Susan Komives

Scarpino:         As I said when the microphones were off, I’m going to read a statement and get it in the record.  It’s going to take a couple minutes to do it. Today is Saturday, October 15, 2022.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Dr. Susan R. Komives at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association (ILA) in Washington, D.C. This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that as part of my background research I talked to two of Dr. Komives professional colleagues: Dennis Roberts, writer, scholar, and consultant in the area of leadership; and Julie Owen, Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the School of Integrative Studies, George Mason University. Dr. Komives was Professor Owen’s dissertation advisor. Julie Owen described Susan Komives as a “field shaper,” which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Susan Komives earned her Doctor of Education degree in Educational Administration and Supervision at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1973.  She also holds a Master of Science in Higher Education - Student Personnel Administration, earned at Florida State University in 1969.  Finally, she has a Bachelor of Science with a major in Mathematics, and a minor in Chemistry from Florida State University in 1968.

Susan Komives’ career is really a tale of two related careers. Her first career was in university administration. She served as Acting Director and Assistant Director, Area Coordinator of Residence Halls, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1969-1973. Associate Dean of Students, Denison University, Granville, Ohio, 1973-1978. Vice President and Dean of Student Life Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, 1978-1985. And Vice President for Student Development University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida, 1985-1987.

In 1987, she began the second phase of her career when she moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, as an Assistant Professor, College Student Personnel Program, Department of Counseling and Personnel Services. Susan Komives advanced through the academic ranks at the University of Maryland, having been promoted to Associate Professor in 1993 and Full Professor in 2007. She retired in 2012 and presently holds the title of Professor Emerita. Among her many duties at the University of Maryland, she served as Faculty Director, Minor in Leadership Studies (2007-2012), and Senior Scholar, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership (2002-2009).

From 2012-2015, she was Consulting Editor, Student Leadership Development, Jossey-Bass Publishers, New Executive Directions for Student Leadership.

Susan Komives has had a profound impact on the general field of leadership studies through her scholarship.

Between 1996 and 2023 she has co-authored or co-edited 15 books beginning with Student Services: A Handbook for the Profession (1996); and Exploring Leadership: ForCollege Students Who Want to Make a Difference (1998). Most recently she co-edited, How Academic Disciplines Approach Leadership Development (2020), and Research Agenda for Leadership Learning and Development through Higher Education, which is in press for publication 2023. Some of her books have been translated into Chinese and Japanese, which has reinforced the international dimension of her professional impact.

In addition to her 15 books, she has authored or co-authored dozens of book chapters and journal articles.

Alongside her impressive publication record, she has delivered over 90 national and international refereed conference presentations. She has consulted or presented in Canada, China, Qatar, South Korea and Taiwan.

Susan Komives also contributed to the development of the field of leadership studies through her service as Founding Editor, Student Leadership, a quarterly series from Jossey-Bass Publishers from 2014-2022.

She has also had a profound impact on creating the next generation of leadership scholars. She Chaired or served as a committee member for over 60 Masters’ theses; chaired doctoral committees for 38 graduate students in college student personnel administration; participated as a member of the doctoral committee for 70 doctoral dissertations.

She has received numerous recognitions for her body of service and her body of scholarly work, including the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College Personnel Association (ACPA)l. The award that brings us here today is the Lifetime Leadership Legacy Award, given by the International Leadership Association at its annual meeting in 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Scarpino:        Before we really get started, I want to ask you permission to record this interview,

to transcribe the interview, to deposit the recording and the transcripts in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and transcripts into the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives. And, also to deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part may be posted to those organizations’ websites. Can I have your permission to do those things?

Komives:         Yes, you do.

Scarpino:         All right. I want to start by explaining for the sake of anybody who uses this

interview in the future that I’m going to ask you some basic demographic questions followed by bigger-picture questions about leadership. And then we’re going to work our way more or less chronologically through your career with a lot of discussion about leadership and leadership ethics. The Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that help provide continuity to the interviews done over the years, and I’ll work those in as we talk.

Part of the fun of doing these interviews is that we can start out with questions and a plan, but you never know quite for sure in advance where it’s all going to go. So, let’s get started. And we’ll start with some democratic questions. When and where were you born?

Komives:         I was born in Portland, Maine, in April of 1946.

Scarpino:         Did you grow up in Portland, Maine?

Komives:         No.

Scarpino:         Where did you grow up?

Komives:         My parents both met in high school there, and went into World War II. My mom was a WAVE, and my dad was in the Navy. And when they came out there was no work. Bath Ironworks was scaling back down. And although both had been longtime Maine, my mother had been born in Florida and had family in Florida, so they decided to come down and see if jobs would be possible. So, we came down, I remember my mother, two-year-old brother, and I was four, on the train came down to Florida. And I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida, from the time I was four years old. Lived in the same, my dad built our house two years later and so I never really saw snow really until I was, like, 23, when I moved north.

Scarpino:         That’s a long train ride for a small person.

Komives:         It was. I remember walking up and down the aisle of the train to get a cone-shaped paper cup and the water cooler. My mother would let me walk up. I’m sure I spent the whole time also in the bathroom...

Scarpino:         Probably did.

Komives:         ... walking up and down the aisle of the train.

Scarpino:         You said your mother was a WAVE.

Komives:         My mother was a WAVE.

Scarpino:         For the benefit of somebody who might not know what that is, could you say what a WAVE is?

Komives:         Gee, I hope I know, Women’s Auxiliary Volunteer Corps, or something. I mean it’s women that enlisted to support the war effort. They weren’t in the battlefield in that era, in 1945 or ’44, but she actually ended up teaching stenography and shorthand, because she knew all that from high school training. And she taught some courses in Milledgeville, Georgia, at a base there to other women to then serve as administrative assistants to officers in the bases around the country.

Scarpino:         She was in the military in World War II...

Komives:         She was in the military, my dad was, too, yeah. My dad was a photographer and was stationed in Puerto Rico. He talked about being strapped in and hanging out of the side of big planes taking photographs of the coastline of Florida where the German submarines could be spotted in the water, and planning all those logistics. But he did photography.

Scarpino:         Must have been interesting. So, you grew up in Florida. Did you have any brothers and sisters?

Komives:         I have a younger brother, two and a half years younger.

Scarpino:         You talked a little bit about your parents, but is there anything you want to add about who they were as individuals?

Komives:         Absolutely, and we could fill the whole time with that. I mean, I will try not to, but, I was blessed with a marvelous family. And we knew that. We were a close family. They were young when they married. Because of the war, they married right out of high school and went into World War II. And my mother got a military discharge to have me, so she was only 21 when she had me. My dad was 21½ or 22. So, I had the youngest parents of all of my friends growing up. A lot of them had older parents.

Scarpino:         A lot of them waited and actually got married after the war.

Komives:         Yes, they did. And, my parents, I just admire all they did. My dad built this house with his own two hands at 27 years old, getting building loans at every step of the way of building a house. But they were just marvelous. He also learned to be an engineer, came out of World War II and wasn’t able to go to college. But at that point, with the workforce exploding, Southern Bell, he worked for Southern Bell phone company, tapped people that had passed tests and showed these intelligences to do this. And they would send him off for two or three weeks at a time, places to learn engineering. So he became an electrical engineer and ended up being district supervising electrical engineer. My mom was a legal secretary for a wonderful man. I used to hang out there and do homework after school in the law library. And as that firm grew, and she was his first private secretary, but she became the supervising secretary for the whole office.

Scarpino:         Do you know what the name of the firm was?

Komives:         Vocelle... and different names, Vocelle and other people. Mr. Vocelle was in Florida government with LeRoy Collins as the governor at that time, and came back to be city attorney in Vero Beach. Now my mother did a very smart thing. They added three or four secretaries over time and lawyers along the way. She would always say, “I should work with the newest lawyer because I can teach him how to be a lawyer. So I can then teach him what forms you fill out, what you got to file, and don’t say that because the form says this.” So, Mr. Vocelle thought that was brilliant. And my mother wasn’t his private secretary, she was the one in-boarding the newest lawyer who needed someone to help be a guide. And she was marvelous like that. They both were my Girl Scout troop leaders, both my dad and mom were the Girl Scout troop leaders taking us camping. They supported every single thing educationally that I could do. There was an opportunity to go to a marine biology camp in ninth grade, and I was all in the sciences at that point. I want to come back to that, that science was so important in that era. But in ninth grade, I applied for it. And they were saving money for it. We didn’t have a lot of money, but anything educational we could save for and do. And I applied, and I got a letter back about a month later that I was the only girl who applied, the others were all boys, so I wasn’t going to be able to go. They weren’t going to take any girls since I was the only one. So, things like that weren’t happening...

Scarpino:         And in those days they would say it right out loud.

Komives:         Oh, yeah, oh yeah. And you could even understand it, you know, that that might not be possible. But, science was very important. When I was 11 or so, Sputnik went up. And Sputnik changed everything in terms of the type of high school education we got. I don’t know how educators geared up as fast as they did to make the changes, but a year later, just a year later we had ninth grade honors biology. And then we had two years of high school chemistry offered, while previously there had only been one. So, boy, I loved being in all those classes and taking two years of chemistry. Matter of fact, the chemistry textbook we used, I remember to this day, was by Quagliana. I haven’t thought this in years. When I went off to Florida State in the honors program and took organic chemistry, was the same book that we used at FSU that I had just had in high school in chemistry. I mean, it was that good a step up...

Scarpino:         You must have been in a college prep high school or something.

Komives:         No, no, no, but, they had us tracked in sections. So, at that time section one and two were the students that indicated an interest, and they were tracking into college, I guess. So, I didn’t take home-ec and shop and, you know, there were other tracks for students.

Scarpino:         My high school was tracked too.

Komives:         It was tracked, but it was not integrated. The first integration of high schools in Vero Beach came the year after I graduated. So, my high school...

Scarpino:         You graduated in what year?

Komives:         I graduated high school in ’64, 1964. And the integration, there was a black community in the Vero Beach community, and then all that transitioned over ’64, ’65, ’66 kind of era, where the black high school then became the middle school for the county. And so schools were used for integrated purposes.

Scarpino:         What were race relations like for a young girl in Vero Beach, Florida?

Komives:         They didn’t exist. Or they were... but we were aware of the world going on around us. I mean, you watched TV and you saw Lester Maddox with axe handles, terrible things happening in the South. And we had ‘white-only’ and ‘colored-only’ water fountains at the courthouse, which we all thought we were being really rabble rousers to drink out of the colored-only water fountain or whatever. And you went to your doctor’s office and there was a colored waiting room in the back on the other side of the building. So, there were things that were very obvious and not right. And we became these privileged probably white kids. I say privileged because I know we had privileges. Not necessarily that my family had money, but there were privileges. But we became activists for:  that’s not right, that’s got to change, that can’t be like that. We were even sorry, I remember classmates talking about we want to have a chance to be friends that are of another race in the way the structures are; the sports systems, you know… and it just didn’t exist. Then, I got to Florida State and it’s an integrated experience. So, at that point that was certainly wonderful.

Scarpino:         As an elementary school student and a high school student, you really didn’t mix with African-Americans.

Komives:         There was not any opportunity. Churches were all white or black. No, we did not. Now, we did have a lady that came in and cleaned our house kind of thing. So, there were experiences, but they were stereotyped ones, I would say, more generally.

Scarpino:         What church did you go to?

Komives:         First Baptist Church.

Scarpino:         Did that have an impact on you as you grew and developed?

Komives:         Oh yes, it had a tremendous impact.

Scarpino:         In what way?

Komives:         Well, for one thing it was a social outlet for us as teenagers. Certainly, there’s the choir and the things where we enjoyed singing, but it became a place to go for youth activities and a social outlet. And they would do the hayrides and the bowling nights at the bowling alley. Now, we didn’t have any dances. The First Baptist Church did not do dances.

Scarpino:         Hayrides were okay, but not dances.

Komives:         Right, hayrides were okay, but not dances. And we did Wednesday night prayer reading, and Sunday night training union. So, I was very active in the church. I even worked as a church secretary one summer as my summer job. Went off to Florida State and went maybe twice, and never went again. It was a meaningful experience for me, and loved the people, and a lot of them were my social friends.

Scarpino:         So…

Komives:         Well, my parents, because we were talking about my parents. I would want to give them exceptional credit. They couldn’t have been more supportive, more proud of me. I never once heard my father say, “You shouldn’t do that because you’re a girl.” I mean, there was nothing like that. He would say, “Why don’t you run for student government? You’ve got all these ideas on how you can change things.” I said, “Okay, I’m going to run for student government.” I mean, he didn’t persuade me to do it, but it was him affirming that doing any of those things was valuable, and I should and I had something to contribute, and I had good ideas. Our dinner table... we had dinner together every night and there were dinner table conversations that, my mom said finally, “Well, I have to get up and do other things, folks.” My father and mother...

Scarpino:         Well, that’s nice.

Komives:         We had encyclopedias, you know, the whole set of them, and he would assign us topics. Sometimes he’d say, “Okay, we need to learn more about a couple of things. Why don’t each of you bring that info to us tomorrow night at dinner?” So, we’d be looking up in the encyclopedia. But learning things, and being a learner, and talking about knowledge, it was a part of every day. I was very lucky. And I knew it at the time. I knew then that it was special. I later studied some of this, and also there was research later that for young women in their teenage years in the ‘60s who became successful in non-traditional fields, the single most important variable was a supportive father. Because a father says, “you’re great and you’re doing good and keep at it, and I think you’re wonderful and that you’ve got a lot to offer,” that affirmation, and it makes sense, and in that era, they actually showed that through research.

Scarpino:         Do you think it was unusual at that time for a father to be encouraging his daughter to look upward and outward as she grew?

Komives:         Well, I’m going to give you two answers to that. One is, with a lot of my friends, it was the same. I mean, some of these students being tracked into the sciences, and my girlfriends that were in the same classes as well as the guys, but the girlfriends also had parents that thought this was so cool that we got two years of chemistry, you know, and biology in the ninth grade, and more math than usual. So they thought it was great. I had other friends, too, through chorus and through P.E. and other courses that you take in school whose fathers said, “We can afford to send our son, but we’re not going to be able to send you,” the daughter, “so you’ll have to work.” Or, who decided to get married themselves right out of high school instead of going on to college, and nobody in the family said, “Why don’t you instead go to college?” So there were different life experiences I knew for people then, although the friends that I had were more on the track of saying our parents were wanting us all to go get higher education.

Scarpino:         Do you think it helped you develop as a person to be tracked with other children who had your level of intelligence and ambition mostly? I’m sure they fooled around and had a good time, but...

Komives:         Well, it’s hard to know what it would have been if it was different.

Scarpino:         Right, that’s true.

Komives:         And you’re so busy when you’re a teenager doing things. I was in plays with other people. I was in ninth-grade chorus with lots of other people. So there was lots of variety, not racial variety, but there was lots of variety of life experiences. But there was a lot of homogeneity beyond all being white. One was, like, I only knew one friend whose parents were divorced. Every single other person that I knew, like me, had parents that were together and had been throughout their whole marriage. It was a uniquely unusual snapshot in time, I think.

Scarpino:         Did you know any Catholics?

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         Jews?

Komives:         There was one Jewish family, great kids, I mean really just brilliant and in classes and everything, so, we knew one Jewish family. And, what did you say? What was the other one?

Scarpino:         Catholic.

Komives:         Oh, Catholic, yeah. Now, the Catholic school had a high school. So, there was actually another whole environment happening. Like, now when we go back, like, my hometown has something called Golden Grads. So, for anyone who graduated from high school 50 years ago or more in Vero Beach anywhere, there is this, at the fairgrounds, big reunion thing. We’ve been to that several times. So, I’m meeting even there some new people I didn’t know because they went to the Catholic high school. So there was one Catholic high school and the public school.

Scarpino:         As you think about being a young girl in Vero Beach, and you mentioned your parents, but were there any other experiences or individuals, as you look back on it, that really shaped your character?

Komives:         Oh, yes. Just phenomenal. Both teachers and advisors and those folks, and I’ll mention several, I guess. Also, peers. A lot of positive peer influence happening. One of those was through Scouts. There were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. We were in Girl Scouts, and then they added a senior level for scouting for girls. That had not existed in our county. I don’t know if it didn’t exist in the whole U.S., or we were just adding it and we were Mariners. So, we were there in a water culture, and we were Mariner Scouts. We did lots of community service. And it was my same great group of girlfriends that did lots of things together. I went off to the National Girl Scout Council Conference one year when I was a junior in high school. My mom was one of the directors and there was another woman director. A transformative experience was the Miami Herald sponsored something called Operation Amigo, which was bringing up a group of youth that applied for an exchange from Cali, Colombia, in South America. And we could then volunteer to be a host family for somebody while they were with us for three weeks in our junior year, spring of our junior year. And my family, of course, were right there volunteering. And the girl that we got to be our Amigo spoke beautiful English, and we were very lucky that way. They didn’t all, and I don’t blame them, but, I mean, we had someone who did. And we’re friends to this day. So, that was 60 years ago, 55 years ago. That summer, then, we were invited to go back down there for three weeks, and most of us were able to do that. I learned, at that time, my grandparents helped out with some money for my family. And so my first plane flight ever in my life was flying out of Miami in 1963, low enough over Cuba so that we could be recognized as a passenger plane, because you didn’t want to be a U-2 up there flying over Cuba. And we landed in Panama, and then we got to Cali, Colombia, and had a three-week remarkable experience. I got written up in the Miami Herald and lots of newspapers, but this whole cultural exchange with youth from another country was just eye-opening. And to be down there independently with those people was an empowering kind of experience.

Scarpino:         What was it like to be in Cali, Colombia, as a young girl? You had a family, but pretty much on your own.

Komives:         Well, we were very chaperoned. We were in a very group experience. We were scheduled to go. We went to plants, and factories, and a bull fight, and up in the mountains to see where a poet lived and where he wrote his poetry. So, we were scheduled and things. And then otherwise we would hang out at houses of these various people. But it wasn’t any, like, wild rides at night or anything.

Scarpino:         No, no, that’s not what I was looking for. (laughs)

Komives:         Another experience I had out of it, which was interesting to me, was I hadn’t... I hadn’t thought of this in a long time, either – spike heels were popular then, like three-inch spike heels. And, with my height and three-inch heels, and hair, hair was high, I was almost 6-feet tall with these three-inch spike heels. I’ve shrunk a lot since then.

Scarpino:         You towered over those folks.

Komives:         And blonde hair. I had blonde hair down to my shoulders in one of those cuts like we all had. And I would walk down the sidewalk and these guys were calling out things to me or coming up… I looked down at one point, I was looking in a store window and this arm was around my waist because this guy had gotten kind of friendly coming up beside me. So, I was this tall blonde, which wasn’t the norm in that culture. Most people were darker and a lot shorter. So that was quite an experience.

Scarpino:         In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve lived in Bogota, so I have some idea what you’re talking about.

Komives:         That’s where my friend lives now.

Scarpino:         My beard is blonde now, it’s actually gray for the people who can’t see this.

Komives:         But there were other experiences...

Scarpino:         What did you take away from that experience that influenced the adult you became?

