Talking Stick - March/April 2015 - 46

"If I Knew Then . . ."
Everyone has fantasized about going back
in time and re-experiencing the events of
their youth armed with the sage wisdom
that comes only from experience. Not
many people, however, actually get the
chance to do this. One exception is April
Herring, an assistant professor of higher
education at Immaculata University in
Pennsylvania. After climbing the ladder
to become the director of residence life
and housing, she purposely chose to
ride the chute back down to house dean
and assume a live-in position as she
pursued her doctorate. The experience,
she explains, opened her eyes to the
challenges that the latest wave of entrylevel staff faced. She shared her story
with Talking Stick.

46

TALkIng STICk

I

did a kind of crazy thing. At the age of 38, I went
from being a director of residence life and housing
to being a house dean. This meant my partner and I
moved into a first-year residence hall of 500 students.
now, instead of being three levels of supervision
removed from the resident assistant staff, I was directly
supervising 24 RAs. My last stint as a residence hall
director ended in 1995, so it had been a while. As the
director, I certainly had my share of frustrations with our
live-in staff, and this experience helped me reconnect
with their lives and jobs and better see the things I had
done well as a director and the ways in which I was out of
touch as a director.
The thing that struck me the most was the messiness
and the intimacy of it all. Students and staff take time,
and lots of it. The room condition reports or the expense
reports were hard to get to when students needed to
talk, to visit, and to share. I knew that being fully present
with them was the thing that they needed to stay on
track both academically and socially. If I got a report in
on time, but a student left school, in the end, retention
mattered. Of course I knew why reports were important;
I had been asking my staff for them for years. But I forgot
how much time the relationships took.
When a crisis happened I was great at handling it.
But when the staff fell apart, it took me off guard; I
was so focused on all the things to get done and deal
with and had gotten so good at compartmentalizing it
that I'd forgotten the toll of the intimacy of living with
people and seeing them every day. That lesson really hit
home when a student I knew died. The time and space I
needed to grieve, and the time and space the staff and
students needed, surprised me. I knew it, but living it was
different.
I had long since given up the value of checking off
programming goals, even as a director, but my time in
the halls reinforced that. Students are overworked and
stressed out. Spending money on pizza and getting them
to relax and talk to each other was actually the thing
they really needed. They still talked about important
things with or without me there. When it came to some
subjects, I'd prefer not being there.
When I was 22, I cared that my staff liked me. I knew I
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