ET Talk: Driving UT Forward — Creating Student Connection, Care, and Community

An unexpected pairing

It might look like an odd combination — the CIO and the Vice President for Student Affairs walking into an auditorium together. But as Cole Camplese and John Dalton make clear from the opening minutes of Episode 9, the two divisions revolve around the same thing: students. The conversation, recorded in the historic Hogg Auditorium, frames Enterprise Technology and Student Affairs as parts of a single shared responsibility. Students should not have to know which VP a service rolls up to. They should just feel supported.

And the scale of that support is genuinely remarkable. UT has more than 50,000 students. Student Affairs employs roughly 500 full-time staff — and another 2,000 student workers who keep the operation running. RecSports, which John affectionately calls the "Disneyland of Student Affairs," runs multiple facilities, swimming pools, and dozens of club sports with only fifty full-time staff. The students hold the keys. They open and close every facility, every day. They are not just employees. They are custodians of the institution.

Listening means asking

John tells the story of a recent lunch with three students who had been brought into a consulting process to evaluate Student Affairs. They changed everything. Their perspective, the questions they raised, the assumptions they unpicked — none of it would have surfaced in a room of administrators. The cost was one lunch.

Both Cole and John return to the same lesson several times: the moment you assume you know what students think, you are wrong. "My go-to is just ask them," John says. They will tell you. They will tell you anything. And on every visit, on every lunch, the message is the same — students see the campus through a lens that administrators simply cannot manufacture. Listening, in this conversation, is not a soft skill. It is the operating discipline of the work.

A first-generation path to this work

John did not arrive at Student Affairs through a planned career path. He grew up on a dairy farm in Virginia, became the first in his family to go to college, and arrived at Radford with no financial cushion. He spent summers picking up odd jobs to cover tuition and rent. The turning point was a phone call from an assistant dean of students named Mike Dunn, who insisted John become an orientation leader and made the math work — paid summer employment, plus a job in the dean of students office.

That call, John says plainly, changed everything. He talks about it now with first-generation students at UT to make a point about the leverage Student Affairs staff hold in a young person's life. "If it weren't for student affairs staff, I don't know if I would have even finished college." Cole echoes the theme with advice from one of his own mentors, Carl Burgerer, the dean of education at Michigan: when the elevator door opens and the arrow points up, you get on. You figure out where the coffee is when you get to the floor you land on.

The chair, and what it actually demands

John spent a few years in Student Affairs early in his career, then twenty years elsewhere on campus — including time in compliance — before returning to lead the division. He is candid that his prior impression of the work was warped. He had no idea how frequent and high-stakes the protests, expressive activities, conduct cases, and student discipline matters had become. "What I believed was not so hard," he says, "is extremely difficult."

He and Cole find common language for the rest of the job: the inherited operations, the long backlog of legacy processes, the parallel track of new initiatives a leader actually wants to launch. Cole calls it technical debt. John calls it operational debt. They are describing the same thing — the gravitational pull of all that already exists, and the difficulty of carving out room for what is next.

The new president arrived the same week John did. Their first months together have been spent learning how to work with each other and aligning on priorities. The conduct process is being revisited. Programming and resources are being reorganized. And the back-office combinations and efficiency work is also underway — the kind of unglamorous infrastructure that does not show up on a marketing page but makes everything else possible.

• Protests, expressive activities, and high-liability conduct cases occupy much more of the role than is visible from the outside
• Student conduct processes are being revisited so outcomes feel fair to students and the experience itself becomes educational
• Behind-the-scenes consolidation work is creating the financial and operational space for new investment

Family, community, and finding your people

One of John's strongest convictions is that admitting a student means admitting a family. Communicating with parents and families about the what, why, and how of UT is now a deliberate part of the division's work — not an afterthought. Programming and resources have been reorganized to reflect that.

The other half of community is student organizations. UT has more than 1,200 of them. John removed the small registration fee that used to gate participation — "Like why do we do that?" — and the division has invested in a new platform to make it easier to start, run, and resource a student org. Seventy-seven percent of UT students participate in some form of organization, and almost 100 percent of them say it has positively impacted their lives.

What students are really looking for, John argues, is connection. They want to participate in a tradition, or to start one. They want to leave something behind. They want to be able to come back in ten or twenty years and say, I was a part of that. And in a place this size — 55,000 students, 20,000 employees, a city of nearly a million wrapped around the campus — student organizations are how you find your people.

Mental health, accessibility, and the pandemic ripple

The Counseling and Mental Health Center has eighty to eighty-five licensed mental health providers on staff. John would still like to have a hundred. A new walk-in facility opened in the Student Activity Center to remove the barrier of scheduling — and was so immediately overwhelmed by demand that the staffing model has to be rethought. Anxiety, depression, and eating disorders are all part of the daily caseload. A registered dietitian works alongside the clinical team.

Disability services tell a parallel story of growth. Between four and five thousand UT students have registered disabilities, and the number rises every year. The episode references the conversation a few weeks earlier with Jaxsen Day, the doctoral student who described the "ghost population" of students who never register at all. UT now has full-time staff dedicated specifically to neurodivergent students, a newly opened Disability Cultural Center, and a developing focus on career services for students whose path into the job market is harder than most.

Cole and John close this stretch on what they both see as the lingering effect of the pandemic. Demand for counseling is up sharply with this cohort of students. Students who were here before 2020, came back after time away, and are still on campus describe a campus that simply feels different — newer students seem less independent, less socialized into the experience of being together. It is not a complaint. It is an observation about a generation whose formative years were interrupted, and whose institutions are still figuring out how to meet them where they are.

Make yourself uncomfortable

Asked what advice he would give to a student listening this week, John doesn't hedge. Find someone outside your friend group. Have a real conversation. Get uncomfortable, and pay attention to why you're uncomfortable. "That's how you learn about people. That's how you learn about yourself."

It is a fitting end to a conversation that began with the unlikely pairing of a CIO and a VP for Student Affairs and ended in the same place it started — with the people the entire University exists to serve. Episode 9 is not a story about technology or about Student Affairs as separate divisions. It is a story about what it takes, at the scale of UT, to keep a student supported, connected, and known.