Komives:         The excitement of learning about other cultures, and that there are other ways of seeing and being and experiencing even the same stimulus, whatever it might be, and how much there is to learn from that. Boy, I’ve been a learner all my life. The chance to learn anything new, and then weave and bring that into my opportunities to do something with it probably becomes a theme out of this. But that international experience, the sciences, loving history, the courses that we took. I loved every course. You know, what’s your favorite course? I could then tell you, oh English, oh no it’s history, oh it’s biology, no, it’s chemistry. Sputnik had gone up and they ratcheted up in all these courses. This is a tangent from what you just asked me, but I do want to share this. They rang the school recess bell one afternoon, hadn’t told us what we were going to see. We go out on the school grounds, all the classes emptied out like a fire drill, and they pointed up and there went Alan Shepard over our head. They had just blasted off from Cape Canaveral. We saw the rocket go up, and then there was this explosion, and we all went, “Uhhh!” You know, you gasp, and the teachers, I don’t know how they prepared them to do this, the teachers said, “That’s the first stage, he’s in that little thing that’s still going.” We didn’t even know how to interpret what we were seeing. And then, about six months later, we go out and saw John Glenn go right up over our heads. And then John F. Kennedy got elected president. So we were into the future, and we were the first of the baby boomers. So, 1946, when you look at lots of those reports, is when that generation then exploded, but also the future of building a culture together, the Civil Rights Movement that was happening, all the things that we could make this a better work, it was just so powerful. And we were learning the sciences so that we could that, and technology was going to be growing. And we were going to be in the moon at the end of that decade... we were going to be in the moon. And I remember certainly where I was, balling, as I saw Neil Armstrong step down on the moon. I was in grad school.

Scarpino:         You were working in the mall? You said, ‘malling?’

Komives:         Balling. I was watching TV, balling.

Scarpino:         Oh yes, I understand that.

Komives:         But I had marvelous opportunities in school. I was president of the National Honor Society. You know, I was your miss student leader kind of person. I loved it.

Scarpino:         In high school, you were president of the National Honor Society. What else did you do in the way of student leadership or student government?

Komives:         Oh, I was student council rep, and I had a radio station show. They wanted teens to play young people’s music and interview the high school football player, you know, the quarterback. I was in all the school plays. I was in Wheelettes...

Scarpino:         What are Wheelettes?

Komives:         Well, it’s like Rotary... the girls’ version, like Key Club and Keyettes, so you’re always an auxiliary to what sounds like is the guys’ version. So, Keyettes, and Key Club, and Wheel Club and Wheelettes. But I was really active in school, and had a lot of leadership opportunities. I also did a lot of public speaking. We had an American Legion in town that sponsored public speaking contests. And we had a speech class in school, so many of us were in that class learning to do public speaking, and would then write speeches to do at the American Legion. Then I went on to regionals and state giving speeches.

Scarpino:         Speech, student government, and leadership; do you consciously look back and think that those experiences really influenced the adult you became?

Komives:         Oh, absolutely. It’s just been a continuation of that all my life. At one point, I see the roots of the things that I went on to do that just then kept expanding. And almost like as being a continuer. You know, I was continuing to develop the same interests in new and different ways. So, when I got to Florida State in the Honors Program and in my residence hall, I thought, well, I’m going to run for Reynolds Hall representative to the Women’s Student Government. There was still a Women’s Student Government then. And, so, my friend and I went around and campaigned, and I won the election to be the rep to Women’s Student Government. I was picked, somehow, to be an advisor on the president’s cabinet. The president of the university had a student advisor cabinet, and I was one of the two freshmen reps to the university president on this thing for all four years of my time at Florida State.

Scarpino:         You had more contact with the university president than the average student.

Komives:         Oh, yeah.

Scarpino:         Did that influence your career decisions?

Komives:         Not necessarily who the president was, but the opportunity to engage with student leaders from across campus meant when we then wanted to get something done, we already knew each other. So, I mean, I was furious at that point that women had a curfew and men didn’t, and that women had to pay for the linens program where you got sheets and towels replaced once a week, and guys didn’t have to do that. They’re the ones that probably needed the linen program.

Scarpino:         I knew a guy that didn’t change his sheets for an entire quarter.

Komives:         Just getting comfortable by then... that’s right. (laughs)

Scarpino:         I remember women with hours and men with no hours.

Komives:         And the logic of it, women couldn’t go to apartment parties, freshman women could not, sophomore women could. So there were all these restrictions at that point that certainly made no sense to me as this early feminist that I was becoming. But connecting with some of those people from that advisory committee meant I was meeting people across the university that also might agree, and we could form coalitions and begin to do some kind of change initiatives, which I enjoyed. I ran for president of the Women Students by my junior year, did not win, was not selected. I was in a sorority, and an officer, did a number of things.

Scarpino:         Which sorority were you in?

Komives:         Tri Delta – Delta Delta Delta. And I was rush chair for that group, which is a phenomenal experience. I got my first job because of that, not in the way you may think. When I applied for my first position at the University of Tennessee, and they said, “You haven’t supervised anybody before; how would we know you can handle the supervision part of the job? Because you’ve had summer jobs, but they’re not like this.” And I said, “Well, let me tell you about being rush chairman of a sorority where 2,000 women go through rush in a week before school starts. And, what I had to coordinate the schedule for the people I had to work with in teams to make sure things were ready, and how to manage them, the selection process. So, managing a sorority of 100 women, engaging with 2,000 coming through in cycles meant there was a lot of coordination, motivation, boundary setting, those kinds of things.” And they said, “Oh, okay.”

Scarpino:         I want to talk a little bit about your education. We’ve sort of done that, but we’ll do                         it a little bit more systematically. You started high school in 1960...

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         And, you went to high school in Vero Beach.

Komives:         That’s correct.

Scarpino:         And to a white high school, and the system was still all white.

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         When you were in high school, were there any individuals that you remember that had a significance influence on the adult that you became?

Komives:         Well, I would say, yes. One was the speech teacher. His name was Gordon

                        Popple. And literally learning techniques of giving speeches and constructing a flow of one to give substance and engage, but have some humor, you know, those approaches to those things made a big difference, I actually won some contests with that and have done a phenomenal... I’ve given like 500 keynote speeches in my career, nationally and internationally, some groups two or three times. I’ve had some associations, they would ask me and then ten years later, somebody says, “would you come back?” So I’d say, he went on to be principal there after I had gone, but he was the speech teacher then. The high school English teacher is always a marvelous person. This woman, everybody would say was one of their favorites. We did, like, 28 Shakespeare plays in that senior English class, and she acted out most of the parts.

Scarpino:         What was her name?

Komives:         Betty Baker, no, Carlton, Joyce Carlton. Betty Baker was the dean of girls. She was my National Honor Society advisor. But Joyce Carlton was the teacher. The things that you think you don’t like at the time, like, diagramming sentences, but boy did that make... I was a science person, but that made me a great writer. I could really see the core of a sentence, or try to write one that had a core. And you knew what the modifiers were, and the clauses were, where everybody’s getting lost. But I remember diagramming sentences and the beauty, language, metaphors of Shakespeare plays that you then see all around you as an adult in just everyday life.

Scarpino:         As you look around the world now, and education in particular where students don’t read Shakespeare, don’t diagram sentences, and don’t do many of the things that you did in high school, what do you think about that? Are they better off or worse off, or is it just different.

Komives:         Well, I’ve always had a philosophy, the students aren’t better or worse, ever, they are just different. And our times puts on different pressures and stresses. I used to publish a list of what students were going to be like as they were come into college, like the Beloit College list that gets published. And I’ve never liked that because it’s a deficit model. It’s almost like how you ask the question or what that could lead to, because the question is saying, how are they deficient from what we wonderful people were like when we were in school. It doesn’t say, how are they better than even we were like. These people know so much more about social issues, about injustice and equity and citizenship than we knew. They know more about technology than I know now. I’m certainly an immigrant to technology, not a native, and these students we all know are native. I have a friend who says, “Hold your arm out, anybody who can walk under knows more about technology than you do.” And that’s true. And I call our son now for advice. But I think there are many things they bring us as gifts and talents that we need to see that way. Now, I also think it’s very, very stressful to be a public school teacher. I don’t know how, with all the limitations, my teachers... As a matter of fact, I remember my senior year in high school, in Mrs. Carlton’s senior class, we had to pick an author to do a report on, and I picked Oscar Wilde. And she said, “That’s just wonderful. I’d like to talk to your mom and dad and see if that’s okay with them to do that paper.” And they said, “Sure, that’s fine with us.” I don’t think they had any clue who Oscar Wilde was. But the point was, nobody said to me, “you can’t do a paper on a gay poet because that wouldn’t be allowed.” Now, my governor in our state of Florida says, “you’d better not be talking about that stuff,” even at the University of Florida. So, we’ve got constraints on how educators could open up our minds that really do worry me. I’m less worried about the youth themselves. I think there are lots of challenges there, but also wonderful...

Scarpino:         Well, that’s what I was fishing for, was the different context from when you were a student.

Komives:         Yeah.

Scarpino:         We talked about where you went to high school. When you were in high school, which would have been ’60 to ’64, were there any events that took place that influenced the person you became?

Komives:         Well, I think of two: One real personal, and one, well two that are world related. The personal one would be, I got a wonderful boyfriend my sophomore year in high school, you know my first date is this guy that I went with all through high school. He was the star basketball player. So, I was this tall girl, you know, feeling awkward and you never feel like you looked as good as everybody else. And had this just terrific guy who’s a year ahead of me in school, so I got to go to the junior prom my sophomore year. But to have that affirmation of a nice relationship with a guy, and we went to the same church so we did all of the youth activities at the church together. My parents just loved him, trusted him. Our parents played cards together. You know, like, we were supposed to get married was the vision of those parents, then they could be connected all their lives. And we didn’t, you know, we broke up in college later and all that. But that made a big difference for that acceptance and somebody to go to things with that I liked. That was a real joy. The world events that made a big difference: I would say one was Kennedy’s assassination. We were seniors that year, and so everybody remembers where you were sitting when the... and in my case it was chemistry class.

Scarpino:         Study hall.

Komives:         Study hall... well, I was in chemistry class, and we had the crazy scientist kind of chemistry professor. He could’ve been played by Christopher Lee, he was great, crazy scientist. He got called to the office, then came back and he said, “I have to tell you all, the president has just been assassinated.” And we went, “Yeah, right,” you know, like because he would be teasing us. And we realized he was telling the truth. So, that was phenomenal, because that was dreams dashed, but it was a recommitment to... it was like, we still have got to get to the moon, and we still were going to do these good things. But that national grieving, that was really tragic. That was a tragic... and partly, the young people, we knew they were young. Anybody was older than us, but Jackie Kennedy was young. And to see a woman be as gracious and appealing as she was, because you could imagine being Jackie Kennedy. Everybody had a pillbox hat that were girls. We all wore the same kind of style dress. I bought my simplicity patterns and made all my own clothes. And they all looked like Jackie Kennedy. That was sad, and that was impressive, that was something.

Scarpino:         I thought of something as you were talking earlier, I’ll see if this works or not. You mentioned that as a high school-aged person, you were taller than other girls, and you finally got a boyfriend that was a basketball player. If you were taller than most of the other girls, that meant you stood out in your peer group. Did that influence the person you became?

Komives:         It always made me feel special. I wasn’t ever one to cower my shoulders and hunch down. But I was always taller. I had an April birthday, so I was six and a half when I started first grade. Well, a lot of my friends hadn’t even turned six yet, because you could go until November or something. So, in terms of going into the school system, at six and a half I already knew how to read. I can remember the teacher in first grade led one reading group and had me lead the second reading group. She asked if I would help her with it, and I sat with one group and read, and she read with another group. And then, I would finish all my lessons first because I was just ahead of everybody for a while. I mean, that catches up certainly as everybody gets caught up with basic skills, and then it was more equal. But through much of elementary school I was the one who would be asked to put together a bulletin board display on something because I had already done the worksheet kind of thing. So, I was ahead of folks, I was taller; I remember not wanting to show off that much. The teacher was real good about being subtle about things. But, my friends, of course by my senior year when they were electing senior superlatives, I won two of them which you’re not supposed to do, you can only get one. You’ll guess which one I picked: One was most studious, and the other was the most likely to succeed. And, so, I picked the most likely to succeed to be mine, not the most studious one. But I think everybody thought all I did was study and go to basketball games.

Scarpino:         Do you think that, when you were in high school, people could look at you and say, “This person is going somewhere?”

Komives:         Oh, I think so. They tell me that now, too. Or since Facebook days and, you know, since all this has happened, people have seen... or Googled my name. I had a friend that said, “I Googled you,” and they said, “on fifth page I stopped looking at books.” But that’s been nice, that’s been nice.

Scarpino:         When you were in high school, or if you think back to when you were in high school, maybe on graduation day or evening, where did you hope or think or expect your life was headed?

Komives:         I couldn’t go too far ahead with that. I remember hoping I’d certainly have a partner, have a husband and then have kids. That would be an important message out of the upbringing that I had. And the second one was, I loved the sciences so I knew I wanted to keep going in the things I was already good at and had won…. you know, I’ve had awards in all of those disciplines. So, I was going to major in math and minor in chemistry at Florida State. But, then, I didn’t think into career. So, then, as I found when I got there, the only thing women in that era could do with a major in math was going to be teach high school, or be an actuarial scientist with a life insurance company figuring out, you know, like, how much is a limb that you’ve lost worth in your payments of your disability insurance. These things weren’t appealing. Women weren’t being hired in big ways to be going into the sciences.  That came along, but that came a little bit later even in my time. So, I began noticing around me -- I don’t want to get ahead in your question -- but I knew what I wanted to major in, but I didn’t think through what the career fields would be. I got AP credits for a lot of freshman courses, so, I had extra time in my schedule to actually get certified to teach math. And I did do… the college had a couple of courses and then you get a teaching certification in mathematics. And, it was okay, I didn’t particularly like doing that...

Scarpino:         Did you ever teach?

Komives:         Only student teach. And by that time I did that, I had already decided that I was really liking all the student involvement things I was doing, and had asked one of the deans working with our student government, “how did you get the job you got?” And then she told me about this whole field called Student Affairs that I had not ever, of course, known existed. But I was working with the dean of students and with her, and then changed career fields completely to go into this.

Scarpino:         I’m going to talk to you about that. You graduated from high school in 1964, matriculated to Florida State University, I assume because you were in Florida, so that would in-state tuition and all of that.

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         You majored in math and minored in chemistry, graduated with a B.S., bachelor of science, in 1968. Obviously, Florida State is not the only university or college in Florida. Why did you pick that?

Komives:         Well, I remember my father saying, “You can go anywhere you want to college in the state as long as it’s FSU or the University of Florida.” And that logically would be where would go. The only college campus I had been on at that point had been Rollins. Rollins is a beautiful private university in Orlando, and we had gone there for choral competition, our tenth-grade chorus or something went there. So, I thought all colleges must look like Rollins. But it was private and that was very expensive. And, in the state of Florida, the history of Florida State and the University of Florida are very different. Florida State was Florida State College for Women until 1947. The University of Florida was the men’s university and had the law school. So, all of the state legislature came out of the University of Florida Law School, and state politics were University of Florida politics. And it had the engineering school, and the law school, and men’s kinds of education at that point. Florida State had arts and music and education, and a lot of those kinds of things. As the World War II vets came out, both went coed, Florida was already coed, I think, but Florida State went coed. And then Florida State added a law school. When I was there, there were law students. As a matter of fact, the law students started to take over student government and we were very incensed by that. Those law students were wanting to run the student judicial boards and all those things. The law student who became the head of the Student Judiciary when I was there went on to be - Parris Glendening - governor of Maryland when I was at the University of Maryland. I did not know him at Maryland, but I knew him at Florida State as an interloper law student, you know, taking over our student government. But, very, very localized politics in any state between the two main state universities. And, so, of the two, then, of course, I really wanted to go to Florida State. So, I went to Florida State.

Scarpino:         But you were going to major in math and minor in chemistry...

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         ... and you picked that because...

Komives:         Because I was good at it, and it was challenging, and I liked it, and in my dualistic way of thinking at that age, if you worked hard enough you could get the right answer. You know, and in other fields the answers were more amorphous and, you had people’s opinions… so I was dualistic not quite seeing multiplicity and certainly not relativism in any of the knowledge, so the sciences were appealing.

Scarpino:         You’re in math and chemistry, you alluded to this earlier, but were there many other women in those classes?

Komives:         No. There were more in chemistry than there were in math. And some of those chemistry courses were big. You know, at that point, they were they flunk-out courses kind of thing. Like, anybody who couldn’t pass organic chemistry probably was going to leave the university, or leave the sciences. That was a course that weeded you out, like calculus might be for those of us in math. But there were many math courses; linear algebra and those... I was the only woman in the class. We were still using slide rules in these courses.

Scarpino:         I still have mine. I don’t know how to use it, but I have it.

Komives:         The technology story that could be woven throughout this is also wonderful. I did sit with, in two of my classes, a guy that was really interesting. I wore my sorority pin and he had on a fraternity pin, interesting. So, we kind of sat together. I don’t think that was why, but… and everybody else had their slide rules it felt like strapped to their belts. They were real mathematicians. And he was a real mathematician. We ended up getting engaged and got married, this is part of the story to come. But we were the two people we felt connected in these math classes that brought us together. Mike Bowling is his name... Mike Bowling – B-O-W-L-I-N-G. But I would be the only female in those classes.

Scarpino:         Was that a challenge for you?

Komives:         No. And I never got any discrimination, or, nobody to my face anyway said anything. I was also good.

Scarpino:         The professors treated you the same way they treated the men? I know they know you were a woman, but I mean, minus that.

Komives:         Yes, I’d say, with one exception: Yes they did, and they looked at, I think, talent, so, when you’re the one that’s making an A on the test, the professor is glad to have you. Doesn’t matter what you look like, or color, or anything; if you’re a good student you’re a good student. And I was a strong student. I could memorize my way through those formulas, I mean, I was bright, I could learn that stuff. And I remember staying up… my only all-nighter I ever pulled in college was for a linear algebra test, and I thought I just bombed it. I left it in tears. I did not do well on it. And, of course, with the curve, I got a B-minus or something. But the teacher said to me, “This isn’t your normal level of work. I want you to take this test over. I know that something had happened, because you would not be doing this kind of work in this class.” And he let me take the test over, partly because believing in me, I think, you know, was my ability. I did have an advisor, I won’t name him, particularly in the Me Too Movement era, but I did have an advisor who is a famous man, and had written a textbook that we used in one of our classes. I went into his office one day to talk with him, and he came around to show me something by his desk, and he had a Playboy magazine and wanted me to see the centerfold. And I said, “I don’t want to see that, put that away.” You know, and I went down and sat, and said, “Now, what should I take next semester?” I just went on like nothing had happened. And it didn’t, because I went on like nothing had happened. But, I literally had that experience. I thought he was a jerk from it, so I didn’t let it affect me saying, What’s wrong with me? I’m thinking, What is wrong with this guy? But it also wasn’t anything you told anybody at the time. It was just like you dealt with it.

Scarpino:         And it was something in those days that somebody could get away with.

Komives:         Yeah, oh yeah. I did have later experiences, and I’ll weave those in.

Scarpino:         Because you were in a minority in those classes, there were not many women, sometimes you were the only one. Did you ever think of yourself as a leader in those classes? As somebody who was blazing a trail?

