Leadership Exchange - Winter 2009

will never have any allegiance to the university or any involvement with the campus. We just wanted to create a wide range of opportunities for them to remain engaged. There is no question that the more students living on campus, the better your retention and graduation rates will be. Residential students are always going to be your most involved students.

PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSI TY OF ARKANSAS

Johnetta Cross Brazzell with NUFP Fellows, whom she hosted at the 2008 Summer Leadership Institute at the University of Arkansas.

Q: What are the greatest challenges facing the profession in the coming years?

Financing higher education is always going to be a challenge for students, and how those funds trickle down to student affairs is even more of a challenge because, for the most part, student affairs operations have not been supported in the same way as other areas of the university. Student affairs must become more entrepreneurial about what we do and how we do it, including how we acquire funds. I’ve been able to grow my division by looking at a variety of revenue streams, and we have been very successful.

If you are a senior student affairs officer, you need a fund-raiser as a part of your division. More and more student affairs operations are moving in that direction and finding private dollars to support their efforts.

Q: What innovative programs for students have you found most successful as part of the University of Arkansas experience?

The first order of business for us was to build a comprehensive first-year experience program, which has many elements to it. We spent a semester with a committee that was composed of representatives from every college and every division on campus to come up

with a concept for a first-year experience. We spent the spring semester selling it to the rest of the campus. We had faculty talking to faculty, staff talking to staff, students talking to students because we wanted the campus to buy into the notion of the comprehensive experience. We rolled it out in fall 2000. It took about five years to roll out all of the elements of the first-year experience concept. It is my baby, my heart. The first-year experience is a comprehensive program aimed at anchoring our students, because we know that first year is critical.

Q: How has your office helped your university transition from a ‘suitcase’ college to a more traditional residential institution? The reality is that with any large research institution you are always going to have more students living off campus than on campus, but the feel of a campus will always be driven by the number of residential living units. We have 19,000-plus students at the University of Arkansas and only about 6,000 of them live on campus. It feels like a residential campus because residence life has worked hard to create a sense of community. When I first arrived at Arkansas, I could walk across this campus on a Friday afternoon and the students and faculty members were gone. There was no sense of a campus community or campus life, so we created late-night weekend programming and called it Friday Night Live. Another thing that helped was that our home football games were finally played in our own stadium, rather than three hours away in Little Rock. If students are not calling this place home, they

Q: You’ve been a great mentor to students and colleagues. What are the most important components of successful mentoring?

You must have a mentee who wants to be mentored and a mentor who wants to do mentoring. It is a reciprocal relationship. It certainly is the most rewarding part of my work. I am often asked by young professionals if they will lose the ability to interact with students as they move up the career ladder. The reality is that the higher you go up the ladder, the more your job is consumed by administrative responsibilities. My answer always is, ‘You will lose that contact if you choose to lose that contact; you can maintain it if you choose to maintain it.’ My days could be filled with all of the meetings that I have to attend, but I make sure that students are scheduled to see me.

It is my responsibility to mentor young professionals, mid-level professionals, and students. That’s my job. In my portfolio right now, I have about 40 mentees at different stages. I see first-year students much more often. I see students in trouble more frequently. I’ve seen students on a weekly basis if they are in crisis situations. That interaction with students is the most rewarding part of my job.