of being in class with you and you being giddy and excited about what a student had brought in from another realm from their undergrad major. Just so excited about that. I’m getting this image of you and your early career, as someone who’s seeing all this change around you and really inspired to make a difference. And then at the same time, gobbling up everything you could consume along the way to inform you and help you lead better and lead this change better. Is that sort of resonating with you?

Susan Komives:
Oh yeah. And at that time, I think it was all xeroxing articles and sending copies to people and it got a whole lot easier when it could be PDFs. So I’m one that really has advantaged by all the technological changes, because I can send a link out to somebody you should read this article. You’d love it, you know, and that connecting people with ideas has always brought me so much energy. I just love knowing that I might’ve found something, someone else would love to see if they didn’t already know about it, or people will send me things saying, they know I would love it. And that’s a great way to learn.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Well you mentioned ACPA and professional involvement in shaping the profession and you were ACPA president in 1982. And I know there’s a twist to this story. So why don’t you tell us what was like to lead ACPA in 1982 as president of the association?

Susan Komives:
Yeah. And, and concurrently what was even going on in my life at those times, which those two kind of are always for all of us. And it was a hard and exciting time in my own life. I was at Denison Denison university till 1978 and my husband and I, then Mike and I decided to divorce. And that’s a hard thing for anyone to go through. I’m sure there are, who have, or ahead of them might even have that happen, but you do come out of that and you come to me at that point, it was terrifying to think of dating again at 32 years old, like, Oh my goodness, that’s another story. But so I looked, I was looking at other positions to leave Denison and always looked at a faculty position. I always knew I loved ideas and learning in that process and accepted the position out at Stephens College as Vice President and Dean of Student Life.

Susan Komives:
It was just wonderful at that point, I was VP for commissions for ACPA and became member at large, but a year after being there and people might not know Stephens College is a women’s college. It still is. And how exciting to be at a feminist women’s college in that era where we’re supposed to be helping women be empowered and seeing their role in the future. And that was very, very exciting time. But a year after I’d been there, they, our department hired a great guy called Ralph. They called me and said, we have an applicant for a job. His name is Ralph Kom-Ives. Do you know him? Because he used to be at Denison and I didn’t know him there, but I said, I know it’s Komives. And he would be very good here. And we got married about five months later, which is very exciting.

Susan Komives:
But in January of 81, I found out I was pregnant. That was thrilling. And three days later found out I won the election as president of ACPA. Cause it was like, sit back for a second and think, Oh my goodness, how do you do both of those things? Neither of which I’d ever been a mother or a president of a national association. And to this day, I think the key thing I would say that made all that work and worked so well was Ralph that having the right partner in your life, the partner that thinks you’re tremendous that you can do it, go for it, that we are a team here and we’ll make it work. And I mean to have had Ralph behind me all that time, even to this day you know, Ralph’s in here helping set up the lights and you know, that, that, that support makes a big difference, but it was exciting certainly personally.

Susan Komives:
And to know that Jeffrey then was born when I was about to be president elect of ACPA and he’s 39 now. It’s like, Whoa, that was a long time ago. I think there’s some lessons that come out of that experience of having big things happening in your life. And, all of them taking serious responsibility. One of them was a set priorities that there are seasons for things you don’t do everything. For example I didn’t do hotel selections for ACPA, for the convention coming up in three years. I thought, I don’t care what the hotels look like. Someone else can do that. Cause I don’t have the time to travel now, but that’s a task others could do. My house was never clean in that era unless we paid somebody to come in and do it. And that was a privilege that we could.

Susan Komives:
But there are things – all my plants died. I mean, they’re just things that while other things do happen, I think another lesson from that is, you know, people are always watching, the more you get into a visible role, like you would these podcasts and your work your consulting and your men’s and sexual violence work and all that you do, people are always looking at you and they were me. But I remember giving a couple speeches when I was very pregnant and I would stand up to go to the podium and the audience would gas. There literally was a visible, you could hear the intake of breath. And then afterwards I was flooded to the front of the stage with young people saying, can we talk to you about how you’re doing this and going to be a mom or a mom?