Komives:         Not necessarily in those classes. I realized I was over my head as you got into advanced math. But my first two years at Florida State, I had a 4.0 average. I was taking things, like that chemistry course, used the same book. So, I’m earning good grades because the material was catching all of us up to some standard or level. And then it got hard in those junior and senior level courses, and it wasn’t as enjoyable. And I was doing more student government so I wouldn’t start studying until midnight when I got home from whatever meetings I was in. I wasn’t invisible, but I wasn’t trying to stand out in those classes, and math classes didn’t lend themselves to group work. You didn’t do things, and you didn’t have conversation, you were watching the teacher write with one hand and erase with the other trying to keep up with the D’s and T’s and all that, so I’d say, no. In some of the other classes I really did enjoy the human interaction of the class, a group dynamics course that the Counseling Department offered. We read literature and had to analyze the group functions in the story, and those kinds of things.

Scarpino:         I talked to Julie Owen, and I mentioned that in the introduction, and she told me that while you were at Florida State, you were president of your sorority that we already talked about.

Komives:         No, I was rush chair, not president. I was an RA...

Scarpino:         And you were in Delta Delta Delta.

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         Talk about the positions you held in student government.

Komives:         Well, I started off representing my residence hall, Reynolds Hall, women’s hall in women’s student government. And became freshman class senator. And, then I didn’t win the election for the president of the women’s students, because there still was a women’s government, that was a holdover from being Florida State College for Women, really. And there was also a regular student government that covered all students. And, the boy that was elected president of the student government was appointing a cabinet of people then to do the civil service act, you know, functions of student government, and asked me to be the secretary of communications. And, so, I then took on, for my last two years under two presidents of student government, the secretary of communications role. And a lot of this was communicating with the administration, doing newsletters to the student body, doing the column in the school newspaper, the Torch Bearer, so that there would be information flowing out to students of what actions we had taken in student government. We were activist students, and we had a marvelous dean of students, and dean of women, who encouraged us to be active players in getting the institution to be coming along with the times changing it, so it wasn’t a butting heads kind of approach to change. After I left, of course, they did, but they finally changed the dress code and the curfews, and those things.

Scarpino:         The dress code must have been skirts at a certain length, certain types of shoes, certain types of stockings.

Komives:         It wasn’t that strong, but it was that girls had to wear skirts or dresses outside of their residence hall, in any cafeteria or university building. So, for classes you had to wear a dress or a skirt. So, of course, what we would do is like go to breakfast with our trench coat over our pajamas, so that underneath that was the little rebel, but we had our trench coat on over it. So girls had a dress code and boys didn’t.

Scarpino:         When I started at the University of Montana in 1966, the rule was the girls had to wear dresses and skirts unless it was below zero. Imagine that...

Komives:         That was true in high school in Florida too. And it got cold enough that we would wear, then, jeans under our skirt, so you had a skirt on but you had long pants on underneath it.

Scarpino:         Did your experiences in student government and other activities that you engaged in at Florida State, did they pique your interest or nurture your interest in leadership?

Komives:         Oh absolutely. Absolutely. And I knew I was getting phenomenal experiences too. At one point, the students appointed me to be, through student government, the campus director of the National Student Association. And the National Student Association on the national level was doing quite a bit of activist work, and also offering benefits to college students if your campus was a member, like study abroad programs. You know, they managed several study-abroad programs in France and Italy and places. They had national student insurance policies that you could tap into that we then did make available. So I was doing the benefits of that as well as NSA. I didn’t know as much about their activism. You know, they later got connected with the CIA and some other things that were quite interesting. But I went off to the National Student Association conference, and airplanes were on strike that fall. I don’t remember when it was, or spring. But the airplanes were on strike, I couldn’t fly there. So, I remember taking a bus over to Pensacola from Tallahassee, and took the train out of Pensacola all the way to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in an overnight car. Me, all by myself. And the car that I was in was full of Navy cadets from Pensacola air station or something going on up to the Great Lakes, or going up... so it was me and a whole car full of Navy cadets. And they were all very nice. We played cards and we did all of this stuff. But I get to this conference, this National, NSA conference, and I looked up there and I went, “That is Timothy Leary, that guy over there is Timothy Leary.” And he was walking by with somebody. So, there were a number of other kinds of people. And I showed up in my villager dress. Now, villager dresses were the thing in 1962 or ‘63. They were the kind with lots of pleats down the front and little Peter Pan collar, and my sorority pin right on there. I went, oh boy, took off my sorority pin, went back and put on sweat pants. I mean, the style of the day was sweat pants and sweat shirts, not villager dresses at this conference.

Scarpino:         I am sure that there will be people who will read the transcript or listen to this who will not have a clue who Timothy Leary was. So, can you...

Komives:         He was there with Allen Ginsberg. Here’s the two of them, side by side.

Scarpino:         They were both at this meeting of the National Student Association.

Komives:         Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:         Maybe you can just give a few words on each of them.

Komives:         Well, if I can remember. I mean they certainly the adult figures we looked to at the time were into drugs, and were very upfront about it. But, one was an author, and one’s a lawyer, and I mean, they had other careers in their world, but they were on the hippie, probably leftover ‘50s hippies that were then doing some of these things in the ‘60s.

Scarpino:         They were certainly the spokespeople for drugs and so on, yeah.

Komives:         Now, one of the things, this is getting back to your leadership question, one of the things NSA offered was encouraging campus reps, of which I was one, to be going back and organizing, like, institutes or symposiums around student stress, and how the campus could better manage student stress before it was detrimental to students’ success. And they were using terms like that. So, I went back and organized with my friends, and through student government, a weekend retreat for student stress for student leaders and administrators. And we all gathered at the university’s retreat center. Wakulla Springs is where that was, and what a beautiful setting. Altogether and everybody agreed we needed to deal … it was a really good topic we needed to deal with it. I was the chairman of the committee, so we were organizing things to try to ameliorate or resolve issues that we thought would make the student condition better. And, so, there were direct leadership implications of an opportunity like that.

Scarpino:         Do you feel as though you were able to make the student circumstances better?

Komives:         Well, we thought so at the time. And part of it was awareness raising, getting people to talk about it. It did not alleviate probably anybody’s stress, but it was good to talk about.

Scarpino:         You mentioned the National Student Association, you used the term “activist work,” what did you mean by that?

Komives:         Well, they were taking on national political issues. A lot of that was early anti-Vietnam kinds of protests. And so they had information packages on contemporary social issues that your campus might want to pursue, and I would take these information packages to meetings that I had the student government offices. So, they would be on homelessness, and Vietnam War, and various social issues that we might want to or indeed have people wanting to engage in, and they had information on where you get more resources and pamphlets and, you know, all kinds of support literature. Now, it didn’t mean you had to do any of those, and they might not have come out of the university. My grad school year I was at Florida State, SDS burned the administration building.

Scarpino:         Students for a Democratic Society.

Komives:         Yeah, right...

Scarpino:         That was a pretty far left organization.

Komives:         And for a southern university that didn’t do much of any kind of activism or protests, yeah... So, I did have leadership opportunities. I knew I was learning leadership. I was also...

Scarpino:         You were self-conscious about that...

Komives:         I was.

Scarpino:         You understood that you were learning about leadership.

Komives:         I knew that I could engage people and get things accomplished. And of course a lot of it was individual at that point, but I always was working with a group or committee. I mean you didn’t individually put on a whole conference; you did that with people. But I also got interested in why some people cared and others didn’t. You know, why did it matter to some, even local issues, to me, like how come I had to have a curfew and shouldn’t you care about that, that I have to have a curfew? Or other women care about that, or why aren’t they caring about that? So, I got really interested in that, who decides to stand up and engage on whatever the topic may be, that later certainly informs a lot of the approaches we’ve taken to the leadership models we develop.

Scarpino:         Do you think you were born with those inclinations, or the experiences that you found yourself engaged in while you were an undergraduate student?

Komives:         I don’t think you’re born with any of that kind of thing. I think there are characteristics that one can be born with. I mean, one of my dear faculty friends in my department at the University of Maryland studied childhood temperament and prenatal and natal, early childhood temperament development. And, certainly, you see that with your own kids, you see they have different personalities even as they’re becoming little people. And I see those carry forward in both our son and daughter even as the adults they are now. And I do believe that’s true. But not that you are born caring about issues external to you, I think all that is learned.

Scarpino:         When you were an undergraduate student, were there any events that took place that influenced the adult you later became?

Komives:         Let me think of a couple. One would be a weekend retreat in Callaway Gardens, Georgia. They took us on a student leaders retreat with deans of every academic college at the university and the central administration, trying to work on a strategic initiative for the university for the future. And I’d already been known by those people, because of the president’s cabinet thing. I don’t remember who all the other students were, but at that retreat it was solidifying for me, about really like how you see a system works. And, I knew how the university of Florida State worked more than the average student did because I got to see that view from the dean of students and being on the president’s cabinet, perspective and student government. I mean, you saw the interrelated parts, you saw how they worked together, which ones didn’t talk to each other. You know, you could really observe the organizational structure. And it became very clear to me that I liked working at that nexus of, if we can change systems and structures, how they could be more responsive to the needs you’re trying to address and in getting, in that case, students services and other things handled more effectively. But I really liked that system thing. So, I remember the dean of the college of ed, I had not met him before, Stanley Marshall. He and I went on a walk down to the pier and sat on the pier and talked, talked about my career and what I wanted to do with my life, and that I seemed really good at observing those things, and gave me some of that feedback that affirmed:  you see things much more clearly than some others do about this, and you have a talent in doing that. It was so affirming, and he was so focused on my capacity that could grow that it really made me know I want to do this. I’d already discovered Student Affairs and Higher Ed was a field you could study at the grad level, but it was one of those affirmations that I could really use as experience Florida State had given me to look at the systems of any institution and try to make them more effective, and that’s where I’d like to focus my time. He went on to be president of Florida State many years after I graduated. I wrote him a note...

Scarpino:         His name was...

Komives:         Stanley Marshall. I wrote him a note at one point, you now, one of those letters you get out of the blue that says, “You may not remember this, but when you sat with me on that pier and gave me all that feedback... the affirming that did that this was on track and would matter was a big positive feature.”

Scarpino:         You probably said this, but just to be on the safe side... when you sat on the pier with Stanley Marshall, what was his title then?

Komives:         He was dean of the College of Education.

Scarpino:         Okay. So, you had a chance to chat with the dean of the College of Education, which I’m sure didn’t come to every student, but it occurred to me as I listened to you talk that one of the things that Dean Marshall wanted to do was to point out to you that he noticed your talents and abilities and potential and all of that stuff.

Komives:         Well, he’s a good educator. And, you know, I see later in my life, as I would be the dean in those kinds of settings, you realize people need that feedback, and that it matters when someone affirms and can use language to label the good things that you do well.

Scarpino:         But do you think it’s a mark of an effective leader, somebody who can do that?

Komives:         Oh yeah... oh sure.

Scarpino:         Can you talk a little bit about that? Because you’ve had plenty of experience yourself... to be able to see the talent in somebody, to be able to see the potential in somebody and to affirm that and encourage it.

Komives:         Absolutely. And I think I was doing it. It mattered to me, so I knew that it would be important to model that. So as a model, a mentor -- others did this with me, too, but I remember that event so keenly -- I knew that I would want to be that kind of administrator, leader, counselor, person in my career. And as it got more intentional and I learned more about leadership, I realized I was bringing people into leadership by doing that because it was affirming their qualities that made them effective working with others that they may not see. I’ll give you an example of a student much later in one of my jobs that was the quiet shy student in student government who didn’t say anything but was diligent, always prepared, ready to vote any time, was just tuned into everything. But she also, before some votes, she would say, “I think I’m confused. Before we go forward, if we say ‘yes’ we mean this, and if we say ‘no’ we’re meaning this, is that what we’re saying?” And people would say, “no, that’s not what I meant, I meant this with it.” And they said, “Okay, I understand.” And I said, “The way you clarify a confusing conversation so that people can really zero in on what it’s going to mean to vote the way you do is a wonderful act of leadership. You’re being a leader helping the group in that moment make a wise choice for their future, even if it’s not the one you would vote for.” And she said, “That’s leadership?” You know, and I would say, “you bet’cha it is, listen to the influence you had on those people in making a better outcome for the group.” So, I became very keen of helping people learn the language of leadership by the way I would try to intentionally isolate a behavior that really was an example of a philosophy, a characteristic, an approach that’s useful in leadership.

Scarpino:         If you’re going to help people learn the language of leadership, how would you define or explain the language of leadership? What’s involved in that?

Komives:         The language of leadership?

Scarpino:         That’s the term you used.

Komives:         I did use that term. And I think language in leadership is also an issue that we

have. I mean, even the word ‘leadership,’ some cultures don’t even have that word.

Scarpino:         That’s true. I’m going to ask you about culture later on, but...

Komives:         In one place we saw, it was translated as ‘leader boat’ ... ‘leadership’ is ‘leader boat.’

Scarpino:         Well, you can see how you can end up there.

Komives:         So, I would say... I’m saying this now as Susan who is 76 years old, not Susan who is 19 or 20... that the language one uses about leadership should, and I think does stem from, whether consciously or unconsciously, your philosophy of leadership, which is what it is when it’s enacted. So that philosophy undergirds that. Like, I believe that leadership is a process among people working together to accomplish, and I would say, positive change. You ‘re trying to accomplish some goal or outcome that is positive. I do think there’s bad leadership, and I do think there’s leadership for nefarious costs and all that, but I would work toward an aspirational approach to leadership. And in that process, there are people who have roles, and then it might be very traditional roles, like leader/follower, or it might be captain and lieutenant, it might be teacher and student, I mean, mom and children. There are certainly roles that happen out of that. And I think individuals enact these things, but together, this energy of a group of people, is where leadership is occurring. And it’s different by the profile of each group. So, you the governor’s council together among governors, and you’ve got some quiet ones who don’t say anything and aren’t effective, and others that take more of a formal role. So, I think when you begin to think of leadership then, yes, in a philosophy that you’re seeing, you begin to use terms like process, or emergent leadership, or task roles and maintenance roles; you know, talk about the group relational roles, talk about ethical practices, courage. You know, there are terms, then, that can be identified. I don’t think it’s five things, or 10 characteristics, but I do think each person can learn to be more effective engaging with other people in whatever role they may be in. And teaching them how to be more effective is what we do in leadership education, and teaching groups to work together better as a group is also leadership education.

Scarpino:         An important part of leadership education is teaching people, or encouraging people, or modeling for people how to engage.

Komives:         Yes, and bringing it out of them what they think it is, but, yes, that’s true.

Scarpino:         You mentioned a minute or so ago about leadership and positive change. Do you think it’s possible for somebody to be a leader who does things that are not positive? Were Hitler and Idi Amin leaders?

Komives:         I would, you know, that’s a...

Scarpino:         I tried to think of something really bad people.

Komives:         No, I know. Some of it’s like contemplating (inaudible) conversation, like, how many angels on a pin they could...

Scarpino:         Well, what I mean, I have actually had people tell me that if you’re not doing something good, you’re not leading.

Komives:         Yeah, I know, and I was just going to say that same thing. And Burns takes that position, you know, that leadership... and some would say then he would be advancing saint leadership kind of approaches.

Scarpino:         James MacGregor Burns, just for clarity.

Komives:         James MacGregor Burns. I would say this, that in the broadest sense of the term, I think leadership can be a variety of styles, approaches, and can be negative and coercive and can result in terrible outcomes that are exhibited by some of the people that you just mentioned. That is not any kind of approach... the study of leadership would show that how did those people influence others to do these terrible things?

Scarpino:         Right, and that’s kind of where I was going with this.

Komives:         And that’s the study of leadership. The leadership development, however, isn’t to try to teach people to be like that. It’s trying to teach people to get good outcomes accomplished through the ethical and the equitable and just approaches. So, this is where Burns was right on target, with moral processes, you know, value-based processes for moral outcomes. And that approach to leadership is one we want to be developing and teaching, and I’d want to learn as a person, not these others. But in the ‘80s, you’d go to the airport and you could pull off the shelf, they call it leadership books, but it’s really management. Robert Ringer had two books out in the ‘80s that had been the icons for me of bad titles. And the books were equally as challenging. One was Looking Out For #1”...

Scarpino:         Yes.

Komives:         ... and the other was Winning Through Intimidation.

Scarpino:         Yes.

Komives:         And I looked at those and thought, that is not anything I would want to be teaching a college student as leadership. You know, that is how you get your own way at all costs and leave bloody bodies behind you.

Scarpino:         As I recall, those were bestsellers.

Komives:         Yes, they were. And they taught you how to put your desk on a slightly raised platform so that your chair is higher and everybody is looking up to you when they’re in your office, and it was, like, terrible stuff using the very principles of environmentalist assessment and things, to put yourself at the advantage and others at a disadvantage. So, it’s good to know there are people that might be like that. But as an educator, that’s not the liberatory approach to bringing out of the person the best abilities they have to work with other people to get great things accomplished, wherever they go. And I would want that to be what we taught students, and what we brought out in people that we engage with. So, yes.

Scarpino:         You were in high school in the early ‘60s, and college in the mid-to-late ‘60s, which was a period that saw the rise of social activism, and we sort of talked about civil rights, women’s rights, war on poverty, environmental movement, and we could go on and on. Were you a participant in any of those things?

Komives:         Yes, I was, although not all those things. I mean, I was aware of those things happening and was really happy about the civil rights movement. I mean, the South was just, we were in the news every day with fire hoses being trained on groups to get them to disperse, and Johnson having to send marshals into Arkansas high schools to get people able to go to school. And all of that was just terrible. By that point, I was at Florida State where Florida State -- and I did not know they had only recently integrated. I think it had only integrated a couple of years before even I went there as a freshman. But I didn’t know that. I just knew I was finally seeing black friends and black people in the community, and there still was, certainly, all kinds of discrimination and issues that surrounded that. Like, sorority rush was 2,000 women, but it was white women, you know, that was still occurring. And I was aware of that, too, but that was still happening. We were very concerned about the Vietnam War, although one of the approaches that, in this case, my sorority took was to adopt a platoon and send them letters. You know, it wasn’t like go out and protest.

Scarpino:         I was a soldier and I bet that just delighted those guys.

Komives:         Oh yeah. Then they wanted to come back and marry you, you know, that kind of thing. So, we were being supportive of our men at war, but we weren’t quite -- we were not in this stage “anti-war.” That came later as the ‘60s kind of progressed as more information came out and we saw more of the atrocities and things that were happening. But I was very much involved in the feminist issues at that time. So, I already was having experiences in my career where I either was advantaged or not, or discriminated against, being female going into what would have been typically male kinds of positions.

Scarpino:         Can you talk about that?

Komives:         Uh-huh. So, the feminism things I would say shaped, and gender issues, shaped a lot of my activity, and still does. I’m still interested in gender issues and leadership.

Scarpino:         Can you talk about some of your experiences?

Komives:         I’ll share a couple of them with you, and one of them concerns race. I was an area coordinator in Residence Life at the University of Tennessee, that came about in an interesting way, but I was hired as a hall director, which is a typical entry level student affairs job. And I was going to have a hall of like 500 students, women students. And my husband and I were going to live in, like we would be...

Scarpino:         You should get combat pay for doing that, I’m sorry. (laughs)

Komives:         And particularly lately with Covid and everything, those people are in combat positions. That was going to be my first full-time job. Well, they called me, this is getting...

Scarpino:         You were married at the time?

