Tom Stafford Retires!!!

NC State Administration37

You really know you’ve made an ‘impact’ in the fabric of NC State when a predominantly sports-related blog decides to highlight and celebrate the retirement of a Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs.

Link to announcement

Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Tom Stafford has announced his retirement after more than 40 years with the University.

Stafford, who has been vice chancellor since 1983, will leave his post no later than July 1, 2012.

Nothing more to say other than admit that we had bad information on this move. We genuinely heard/thought that Stafford was (finally) being pushed out last year when Chancellor Woodson was joining NC State. We were wrong; we were 6-12 months too early.

We really encourage you to click here and do some reading.

Here’s to raising a glass to a significantly improved social and greek experience at NC State. (Unless all of the social fabric of the college experience has been 100% destroyed and is impossible to re-build).

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NC State Administration

37 Responses to Tom Stafford Retires!!!

  1. projectwentynine 03/03/2011 at 8:02 PM #

    They treat students like crap at State. I had multiple bad experiences with faculty members. While it does help prepare you for the often unfair real world, it fosters resentment and results in very little, if any, giving to the alumni association. I have never given a penny, and never will.

  2. runwiththepack 03/03/2011 at 9:37 PM #

    I had just the opposite experience in the 70’s. If I strike it rich, (very, very, unlikely), I will give very, very, generously to NCSU.

    The greatest factor involved was the faculty. The fellow students were great, but my faculty contacts were overwhelmingly favorable, especially in my major.

    My major came down to pharmacy (UNC, of course), Business Adm. (UNC again) and the major I selected, which was only offered at NCSU. It surprises me that fellow posters here had such a different experience.

    It’s hard to understand, then, how SFN posters can back the Pack, but pledge never to give NCSU a dime. Is the athletics dept an exception?

  3. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 03/03/2011 at 9:45 PM #

    So how of this is going to change?

  4. packalum44 03/03/2011 at 11:00 PM #

    I bleed red/white and give back not because the NC State faculty optimized my experience but because they need my money to hire and retain staff that will be able to optimize the NC State experience for future students. I love State. I don’t/didn’t love many of the administrators there. Note that the school has great great professors, whom should not be confused with administrators.

    I truly believe the hiring of Woodson will be considered an inflection point in NC State’s history. He is awaking a sleeping giant out of a long slumber. It takes time: academia makes government bureaucracies look efficient.

  5. McCallum 03/04/2011 at 6:41 AM #

    I only give money to my fraternity. Anyone that would throw money into that bottomless vortex known as the general fund might as well send it to the following address:

    Bowersville Optimist Club
    Pappy’s Brown Bag Rd
    Bowersville, Georgia 30516

    Now if you’ve ever been through Bowersville you’d know the irony in it having an optimist club.

    Send it suckers!!!

    McCallum

  6. OwenDorm83 03/04/2011 at 8:09 AM #

    devnooe Says:

    From what I can tell from 70′s and 80′s alumni there used to be keg parties at the dorms paid for by the social budget of the dorm.

    Owen says: One of the tragedies of time: The conversion of the Owen Underground into a study lounge…

  7. McCallum 03/04/2011 at 8:11 AM #

    I know where the old Owen Dorm bar resides!!!

    McCallum

  8. ryebread 03/04/2011 at 11:14 AM #

    tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc: I can’t say I have all the answers, but I have some ideas.

    1) Go study UT Austin. That’s a public school with good academics, that provides a great college experience and has a huge endowment (the largest of American public schools). Yes, a lot of that endowment is due to oil money, but they’ve got to be doing something right from a campus life perspective. Emulate as much as possible.

    2) Provide incentives for students to stay on campus all four years. Maybe make some dorms for juniors and seniors only and others for seniors only. Maybe make the top floors only for juniors and seniors. Make them nicer or cheaper or something to stop the mass exodus from campus. Because of the housing crunch when I was there, students were actually incentivized to live off campus.

    3) Give the Christian Coalition their own dorms — one each on west, central and east campus. You can do this by making those the dry dorms. When you have dry floors mixed in with normal floors, it just doesn’t work. The Christian Coalition will naturally self select to them and RA in them. This will stop them from trying to turn every dorm top to bottom into a dry one. When I was there, they actively were doing this by becoming RAs, implementing policies that weren’t in the handbook and then enforcing those policies. They were openly proud of that fact and went so far as to key into rooms at 1-3 AM to try and “bust” people. Complaints to student housing and student life that were paired with documentation fell on death ears.