Susan Komives:
And those things just weren’t as visible in their lives. I think in that era, particularly in 81 or 82, a lot of women who worked either didn’t have children or might not be in partnerships. And so it was a visible thing that caused a lot of people looking. So to remember that people are always looking to us and you are a role model for good or bad, even if you didn’t want to be right. So that, that awareness of, of became very keen to me. And one of the important things to me was to realize, okay, I’m going to always talk about my family, because one of the things that I think we need to role model in our lives is, is more balanced and more wholeness. And people need to know about what’s life, like as a stepmother to Rachel and as a mother to baby Jeffrey and to, and so my students all knew my kids. You did. I mean, they saw them grow up from little people to be the big people that they are. I think all those things are really important. Yeah. Go ahead.

Keith Edwards:
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because we have a few people who are, who chimed in about interviewing you. Well, one of them is Larry Roper. Larry Roper, who was the vice president vice provost for student affairs at Oregon State. A Maryland alum. He was the vice president at Oregon State for 20 years. And I asked him about you, cause I know you think so highly of him. And he said, the thing that stands out about Susan is her love of family. And I never fully understood Susan until I met Ralph until I met Jeff. And it put him in touch with your wisdom and your humanity. And so he said, I should ask you about that.

Susan Komives:
Ah, that’s nice. That’s nice. Well, I have to tell the Larry Roper story too. Larry and I were the closing keynoters for some NASPA in LA, in New Orleans some year, whenever that year was we were to draw themes out of what had happened. And he was reminded of Ellis, his son as little children do teaching him a lesson of something he observed. And he said, I don’t think I can say that. I said, you must say that you must use Ellis as a story because that’s going to connect to everybody out there as well as young people who want to see that part of you. And so I think that’s a good example of those things. I think Larry’s tremendous, just tremendous. But it’s interesting. We don’t seem whole, maybe until we bring that family and those parts of it into it. So it’s good that, that I’m, I’m proud that he said that. That’s very good. Yeah.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Do you want to say anything more about ACPA before we move on to your demotion?

Susan Komives:
Well I think what I would say it’s tangential to ACPA is when that, how important it is to have a work community that supports you to take on a role like ACPA president or to take on a role. And like a new parent has to coming back to work after maternity leave or whatever means. You’ve got to have people around you who truly know that we’re supporting each other and it’s your turn to be supported. And I really give a lot of credit to Stephens. The president was phenomenal. The associate Dean that worked with me as a dear friend to this day, and she just stepped right in and did things. She said, don’t you worry about this, you’ll be healthy in the hospital having that baby. And we’ve got it. You know, it was like, wonderful. And how can we be that kind of person for other people becomes the modeling that that always did for me. But it’s important to know that in seasons, when we’re too busy, others need to step up and help out. And we do that for them too.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Wonderful. Well, you were president of the association for student affairs, ACPA. You were a two time VP and my guess is there were some inquiries about presidencies in there too. But then you made the leap to a lowly assistant professor at the University of Maryland. What provoked this shift from these powerful leadership positions and some more possibilities to then becoming a faculty member and doing that work?

Susan Komives:
Well, I signaled it probably by saying that I’ve always looked at a faculty job in each move. I’ve made several moves and in each of them, I would find out what faculty positions were open. I got offered one back in 78, but I decided, I didn’t know enough yet. You know what I thought as a faculty member, I should be old and wise and that I wasn’t there yet, but that’s always interested me. I did interview for a couple of presidencies. I got nominated. The search firms were kind of new things in that era. And a search firm got a hold of my name from a nomination. And although I was a final semifinalist for that position and didn’t receive it they, they had a hold of me at that point. So they called me three months later and said, we have another contract.

Susan Komives:
We think you’d be perfect for, would you be willing to look at this position? And I said, Oh yeah, sure. So I interviewed for that and I was a finalist for that position. And I thought I was 38. Then I thought, well, you know, this is going to click and I, this well could happen for me. And then I thought but, do I want to do this? I think one of the phenomena that happens to all of us is we what, whoever your supervisor is in, particularly those of us working within higher ed institutions, you have a supervisor or their boss, and you think I could do that job and probably better, you know, I could do that well. And so I could imagine doing it. I, once I was a VP, I could imagine being a president. I always like Rosabeth Moss Kante’s work.

Susan Komives:
And she said, she wrote and said, success is something other than upward mobility. And I you know, I certainly know that I felt very successful in what I was doing. I didn’t need to be a president. Matter of fact, I probably never see Jeffrey grow up. You know, I wouldn’t be out trying to raise money to keep people fed in their jobs in small struggling liberal arts colleges. So decided I don’t want to do that. And Ralph, in the meantime had art, he was an art, he’s an artist. And he had already planned the poetry readings we would have at the president’s house on Sunday afternoons. You know, Ralph thought it’d be great for me to be a college president and he could do all those things. But that was fine, but it, it was clear to me that wasn’t the direction to go.