Komives:         We got married in September of ’69... and had just seen Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, you know, that experience was phenomenal. And, I was hired as a hall director before I started, and they called me, the University of Tennessee people called me about two months later and said, “the legislature has just approved a new level of position for us because we’re opening up so many residential complexes because all of these people are coming back to college. And it’s called an ‘Area Coordinator’ position, and we offered it to” – this is before Affirmative Action and posting jobs, you kind of had to find where the jobs were, or you got offered one... and they said, “We’ve offered it to all of our current hall directors who are returning, and they are all in law school or various things, they don’t want to do that. But we thought you would be one that could an area coordinator. You’ve got good experience.” And that’s when they were asking me about supervision.
“And, you know how universities work, and we were impressed and would like to offer you an area coordinator job.” (Inaudible) live out, you know, as a real young adult couple could do. And I thought, whoa, that’s great, I’ll take it, sure. So, I said, “Yes.”

Scarpino:         You were promoted before you ever showed up.

Komives:         That’s right. I skipped the hall director level of what would in my field be an entry position for like three years. So, I started as an area coordinator in a complex of five residence halls that has 4,000 students, and had a staff with five hall directors, probably 50 RA’s. And protests were going on at that time and we had a sniper shooting down in the courtyard one day, and I had to decide when we evacuate buildings and when to call the police in, all kinds of fascinating… Big decisions to trust a young person to make in that context. I’ve now lost track of your question... oh, so then I was appointed chair of the search committee for hall directors for the next year. And I knew, and the committee knew we wanted very much to bring in hall directors of color. And we had a terrific candidate, a young man from a major university master’s program, a really outstanding black applicant, had been an RA, had great experience, came and wowed everybody.  He was just outstanding. And I go in to make the recommendation to the assistant director, who would then decide of the candidates we brought in, and he had met with all of them, who we would hire, and we recommended this be the candidate that we hire. And he said, “It pains me to say this, but I don’t think Tennessee is ready for that yet, and, so, I’m not going to be able to approve that hire.” And I just collapsed. I said, “How could you not tell me that before we as a committee… we needed to deal with that at the time... I mean, you said, ‘Bring me the best candidate.’ This is the best candidate, and he’s outstanding.” And was told, “No, we won’t hire, or we cannot hire,” in quotes, “that person right now.” I was furious. That was also the first time I collapsed in tears in front of a boss. We were friends, too, but I was just decimated that that would be the decision for the merits of it, for all the work we had done, you know, everything in that process. That was terrible. That was really a bad experience.

Scarpino:         It also said something about the underlying attitudes toward race there.

Komives:         Oh, yeah, sure, oh yeah. But I thought we were further along than that. And, usually student affairs offices are. You know student affairs are people way out front in terms of equity and things that are just. Now, another experience I had in terms of the gender experience at Tennessee. My first year I started a doctoral program, I was working full time, was an area coordinator. My husband was getting his PhD at that point in math. And, to move back to our relationship briefly, I learned in our relationship when we were back at Florida State, there’s a difference in being a math major and being a mathematician. And he was a mathematician. He took tests in ballpoint pen. And I went in with, like, four No. 2 pencils with great erasers. So, I’m the math major and he’s the mathematician. And he would just sit there and think these things through in his head then start writing it down. I never was that level of mathematician as Mike was. But he was in the doctoral program, so all we did was play bridge and study. So I decided I was going to start a doctorate because I could do it free, and because I was on campus, I could walk right out of my building across the street to the College of Ed and take courses even in the afternoon, you know, because I was going to get work caught up, no matter what. So, they encouraged me to do that. And my advisor was the vice chancellor of Student Affairs. He was on the faculty in the Ed Leadership, which is ed admin and supervision. When I got to the dissertation stage, I designed a dissertation in leadership. I wanted to study the perceived leadership of the senior student affairs officer and its effect on the department head’s morale and job satisfaction. So, I did a systems management kind of study, senior leadership, morale job satisfaction, got into all that literature, loved it. So, I was actually doing a leadership dissertation. And my four committee members, all men, and one was a young man, so he was being socialized into how you become an assistant professor and be on doctoral committees. I liked him very much. I had my leadership course from him. I actually had a grad-level leadership course in 1971 at the University of Tennessee.

Scarpino:         That was relatively unusual at that time.

Komives:         Yeah, but you know, ed-leadership people though, superintendents and principals, everybody else in the class were K-through-12 folks, going to be superintendents or principals. But they were learning leadership work, that I then picked that as my doctoral program for that reason... of leadership. And, so, my committee was gathering, and I knew that this young man thought he was being smart to ask the really wiseacre kind of question, but he said, “I want you to tell us why we should devote all of our time and energy on you as a doctoral student when you’ll probably just quit work and have kids anyway and start a family and not ever use this degree?” And, as I gasped in to start to answer the question, boy, having a great advisor is wonderful, he moved right in on that, and he said, “That’s an inappropriate question to ask this candidate. This is a serious doctoral candidate. She is here. And if you don’t think you can work with her, we can get another member of the committee.”

Scarpino:         Good for him.

Komives:         And good for him. I didn’t have to even, I mean, I was intaking my breath after shaking my head.

Scarpino:         Was he kidding? Or was he just trying to get a rise out of you?

Komives:         No no, no, no, oh no no no no. He thought he was doing what -- In toxic male masculinity culture, he thought he was doing what a guy should do, to be saying, do I deserve a place as a female in the doctoral level of any organization? Now, at the same time...

Scarpino:         Now that says something about education and gender relations, and all the layered activities.

Komives:         I was at the nexus of things nationally that were happening. When you said, what events mattered in those early career days, Title IX happened, Affirmative Action happened, but all kinds of things were occurring. And at one point, the University of Tennessee was getting -- all universities added layers of administrative jobs because all the federal regs you had to track, and the things that were happening. So at this point, they promoted me to be assistant director of Res Life, and this is a 9,000-bed space residence hall system with 550 employees, and at that point a $5 million-dollar budget, which was huge even in that era, major management operation. The maintenance things all reported to me. The mattress replacement programs and the painting schedules and the duct cleaning on the buildings, as well as the staff and the students and all of those parts, so I was assistant director during part of that. The director left and they said, “Would you be the acting director while we do a national search for a director?” And I said, “Yeah, we can handle that.” And I heard myself even saying “we” at that point, because the other area coordinators and the other assistant director, we were a great team. We were a flat-hire. We trusted each other. We were real good together. And I was going to be the person that was the director, but we were going to do it. I knew we could do it. And they were all thrilled, and said, “Oh, we’re glad they asked you. I don’t want to do that... and that’d be fine.” So, I became the acting director. Well, I was in that job for about a month when the new vice chancellor for administration wanted to come down and visit with me. And he was setting up a strategic planning committee I heard or something, so I thought, okay, you know, as Res-Life person I’m going to be on a committee. So, he came down and he said, “I wanted to talk to you, because we need to get more women into senior level administration. We got dinged by our accreditation on ‘the only women with management and budget experience” – and this is just no University of Tennessee, I mean, that’s everywhere, this is not just there by any means – were the dean of the College of Nursing, the director of the Student Union, budget operation of the union, and me, as the 27-year-old acting director of Residence Life. And he approached me, and he said, “I would like to offer you the position of assistant vice chancellor for Administration for Budget and Strategic Planning, to help us lead the institution forward and everything.” And he gave me wonderful compliments and feedback. Of course, at this point, I’m thinking, I’m good, I’ve always been told I was good. And I did good things. Things went well for me. And, I said, “I need to think about that overnight, I’m just floored by that offer.” And I said to him, “Isn’t that sad that the only women you can name at the university, you pull in somebody 27 years old at this level? But how good that you are looking to do that. You know, that’s wonderful.”

Scarpino:         It’s a good thing that he knew who you were.

Komives:         Well, yeah. So, the next day I called him, and I said, “No, I don’t want that job. I want to work with students.” I could see a career that would then go into that, and I’d be a president very young or something. I could actually see that happening. I did an interview later for presidency, but not out of that route. And I said, “But I want to work with college students and their success and their growth, and do the student affairs things. If this was an assistant vice chancellor for student affairs, I’d be saying yes in a heartbeat. But it’s not going to take me in the directions that I now see I would want to go.” And so we talked about that, but I actually knew then what I wanted, and that solidified it overnight for me, to turn it down. And turning down something is as important in your career because of the pathways that then happen to you.

Scarpino:         To be self-aware enough to know where you want to go.

Komives:         But the same institution, and it doesn’t mean it’s a sexist institution. Well, everything then basically would be sexist or racist just by definition with how the systemic kinds of patriarchy and things work. But I had experiences then with racism and with sexism, and also some with the opportunities being given because of elevating women, in this case, to roles. So, I had a variety of terrific experiences.

Scarpino:         I want to follow up on something you said, but before I do that, you’ve just in the same sentence mentioned, in your experiences as a much younger person 27 years old or whatever, about racism and sexism. As you think about the years since then, how have institutions of higher learning changed or not in those areas? Have they gotten better? Are they the same? Are they worse?

Komives:         I think the big answer to that question is that everything has gotten better. The rising tide of all of that improving has lifted all boats. So, everything is better. Women are in all aspects of the institution, people of color are certainly everywhere. And, yes, there still exists sexism and racism and systemic racism. We still have structures of patriarchy, but now we’re into micro inequities, and now we’re also into, some things that are still blatant certainly, but we’re digging deep in that hole to say where at some profoundly deep levels do we need to be addressing this? There’s still faculty with a curriculum that if they looked at it,  they would be surprised to see it’s all white authors and scholars whose work they’re having their students read, and nobody out of any other traditions or voices in that scholarship. And they hadn’t even thought about it. This is what they were taught and they learned and these are good scholars and it’s great work. Really good work. But it’s leaving out voices and the lived experience in American culture that we need to be learning about. So, curriculum transformation is still needed everywhere. When we offer leadership programs, and we don’t stop to think, is this accessible to the very people we’re trying to reach? Or are the approaches in the words we’re using… For example, leadership minors where it’s first-come first-serve, and then the three fraternity brothers show up to register 10 people each out of their own chapters because they want to get in, and it’s all the slots are filled. I mean, the things that still happen, and hazing things... So, yes, there are still issues where, and the struggle continues. I would say this, I have a lot of hope for everything. And critical hope would be that I can see through community and through caring, we’re going to be using equity approaches to look at the struggles ahead for making everything better for as many people, or all people, as we can.

Scarpino:         In terms of leadership training, where do you think, on average, leadership training programs stand with including different voices and a range of lived experience in their training?

Komives:         It’s a more complicated answer than it may sound.

Scarpino:         That’s good, go for it.

Komives:         Yeah... and it’s evolved. Leadership, I’ve certainly written about this too, leadership was largely for elite students, and by that, I mean like President’s Leadership Council class. So, you’re already a president of something, and you get more – my friend Julie calls that polishing the diamonds. You’ve already got a leadership role, and then people work with you to make it even better. So, we largely initially had elite experiences that were, (a) theoretical or even anti-theoretical but were good practices and characteristics and traits. And what’s happened is, a democratization of those programs, so you see leadership minors and majors, and retreats, and emerging leader programs, and anybody is welcome. There are opportunities with the multicultural center, with the black student union group. So, there’s social identities that get special opportunities for leadership within communities of color. There are women’s programs. Some campuses just have such a rich array of things. Is it reaching all the right people? Probably not. And some of that is the language we use, where someone might not want to stand out and go to something that says you’re going to be a leader, while somebody else does. So, we need to find other ways to approach it. Like, be a person who makes a difference, or learn to be a change agent. Or, how can activism help you in your future career. All those are leadership development things, but you have to appeal to people with some language they would find approachable to bring them in and to make those processes work. So, I think a lot of things are a lot better. Most every campus has leadership somewhere now in the mission of the institution in some way, like Active Citizen or Citizen Leader. Now, it varies a lot by disciplines. As disciplines try to add doing more leadership things, they are going to be bounded in some ways, intentionally or unintentionally, by how their discipline shapes their culture and by how they approach things. And what’s been really wonderful to see is how the applied fields know that, for example, engineers just don’t do engineering in a vacuum, they do it with people who are their partners in these projects. Colleges of engineering have been some of the first to adopt intentional leadership programs so that the scientists learn how to engage with people effectively. My son is one of these people. And he took a freshman leadership course at Purdue. He went in ROTC, but he took a freshman leadership course, and he called me and he said, “Mom, guess what book they’re using?” He was like, “oh no.” So, he had to hide out for like the first month not saying his last name. And then people said, “Your last name and this lady’s last name are the same?” But anyway, back to your question, I have been thrilled with seeing the openness to expanding leadership programs in lots of ways across campuses. It is not seen as a legitimate discipline by some folks. By others, it’s not a discipline, what it is is a set of competencies and capacities and skills we want our students to learn because we want our grads to be really effective out there. And so it’s more co-curricular. There are places where the academic discipline might require evidence of leadership development for re-accreditation in your students, and so they then begin adding courses and experiences. So, it varies across the board, but I’m really thrilled with this development. The passion I’m on now is, like, my last book that’s out there to the publisher, it’ll be out in March, with Julie... is a research agenda for learning leadership and development through higher education, and it takes a social justice focus. So, it is saying, how do we make sure that we’re getting experiences to the right people and that voices of those people are informing and critiquing? We’re interrogating conventional practices to say, how do we modify change, enhance make them better so they appeal to all people? And we learn more about working with each other through those practices.

Scarpino:         And Julie is Julie Owen.

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         You completed your bachelor of science degree. You stayed at Florida State. You earned a master of science in higher education, Student Personnel Administration, you got that in 1969. You’re going to switch from majoring in math and minor in chemistry to higher education in a master’s program. From the outside looking in, that looks like a huge shift in emphasis. Why did you elect to leave science behind and pursue education at the graduate level?

Komives:         Well partly was the recognition that my motivated self loved going to student government meetings and to the SGA suite to do my secretary communication things.

Scarpino:         SGA is Student Government Association.

Komives:         Student Government Association... But I was loving all these things I was doing, and I was going to match classes because I had to finish them up to graduate with a degree, you know, it wasn’t a passion to do that. And it’s like a typical story in the student affairs field, as I got aware that the dean advising our student government group had a job doing this and approached her and said, “How did you get this job?” You know, at least I knew she got paid for it. There are people who say, “Do you get paid to do this?” But I knew it was her job. She told me then that there was a field of study that did this where you learned about student development, you learned about learning theory and counseling, and that you could learn to do that. So, I went to the Counseling Department and asked if I could talk to somebody about getting a Master’s in Counseling. You know, she had referred me, and that was one of the ways you could do it. And this wonderful woman whose name I don’t remember, and it would be someone to write a note to, she said to me, “Let me ask you as question.” And she was reading cues from me, I’m sure, this extroverted person I was, all over the place. She said, “Do you want to work with people one-to-one and help them with their problems and issues and to be better and work with them in that way? Or do you want to work with organizations and offices and the higher ed system to do programs and things so that students kind of get excited?” “Oh, I want that. That’s what I want. I would like to be good at listening and counseling, but I want that.” She said, “You want something called college student personnel, and that’s upstairs in the Department of Higher Education. And the woman you want to see is Melvene Hardee, and Melvene Hardee is the person for you to go visit.” Well, I’m a first-generation college student. My parents did not go to college. There’s a footnote to that story, too, which is fun, that I hope we get to. But, so, I went upstairs. I had no idea, number one, that I would find a... I didn’t know I wouldn’t find a faculty member sitting in her office just waiting of course to talk to me. You know, like, someone was there, and she said she’d be glad to talk. I didn’t know that was unusual. And I didn’t know she was famous. There was no Google at the time. I didn’t ask anybody about who I was meeting with, and should I know anything about her work...

Scarpino:         Her name was, again?

Komives:         Melvene Hardee... very famous person in our field. H-A-R-D-E-E. I didn’t know spending an hour with Melvene was really a grad school interview. I was just going, I thought, to get information. I hadn’t looked up anything, I hadn’t looked at the catalog. I just wanted to talk to somebody to learn, to teach me about this. I didn’t even know at first if a master’s came before or after a doctorate. I didn’t know which one you got first. It just didn’t occur to me that people… I didn’t know that. And I had never had a psychology class. I didn’t know affective was different than cognitive. I didn’t know some basic terms because I was in math and chemistry, not in psychology. So anyway, she interviewed me for an hour, and I got admitted. I had good grades, good senior-in-college resume with all those activities. So I kind of thought I would. I had been this golden girl all my life where all these good things were happening for me. And then I find out she only admitted five master’s students and ten doctoral -- so, it was a doctoral heavy program, and only five of us were in the master’s program – and that she was past president of the American College Personnel Association -- right now, one of the major awards is named her in NASPA, which is the National Association for Student Personnel Administrators -- and that she was this famous person. I lucked into one of the best-known programs in the country. But it might as well have been another campus, I’d never been to the College of Ed until I’m going over to find out about this program. It was another world, and therefore staying at Florida State wasn’t an issue because I was comfortable there, but also I was in a whole other world of Florida State in the College of Ed. So I got admitted and it was a one-year master’s program.

Scarpino:         I noticed that you got your master’s in one year, so no thesis?

Komives:         No. And it was a one-year program. Now they’re all two-year programs and usually thesis optional, but no thesis. But I did know that I would want to get a doctorate. At that point, I knew I wanted a doctoral degree, because I love learning. And, that way, I can use my stats, you know, I can use mathematics to be a quantitative researcher. And so, then, in my doctoral program later at Tennessee when I had to take all of those stat courses, they were like a piece of cake, because that was easy math.

Scarpino:         You had done it.

Komives:         I had done that kind of... I had done different math. I mean, algebra is different than stats...

Scarpino:         For people who aren’t going to know this and might listen to this recording or look at the transcription, briefly, what is student personnel administration? What does one do?

Komives:         Yes, and it’s an old name, it’s more of a dated name from that ‘50s and ‘60s era, the guidance movement, and that kind of thing. So, college and personnel, student personnel services, now we would call it student affairs, student success, student engagement. These are the people on a college campus, and there are 5,000 colleges and universities in the United States, and every college and university have admissions people that admit, they have financial aid people who help students with their finances, they have career development people, they have counseling people. They have health people at college health centers. They have intramural recreation people. They have student activities people. They have multicultural center directors. They have conduct officers that started out as conduct people in the origin of the field. But there are twelve or fifteen functions you can name that, no matter how big or small... in small colleges, one person may do four or five of those. You know, the admissions officer might also be the advisor to student government and something else. And in big schools, you have whole offices of student conduct, and whole offices of buildings with counseling center, director people, counseling people. So, those people all learn in their master’s and doctoral work, college student development, late adolescent development, they learn moral reasoning theory, they study ethical development. They learn how you do intentionally designed programmatic interventions to have college outcomes like critical thinking, and what the college or university is trying to achieve in its students, and design co-curricular programs and learning opportunities that help that person be successful in doing that. So they’re in Res-Life and they’re all over, so they bring a body of knowledge about why a student might be acting out very racist at a point because they haven’t yet experienced some stages of development there and help them get experiences that then they see that differently, see themselves differently. And they become more complex, they become more intentional, better critical thinkers, and we can guide the learning around all this complexity from dualistic perspectives to some that are more complex and relativistic. Still not saying to the student what you should think, but learning how to view the world in ways that would be more open instead of rigidly hold on to views that maybe you’d want to be examining for yourself. And often, that’s more liberal views toward humanity and toward people and more socially-just approaches. So student affairs people do those things, but most of them have a background in a field like this, so it’s their calling to do it this way. There are specialists in student affairs. Like only the nurse or doctor is going to give you a shot when you go in the health center, not a student affairs person. But they’re doing... a doctor in a college health center also knows they’re doing developmental education work, and then when they’re working with that student to say, “Why is it you know how AIDS is” -- when that was a concern for us, and it still is – “but how does he know how AIDS is acquired, but you’re not changing your sexual practices to do that? Let’s talk about what’s in between those two, what you know and why your behavior needs to change.” And that doctor is going to talk to them more about that because we’re there for that development of inhabiting that gap between the two, and that’s what good student affairs people do.

