WSUFAE’s president and CEO talks Appalachian living, the current climate of university development, what’s on his must-read literature list, the importance of family and the unexpected companionship of an unnamed black cat.
Dolly Parton has a song, ‘In My Tennessee Mountain Home,’ and though we were an hour or so up from the state line, that song is a pretty good description of my childhood. I grew up swimming in the Knob Creek, catching crawdads, and going frog gigging, but the thing that sticks with me the most is the closeness of family.
Prior to learning about WSU, I had thought WuShock was a bee. I came from a tobacco, coal and bourbon state, not a wheat state, so I wasn’t at all familiar with what wheat looks like. Now, I understand what a Shocker is and its connection to our early students working in the wheat fields to pay for their tuition. I love that we have a mascot that honors this legacy.
We have a rich, robust history and a strong culture that comes with it. Alumni are passionate about their alma mater, and it makes me proud to see WSU banners, flags and memorabilia displayed across the community. Wichita State will continue to be ‘Wichita’s university,’ with so much potential to move onward and upward with the wind at our backs.
I grew up in a very close-knit family, in a log cabin that my family built. We were ‘country people.’ I owe a great deal of who I am to my parents because they taught me the values of tenacity, compassion, hard work, grace, authenticity, humor, simplicity and gratitude – both for what we had and that things weren’t any worse than they could be.
Ecclesiastes says that two are better than one, that if one falls, one can help the other up. My partner Justin is certainly that person in my life. He is a confidant, an advisor and someone who holds me accountable.
Justin and I have two cats – Raymond and the other one doesn’t have a name, much like Holly Golightly’s cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Our unnamed black cat was inherited from a friend who passed. No one was sure of her name, and it didn’t feel right to give her a new one.
If I had the power to shapeshift, it might be nice to be a ruby-throated hummingbird: high energy, live off nectar, stay on-the-go traveling the Western hemisphere from the States to Mexico and Central America, perhaps passing through some Caribbean Islands along the way. It doesn’t seem like such a bad life in the animal kingdom.
It’s a lengthy read, but I’m a big fan of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and think it’s a book that everyone should read at least once. Other must-read books include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
When it comes to the future of higher education, my concern is we’ll reach a tipping point where alumni start to lose that sense of gratitude for their alma maters because of the debt load they’ve taken on and will be paying far into the future. Universities are too vital to the regions they serve and to the American spirit of ingenuity to go down this road. This makes supporting an affordable and accessible education at Wichita State a critical component of WSUFAE’s work.
Education, fundamentally, is teaching people and enabling them to ask questions, draw conclusions and, most importantly, think independently and logically. What they do with those skills can be lifechanging magic.
In a word, education is opportunity.