Susan Komives:
So I always did apply to faculty jobs and I was going to be leaving the university of Tampa because they dissolve the division of student affairs. That’s another story in itself happening to people these days and in all times and I got a call from the search committee at Maryland and said, we have a assistant professor position open, would you even consider it? And I said, I’d love to. So I got offered a VP job or two in that cycle of searching and the Maryland position. And I knew I’d have to go in and established my, my scholarship and my research and those needed to, I mean, for the sake of students, you needed to show that you could do that work with them and guide their work. And so, but I was always devoted to Knefelkamp’s model of practice the theory to practice.

Susan Komives:
So I always loved practicing. And then looking at what does that teach us about our work? And then how do we apply the best of that back to a practice like you all have done with your latest book? I mean, your book is just brilliant on this curriculum and residents’ education or student affairs in general about practice, to theory, to practice. And I believed in that, and I also knew that I wanted to research leadership. I really wanted to dig deep with how can we make better leaders out of our students in the 80s, the books on student leadership on leadership in general were things like looking out for number one and winning through intimidation. It’s like lethal leadership books. You know, it had to be better than that. And I had been teaching leadership courses. So I knew that I wanted to do that.

Susan Komives:
I think a question for me was, did I want to be a faculty? I haven’t told this probably to anybody, but then I want to be a faculty member in a one person program, or would it be mine, you know? And I could really try to shape and do it or in a well-established program and thought, well, I really would like a well-established program. I’d like to work around colleagues who are just brilliant. And I knew that would elevate all of us even more. And in this case, Marylu could teach me how to be a good faculty member and Bud and Drew and Dick, and all the Maryland people were there to support our program. And it was going to be a win-win. So I was able to come, I think the, the fascinating thing to me about all this people would ask me once I was there.

Susan Komives:
So what’s it like to be an assistant professor after having been a VP? And I said, well, I don’t mind doing all the things you have to do to show what you want. As long as the salary would still support my family, fine with going and proving myself to a tenure process. In my VP suite at Tampa had a fireplace and my own bathroom, you know, like, how do you, and then in Maryland, I go to the Benjamin Building and they cleaned out what was being used for brooms and put me in an office with it and it had brooms. But you know, it didn’t matter what mattered was. It was a place to meet with students. And I do think the things I miss though, were having a secretary and we’re having a staff to work with because when you have ideas you want to get with people and percolate ways to implement them, you need a staff.

Susan Komives:
Eventually I figured out that’s what research committees could be. That research projects with students meant, boy, you get grant ideas and together you play them out and you build them and they grow. And so I missed a secretary, particularly in the pre-computer days when, I mean, pre-internet days when you had to set up a meeting, send a little pads of paper with fill out your time slots and send it back and we’ll find the time for them. You know, that stuff took up too much time. So I missed somebody doing that on my behalf. But I loved, I did not mind at all, starting as assistant professor, I learned a lot about how faculty is much harder work than I ever thought, looking at it as a VP. And I’d been married to two faculty members understood this, but it’s all the time work is 24 seven was can’t be turned off because you should be writing or editing in between loads of laundry.

Susan Komives:
I’m thinking of the chapter I need to be working on or preparing a class lesson or it’s all the time work. But it’s thrilling to be at a place like Maryland is, was was just exciting every day. It was that conference high of going to work and knowing you’re gonna just get great ideas and people are so generous and everybody cared for each other. You felt appreciated. I know all work environments are not like that, but I feel very, very lucky all my career for 25 years of my career to have been at that place with those people during those times.