Scarpino:         When you think about the year you spent in the master’s program at Florida State, what stands about that year in terms of your future development?

Komives:         It was like I could hardly wait to get to class. I was, instead of dragging your feet into advanced algebra or something, it was... learning the, I’m a big-picture person generally, so I was learning the history of higher education and where it came from, and why we have the problems we have now, and which ones can we start to forecast we’re going to have as society also changes? I love that futurism piece of learning history. I liked how the history was teaching me, where’s this going? And how can we be the kind of administrative leaders that shape where it’s going, at least our responses to that? But it was exciting to learn all of this. So, I loved the classes I was taking. The counseling classes brought me so many skills for active listening, for getting someone to reflect their emotions back to me. I could say, “Are you angry or frustrated or disappointed? What’s the feeling you’re having about what you’re telling me?” They go, “Oh, yeah, I’m just frustrated.” I mean, I was more effective with my friends, with my family. So, I was learning capacities as a grad student that were marvelous. Forming friendships that I knew would last a lifetime because we’re all going to be in college and university work, and we’ll go to the same conferences all our life. We’ll go to ACPA every year and see ourselves grow, and our kids come along, and we’ll be family forever.

Scarpino:         Did it work that way?

Komives:         It did. It absolutely did. And it does now. The people around me, I’ve known some of these people forty years. Because as we started off in the association together and that was our home base. No matter where we may work, we’re still in touch, we’re on committees together, we’ve been to each other’s weddings. And someone just died last week, and people left here to go to the funeral. It’s been a life of working in a field that’s only on colleges and universities. There’s high school and all that, but we do the college pieces of that. And we see each other on a regular basis, like family reunions at conferences. So, there’s a lot of hugging and kissing in student affairs kinds of meetings where you’re seeing your dear friends you used to for or they used to work for you. I was in a meeting Thursday, the Aspen Institute brought in a bunch of people, and I knew a lot of them. They had me be a keynote speaker. I’d see some of my former students who are college presidents there, vice presidents, but I’ve known them since they were 25 years old, and now they’re a 50-year-old college president.

Scarpino:         You’ve earned the Doctor of Education degree in Educational Administration and Supervision from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1973. Why did you decide to go to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville?

Komives:         Because Mike and I were engaged, so I was going to go where he was, and he was at the University of Tennessee. The only place I was going to be was there, unless I needed to look for a job nearby. So, I called all the offices on campus. He and I were engaged from Florida State, I stayed and got my master’s. He went there to start his doctoral program. And I was then going to go there. And that’s exactly how it worked. I called around at the university, there still was a dean of women’s office and they had some assistant dean of women positions. There’s the student union, and there was Res-Life. The Res-Life people offered me first, the job, the hall director, so I said, “Yes.” So, there I was going to go to Tennessee.

Scarpino:         Generally, what is educational and administrative supervision?

Komives:         It’s an academic department that offers generally just graduate degrees, master’s and doctoral. It is designed for the K-through-12 sector, largely for principals and superintendents learning administrative and leadership practices, like budgeting and strategic planning, curriculum development, those kinds of big-picture things of running a school system. I asked them when I applied to that program, “Can I do my papers on higher-ed as a system? Like, in the budgeting class, can I go and learn higher-ed budgeting, and I’ll get a lot of tutoring on my own, but I’d do my paper on higher-ed budgeting.” Oh, sure, they were happy to do that. Later, that department changed its name to Ed Leadership because that became how that field evolved. So, now, in most colleges if you see a Department of Ed leadership, it’s the principals and superintendents in the K-through-12 sector, and they have been leaders in work on urban youth, on underserved populations, on social justice work, equity work in schools and communities. They really took that issue on. A lot of school systems are certainly in urban and underserved areas.

Scarpino:         You wrote a dissertation...

Komives:         I did.

Scarpino:         And you mentioned it earlier, but your dissertation, what was the title and what did it have to do with leadership?

Komives:         The title of it was, “What Is the Effect of the Chief Senior Student Affairs Office’s Leadership on their Department Heads’ Morale and Job Satisfaction.”

Scarpino:         The dissertation title is very long.

Komives:         Yeah, but descriptive.

Scarpino:         Descriptive, yes.

Komives:         And my wonderful advisor chair, who was the vice chancellor for Student Affairs at the University of Tennessee, also, he was on the adjunct faculty for this department, and he was the higher-ed person in that department. So, of course, he was the one I worked with. He got all of this buddies, they were all men, all white men, in the SEC, because Tennessee is an SEC school, Southeastern Conference of Athletics. All of them agreed that they could be studied, that they’d let Howard’s students study their leadership. And they furnished the names, and they told their departments and said, “give them permission.” They furnished me the names and addresses of all of their department heads who I then did survey research with, with measures of job satisfaction; their measures of the perceived leadership of that boss. Because (inaudible) would be perceived, what do think they’re doing, or trying to do? Then, what’s their own level of satisfaction and morale? I did that study, and it was interesting. And there were interesting findings I didn’t expect. And I asked a variety of questions, of course, that the literature leads you to would be good to inquire about, like proximity, or how frequently you interact with the person. When I asked that, it was very interesting that the people who interacted more frequently, and even in the closest proximity, had the highest levels of job satisfaction and morale. They had more access and were closer to that person than the ones who were in a remote location and saw them less frequently. The director of athletics way out there in their own athletic center only has a weekly meeting with the VP, has less knowledge base and also doesn’t have a personal relationship. There were interesting little twists like that.

Scarpino:         While you’re in that doctoral program, were you involved in the practice of leadership?

Komives:         Yes, and I would say two ways: One way was, we started one of the first in the country RA courses, Resident Assistant. When we picked people to be resident assistants, they go through very extensive training. I mean, they’re wonderful students, they really are student leaders, and they really want to help, and they get good benefits and all that. While we wove leadership content into that RA training, so they would actually see we expected them to be student leaders, and were helping shape the culture, and were influencing us to be responsive to students. So, we wove some of that in. The other thing I would say is, Mel Hardee had been president of this national association, and she said to all of us, “Everybody needs to get to a national association meeting this spring when they’re held.” She said, “I don’t care which one you go to, NASPA, ACPA, or a specialty one like orientation directors or career counselors. There are associations for all these groups. But get involved in something professionally so you always see the bigger picture, and see your role is to contribute to how the profession evolves and what the profession needs.” So, oh boy, yes ma’am, you know I was all for that. So, I went to ACPA that first year. Actually, in my first year I was at Tennessee, I went to the ACPA conference. And, I went to a workshop on res-life issues, and the woman who was in charge of it said to me, “We’re having a drive-in conference in November, do you want to bring a team down from Tennessee to Atlanta for the conference?” And I said, “I’ll do that. We’ll come down.” It was fun, we went down. She was chair of the director of a group called the Commission on Residents Education, and then she said, “We’re filling some slots on our directorate...” they were appointed at that point. She said, “We have a slot open in the southern region and we need a new professional. Would you like to be that person?” And I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful, let me go back and ask my supervisor if that’s okay and if they would sponsor to be able to have me go to meetings.” She said, “Wonderful, we’d love to have you do that. That’d be great for Tennessee, and it would be good for you.” So, the next conference was in Atlantic City, and I’m a member of a directorate at my second meeting of ACPA that I went to, and that grew over time, so I was already a member of it. And then by the next meeting I’m the vice-chair for convention programs for what the programs were doing. And the year after that, by the time I was at Denison, I got my doctorate at 27 and moved to Denison which we’ll pick up on...

Scarpino:         In Ohio, yeah.

Komives:         But, then, I was nominated and ran for vice chair of all the commissions. There were twelve of them for ACPA, so I was elected vice chair of commissions for all of them. I was about 29.

Scarpino:         And that would be the United States when you say all of them.

Komives:         Yes. It’s a U.S. based group. The commissions then were, you know, when I mentioned earlier, a lot of the functional areas in student affairs, of all of them, yep, and that went. My professional development was happening largely within ACPA at that point, and very early opportunities to be engaged that led to opportunities for “did you want to do a leadership role?” And I said, “Yes.” I was invited in and asked to and accepted opportunities.

Scarpino:         At that point, you clearly self-identified as a leader, I mean you thought of yourself as a leader.

Komives:         I did, yeah.

Scarpino:         And leadership as an important element of your professional development.

Komives:         Yes... and, important that I thought I’d develop it in others. So, I’m a supervisor too, and I’ve got staff that I’m wanting to be leaders as well. So, it’s how do I engage with them so that it’s us doing things, and that we message, that we have this to do?

Scarpino:         At that time, was part of the way that you thought about leadership was building a team?

Komives:         Oh yes. Oh absolutely, and a community. We may be talking way too much about all this, but I want to cycle back to freshman year. I sent you an article where I wrote about these, but my freshman year… Well the story is many years later Ralph emerges from our basement and wants to throw away this tube of posters. He said, “We haven’t looked at these, are these yours?” I said, “Oh yes, give them to me.” They were three posters that were on my wall at my residence hall my freshman year in college. I’d save them all these years. It was like getting a letter from your former self saying, “This is little Susie, Susan at 18 is saying to you now, these things were important to me.” And I still see how they are important to me. The first one was a Japanese proverb... “none of us is as smart as all of us.” And that is so woven into all the collaborative work that I think is the only way to do things. And teamwork, and bringing someone along because their voice, or they’re different than what you would see things. So, I’ve always done that... or it’s been important to me. But it was when I was 18 years old. The other one was Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” And part of that was to make excuses for my energy and for my passion. Everything I get into I just zoom in. I love all these things. But it also started addressing for me process and how do you get people engaged, and sticking with something, and appreciating each other? So that process mattered. And the third one was by James Baldwin, and I don’t think at 18 I had any idea who James Baldwin was, but I loved the quote and I still do, which is: “Not everything that’s faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced.” The realist in me, I’m this enthusiastic realist, the realist in me wants to say, “Let’s bring forward and go deep to say what’s a real issue we’re trying to solve?” Because if we can define it and address it, we’ll do better at engaging with it. We can do that. We can figure out how to do something if we can talk about the real issue.

Scarpino:         Those are posters you had on your wall when you were 18.

Komives:         Those were the three posters that I had on my wall.

Scarpino:         I’m going to tell you what I had on my wall when I was 18. They were not, you know, not stuff I wouldn’t show to my mother, but they were like rock singers and stuff like that.

Komives:         I have to tell you, I organized a speech around those at one point, just maybe even five or six years ago. The college president that had invited me to campus got up and he said, “I have to tell you the poster on my wall was Farrah Fawcett.” But I did have those three. The other I had that I usually don’t add to this conversation, or haven’t written about was, it was a Snoopy kind of poster, Peanuts kind of thing, and it said, “There’s no heavier burden than a great potential.” And that’s one I probably still need to wrestle with because I think I felt the burden of, because I thought I could do so much, didn’t mean I had to be the one that said yes to everything, and that I could do it, and I didn’t... it was a burden to know that if I said no to something, it might not get done.

Scarpino:         When did you realize that weren’t really like other people?

Komives:         Oh I wasn’t, well, a lot of my friends are like this.

Scarpino:         That seems hard to believe. That seems like a little bit of modesty.

Komives:         I maybe choose to engage with, or attract or whatever, people who are excited, want to get excited about what they’re doing and together we can accomplish something wonderful. And if we decide to do it, we’ll do it because we’re good.

Scarpino:         You were in the doctoral program at University of Tennessee from ’69 to ’73, you were serving as acting director, assistant director, area coordinator of Residence Halls at University of Tennessee. And we talked about what you were doing there. How did you manage to do that and be a doctoral student at the same time? How did you keep all those balls in the air?

Komives:         Yeah, well, it actually wasn’t hard. I say that because my husband was a doctoral student too, so all we did was play Bridge and study.

Scarpino:         You didn’t have to explain to him what you were doing because he knew what doctoral students do.

Komives:         If I wasn’t going to be a doctoral student, you know, how many times can I read New Bride magazines? Or, I did buy a Cooking for Two book at some point, and then I signed to go back to sewing, so I got my sewing machine out and bought a pattern or two and thought, this is no fun, I don’t want to do these things. I really want to go learn something new. Mel Hardee and the other faculty at Florida State were so outstanding that the quality of my master’s learning, I mean, we were reading Thorstein Veblen. We were digging deep into the history of economic development in the United States and how it influenced higher-ed, all kinds of things. So, when I got into some of these courses, I already had such a strong foundation, I could skim a lot of material, and I mean I was bringing forward things I had learned already in useful ways. I did a lot of work. I had to do a lot of writing of papers, but it was because I would go home and that’s what I would do, or have a meeting at night with students or something. But every night and weekends I typically was home being able to do the work, not a problem. I have to tell you though, writing a dissertation, this cut-and-paste...

Scarpino:         Actually cutting it out and pasting it on...

Komives:         And maybe you would then pay the typist, I typed well but I wasn’t going to type all of this. You’d pay the typist to go through and make a clean copy of where you were at that stage. So I was on my electric typewriter, no computers, cutting and pasting. But I had turned the TV on -- I’ve always done work with the TV on, I multitask that way, but I like it -- to the Watergate hearings. So, I’m watching Watergate, I’m watching John Dean testify, I’m watching Howard, I just forget his last night, the Republican on the committee, Howard... he’s an important story here and I’m forgetting. Baker, Howard Baker, was wonderful on the committee. And I’m typing away, and Butterfield was testifying, dissertation is happening and Butterfield says, “Well the tapes will show that...” and I went, “There’s tapes!” And everybody there was… and I went running out of the apartment, and it was right where the pool was down below, because it was an apartment, a lot of people were around the pool. And I said, “Butterfield says there’s tapes.” And everybody scattered and went back up to their apartments or places to watch the TV to see what was happening with Watergate. So, my dissertation and Watergate are a merged memory for me.

Scarpino:         When I was doing my dissertation research at the National Archives was when they made the Nixon tapes available to the public on a limited basis, and people had to come in there and listen. So, it was interesting talking to some of those people.

Komives:         The lineup of people...

Scarpino:         I want to talk to you about your career trajectory. I mentioned in the introduction that Julie Owen, who I already talked about a little bit, described you as a “field shaper.” Do you think of yourself as a field shaper?

Komives:         I do in retrospect, from where I have come as an older adult. At the time it felt like, I would say, a field co-creator. I knew I was working, and opportunity points with cutting edge people trying to advance something to make it better. We knew we were doing that. I was president of ACPA at 34 years old. The transformations happening around the knowledge basis we had, the new research that was coming out, the ways we could inform the higher-ed... there were all kinds of ways we could make a better experience for students and for our institutions. We would make sure we were doing that within the associations because we could deliver a lot of services and programs through them to help campuses be better. So, we knew we were advancing the field of student affairs. And then my interest area in leadership certainly was then growing, so that by the time I got to… as that theme in my career was developing, I actually then chose over some other opportunities to go to be grad faculty because they wanted to advance the research in leadership in student affairs, but in leadership, college student leadership development, because that theme had been developing along with these things. Like at Denison...

Scarpino:         That theme of college student leadership, that really became more and more important in your professional life as you...

Komives:         Yes. My job might have been being an administrator, but my interest area, like, if you gave me fifty dollars for Christmas, I probably would buy a leadership professional book. But my job might have been to be a great dean, you know, to try to be a good dean of students and deal with all the things dean of students deal with. But what I wanted to make sure I was advancing professionally and knowing and contributing to was leadership. So, if I was going to take some precious time to write a chapter of a book, it was because someone asked me to, and it was usually then on leadership. Denny asked me to write a chapter of a leadership book he was doing with ACPA, and I knew...

Scarpino:         And, Denny is?

Komives:         Roberts, Denny Roberts. So, I knew that it would be published, it would be worth the time to spend to write it because it wasn’t going to just get rejected by some journal editor. It was an editor of a book who wanted me to be the one writing that chapter. It gave me the excuse to dig into literature, and to put some ideas together, and use examples from practice. So, I started publishing as an administrator and did every year, do something as a chapter of a book or whatever. But it wasn’t until I got to faculty life that I had the time to do research and do long-term projects.

Scarpino:         You mentioned that your son was at Purdue, and Julie Owen told me about that as well, and used the book. So, you had a son at Purdue...

Komives:         No, I didn’t have a son at Purdue then.

Scarpino:         No, but you have had a son at Purdue...

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         Okay. Do you have any other children?

Komives:         I have a stepdaughter... that came at Stephens. So, when we get to the Stephens years is when the children come in.

Scarpino:         You have a son, and you have a stepdaughter, and I’m still amazed by something that I brought up earlier, and that was, during all the decades of your professional life - you’re an administrator, you’re a scholar, you’re a teacher, you’re a consultant, you’re a mother, you’re a wife, how did you do that? I mean, you had to keep all those balls in the air, you had to be productive in all those areas, you had to be a good mother, a good wife, a good scholar, a good dean...

Komives:         Just add the word “enough” to that... a good enough mother, a good enough scholar, a good enough...

Scarpino:         I find that hard to believe, but this is your answer, so... Did you ever think about all of these things that you had going on in your life, and how any one of them could’ve dominated a person’s life?

Komives:         I think, I’d also say this, I really am a realist. I also know that there are seasons in life, that there are seasons when you can’t take on more things because something else has popped up to be needing more attention in your life. Bosses change and you’re getting a new supervisor, and so it isn’t the time when I’m going to go say, yes, I’ll be on a PTA committee.

Scarpino:         Or the child has events or you’re on a committee at school or...

Komives:         That’s right... if you realize, you make choices and there are seasons, and I could say no to some things because I knew that wasn’t the time for me to do something. The other is to pick… now, Mike and I divorced, when we get to the Denison years or talking about that, we ended up divorcing. So, in the personal life piece of this that you had brought in, I got to Stephens, and that’s where I met and married Ralph, and he had an eight-year-old daughter, so I became a stepmother right away. Now, she lived with her mom in Colorado, but she would be with us all summer, and then the Christmas holiday, New Year’s kind of thing. And we would talk weekly, and do all kinds of things, a wonderful relationship. Rachel, now is 51, she’s here. And, Rachel was an eight-year-old at that point.

Scarpino:         Your stepdaughter is 51?

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         Mine is 29.

Komives:         Our daughter, well, she’s my stepdaughter, and she was nine when we... and it was wonderful to have a little girl. I had just divorced, my big worry was, what if I never have kids? I really want to have children. I love having family. My family was a wonderful support for me, and I wanted to be that mom. My mom worked as a secretary, and was still scout leader, and so I had a mother role model, that I knew you could do it by the choice you make and by how you support each other. But anyway, so Ralph and I got married and thought we also would like to have a family, so we’d better not... my mom had just been killed in a car accident, March of 1980. We got a terrible call from my dad, “Your mother’s killed.” It was, like, “what...” I was a V.P. of the campus and thirty-three years old or something, but losing your mother at any age is terrible, literally overnight. We were on spring break and the first person I thought was, Ralph’s got to come with me down to my family, and I want him there. We got back from that funeral and all those experiences, and he got down on one knee and he said, “Life is too short, what are we waiting for? We don’t need to wait for any reason. We know it’s each other.” We had been dating five months. We had only known each other for five months. So, I went into the president and I said, “I want to tell you something.” He said, “Are you and Ralph getting married?” Ralph was the head of the Art Department at Stephens, and I was the dean of students. So, we were the campus romance. The women students at Stephens all thought it was pretty cool that we were dating each other.