    4) Don’t ostracize and demonize the Greeks (and I say this as someone who was not Greek). They don’t need to be in the dorms (ah la WF), but they don’t need to have every good thing they do stamped out either. I was told by a friend who was one of the main organizers of the Lawn Party that it was ultimately shut down on a technicality — that they could have an event that had alcohol and donate the money to the entrance of it to charity. That could have been total BS, and I know the school was more worried about the risk, but I believe that it was presented by the school as a way to shut the events down.

    5) The profs, administers, etc. ultimately need to remember that the students are paying customers. They may think that the engine is the research, but it only exists because there are students and a lot of that research succeeds because there are students working on the cheap. That doesn’t mean you have to grade inflate (which is a trend that has to stop), but it means that from top to bottom, there needs to be a subtle attitude shift.

    6) As McCallum says, NC State doesn’t practice Risk Management — they practice Risk Avoidance. My job is Risk Management for a very large, high tech company, and one of the things that you have to remember is that for the business to succeed, there has to be risk. We can remove all the risk out of every engagement, but ultimately we will hamper the business. NC State needs to move that needle back a ways towards the center.

    7) Schedule activities for students on the weekends. One of the disturbing trends that I saw while at NC State was that many just went home. When I think of a school with zero culture and a commuter population, I think of UNC Charlotte. I’m sure their endowment and alumni giving is horrible as a result. NC State has to do something to keep the kids on campus on the weekends. If employees are required to run those events, give them Monday at Tuesday off.

    8) Treat students like 18-22 year old adults, not children. They’re legally recognizable with the law as adults and the university is quick to cite that related to underaged drinking. Treat them like that across the board. In this post we hear that Stafford “protected” the students. That mentality alone is a huge part of the problems. The students aren’t criminals who have to be protected from killing each other. They’re the next generation of functioning adults in our society. Their peers who aren’t in school are already out there serving in the military or holding down jobs. If one makes a mistake, punish him for it, but don’t punish the school at large for the mistakes of a few.

    9) Restore camp out (not sure if that’s been done or not, but it died while I was there). Some of my best memories from school are of that. Yes, I’m sure it took some money to run, police, etc., but there has to be things we can take from the Duke model to make that a little smoother.

    10) Stop @#($)*@#$ sending every engineering major over to Centennial Campus. It’s splitting the engineers from the vet students from the liberal arts students way too much. Step foot on Centennial and you’ll see 90% men. Go to a building over near the Courtyard of the Carolinas and you’ll see a whole lot more women. Does anyone think the guys will be more likely to stick around on the weekend as opposed to fleeing to Chapel Hill if they actually saw women during the week? It’s not rocket science.

    11) No cars to freshman or sophomores — period unless they’re participating in a school sponsored internship/co-op program (which most don’t anyways). All freshman and sophomores have to live on campus. Instant community.

    12) Have one all male and one to two all female dorms. Some students are more comfortable in that situation, so let them be in it. Don’t assign students to these dorms. Let them self select into them. They’ll find other like minded people.

    13) Get better eating options on campus. If the school can’t afford to do so, open the spaces up to the free market. Set health targets for the food served and require that the meal plan be accepted. This will keep the students eating on campus and thus staying on campus. There are a ton of private business that would love a shot at such a setup with a captive audience.

    This stuff gets me worked up just thinking about it. There are so many cheap and easy things that could be done to make this better. People just need to open their eyes.

  9. Pack Mentality 03/04/2011 at 3:35 PM #

    I wish Paul Cousins nothing but the absolute worst that this world has to offer. He is a piece of s***.

  10. McCallum 03/04/2011 at 10:19 PM #

    I guess the Paul Cousins fan club must have a limited membership.

    Though this has nothing to do with Paul Cousins, if I can recall, I do recall all the red tape I had to go through to pull a pig cooker across the Brickyard to cook a hawg in front of Williams Hall.

