With the school year coming into full swing, changes in how the student life offices are run have taken effect. This summer, Al Sturgeon sat down with Lumination to discuss his plans on making adjustments to Lipscomb’s atmosphere.
“The whole point of community life is that this is the part of our campus where students interact with each other, where relationship happen, where interests are explored.” Said Sturgeon on the importance of the Student Life office on campus.
An overlying theme of the changes Sturgeon hopes to bring to Lipscomb is the unification of groups across campus. “We’re putting everything together in a world where we can have conversations and learn how they [different groups] interact across social boundary lines that naturally form,” Sturgeon said
“It’s not like I’m having to convince people to be good people, here [Lipscomb] they’re everywhere, it feels like there is more of a need for me to use my organizational skills and relational skills to build the bridges and connect the pieces together.”.
With the reorganization, comes new roles for both familiar and new faces on campus. “This is just an attempt to make some order out of things,” Sturgeon said. “Prentice Ashford is the Dean of Community Life, which is a new phrase for him, and Louis Nelms is stepping into the role of overseeing Greek life as well as student activities, organizations, and commuters.
“Office of Student Well Being will be led by Dannie Woods, we’re clustering in with the things she does already in her office… the idea is that our concern is not just that students form relationships and interact with each other but that they are doing well, that they are physically and mentally and emotionally doing well.”.
Changes made to the Student Life office, in an effort to push the new theme, are being done in a literal sense as well. This summer, the office suite below the student center that houses Student Life underwent renovations.
Sturgeon hopes the physical redesign of the office suite will contribute to making the Student Life office more of a space where students feel incorporated into the decisions being made within the walls.
“We’re clustering together the leadership of all these different areas so that we’re interacting with each other and bringing in student flow,” Sturgeon said of the construction. “We’re adding more office space in the suite so that we can have more reasons for students to come in and be a part of what’s going on there.”.
The changes Sturgeon hopes to bring are being enacted through ways subtle and obvious. The weekly Student Life email pushes events being hosted by campus organizations, campus recreation, residence life, and more. A student organization fair is set to be hosted monthly in an effort to push student involvement.
“Universities are naturally siloed into departments…but that makes it really hard to interact.” Says Sturgeon on his goal to promote collaboration and partnership. “It takes effort to step across those lines, but we are better as a university when we are working with each other… so I’m tasking my team with being a proactive part of that.”