Keith Edwards:
Well, I know they were very lucky to have you, and I know your office did get upgraded from a broom closet, but not that much. I mean, I, when I was there, you had a window,

Susan Komives:
I got it. Eventually got a window.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. But well, as a faculty member, you’ve you you prove yourself as a faculty member, you’ve written some of the most important texts in the student affairs profession from, and they’re all in the bookshelf behind me, Exploring Leadership to contributing to The Social Change Model of Leadership to Student Services, better known as the green book to being a major contributor to the team that wrote Learning Reconsidered to launching the multi-institutional study of leadership and leadership identity development model. As you look back now, what are the scholarly contributions that you’re most proud of? And is that over-whelming to you even hear those? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Susan Komives:
It’s almost like saying which of your children you love best, you know, you can’t say no to that question. I do think there are two themes there you described. One is advancing our profession. So it was always important for me to remember and people that, that I worked with didn’t know that my job was to teach student affairs in higher education. And my work was to help us figure out the student experience and how we could enrich students’ success. And so projects like the green book, the student services book, but the key thing was, they’re all done. Every single thing I’ve done has been in collaboration with others, because you love to learn. You love to learn. I love to learn, and I think it’s the best way to create new knowledge. I might have had some of the original ideas. Somebody else might have an, I joined them, but we built together some really wonderful, phenomenal in some cases, projects the ones that advanced the profession that you mentioned, like Learning Reconsidered and the green book with Doug Woodard and CAS, you know, being in, being in that whole body of wonderful people in CAS, and then the, the creating and advancing student leadership as a field, we, that we co-created a group of us in practice and scholarship a whole field that now supports people who are called leadership educators, then didn’t even use that title probably before the generativity of that has been wonderful.

Susan Komives:
And probably the most exciting thing recently, I’ve been retired. Now, Ralph says, I’m failing retirement.

Keith Edwards:
You are failing retirement. I know that for sure.

Susan Komives:
I’ve been retired eight years since 2012. But in 2013, I pitched to Jossey Bass an idea of creating a New Directions for Student :eadership series, because I really wanted to keep keep a mechanism for scholarship flowing out into the field to keep advancing it as a field of study, as a field of practice. And they agreed to that. So our first issue came out in 2015. And so we’re five years into that 20 plus issues now of new directions for student leadership with terrific authors. It’s very generative. I’m still teaching. Then again, I get to help new editors with how you edit a volume like that, with what the issues are. If it’s plagiarism with, you know, there’s all kinds of things that come up, but it’s been very, very exciting to work on that project with the wonderful Kathy Guthrie, which keeps me very renewed and very connected. I know I’ll have to give it up soon, cause it really is other people’s time to take on those things. And as much as I love doing it for, for how I feel about it, if you got to pass those things on, so that that generativity helps them all to continue.

Keith Edwards:
Well, one of my favorite memories of you is being at ACPA. I don’t remember which ACPA it was, it was a relatively recent one and you were up on stage in front of everybody for the opening. And I believe you were with Harry Cannon. And when you walked on stage and introduced yourself, Twitter was just a flurry with that’s how you say it. How do say your last name, Susan Komives. And then also someone said that’s Susan Komives?!, Oh my goodness. I just met her in the bathroom. She was so nice. She was helping me with the button to my blouse. I had no idea who that is, that’s who she was. And there are stories after stories, after stories, I was recently in a conversation and I mentioned your name. And someone said, I have a Susan Komives story. And I said, I bet it ends with how normal and easy to connect with she was. And he said, absolutely it is. That’s absolutely the story. So we’ll move to transition from your career to some of the things, but one of your mentees, John Dugan let me know that his observation of you is that you have successfully mentored a wide range of people, a wide range of scholarly interests, a wide range of identities and perspectives. And his observation is whoever you’re mentoring, whoever you’re working with, you help make them better. And so how have you maximized so many different people?

Susan Komives:
Well, I hope every educator can say that. I have to tell you of a story. I was sitting in a table with Gary Hanson, my friend, I remember at one of the ACPA conferences in Atlanta, the diamond anniversary or something. And Esther Lloyd Jones was escorted to the stage. And I leaned over to Gary and I said, I thought she was dead. You know, and got to know her after that very well, because as a past ACPA president, when I then became ACPA president, we even had personal time together, which was very special. But that whole thing of someone seems distant to you because you only see them on the stage or their name in the book. And that seems very different. I hope everybody would have that said about them with they’ve been an educator or a teacher. I treasure John Dugan, I’m the president of his fan club.

Susan Komives:
I mean, I learned so much John Dugan every day. I did learn from John Dugan, but you know, I, I think I, I really do think in my heart of hearts, I always believed in the Student Personnel Point of View when Mel Hardee had us read that for our master’s class back in 1968, and I’m reading the Student Personnel Point of View, and I’m thinking each person has dignity and worth. Each person deserves to develop their talents to the fullest. I thought, that’s what I want to do. That is why I’m going into this field. There’s so much talent and women in at that point Black people and people of color and just so much talent people that’s not getting developed. And we’ve got to do people bring that out in you. People who did it for me, I treasure and we just have to do that.

