Tristan Lopus
Editor in Chief
The Division of Student Affairs (DSA) began the 2017-18 academic year with a re-designed structure and a detailed set of goals that thoroughly reimagined and solidified its mission. Composing those goals was no small task.
The DSA includes small-scale versions of a health care system, a law enforcement agency, a judicial system and a housing agency, among many other branches. To devise a coherent sets of values for such a dizzyingly complex organization is an intellectually laborious task demanding hours of high-level thought and planning.
This week, the Voice offers a small glimpse into this complex thought process, through the lens of the perpetually baseball-capped leader who orchestrated it all: Scott Brown, the College’s vice president for student affairs and dean of students.
On Thurs., Sept. 7, the Voice’s senior editors — Editors in Chief Meg Itoh ’18 and Tristan Lopus ’18 and Managing Editor Mackenzie Clark ’19 — sat down with Brown in his office. The ensuing interview spanned a wide array of topics and every level of detail, from the highest-level guiding principles down to the minute details of policies and forms.
The interview began with a discussion of the planning for the renovation of Scot Lanes. In an email to the campus on Aug. 15, Brown announced that Scot Lanes will be closed in January 2018 and renovated into an updated space that will offer a more flexible range of programming.
During the interview, Brown acknowledged that a loyal contingent of the student body would be very disappointed to see Scot Lanes go, but he said that ultimately, Scot Lanes is a space with a narrow programming capacity that serves a small portion of the student body and is empty most of the time.
“The bowling alley concept was very popular in the 60s and 50s,” Brown explained, “and as [institutions] have renovated, they’ve pretty much 100 percent gotten rid of them — because it’s not the same kind of pastime.”
A key measure of success for the new space, Brown said, will be, “Is it a place that people go, ‘Oh I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m just going to go there,’ because people just gravitate toward that area?”
Brown also emphasized that the possibilities for this renovation will be limited by the space and available resources. The other key shortcomings of Lowry Center — especially the desire for more food options — will have to be addressed in a later renovation of the entire building.
Creating an optimal product with a finite, pre-existing set of resources was a recurring theme throughout the interview. In fact, a favorite analogy of Brown’s was an iconic scene from Apollo 13, the 1995 film about its namesake, a failed NASA mission to the moon. With the spacecraft’s command module quickly filling up with carbon dioxide, a team of technicians on the ground dumps a box of miscellaneous equipment onto a table and scrambles to find a way to make a makeshift CO2 filter from these spare parts on board.
Brown first introduced this analogy to help make sense of one of the loftier goals the DSA has for 2017-18: “deepen ‘residentiality.’”
“So this is, admittedly, a pretty conceptual idea,” Brown prefaced. He went on to explain that the intent behind this goal is to recognize which parts of the Wooster experience are unique and formative and to ensure that each student engages with and benefits from them during their time here. The question, Brown said, is “How do we make the good stuff happen more often, more deeply?”
Brown also reflected on the incidents of hazing last year that prompted the suspensions of several Greek organizations. In Brown’s view, the organizations and their members were well-intentioned and had the right ideas about what the results of new member activities should be; they just followed traditions that “were not super well-informed.”
“Is the argument that those are the kinds of things make people closer or engender loyalty?,” Brown asked, rhetorically. “It’s just not true,” he said. “I talked to the lead researchers on hazing — in fact, I helped consult with them on it — and it’s just not true.”
Brown is optimistic that the DSA will be able to work closely with Greek Life to change new member practices, through its new New Member/Anti-hazing Task Force, as well as through Craig Lutz, the newly hired director of Greek Life.