Scarpino:         I went to the University of Missouri, and I knew people at Stephens.

Komives:         Yeah, okay. Well, we were a popular couple at Stephens. So, we decided to get married, and the president, lovely man, president said to me, he said, “I’m not surprised,” he said “actually, Sally and I were talking about it, because we figured this was going to happen sooner or later.” And there are reasons why he wanted to do this, but he said, “We would like to give you the reception in our home.” So, we were going to have a very private wedding, just immediate family because my mom had just been killed, and only have, like, ten people at this wedding. But, he said, “If we can invite the whole campus, the students and faculty, to come to the reception, because they all love you all, they just think you all are...” And he and I both knew it would be good for the campus. Faculty had just voted in a faculty union, there were all kinds of management/faculty issues. He was not a popular president with the faculty, but he loved me and Ralph and wanted to do this. And it would be a way of healing, too, an institution to come together around something human and good. And it didn’t matter if someone said, “I’ll never step foot in the president’s house on purpose,” but because it was for our wedding, “I’m going to go.” The next summer I go in and he wanted to send me to Harvard IEM Institute, the Institute for Educational Management that Harvard runs every summer. It’s for people aspiring to be VP’s and presidents. I was already VP, but he was going to send me to that and pay for that because he did wonderful professional development things for me. And I said, “Chris, I can’t go to Harvard this summer.” He said, “Are you pregnant?” I said, “Yes, I am.”

Scarpino:         On that congratulatory note, we’ve been going for two hours and four minutes. I think we probably ought to take a break.

Komives: `       Yeah, is it noon?

Scarpino:         It must be.

Komives:         Someone was going to meet me at noon to go to lunch.

Scarpino:         A little bit after, let me turn these things off.

(END PART 1 OF INTERVIEW)

Scarpino:        It doesn’t look like a very impressive recorder, but...

Komives:         These things are all magic, they’re just marvelous.

Scarpino:         Thank you. We’re sitting here in a room in the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. I’m with Susan Komives. This is the second session with her today, October 15, 2022. I have all of the appropriate permissions and so on, on the first recording, but just to be on the safe side, I’m one more time going to ask your permission to record this interview, to have the interview transcribed, to deposit the transcription and the recording with the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives. with the Tobias Center, and with the International Leadership Association, where they will be available to the public, and very well may be posted to websites. Can I have your permission to do that?

Komives:         Yes, you do.

Scarpino:         All right, thank you. Where we left off last time, I was just about to circle all the way around and engage leadership head on. I think the way to do that is just to cut to the chase and ask, how do you define leadership?

Komives:         I used the term earlier, philosophy of leadership, because I’ve come to see leadership as how you enact the philosophies that you hold about it. And I think there’s something to unpack about that more than I have. We have defined it, Nance Lucas, Tim McMahon and I, when we did our relational leadership model, and it reflects our beliefs and my belief, we defined leadership as a relational and ethical process of people working together to accomplish positive change. We use that definition because it frames how leadership education can then be designed intentionally to help students see how they can engage in something that is a process. And it’s about people. You do leadership with people, so, okay college students in my case, you need to learn to work with each other. We really want to emphasize ethics. That was very important to expose college students to the exploration of the discussion of their own self-exploration. Certainly in leadership textbooks up to the ‘80s, you couldn’t even find ethics sometimes in the index, let alone the table of contents. We really wanted to make ethics a front and center discussion. And then that process of working together brings with it the give and take and group dynamics and group processes and where leadership is happening among people. It takes the situation into account, the context into account. And then toward positive change, going back to your question about are there bad leaders, and I think there certainly are, but the kind of leadership we want to teach, expose people to that has this aspirational dimension to it, which is to make something better somehow, allows for the teachable design to flow through that definition.

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you three things...  in order of less complicated to more complicated. You talked about the relational leadership model, and I was going to come to that later, but because you brought it up, I’m going to ask you to explain what that is.

Komives:         Yes. When we were walking on the Exploring Leadership book, it’s Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference. It was out of a need the field had to have a book that was situated in the college student context, where the examples are about classrooms and part-time jobs and clubs and organizations. Not that everybody is a traditional college student, but it would have the college student context as the example and quotes from college students. It was important to us, then, that we have our definition, so they know what we are advancing. The model has knowing, being and doing kind of components, so you have to learn some things. To be effective you’ve got to be able to take them up on as values and beliefs and then do them. So, this model then was designed out of our experience to emphasize elements of the leadership process and context that we thought students need to be exposed to, to get them thinking and interrogating their assumptions of leadership being only hierarchical or authority based or whatever to be process oriented. This model has five components to it, but leadership is all about purpose. I mean, you’re getting together for some reason with other people so there is the purpose dimension, and finding common purpose, shaping that purpose together so that the group is moving in the same direction even in their conflict as well as their dreams. It is about being inclusive. It’s got to be open to new ideas. It’s got to be open to differences of opinion that may come from people’s social identities or personal experience. So, inclusive here isn’t only social identity based, and demographic. But if you can’t get contrary ideas out, you won’t ever come to the better solution that the group wants to take, or decision the group needs to make. So, it’s inclusive. It’s also empowering, that you’re preparing people to be able to engage. The group has spaces for people to talk. It makes room for, in the processes it uses, that empowerment of people that your voice is important, needs to be heard, you can be active in this process. And that it is ethical. We wanted ethics to be something in the model so that people had to engage with, this is for, it's got modal and end values attached to it, as James MacGregor Burns would talk about that. How we work together is perhaps as important as what the outcome is. And if we work together in ways that are nasty and nefarious and backstabbing, that’s not the kind of leadership that any of us want to teach or advance. But if we work in ethical ways together that build trust, that rely on each other to be good citizens of the groups that we’re in, then we’re going to be all better off. It’s all about process. How the group handles its own process is how effective the leadership is going to be. If the group is engaging of others, if it brings in all those voice, if it builds community, if it allows for reflection, if it is a learning organization so people say, “Well none of us know how to do this but we can figure it out, and we can learn it,” then you’ve got a healthy, vibrant group that’s going to be successful. It allows for us to work with college students on the personal and the group dimensions of learning how to make change together.

Scarpino:         In order for a college student to really take advantage of what you were teaching, they had to be willing to engage. Did you find that to be the case with students in your classes?

Komives:         Oh yes. Students who may be in these classes pick them for a reason...

Scarpino:         That’s true...

Komives:         They’re pretty motivated, and most leadership educator classes are highly engaging environments, a lot of small group work, a lot of get into groups and discuss, a lot of pair up with somebody and do something. So you have to be willing to be a certain amount of self-disclosure and working together with other people. Now, leadership studies classes might not be that engaging. A leadership studies class can be someone’s lecture every day on the history leadership and how it evolved and great leaders and who they are. It could be a whole different approach. But leadership development classes, classes focusing on helping you become more aware so you can effectively work with others better, are going to do lots of experiential learning and small group work.

Scarpino:         When I asked you about the relational leadership model and you said that there were five components, I know that you’ve covered them, but to make sure that somebody who’s using this thing, can you just list them?

Komives:         Sure. And, again, they’re in my Exploring Leadership book. There are three editions of that book. It’s about purpose, it’s inclusive, empowering, ethical and engaging process. So, those five.

Scarpino:         The book came out when?

Komives:         The first edition came out in 1998. Concurrently, Nance and I were also on The Social Change Model book and social change model process, which I imagine we’ll also discuss. But it came out in 1998. Been revised twice since then. The third edition was in 2007 or ‘8 or ‘9. Altogether they’ve sold about 100,000 copies.

Scarpino:         Good heavens. That’s impressive. I looked up a lot, but I did not look up the sales figures. When that book first came out, and one of your five components is ethics, to what degree had ethics penetrated leadership development classes?

Komives:         I think it depends on where they’re situated in the academy and who’s teaching them. There are two big caveats there. So, an instructor who doesn’t know anything about ethics and is uncomfortable even talking about, or taking questions of whose right are we talking about and what is truth and what is right and wrong, if someone’s uncomfortable, it probably wasn’t getting discussed much. This is the year of Enron and the Pinto. Some of the examples we have in the book are the failure of us to engage people with ethics. How comfortable the instructor is, student affairs people in the co-curricular working with this model are pretty comfortable with that. They have a lot of engagement with moral development and ethical development, and I think disciplinary-based leadership people have different levels of knowledge about it. And then the other dimension to it, is, now I just forgot my thought... well, anyway...

Scarpino:         I’ll come back to it.

Komives:         It’ll come back. But it was needed. I mean, it was filling a need and people who adopted the book said, “I’m so glad to see that.” Even people who said, to use such-and-such’s book as a leadership book which is for CEOs and business and industry, have to supplement it with other readings on some dimensions like ethical development that they might not be getting from those readings. And this book has all of that in it, so it was well adopted.

Scarpino:         Did you find that that book was used in places outside of classrooms?

Komives:         Oh yes.

Scarpino:         Like executive training, things like that?

Komives:         Not so much that. After the first edition, and then track that back to, some of the people as they graduated from college who went into jobs kept that book with them and then started bringing in those concepts, or doing training modules or something out of that concept.

Scarpino:         As you thought about ethics when the first edition of that came out in 1998, if you were going to put together a (inaudible) to sell this book, and you were going to explain that ethics were an important component of what you were going to do, so you don’t have a lot of space to do it, what four or five ethical considerations would up at the top of the list of what belonged in there?

Komives:         Oh, that’s an interesting question. I haven’t reread that book in a lot of years.

Scarpino:         I mean, I made up four or five, so it could be four, six or two, whatever...

Komives:         Keep in mind that when you say the concepts that might be in that, engage the student in the discussion around those, right?

Scarpino:         Correct.

Komives:         One of them is courage, that courage to do what you think is right, courage to raise an unpopular issue or topic because the group should handle it, or to speak out. And also concurrently was coming along things like the Bystander Movement. You know, when you’re a bystander and you see something bad happening, do you speak up or do anything? And there’s all kinds of case studies we used to use on whistleblowers. But this idea of courage, indeed, is an important one. Another one was to understand how values and beliefs influence ethical actions. What values and beliefs do you have as a person that you wouldn’t ever want to lose them? You might have learned them in church, or you might have learned them from your family, your parents, but you would want to be a person of character who is known to be trustworthy, a person of character who is known to be authentic, and trying to present your authentic self to other people and not make up something of who you aren’t. So you get into those discussions around character and that congruence with beliefs. Those kinds of things come to mind. Usually we get into discussions, too, of legal is not always ethical and ethical is not always legal. There are circumstances where something can be legal and unethical, and there are circumstances where it can be unethical but legal. And that awareness for people of there can be bad laws that really hurt people who shouldn’t be affected the way they are from those bad laws.

Scarpino:         When you talk about ethics and leadership development, are you really talking about having the people that are in those classes and who are interested in developing as leaders have a moral compass? Do they have a sense of what’s wrong, and how that fits in the context of developing as a leader?

Komives:         Very much. There are even activities where you’re designing your own moral compass. With college students, particularly traditional-age college students, but they’re people, the chaplain of Yale University, William Sloane Coffin, used to say, “We have to remember that college students happen...” no, “people who happen to be college students, college students don’t happen to be people,” so we’re dealing with people here, who, at any age they might need to explore this. Our goal is to have them be able to reveal to themselves and label and identify the principles and values that then undergird their own ethical actions that they want to make sure they are truthful to.

Scarpino:         Can you teach that, or are you teaching it out of somebody who already has some idea, some moral compass, some sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and maybe just not applying it in a leadership context?

Komives:         Well, and some of this would be personal philosophy about teaching, but the word education means to pull out of, to draw out. What we’re mostly trying to do is expose people to concepts and ideas that as they engage themselves with it, they can see if that connects to them, or doesn’t, can reveal some new insight to them that sees themselves in a deeper and more complex way. We’re not saying, “You’re unethical because you did this,” or whatever... we’re saying, “If you believe in these things, how would you then act?” And you’re wrestling with that for yourself in your own development. Development is the process of becoming increasingly complex. You want people to... and growth is changing. Growth can be changing for not for good, I mean growth can mean bad things. But, development is going to mean more complexity.

Scarpino:         When we started talking a few minutes ago, and I asked you how you define leadership, you talked about a philosophy of leadership, and then I sidetracked you by asking about relational leadership models. If you had to summarize your philosophy of leadership, how would you do it? What would you say?

Komives:         Succinctly, that’s a good question. First of all, I do think there are multiple definitions of leadership. And if people can make theirs work for good purposes, I think that’s fine. For me, leadership is a collaborative process of people working together to try to accomplish something that’s meaningful and positive. And, so, to me, it isn’t leadership to me if it’s only one person telling everybody what to do. That may accomplish change, and that may be good, but leadership, to me, is also developing the people in the group to be leaders themselves. We’re looking at leader-full organizations, not just leader-led organizations. There is a whole body of thinking with leader and follower being those dimensions, and I would like to see everybody having the potential to see themselves as doing leadership whether they are a participant in the group or the appointed chair of the committee. It’s not just the chair doing leadership, so are you. One of the students in one of our research studies said, “I realized I could be a leader without a title.” Now that’s a leader identity. That’s a person who says, yes, I have an identity as a leader, I know I can accomplish change with other people, whether I’m in charge or a member, and I’m responsible for trying to do that as a member.

Scarpino:         Would your philosophy of leadership work in a hierarchical organization like, say, the military?

Komives:         Oh absolutely... in many contexts. My example of that is my amazing son, who is Lt. Col. Jeffrey Komives Ph.D. who is at the Pentagon.

Scarpino:         He was Army lieutenant colonel?

Komives:         No, he’s Air Force. Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. And he’s here. He’s at these events and functions. I can think of marvelous ways that he has won awards for, and I shouldn’t choose him as the poster boy of this, I think the fact that he’s been recognized for doing collaborative leadership in a number of settings means it’s valued and appreciated, there are people who do that. Now, when you’re in battlefield conditions and you need to follow what somebody says unless it’s unethical, or whatever the condition may be, you obviously have to make command and control decisions, and we would hope so. Like if there’s a fire in the back room now, it would be great if I said to you, “Let’s get out of here, there’s a fire, follow me.” You know, “Okay, yes ma’am.”

Scarpino:         Let’s not just sit here and talk about it.

Komives:         That’s right. So, there are situations when that would be appropriate. Jeff was given tasks that he knew he didn’t know as much about as did some of the first-year students in ROTC that he was responsible for. So the way held team meetings and group meetings to get out ideas of what they should do, let’s make decisions together. People’s talents could be used, their information was brought into it. They appreciated that he recognized they had knowledge to contribute. He wasn’t trying to beat them down so they would then unwilfully just follow along with anything he said. And that building up of people and developing their talent got him recognized for the kind of leadership he was exhibiting that made his team better, and made the organization better. That was rewarding for him, and it has been in numerous times in his career.

Scarpino:         Do you think that there are qualities that distinguish effective leadership?

Komives:         Qualities that distinguish effective leadership? It’s in that category of do you know it when you see it, or do you...

Scarpino:         Well, I know there’s some of that, yes.

Komives:         I would say this: I think that… I wrote a piece for the New York Times one time called, “Is Seeing Believing or Is Believing Seeing?” And in this leadership arena, if you have a philosophy of what is good leadership, these are called implicit leadership theories in our field, but if you have a philosophy of what you think is good leadership, somebody either fits that or it doesn’t, so if they don’t do it the way you think it should be done, you don’t see them as effective, because they’re not doing leadership the way you see leadership. Conversely, you start seeing really effective things happening by somebody you didn’t expect was ever going to emerge or show leadership, and now you see leadership differently because they helped accomplish amazing things, but they weren’t at all fitting in your model, so, now you’re changing your view of leadership. Both of those are true. We did a piece of research, it’s the Leadership Identity Development model, which was a study out of the relational leadership approach. And in that model, there are a number of developmental stages that people go through. A basic transition one is, to go from seeing leadership and believing that good leadership is hierarchical, that when you’re in charge you’re responsible for getting everything done in the organization and you bring other people into that. You might be nice to them, or you could be authoritarian, or you might be benevolent, but you believe it’s your responsibility to get things done and that you’re the leader doing that. There’s a transition that then occurs where you see leadership as process, and you see that all of us are responsible, and we’re interdependent with each other, and we may have different roles, but we can be a leader even if you’re not the leader, and you see that process approach. I had a friend who became a college president and inherited a cabinet of men -- and she was a female president, first one -- and they had different views of leadership. She came in and said, “Let’s think about strategic planning, what are the issues for this campus for the next so many years? What are going to do together? What do you think most needs to be done?” The feedback after that meeting was, several of them saying, “We’re paying her the big bucks, she’s supposed to tell us what she wants us to do. We’re going to implement the president’s vision if she’ll let us know what her vision is. She’s keeping a secret.” A couple of people were really glad to hear her asking for input. She’s a psychologist. And she came in at the next meeting realizing that this somewhat critical feedback that was brewing was because of their views of what leadership was. So, she said, “I certainly am the leader of this organization, I can make a lot of tough decisions, but you have a view of leadership that’s perhaps this way; mine is that we’re going to do it as a shared, collaborative process with a team, and we’ll try to come to the agreements that we can accept.” So, then she explained it was a difference of viewing what’s good leadership, and taught them that I think, and then had a team that worked to get on board with her. But she knew to interpret that feedback, not to worry there’d be an uprising, but that they had a different from the last president of what leadership was, and hers was different, but would also made this approach work. I just think that’s a great example of viewing, and seeing is believing, or is believing seeing?

Scarpino:         I want to talk to you about how you became interested in leadership, and we’ve talk about this, kind of woven into our conversation this morning. I want to talk to you about, generally, about what drew you to the study of leadership. But what I’m really interested in, is what drew you to teaching and studying undergraduate students and leadership? Because that’s been your focus, right? Undergraduate students, teaching them?

Komives:         Yes, and people in general, but I work with undergraduate students, and grad students.

Scarpino:         What drew you to doing that?

Komives:         Probably my roots in student affairs. That master’s degree and that doctoral degree, and the career that I had for myself was really as a student affairs professional working with college students to help them... that profession has a set of principles and beliefs behind it, that each student is unique, that each student is worthy, each student deserves to develop their capacity to the fullest and how can we design programs and services to, if some need remediation and others need to be advanced, and, you know, we’re working with those individuals to help them be successful, and develop capacity. Well, that’s a very, very positive, hopeful future, build people’s ability to be better, and that approach then meant with leadership as an outcome and leadership being something we wanted them to leave college feeling more comfortable doing and holding that identity, those two were perfect to marry together.

Scarpino:         Can you think of a time in your life when you were really beginning to self-consciously think about leadership and teaching leadership, that kind of thing?

Komives:         Yes, and it would go back to those early years at the University of Tennessee when we were designing the resident assistant course. We even designed and gave credit for an intensive experience to prepare them to be good in that role. But also meant that we’re helping develop them as people. I’ve been interested in leadership from those early Florida State and University of Tennessee days. At Denison, when I got to Denison, an economics professor, because you didn’t have a business school in a liberal arts college, so it was the Department of Economics, but he and I co-taught a work leadership class that he invited me to design with him. I taught it three years in a row at that place. So I’ve always been teaching leadership. I did supervision workshops for years with other VPs and deans of students and all on developing talent in your organization, and leadership talent would be a dimension of that, so it’s always been there.