Susan Komives:
But I also think it connects to me being a lifelong learner. You know, this learning theme, that’s kind of evolving as we talk. I learn, I literally learned so much from each person, every student advisee, everybody that sat in my office students in class, they brought some contexts that I never thought of before. They, they thought of something in a way that made me sit back and go, Whoa, I didn’t even consider that. And I should have but this co-learning kind of thing that we try. I mean, I brought a lot and I know I taught a lot, but I hope they knew too how much I learned from them, particularly thesis and dissertation topics. People would want to be, do a master’s thesis or dissertation on something like gambling or on sexual violence or on a population that I knew little about or a method that I didn’t know at all.

Susan Komives:
And I thought, well, it’s a journey we’re taking together and I can learn it. I’m smart. I can learn it. We’ll do it together. And it’s going to be important to me to learn this. And I, and you will help me learn. And so doing dissertations and thesis advising became probably one of the biggest choice in faculty life and being on dissertations and thesis, even, particularly in other departments where they view things differently. I was always amazed by the different words we use for the same phenomenon, you know, or I would go, Oh, that’s self-efficacy, you know, but that is the word they use for it. But I just, it was, it was always learning. So everybody taught me things and everybody indeed is special and wonderful to me. I love Facebook. And when I look at Facebook and see somebody’s face pop up, Oh, whole legions of thoughts of things we’ve done together, or I learned from them or that I’m happy to see what they’re doing truly, truly is a joy.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Well another person who I know you look up to quite a bit, Denny Roberts he, you know, these are very accomplished people, but when you mentioned your name, they rush to share a little bit of nugget with you and Denny Roberts said that you make everyone who you interact with, feel like they matter. And that’s the thing that he was taken away. And how do you make everybody? And his question that he wanted me to ask you is how do you replenish your reservoir of caring, mattering, compassion, and humility? How do you replace that when that gets pulled down?

Susan Komives:
Wow. I think so highly of Denny, I could tell Denny’s story now, too. I mean, there’s so many with the work that I’ve done in student leadership, you know, we’re like used to be, we were kind of like the parents of student leadership development now are the grandparents, but I’ve known Denny since 1971 or two. I mean, we’ve known each other a long, long time and to have shown up at my, I came to my retirement party at Maryland and there was Denny who had come from Qatar. He was on his way home, but he had made a plan to be there at my retirement. What a special thing that was to have a friend that, that did that and would do that. I do think this question is interesting. To me, you know, I started giving speeches off campus and nationally and internationally back probably 79 was my first one asked me to be one of the keynoters for ACUHO in Vermont, in the hottest summer ever Vermont in no air conditioning in the residence halls.

Susan Komives:
I mean, it was like one of those experiences, but I’ve always done these speeches. And I’m one of those versions of a speech I used to do was about personal well-being. And how do we stay centered and have personal well-being? So I’ve always thought about it. It’s always been important to me to try to be, have some commitment and balance to diverse things and try to do them well. But I used to ask the question, are you excited? Are you existing? Or are you exhausted? You know, which best describes and conclude with the idea that exhaustion is probably mental exhaustion that I hope not many people do experience these days. That’s a real risk. I mean, the anxiety and the exhaustion of, of our times we all know what those are lead to that risk. So but my conclusion would be, I hope what most of us are, is tired but excited.

Susan Komives:
You know? So I am in, in me has always been an excited person that might be very fatigued. I mean, I might get tired needing sleep or having too much to do, but I still, if you asked me, would you like to read this or would you want to be on it? I go, well, yeah, sure. I’d love to, but I can’t, you know, I know I should do something, but I had to learn to say no to those actually taught a sort of his training in the programming we did at Denison. And when that was popular in the women’s movement of the seventies was how do you say no without feeling guilty? How do you say, you know, I can’t right now, but call me next year because I won’t have this responsibility next year and I can take that one on.

Susan Komives:
So how do you balance what you’re doing and stay excited, but not exhausted. There were several posters I had on my wall. My freshman year I’ve even written about this. They asked me to write a piece on the about campus anniversary a couple of years ago. And then Ralph had recently cause he was going to throw them out, found a tube of old posters that had been in our basement. And they had been literally on my hall, on my walls at Reynolds Hall at Florida State University. But one of them was Benjamin Franklin saying that nothing was ever accomplished without enthusiasm, you know, and you really gotta have a passion and an enthusiasm for the things that you take on. And if you don’t feel that way about it, do less of it, give it to somebody else to do, try to get rid of it.