    I had to submit a request form. Then I had to go meet in person with some yahoo at the physical plant. Then I had to take them to the spot where I want to put the cooker. Then I had to meet with a staff engineer so that said engineer could see the pig cooker and the pick up I was pulling it with so that he could calculate, no bulls.hit either, the amount of weight I was going to be putting on the bricks so that he could determine if I might damage the bricks or the soil beneath the bricks. (it didn’t help matters that I’d had 4 semesters of soil science BTW)

    THEN he had to submit a form stating that I was either in violation of the physical plants range for weight across the bricks or I was not. Then after all that he called me back two weeks later to tell me that I could indeed pull my pig cooker across the bricks but that I MUST enter at the Gardner entrance area and that I must be there at 10:15 AM the day of the event. No exceptions. Of course while we were out there “inspecting” where I might damage the bricks with my cooker and pick up several physical plant utility trucks went past us on the bricks which far outweighed both my cooker and truck combined!!!

    Now I have no idea about Ryebread’s comments on the Christian stuff but since North Carolina is an overwhelmingly Christian state it is fairly much a given that Christians should have some say on campus. In fact they should dominate campus but putting that aside hopefully you now understand the complete and total HORSECRAP State has in place concerning RISK AVOIDANCE.

    That is but one story. I have tons and tons of others where the university basically made it as difficult as possible to get anything done and then produced an arrogant attitude when you had your ducks in a row.

    Not a dime and I openly advocate for people not to give.

    McCallum

  11. Cincinnati Wolf 03/05/2011 at 11:59 AM #

    I agree that since the time I graduated in 1979 the life has been sucked out of campus activities. My son is a freshman this year and he says that except for the Cinema at Witherspoon the campus is totally dead on the weekends. For an out of state student with no car on campus that is not fun. I’ve read most of the posts above and there are some very good ideas. I lived on campus all 4 years and had a blast. Being removed off campus was never appealing for me personally because I enjoyed what campus had to offer and it didn’t have to worry about the commute. Kids now more than ever begin to plot when they’ll move off campus after their first couple of months in school as a freshman.

    I’ve got a lot of confidence in Randy Woodson. I hope he has his finger on the pulse and will make some changes that need to be made. I’ve been a Wolfpack Club atate or county chair or representative for 26 years and even for Wolfpack Athletics it is easy to see which alums had a good time at school and which ones are really ambivalent when it comes to donations.

    Stafford retiring alone isn’t going to fix this by itself. The overall culture needs to shift back towards a more fun campus environment. Unfortunately the culture is endemic so it will take a while to change. I know that Dr. Woodson has put a lot of focus on what to do to increase both annual giving and the endowment so maybe he’ll put two and two together and realize that a better experience as a student will lead to more generous alumni. The money is there in our alumni base so we’ve got to tap into that.

  12. dukerDSP 03/16/2012 at 10:58 AM #

    As a member of Delta Sigma Phi in the last 2 years of Lawn Party all I can say is that whoever was incharge of student life in 96 had it out for Lawn Party.

    140 members worked that entire event while drinking absolutely NO alcohol. We invited/paid RPD, Event Staff Security, and ALE to attend to avoid liability. We raised upwards of $50,000 for charity with VERY little overhead since our time was 100% free. One picture of a car in a ditch on in the N&O and an article detailing 90 underage drinking tickets given out, was enough to somehow hold our fraternity to some incredibly vague clause in the student code-of-conduct, suspend our social program for 2 years, and basically keep Lawn Party from ever happening again.

    I’m sure anyone who ever got to attend this event appreciates the elimination of an event that “was” known from Maine to Florida and as far west as TN/KY as the best concert on this side of the country. God forbid that NCSU got bad press from a newspaper run by UNC-CH alumni.

    It was an incredible kneejerk reaction that was obviosly one in a long list for an administration that thinks/thought that social activities have no place in the college experience. This is obviously the same strategy that great schools like Harvard use when explaining to students that their education is no better than what they could receive in any other school… it is the people they meet and the life long connections they make that separate Harvard from the others. Please note the sarcasm.

    Looking back, I now know why I finished my final senior design class as a senior and invited my team for drinks at Amedeo’s, and 4 of 5 of them said “where is that?” and responded with the same answer when Mitch’s was proposed as an alternative.

    I cannot say I have any real interaction with any of the administration, but as someone who saw what happened at NCSU during the late 90’s, I can say that something needs to change or the school will become a group of students completely incapable of socially interacting with real life people.

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