Scarpino:         Do you think of yourself as a leader?

Komives:         Oh, yes, absolutely. Identify, I would identify that I am a leader, I can engage in leadership, yes.

Scarpino:         What do you think your strengths are as a leader? What are you good at?

Komives:         What am I good at? Well, I think, and it’s been fascinating here because of being a recipient of this award, and these programs they’re having about me, to hear these people stand up and say what I did for them, or the opportunities I brought their way or whatever. But I think that I have been particularly intentional about bringing people into marvelous experiences where they can fly. If I had an opportunity like, and I worked here of course for 30 years at the University of Maryland nearby D.C... So, an association might call me and say, “Susan, can you come down and work with us on a strategic planning thing around something?” And I would say, “Yeah, but can I bring two of my doctoral students with me? They could help facilitate and take notes and could participate in some of the...?” “Oh, sure, bring them, that’d be fine.” So, here’s two people who are getting exposed to a D.C. association, and have that credential and have that experience. I’m all the time matching people to opportunities, and if I have them, I would never do it alone unless I really had to. I’m going to take somebody. I would get called to do a consulting visit and say, “Can you afford to bring along a doctoral student too, who could then assist me?” And they would usually say yes. So, that matching people with marvelous opportunities even if they don’t think they’re ready, but if I know they are, they trust me, so, then I say, “I’ll be there. I’m helping you. You’re not alone in this. But you’re going to do really good at this.” And they would trust to do that because it wasn’t a big risk, and I would be there to support them. The same thing with ideas, I love ideas, and I love other people’s ideas. They call me this human Rolodex, my students do, and talk about my magic files. But I’ll read an article or, these days, find a link to something on the web that I read and remember who was studying that or who was interested in that, and zap that out to them. And often that comes just at the right time, or they’re just so tickled that you remembered that was their interest. I like harvesting ideas, and curating ideas to get them to where there are people that are going to grow them, or I know they’re growing them and I can support them in doing that. I think as a leader, you hear a lot of educator in that, you hear a lot of teacher coming through in that, but it’s matching people to ideas. And one of my favorite pieces of feedback was a student who said, “You always thought I was better than I thought I was.” And I said, “You were, you were always wonderful. You didn’t just become wonderful now at 40, you were wonderful at 22. You were marvelous.”

Scarpino:         Creating a situation in which you help people believe in themselves and their own abilities...

Komives:         And in our ability. If it’s a group that I’m a leader of or a member of, we can do something, we have the capacity. So the mindset is one of we can do it because we’re smart and we can learn something. But we’ll figure this out, we can do this together. And being humble enough to say, “and I’m one of the group.” I may be the VP and in charge, and a lot of people attribute things to that, but it also means I can be a member of the group also running the data that somebody else gathered, because I know the stats for it. I can help with that piece of the project. So, I think I’m good at the talent development, and matching people with ideas. I’m also a real good realist, so, I’m pretty good at strategizing. We won’t be at where we want to be until about three years, but this is the year that we expose to the change that may be needed and get the campus talking, using the language, next year we’ll make the proposal. You’ve got to know when the time is going to be right for some kind of change being introduced. 

Scarpino:         A leader is a planner, a person who sort of figures out where the points on the horizon are, and encourages other people to come along?

Komives:         No, now that isn’t the question you asked me at first. Because I don’t resist the language of a leader, because individuals do need to learn how to do leadership. But if you use the leader-ship language, you’re always talking about the process of people working together, and so as an individual, you need to learn how do you work with and move a group, and the group moves the tugboat to the ocean liner, or whatever, but have the group help the change occur. I’m not always trying to teach a leader how to accomplish something themselves, it’s how do you do it with and through other people? Somebody’s got to do some planning, and planning is needed. But I think a good example is, I might not like budgets or want to do budgets, but our team needed to do good budgeting, so who could do that? It might not be me, but it could be somebody else, but I knew we needed it. So, a leader is helping fit needs with talent and having that be a positive direction.

Scarpino:         Again, as you kind of self-assess your career, do you see any aspects of your own leadership where you came up short of your own expectations for yourself?

Komives:         Yeah. there are a lot of, either I just forget or I saw them as a growth opportunities or something, or might not have been as aware, but, and we haven’t gone through my whole career, I don’t know how much of that we’ll get to in the time we have...

Scarpino:         I think we’re going to get to most of it, I hope so.

Komives:         Oh, okay, because there is a story coming... there’s a time in my life coming ahead of where we are in these... they brought me into an institution to create a Division of Student Affairs. They needed it for retention purposes. They had big turnover of students, and I already had been ACPA president and established. But it turned out they didn’t have the budget to support that adding of a VP office and the programs we needed to be doing. So they dissolved the division eighteen months after I was there. So there I am, out of a job. I wasn’t fired, but by dissolving the division, my job and that level in the organization were gone. And so it was one of those where, ooh boy, how did I not see that coming? And sometimes organizational dynamics you’re not informed of when you take a new job, or things might change in the process. I also think sometimes, when I particularly was younger, and you can even see how much energy I have, but I moved faster and was ready to go further, and my head already saw where this could go than did the people I was working with. And so if people were resisting change and not wanting things to change, then I would look like I was pushing a change or encouraging something and hadn’t brought along the organization to see it or plan it or do it. I had to work a lot at slowing down, and in the actual settings we were working, doing that at a different pace.

Scarpino:         Recognizing what you said about leadership and the value of the process and collaboration and so on, do you think that even under those circumstances that a leader needs a certain amount of vision, to have a sense of where she imagines things could go, or the possibility of where things could go?

Komives:         Yes. And again you’re saying a leader, and I’m saying a leader needs to know that vision is really important, and it may be somebody else’s vision. And maybe it’s the group’s vision, and the leader knows that keeping vision in front of people is really important for accomplishing the ups and downs of a change process, yes.

Scarpino:         Do you think that leadership is sometimes situational? That is, in some cases people exercise leadership in response to the circumstances they find themselves in?

Komives:         Sure, they do. Yeah. Context is really important, I mean, context matters. And the approach you use, or your comfort in that context, or the attributions people make of you. Like... we talk about gender a lot, so a woman going into a highly male-dominated field like military command or head of General Motors, whatever it might be, will have attributions made of that person that make how they lead then particularly need to be intentional.

Scarpino:         Do you think that leadership is a cultural construction?

Komives:         Yes, a social construction, I do.

Scarpino:         If that’s the case then, are there still qualities of effective leadership that vary from culture to culture? Or is it one size fits all?

Komives:         I would never say one size fits all. Let me think how to approach this question.

Scarpino:         I know you’ve taught international people, so this must have been something you’ve had to wrestle with on occasion.

Komives:         Yes, and have consulted and been in lots of international kinds of communities. I think the two answers I’d give you is: There’s the reality of how leadership is enacted that has a lot of cultural overlay to it. Being in Qatar and seeing people having wasta... wasta which means you know how to work the system, and who’s connected to who, and if you get the right connections, you’re going to make more of an impact than if you don’t. So there are, how things really work, a dimension. The other dimension is, what ways we as humans might like to really relate and interact with each other than have some universal dimensions to them, and can make you effective in numerous cultures. Some of that is care, and is being concerned with community, and is trust. You know, there are qualities that most cultures do value, so an effective leader would have some of those characteristics. How change might happen might be very authoritarian or hierarchical with people with wasta. But if you are engaging with those people and you are trustworthy and care and listen and people know you hear then, yeah, you would tend to be then more effective in accomplishing outcomes.

Scarpino:         Wasta is what?

Komives:         Wasta is knowing how to read the system and use your connections and get to your brother’s uncle’s father who’s really in charge, and that’s how you get admitted to university, and not through the Admissions Office. So, wasta is that savviness to work a system.

Scarpino:         Okay. When I was putting these questions together, I was thinking about how to ask this. I thought about the fact that, once upon a time a short little guy like me sort of learned to play basketball. I was never very good at it, but I could sort of do it. And then I look at somebody, like Michael Jordan or somebody, and what occurred to me in that sort of disjointed context was, is leadership a product of education and training and coaching, or is it at least in part a product of qualities that somebody’s born with, or some combination thereof? Or neither...

Komives:         The answer to that is it’s both and, not either or... I wouldn’t set it up as a binary or as it’s one or the other. There are marvelous leaders in many cultures who have very little education, but they have a vision for their community, they know how to engage people around that vision. They work together and build networks and build communities of practice that have accomplished something wonderful. So, we know it’s not only people who have formal education. But they’ve learned somehow how to engage with other people and get something done that’s of value to others. And of course, we talk about implicit theories. If you use that phrase, people make up their own leadership definition, and they bring a mindset to that, they bring a cultural orientation to that. But I think it’s not either or, it’s both of those. And then you can learn to -- leadership can be learned -- you can learn to be more effective in the ways that you do relate to other people and then how you accomplish change. And so a person can learn to be a better leader. And a group can learn to be a better group. I see academic departments, for example, in my life that are terrible academic... Individually they’re brilliant people, and they’re leaders in their field. But you get ten of them together in a room and it’s the same conversation you heard two years ago at this time about why we’re having a department retreat that nobody wants to go to. And the same person is going to block it, and the same person is going to bring up, you know… So, you get a group of people together and they don’t know how to function as a group. And I’ve seen academic departments where things just thrive, where people brought in new ideas, someone said I could change my course to also fit your minor that you’re planning, that works out good for me too. You know, and they build something better. So, how do we bring individuals into the capacity-building to know I’m engaging with others if we’re making the group better. That’s what our approach to leadership is trying to accomplish.

Scarpino:         In the general field of leadership studies, many of the scholars are social scientists, psychologists or whatever. Your master’s and doctoral degrees are in education. So as a person with advanced degrees in education, how do you fit into that field?

Komives:         We are where the rubber meets the road. This leadership education field is very interdisciplinary. It is multidisciplinary because we certainly draw from lots of different disciplines. You get sociologists work on social movements, you know, social stratification. We get psychology, both the individual development as well as IO psych and org development. You get communications, you get business management, you get... we’re drawing from all these fields, then in an inter-disciplinary and now a trans-disciplinary way, because it’s creating its own language, its own way of study as it has developed as a field, but in an inter-disciplinary way. Leadership educators in a college of education, but anybody, I think, is a leadership educator who is doing this intentionally, are trying to translate how people can be better into training and learning opportunities so that they can then enact their practice differently? We’re doing the design of curriculum, learning experiences, through reflection, through all kinds of things, to make that person see it intentionally, interrogate it, and try to do it better for themselves as they practice leadership. Education is the learning. For example, I’m going to say this probably tomorrow when accepting the award so you’ll hear this twice, but ILA is about the scholarship and practice of leadership. That’s the people that ILA identifies, and education inhabits the gap between scholarship and practice. So, you know the scholarship, and you know how it should be looking, but how do you get it there? You inhabit that gap through education to help people learn how to do that better.

Scarpino:         Do you think that maybe the field is a little slow to come to that realization that you just laid out, that education sort of fills the gap between scholarship and practice?

Komives:         Do I think they’re slow to come to that?

Scarpino:         Yes, I mean...

Komives:         What other alternative is there?

Scarpino:         I mean, there isn’t any, but you’re the first person that I’ve ever heard put it that way. I mean you get the people who will talk about the scholarship, you get the people who talk about the practice...

Komives:         Well, it’s not magic that happens in between those two.

Scarpino:         No, it is actually not magic.

Komives:         A talented supervisor, a trained educator, the people doing the developmental work, whether they know it or not, are helping take what scholarship says would be good to do, and with the person who is trying to build it to be able to do it, help them learn how to develop it. So, we’re doing it as good supervisors, we’re doing it as teachers.

Scarpino:         One of the things that stands out about the field, at least to me about leadership studies in the past few decades, is the explosion of books and articles in the field.

Komives:         Oh my goodness. Can’t keep up with them.

Scarpino:         I can’t even pretend I’ve read them all, because I haven’t, not even close. So, given the huge numbers of books and articles available on leaders and leadership, which, I don’t know, four or five books or articles do you consider to be essential reading?

Komives:         Oh, gee, that’s not even a fair question.

Scarpino:         But I mean, where would you tell somebody to start? Let’s put it that way, because...

Komives:         Yeah, well if I, that’s a good one...

Scarpino:         Or what do you think, given everything that’s out there and knowing that no human can read all of that, what are the few things that somebody should read to really have a sense that they are beginning to understand and ground themselves in that field? Where’s the cream in all of this stuff?

Komives:         Yes, yeah, yeah, but I think your question is deceptively… you’re making a simple question out of a deceptively complex-related field. I know when I first came back to be a faculty member in ’87, one of my friends phrased it as, “I’m lost in the leadership forest and I can’t find the pathways out of it.” You know, if you just look at the leadership field, it isn’t all the same, and it’s not all about approaches to the complexity of how leadership could be looked at, so what are the pathways? Well, there are pathways out of that field. And I’ve been living in the pathway that is around relational and socially-just work, and educational interventions to accomplish that. There are other pathways in there, but when you asked me, I would say, “For what purpose am I looking for a source of a book to read?” It isn’t just any old book. There are some good overview books, Peter Northouse has had a new version of his come out all the time, and it’s got his latest thinking as well as good overviews of basic things, but it doesn’t necessarily make you then a better leader, because that’s about leadership scholarship. It doesn’t say how you turn that knowledge of LMX theory into using it yourself. Ron Riggio has always done good work around what’s right or wrong with leadership develop, so reading Riggio’s stuff is always good. My colleagues and I have a book called The Handbook For Student Leadership Development. If anybody’s designing programs for their campus and want a bible, a manual kind of thing to go through that looks at from soup to nuts, like funding and standards of practice and curriculum design and program design and student learning theory, I mean, this is how one might come up to speed on being a leadership educator, and now it’s used for that widely, I think.

Scarpino:         The reason I asked you that question, and I know it’s a simple question layered over a really complex field, but it isn’t an unreasonable question for somebody to say, “Where do I start?”

Komives:         Yeah, not it’s not unreasonable.

Scarpino:         Of all that stuff that’s out there...

Komives:         If you were to ask me that as a person, like we were sitting down and you were honestly... if you were really saying, “Okay, I’ve got to find my into what’s going on here,” I would first be asking you questions. And the counselor in me would be saying, “Now, what do you already know?” or “What do you already think?” or “What resonates with you and what have you read anything about?” And then try to match readings to what would take you to another step, or another level. And I don’t know all the work that’s out there, either. There are seminal works, but I wouldn’t tell a brand-new person to go read James MacGregor books on leadership that won the Pulitzer Prize, I don’t think very many people have read it all the way through, anyway. But it’s a marvelous book, and I would assign as a reading or parts of it in a class on leadership studies, but it might not be something I would give a person who asked that question. I would go with overview books, like Northouse serves a good purpose on. And then I would get into social change, social justice equity kind of work. If someone’s new to it, I’d like you to start learning better ways of doing things than we learned classically over the years that turned out to only privilege certain people, like white men and others, and didn’t have any room for women’s approaches to leadership or for people of color, or didn’t see leadership as socially constructed and would make you want to fit a pattern of being command and control and authoritarian. So, I would like people to start with better work that’s coming out now. And there are some marvelous thinkers out there, like Helena Liu and others who are writing about equity and other interrogations of systemic oppression that happened within higher-ed organizations and leadership settings. Better to learn some good new ways. Deconstruct and reconstruct, John Dugan has a great book on deconstructing and reconstructing leadership theory, he was my doctoral student.

Scarpino:         You have an amazing, I wouldn’t use the word collection, I don’t mean it disrespectfully, of doctoral students.

Komives:         Aren’t they amazing? When you get around great people, just amazing things happen, yeah.

Scarpino:         Do you think that maybe that’s a sign of an effective leader, is somebody who can spot the potential greatness and just encourage and open doors, and make suggestions.

Komives:         I don’t think all leaders have to be that way to be effective. But, yes, that’s a marvelous leader. That’s somebody I’d like to work for. They could work for me or I could work for them. To be around a person that inspires you to be your best self and who brings that out in you, and who says, “Wow, these talents, you’ve got to work on this a little bit, but these talents are phenomenal,” where you’re almost unconditionally regarded well, and when you’re able and have the capacity to do these things, then it’s just, there’s no limit to what you can do.

Scarpino:         You are that person, right?

Komives:         And some of that is Meg Wheatley’s thing about:  If you want to accomplish something, get some good people in a room together just to talk about it. And, a synergy that comes out of six people in a room from across campus dealing with an issue, I mean, the outcomes are guaranteed to be better.

Scarpino:         Do you think that maybe it’s the mark of a good leader to figure out who those six people would be?

Komives:         That would be a talent. And I do encourage...

Scarpino:         Or five or twelve or however many it is...

Komives:         As a matter of fact, in a speech I gave Thursday to the Aspen Group, part of that was find the green -- where are the green spots on your campus? Where is it just glowing and vibrating that you could give it a good idea and they can make it happen? Where in another office it would die on the vine and they would gripe the whole that they didn’t have enough money, you know. So, we all have departments that are better or not on that. So, if you plant opportunities and good ideas in the right places, they can flourish with good support. And knowing where that would be and developing more of those is important.

Scarpino:         In 2011, you were awarded the Faculty Award for Teaching, Board of Regents, University of Maryland System. What connections do you see between good teaching and effective leadership?

Komives:         Well, I see a one-to-one correspondence, I really do. They overlap, they’re almost the same thing. I think the teaching role is inherently by definition also a leadership role. And you can co-create, you can do that it in a... some of the most challenging teaching I’ve done is in co-creating a knowledge base together that we then collaborated on where I wasn’t the only one who knew anything, but we were building it. Some of that… two or three of my books have come out of class projects with grad students who were just brilliant. They didn’t know they could write that well. I said, “I can help you learn to write. And I can help you shape your ideas, so we’ll work on an outline first, but you really can do this.”

Scarpino:         Can you name a couple of books that have come out from your class projects?

Komives:         Oh, yeah, oh sure.

Scarpino:         Because somebody is going to hear this and want to know.

Komives:         Yes, for example... We haven’t talked about the social change model of leadership development yet, but when we developed that there was no textbook it followed. People were adopting the model all over the place in higher education in 1996 and into the early 2000s, but we needed a textbook for students, so I had my class write the first textbook. And part of the class was learning leadership, discussing what should be in it, doing their lit reviews for it, and I knew enough to guide them in that, but they were putting together chapters for this book.

Scarpino:         This was a grad class?

Komives:         This was a grad class, my leadership educator class, so they were motivated to do leadership. I said, “In this class, I’m going to be your teacher and co-learner, but then we’re going to shift over and I’ll be your editor. The chapters won’t all be done. We’ll have them in a done draft form, but you have to hang in with me, if you want to be published, to get these into a published form.” Of course every single person did, because they got a publication out of it, helps their career. So, Leadership for a Better World is one. Another is The Handbook For Student Leadership Development, was done in another class, and the second edition we had some people update their chapters and then added some new grad students to write other chapters. The facilitators guide to the social change model were students in a class. So, yeah, we had several books out of those classes. And, I’m very proud to say, not once with them I said, “I wrote,” or… I’ve seen faculty that take students’ work and put it in their own book. Talk about unethical, that’s terrible. But in this case, everybody could launch their careers as leadership scholars or educators knowing they had some publications that mattered.

Scarpino:         Part of what you were doing as the leader and the teacher was really creating opportunities for them to launch their careers.