Susan Komives:
The other was a poster by James Baldwin. I don’t think as an 18 year old had any idea who James Baldwin was, but I liked the quote so much. And it was that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced. And that’s the realist in me. You know, that’s the person saying call things like they are be realistic about how long it’s going to take to get something done or how hard it will be for you to learn set structural equation modeling, or let’s just be realistic, but go for it. So that enthusiastic realist has always served me well, as a combination, I later read some work by Jerry Edelwich, and I had the master’s class always read a chapter on stages of burnout because people can be, you can get burned out easily. And there is such a thing as situational burnout.

Susan Komives:
Like I can love my residents life work, but hate, RA selection every year. Cause it goes over and takes everything and I don’t like it. But Edelwich talks about the first stage of burnout is enthusiasm. Particularly if it’s not tempered with realism, because if you just think things are gonna change, cause you try it or you submitted a bill to faculty Senate, or you brought up a great idea, nobody likes it. So then you’re deflated well you, that doesn’t help you. You’ve gotta be realistic about it and say, I just want to share this idea maybe next year, I’ll bring it up again, you know, or maybe I’ll get more people in on my, on a coalition building process. But that idea of being an enthusiastic realist I think has really served me well to, to do that. I, I, I think the compassion part, you use some wonderful words or Denny use a wonderful appreciate there.

Susan Komives:
And I have to give great credit to the role of counseling in our profession. I was a math chemistry major as an undergrad. And I didn’t have these kinds of courses. I never even took a psychology course as an undergrad. But I did get the counseling and helping skills courses in the master’s program. And that focus on the other person that concept about actively listening, Roger, Carl Rogers and all those things that just opened up my world to the ways we can engage with each other more fruitfully. Now I’m a major and I believe in self-awareness too. I mean, I loved Myers-Briggs and we used it more previously than we seem to be now. But when I found out I was an ENTJ, I said, Oh yes, that is me. And that extrovert in me has to always keep from talking and really work at actively listening and engaging and advising help me do that. I mean, I love the advising role as a grad faculty member because one-on-one, that was so critical.

Susan Komives:
So anyway, those are – humility is I’m a really proud person. I am proud of my accomplishments, but I think the humility piece may be, I don’t know what Denny would say or you would say, but is the, is how important the processes are that we did things together. We did this with each other, we accomplish this and that idea of, I would never take credit for almost any of the things we’ve gone over as alone. I initiated many of them. I was the instigator for many of them.

Susan Komives:
I couldn’t have done a lot of them or most of them by myself or alone. And they, the third poster that was up on my wall, my freshman year at Florida state was the Japanese proverb that no one, none of us is as smart as all of us. You know, that idea of truly believing, yes, I have a lot to bring and I want to be heard, but all of us have something to contribute and we need processes that bring those other voices. And so the bottom line for me always has to be build communities wherever you go, build communities of people who then can bring in those voices and can bring in different perspectives and make sure people are heard and are engaged, but community particularly healthy, thriving, challenging communities where you can take each other on. Or if somebody hears, you know what so-and-so said the other day, someone would say, I don’t think that sounds like what they would have said, or you misunderstood because you know each other that well to know your heart and your head and where we are with each other. So anyway, building communities then becomes really critical. We do this, right,

Keith Edwards:
Right. And I, I love the we because it, because you, as you’re mentioning you, you are proud and you are humble at the same time. Those are not in conflict. Right. And it’s not a false humility where you pretend, Oh, me and not me. I haven’t done anything, but you are proud, but you also recognize it – it wasn’t all with you. I just want to – end the learner. Right. You just love to learn. You love learning about other people. You love learning about other things. You’re just so curious. I want to quickly, as we move to, you know, we, I know we were going to run out of time is to get you to look back quickly and then get you to look forward. So one thing John Dugan said is that you were very moved by Sandy Astin’s response when he was asked what he knows now that he wished he knew earlier in his career. And he said it was evoke quite a moment for you. So I’m wondering what might you, what do you know now that you wish you would’ve known earlier in your career?

Susan Komives:
Wow, that’s a great question. I haven’t, I wish I knew about – gee I think of all the things I still wish I knew about the latest three or four books that I just bought, or I was like, I’m still learning, but I think I wish I knew about institutional oppression. I don’t think that I knew that term until, well, certainly in the last 15 years or so, but this idea of how do we make sure that we’re changing systems and structures in ways that bring that voice of everyone and how do, how are those closing down opportunities? And certainly learned that through being an ally and through experiences with the LGBTQ movement, as well as black lives matter. And before we weren’t calling it that, but what black students being involved on campus. So this whole idea about how do we design and redesign and remove and substitute structures and systems and policies and new ways of questioning everything we do to say, who is this going to oppress and not lift up?

Susan Komives:
I mean, how can everything be done to lift up instead of keep down, which too many systems do. So I think if I had known that language and we, and I just didn’t, I don’t, I mean, sure somebody did, I didn’t know that in 51 years ago as my career was starting, although we were challenging those systems, but we didn’t talk about it in that way to give us a handle on it. Where, my friend, Michelle Pope and her work on multicultural organization development, along with Bailey Jackson, her professor and others really resonated with me. I started using that and readings in my classes for the master’s students back, you know, 20 years ago when they first came out because it started getting at how do we change the structures and systems?

Keith Edwards:
Well we’re w for our last question, this is, we called this podcast student affairs now. And so we’d love to hear what you’re thinking about now. And Julie Owen, who also chimed in, on some of this who was just gleeful at another opportunity for your gifts to be shared the world said that you’re a futurist and as a futurist, and I know this about you and she reminded me this is a time of such uncertainty and complexity. I’m wondering, what do you see for the future of student affairs and higher education?

Susan Komives:
Wow, that’s great. That at least that’s a good question. Julie could have, Julie knows a lot about me that she could have asked about it.

Keith Edwards:
She was very kind and very generous.

Susan Komives:
Very generous. I always did like studying the future. You know, I, I do think that there are ways to do that. And I wish I had done more of that, but in some of the early futures work that I used to do, I learned that some ways to look at the future would be a principle of analogy or use a principle of continuity. So principle of analogy and futurism would be to say, if something happens, then what’s going to happen. Like, if there’s a recession, then more people go back to higher education to get retraining or new jobs. Okay. So there’s an if then component. So we’ve learned if there is a deadly pandemic illness going around, then we must be concerned about safety and all human interactions. And what does that mean about our work? You know, so this, if then the pandemic would be an analogy.

Susan Komives:
If there’s civil unrest, then there’s going to be college unrest on the same human topics that civil unrest might create. So, and we can see all of those play out. Principle of continuity says something like if you have more of something, how do you keep having more of it? Or how does it shape everything else you do? So we now have because of a move to online learning and cyber instruction we’re going to keep having more online learning. People have liked mid parts of it. They’re seeing how it really can be useful. We’ve changed some of the ways we interact you and I were on a wonderful birthday call with 80 people and one person. And we learn how we can do that kind of thing effectively. So there will be more online services. We need to be delivering. And in student affairs, we should learn how to do that.

Susan Komives:
Then better with our smaller numbers and residence halls or being on campus, we’re gonna have employment issues. So there’ll be people laid off. We won’t be having the numbers and employment. The institutions that were in trouble before the pandemic in 2019 are the ones that are in worse trouble right now. That’s a continuity principle. There aren’t too many that will be new in that group. There’ll be some, but then in that equity and social justice issues continue to be, and now I have taken on new forms and new shapes, including institutional oppression that we need to address. So safety, how do we say open and stay safe? How do we not put student affairs? People who were, and, and other essential workers into life-threatening situations, we certainly have to deal with how do we create online experiences for belonging, for delivering services?

Susan Komives:
I think we have a lot to learn still from the people doing distance learning work. They’ve been in it for years, University of Maryland – University College, Washington State. I mean, there are places that have had online programs for a long, long time doing online, advising online courses, online programming, online, pushing podcasts out to their students of famous speakers. I mean, getting other ideas out to them. NASPA’s new book on online engagement, which is edited by one of our Maryland students at one point in her life. But we’ve got, we’ve all got to reeducate ourselves around all that. And I think probably one of the key ones is around how do we get our institutions doing effective diversity inclusion institutional oppression, challenging kind of education. I have been shocked to see few institutions speaking out against the president’s comment to remove diversity training and calling it something even insidious instead of a solution to some of the problems that we’re facing.

Susan Komives:
So maybe speak up about that and do that. I am worried about higher ed in some general ways. One is the death of tenure. I think we’re looking ahead at the future of tenure being no longer viable. Partly we’re seeing it out of the challenges of freedom of speech. We should be standing up for faculty who do freedom of speech things, even if we don’t like what they’re saying, because freedom of speech is central for inquiry, discovery of knowledge, pushing the boundaries of knowing. And we can’t be silent about that. We need to find ways to do that. I also think we’re going to see whole program elimination, university of South Florida here in Tampa, just eliminated their undergraduate college of education. And you just can’t niggle away at a budget and cut everybody 30% and have much of anything left over. You’re going to have to say, we’re just no longer going to be doing these sports.

Susan Komives:
We’re no longer do this activity. We’ll no longer have these majors. And then we need to help find ways that students survive that get their degrees met, transition in that as well as look at our own work, my friend, Nora Moore, who used to be the VP at Mizzou used to tell his staff every year, I’m going to ask you to do a lot of new things this year, but I want you to have a going out of business list. What things will you tell me you can no longer do? If I asked you to do these new things, what things can others do that your office shouldn’t be doing, but always figure out what you can do differently. Give it to student groups to handle, not do it at all. We just always need to know which things are worth our time or have the impact would like them to have, and not just keep taking on more and more and more and more and getting ourselves sicker sicker.

Susan Komives:
So I would challenge student affairs people to think about that going out of business list kind of concept. And there are more things I would say too, but I think that they’ll always be a need for student affairs. People there’s always going to be admissions, housing, food, financial aid, counseling needs. They’ll just always be things that student affairs people are prepared for know how to help their institutions handle. Some of the things may go all while on the edges, at least partly. But, how do we do all this work? And lead our institutions out of these very shocking times. How do we be the people that I believe institutions on designing the student experience for the future?

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, I really appreciate that. And it really, I really resonate with this idea of what are we going to let go of because I think student affairs folks don’t do a very good job at that. We’re really good at what we’re going to add and these new innovation and new innovative ideas, but not so much what we’re going to let go of. I say, we’re, we’re very good at being entrepreneurial, but not good at being editorial. So that’s something we can continue to work on. I want to thank my co-conspirators in this John Dugan, Denny Roberts, Julie Owen, Larry Roper, and others. Thanks for having some little nuggets for Susan. Susan, I’m so grateful for you and your time and your generosity today. Sharing all of this with our listeners on student affairs. Now it was one of the things I wanted to do in this new podcast is have some one-on-one conversations.

Keith Edwards:
And so thank you for doing this to our listeners. You can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to the student affairs now, newsletter or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. We want to thank our sponsor Stylus for sponsoring this episode, and please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social or leave us a five star review. It really helps conversations like this, reach more folks and build the community so we can continue to make this free for you again, I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again for our fabulous guests today and everyone who is watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you, Susan.

Susan Komives:
Thank you.

Susan Komives’s ACPA Profile

Melvene D. Hardee ACPA Profile

American Council on Education. (1949). The student personnel point of view (revised edition). In A. L. Rentz (Ed.), Student affairs: A profession’s heritage (pp. 95-108). University Press of America.

Knefelkamp, L. L., Golec, R. R., & Wells, E. A. (1985). The practice-to-theory-to-practice model [Manuscript, University of Maryland]. College Park, MD. 

Widick, C., Parker, C. A., & Knefelkamp, L. L. (1980). Student development. In U. Delworth, G. R. Hanson, & Associates (Eds.), Student services: A handbook for the profession (pp. 75-116). Jossey-Bass. 

Lee Knefelkamp’s Teacher’s College Profile

Edelwich, J. (1980) Burnout: Stages of disillusionment in helping professions. Human Sciences Press.

Selected Publications Mentioned

Komives, S. R., Lucas, N., & McMahon, T. R. (1998). Exploring leadership: For college students who want to make a difference (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass. 

Komives, S. R., & Woodard, D., Jr. (2003). Student services: A handbook for the profession (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Komives, S. R., Owen, J. E., Longerbeam, S. D., Mainella, F. C., & Osteen, L. (2005). Developing a leadership identity: A grounded theory. Journal of College Student Development, 46, 593-611. 

Keeling, R. P. (Ed.). (2004). Learning reconsidered: A campus-wide focus on the student experience. National Association of Student Personnel Administrators and American College Personnel Association.