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         Did they know that’s what you were doing?

Komives:         Yes, we talked about it. It was transparent. We did. I even remember one class, my Intro to Student Affairs class, I had lots of projects in that class and way too much work. I knew it was, it’s like, one of the students called it, “like Student Affairs in a fire hose,” you know, it’s coming at you. And I said, “But every single thing I’m going to ask you to do I can tell you what I think it should contribute to your professional orientation, your personal development, and so it will matter in your career.” And they were willing to trust, and they said, “Okay, we’ll do this, all this hard work,” and they could see the benefit of it. I even sometimes stepped outside of myself and say, “Let’s just talk about what we should’ve gotten out of that discussion. You know, like, why did that matter that we had that difference of opinion.” So you’ve always got to be making visible what might for some stay invisible.

Scarpino:         Do you think that qualities of somebody who is effective as a leader are inspiring trust and making things that might not necessarily seem evident at first, visible?

Komives:         Those are all useful qualities. I mean, I wouldn’t come up with ten things, but those things are all effective.

Scarpino:         I’m just trying to figure out what’s in the jar here.

Komives:         And that award, I was so touched by that award. That’s a system award for the Maryland System. The University of Maryland System has ten or twelve institutions...

Scarpino:         The one that you got in 2011...

Komives:         Yeah...

Scarpino:         I noticed that you reacted when I mentioned that.

Komives:         Yeah, that was very meaningful. And that brings the mentoring into it too, mentoring is really important to me.

Scarpino:         Mentoring is another effective quality of… or another quality of an effective leader.

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:        Very early in your career, I think in 1991, you published something called “The relationship of same- and cross-gender work pairs to staff performance and supervisor leadership in residence life.” It appeared in a journal called, Sex Roles, which I have to admit I have not read, in the interest of full disclosure. You also published a piece in that same year, called “Gender differences in the relationship of hall directors' trans-formational and transactional leadership and achieving style,’” in Journal of College Student Development, also in 1991. That got me to thinking about an issue that I’ve talked to several people about, and that is, do you think there is a gender component to leadership? Do you think that, generally speaking, are there differences in the way that, on average, I’m not saying that all men and all women are the same, but, do you think that there are differences in the way men and women approach leadership?

Komives:         The realist in me would have to say yes, because we’re socialized differently even today in our culture, you know, there’s boys ways of doing things and girls ways, and we’ve got a lot of toxic masculinity and hegemony and things out there. But I also think both men and women bring, from whatever their socialization by gender, attributes that are particularly useful in leadership situations. So, women being thought of as more relational and caring and nurturing, which is often a set of attributes that would be ascribed, doesn’t mean all women have to be that way, or that way, but now that we might value that more in leadership, it’s more evident. There was a time when, well for example when I would be the only woman in the president’s cabinet as a VP early on the ‘70s or in that era...

Scarpino:         Did you find people turning to you and saying, “So, what do women think?”

Komives:         Well, sure, but also it was to fit in. The dress for success stuff was happening then, so you might naturally wear your blue suit and red and blue-striped tie and shirt, but I would need to wear a blue blazer with a tie and a shirt, and a little floppy maybe nice little scarf at the neck. So, I was supposed to look like you in order to be seen as serious as a female in the work environment. Well, I’ve pushed against that a lot, so I wore my hot pink suits and my maxi-dresses, and, you know I wore things I wanted to, but there was very much a press early on in finding my way as a young professional into how much I need to adapt the dominant culture that I am now the outsider coming in to, to be taken seriously. And then realized that people got over some of that fairly quickly if they thought you were capable or smart or could really grasp an issue or contributed something. So, I never felt a whole lot of push-back in work environments from men at work at all. And that was really a joy to see, because we could just be a great team, and we knew... I mean, I would make a point to say to people what great contributions I thought they made, or that I really appreciated what I learned from what you just said. But having the confidence to be able to say that then meant we can say it to each other also. So, those things went pretty well. But the dress for success stuff is a good example of people attribute to you different things, or of how you’re even supposed to look. Matter of fact, that Sex Roles article, which I won’t go into detail, but there were no significant differences, and that got published. Usually that never happens. If you have an article where nothing was significant, why would you then publish it? Well, it was because the research question was, in essence: the matching of the pairs, is a male supervisor seen as better for a female or male supervisee, or vice versa? You know, and when I found no significant differences, that men were just as comfortable working for a woman supervisor as the women were, then that meant we’d turned the corner in some gender attribution stuff, where the research up to that point was saying, male and female prefer to work for a male supervisor than a female supervisor. And this study said, not so.

Scarpino:         That actually was a significant finding.

Komives:         It was an important finding, and it was statistically significant in its not-significance, mathematically.

Scarpino:         Gender difference between the way men and women lead, or, how do you advise your female advisees who are going into leadership? The same way you advise the men? Or, how do you advise the men, the same way you do women?

Komives:         Well, it depends on the context maybe they’re going into, but most of ours minor in higher education and working at colleges and universities, which have come a long way in gender attribution or in discrimination against women, etc. So, mostly I’m saying to people, know what gifts and talents you’re bringing to a group and make sure that those are contributed, and then help others see theirs, and build a good community. And then people will see you doing that and value and appreciate your contribution. And that may be, then, some gender, gendered, like, nurturing or caring for community, or those roles be you, affect you. But don’t try to be somebody else and act out like you think the guy is who’s in charge at being a certain way. That’s not you, so... That being authentic, you know, authentic leadership then becomes important.

Scarpino:         How about followership? We talk about leadership. We talk about leadership and followership. Generally speaking, do you see any gender differences when it comes to followership? Do men and women tend to engage with, or follow, a leader in similar ways or in different ways? Does it make any difference?

Komives:         I’m sure yes it has to make some… I mean, there are just so many differences among genders anyway that there has to make some difference. I would say this... I have tended not to use the term follower, and I know that that is controversial in our field. I would like participant, or collaborator, the word follower to me has more connotations that are negative than does the word leader. I mean, leader has some negative connotations too, but follower too often is thought to be the passive, fairly unengaged or less engaged person who is doing what the leader wants them to do, and that’s not a kind of role in a group that I would be supporting. So, I would like active follower, or active participant. Yeah, there may be a position of leader, but you want everybody else engaged in the process, caring about what happens, fully contributing to the success of the group, whether they’re asked to or not. And then, to me, that’s developing their leadership also. The leadership process has people in different roles. Leader and follower may be those roles. But I want that follower to be a highly-engaged person.

Scarpino:         And not passive.

Komives:         And not passive.

Scarpino:         Right.

Komives:         So, active follower, or don’t be there. Get a different job. Or be in a different group.

Scarpino:         I have to think of a way to rephrase the way I wrote this question. When one thinks about leadership, I mean, one of the things that a leader does is at least encourage the collaboration and the process so that the group can move, we hope, in a particularly productive direction. I don’t know what it is, but whatever they’re going to talk about and do. How do you persuade people to participate in that process? I was going to ask you how do you persuade people to follow you, but I don’t think that’s where you want to go, so, how do you persuade people to be active participants in that process? Because not everybody does that. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where you just sort of keep your head down and your mouth shut, but that’s not what you’re after. And I’m sure that’s not what you were advocating when you were the dean, and associate dean, and all that stuff. How do you get them on board?

Komives:         I think there are numerous kinds of strategies and the context indeed may vary a lot. So, if it’s a staff, and they’re in, you know, like if I was a VP and I had department heads and some of them didn’t want to play and didn’t think they wanted to do those things, we’d have to have some one-on-one conversations about what our responsibility is for the overall organization. But if we’re talking about a committee getting together for a purpose, or a committee taking on a project that the whole committee has decided they’re going to do, then it’s how do you, like the Leadership Challenge says, inspire a shared vision. What is our vision of what are trying to accomplish and how can we get there, and how do we divide up the tasks or what are the steps we’re going to take and who wants to do what parts? And the group is sharing how they’re going to accomplish it, and own it. You know if you build it and you own it then you’re more invested in getting it accomplished. But it’s not ever going to be with me, or I would recommend a top-down approach to do this.

Scarpino:         But helping people to believe and then become participants in a shared vision, is what you’re talking about.

Komives:         Yeah, yeah. By shaping it, by helping set its direction, by agreeing that even if it doesn’t go... someone might say it didn’t go my way, but I still believe in what we’re doing as a group, I can support this because it’s so important.

Scarpino:         I’m going to talk about your career trajectory. I’m going to set this up by saying that, for the betterment of the recorder, between 1973 and 1987 you held three administrative positions: 1973 to 1978, Associate Dean of Students, Denison University, Granville, Ohio; 1978 to 1985, Vice President and Dean of Student Life, Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri; and 1985 to 1987, Vice president for Student Development, University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida. All of these are relatively small private colleges with strong reputations in different parts of the country. As you moved through these positions, from associate dean to vice president and dean of Student Life, vice president for Student Development, what did you learn about being a leader? How would you squeeze all that out and say, as I look back on all of that, I took these things away from that experience about what it meant to be a leader.

Komives:         About myself as a leader?

Scarpino:         Yeah.

Komives:         Not a leader, generically, but talking about myself. Well, in the first place, I went to the Denison position from University of Florida State and University of Tennessee. I had been in large public institutions, and then interviewed for that position for a variety of personal reasons. My husband was changing doctoral programs. I can go into that, but I don’t want to avoid your question. And, I had to convince them how a big school person could actually understand a small school environment in the first place, what a treat it would be to work with people closer like that. That also meant working with faculty and staff across the institution in more of an interpersonal way. And I learned very quickly at Denison that I found a whole lot of good people who believed students really were marvelous and needed development and they were there to help them. Terrific faculty that were advisors to students, who cared if students learned the material in their class and, if someone needed help, would send them to me so I could help them. And we worked together as a team helping that student. So, as you build your own reputation and it has credibility, you can accomplish a lot with faculty colleagues across the institution. Up to that point at a big university, I didn’t know any single faculty member other than the ones I had at the University of Tennessee. But these marvelous people that my husband and I played Bridge with on Friday night were also the people I was on the Admissions Committee with the next morning or trying to get together to see how we might stop plagiarism that was going on in one class, you know, how do we work on that together? But you earn your own reputation. And if you work really diligently at a credible authentic reputation of good work with people, they will trust you to help them do anything and they will bring you into their needs too. So, those small colleges were really treats for me because we all cared about the students, we all loved those students. We’d do the best we can to get them a good experience. There were a few people here and there that didn’t care much and should have retired a year or two before. But I would say the vast majority of people picked there not for the money they were getting, but because they loved the teaching and learning process, and keeping that vision in front of us was terrific. I mentioned Stephens, and the faculty had voted in a faculty union, so just structurally there was an administration/faculty kind of split with the dean of faculty and the president, sadly. But what we all could care about was, students matter. So, when I would stand up in faculty meeting, I would stand up and say, “We had a rape on campus, folks, last week in this parking lot. Now you know the things we did because I put a notice out about that, but when you’re in advising next week, look for these kinds of signs, and your women students are going to be anxious, and they are going to need to talk to you about something about that.” And people were taking notes, you know, we’re so pleased to have supports, where to call, which of our counselors would be standing on-board by phones. But when you help people do their job well, and it’s in our enlightened interest because it’s all about students, then it isn’t going to be anything but well received.

Scarpino:         When you were there, Stephens was an all-women’s college.

Komives:         Still is.

Scarpino:         I thought they’d admitted some men, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been there.

Komives:         Well, they did then too. Stephens even then admitted like ten men into the theater program, so they could only be in the theater program. They took general ed courses and all that, too, but there weren’t many men at Stephens. So, my point is, the Denison experience taught me the small college environment is a personal credibility space. And being authentic and being trustworthy and being helpful to other people to help them do their jobs well was really important. So the VP job I took on at Stephens let me do even more of that, but also around a women’s college mission, which was so exciting. To be in a women’s institution where feminist leadership is what we were all about was really an exciting thing to see us try to enact. Then Tampa brought me down because they were having big retention problems and graduation rates were not high. And so what could we do for safety nets and to try to do things for students’ success so they’d stay at Tampa?

Scarpino:         Were you able to turn that trend around?

Komives:         Well, yes, we did at Tampa in one year see an increase of about ten percent reenrollment over the previous year, and then they dissolved the Division of Student Affairs.

Scarpino:         That’s the place you were talking about that just closed it all down.

Komives:         That’s right.

Scarpino:         In 1987, you made what appears to me to be a huge career decision. You moved from a position as Vice President for Student Development at the University of Tampa, to a tenure-track faculty position as an untenured assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. My mother told me I shouldn’t do this, but how old were you in 1987?

Komives:         In 1987, 42... 41...

Scarpino:         I could figure it out, but I didn’t. So you were in your early 40s, so you were not a newbie.

Komives:         I had been eighteen years in Student Affairs, and I’d been elected ACPA president. I had administrative jobs, but had that volunteer major leadership...

Scarpino:         In other words, you had years of service in a field in which you had established a reputation for yourself, you climbed the ladder of advancement and so on, and then you made this decision.

Komives:         Actually, when I was leaving Stephens and the Tampa job came up, I also interviewed for two presidencies at that point in my career. I decided not to do that, kind of like my assistant vice chancellor thing at Tampa -- at University of Tennessee... that just because I could do it, like, the next job always seems more doable because you can do that job, you’ve been around it all the time... So I was interviewing at 37 for a presidency and thought even though I could doesn’t mean I want to do that. Because in small colleges, which is where I would be situated, your whole job would be raising enough money to keep people employed. It wouldn’t be having soirees at the president’s house reading poetry on Sunday afternoon. Like, my husband planned that we would probably...

Scarpino:         No, you’d be the rainmaker.

Komives:         Yes, but it would be money-making. And what I’ve always done, every move I made, I applied for a faculty job – because I love ideas, and I love the learning environment, and I loved developing people’s potential. What better way to do that than if you can get a faculty position and do it all the time? So, that spring, as they dissolved the division, I applied for a number of vice presidencies, and had two offers out of that process as they were rolling in. And then Maryland called me and said, “You’ve been nominated, and we would really love to see you pursue this position.” Here was my chance to go that route. And what Maryland did that was just phenomenal for me, and I really appreciate this, because I was known by a lot of people there, some of them I’d even worked with twenty years earlier at the University of Tennessee, a couple of them. But, as that position unfolded for me, the academic department knew it was a risk they were taking because I was not a researcher yet. I had published, but it wasn’t...

Scarpino:         You’ve had a pretty respectable publication record.

Komives:         It wasn’t much for Maryland, but I had a professional reputation, and I had a professional leadership reputation with ACPA. What they did was be able to almost match my VP salary, so that I wasn’t losing income for my family to make the move, and I would then start as an assistant professor. And I thought well, at least this way I have a job or seven years. You know, if I don’t even get tenure there, it’s been more than the two that happened at Tampa. And our son would then be going into middle school because he was six and going to be starting first grade when we moved to Maryland. And that would be a time when you could move again, and I could go back into administration. But I wanted to be getting research teams together and doing writing, and accept the responsibilities of advancing scholarship, and I’d love to do that. It was a gift, my husband said, “Then what are waiting for? Let’s do what you dream about doing.”

Scarpino:         And so you decided to...

Komives:         Took the Maryland job.

Scarpino:         …in effect, except for the pay, to over, I mean, you start at the bottom, right?

Komives:         Oh, I didn’t feel that way...

Scarpino:         … earning tenure assistant professor...

Komives:         But I didn’t care about rank then. I’d already been a VP two places, it didn’t matter. I’ll tell you what was interesting was, I left a, in Tampa, our offices were in the old Tampa Bay Hotel that Henry Plant built, and with cupolas on the top, my office was a suite, a former suite of the hotel with a fireplace and my own bathroom. And I would go up to the University of Maryland, and I showed up at the academic department, and they figured out which room, and they took brooms out of it, it had been a closet, and it was going to be my junior faculty office. So, it was big enough for two chairs and a desk, and some books. I moved into that office.

Scarpino:         I’ve had an office like that.

Komives:         Yeah, but I did start over in rank, and I did have to go through the earning tenure process.

Scarpino:         I want to talk to you about some of your leadership related activities and publications while you were there at the University of Maryland. You were there from 1997 until you retired in 2012.

Komives:         ’87, yeah.

Scarpino:         In ’87...

Komives:         Yeah.

Scarpino:         Both a typo and my trifocals... I want to talk to you about this phase of your career, but I really need to ask you this: Did you know James MacGregor Burns while …?

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         Did you work with him?

Komives:         Yes. More indirectly, but Georgia Sorenson had started the Center for Political Participation and Leadership, largely to bring women and underrepresented groups into political life. And then as she connected with Burns through her own research and he agreed, he aligned himself with what became the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership and the Kellogg Grant. And I was then a fellow with the Academy, meaning going to their activities and participating as a fly on the wall and hearing him do things. But when he would come to campus for a three-week period each time he came, they were very interested in building his schedule to use his knowledge. So, I would always get him scheduled to come to one of my classes. So, my leadership educator got to read Burns and then have him come in and talk to them and with them. He didn’t talk at that, he was always a question asker – he would ask them the first question, and then see where the conversation went. I have pictures of me and Jim Burns together, and Jim and Georgia, and yeah, we did things together.

Scarpino:         I had to ask you. I interviewed him, and when we were done, he hugged me. Very nice man. At Maryland, you were the coordinator of a Navy LEAD – L-E-A-D Program from 2007 to 2012. And first I’m going to ask you what LEAD stands for, and then I would like you to talk about what that program was all about.

Komives:         I don’t remember what LEAD stands for…Leader… I really don’t know the official acronym.

Scarpino:         I can look it up, but the L stands for Leadership.

Komives:         Oh yeah, L is leadership. And I think we talked a little bit about this in our pre-interview, as a matter of fact. And this is kind of like a sideshow thing that I did, because my main job is still teaching Student Affairs Administration and College Student Development, and leadership educators and the leadership educator cycle. But, all of the military academies for cadets, like the Air Force Academy, West Point, the Naval Academy, they all have officers who are stationed to come in and work with them as midshipmen or as cadets or as whatever, and have leadership programs for them in that context. And West Point is aligned with, I think, Columbia University, the Air Force Academy with the University of Colorado. And the Naval Academy right there in Annapolis, Maryland, you know our state capitol, was working with some institution out in California, which never made much sense. So, the Naval Academy decided and what they would do is of the ten to twelve, maybe fifteen officers they were bringing in out of ships and whatever whose next assignment would be to head up these groups of midshipmen...

Scarpino:         At the Naval Academy.

Komives:         At the Naval Academy... they needed a year-long executive leadership development program is what this was. And they would then use that knowledge to teach leadership courses there, and to lead these brigades or whatever the units were of midshipmen or cadets or whatever. So, they invited Johns Hopkins and Maryland and I think Georgetown to submit bids, you know, requests for proposal kind of process. And Maryland put together a bid to have this program be aligned -- they would be coming to classes in person at Maryland at the university in our classrooms, and Maryland put together a bid that involved the military sociology people, the IO psych people, and the college student personnel program in my counseling department that we were in, because we knew college student... these are college students getting college degrees at the Air Force Academy or, in this case, the Naval Academy. And, so, we knew student development, we knew how 18- to 22-year-olds developed and how that process worked, how they learned, how they best learned social identity, all kinds of things. Our program was going to teach them how to be faculty for college students who just happened to dress funny, you know, and wear uniforms to class. And, so, we taught them like three courses in their program. We taught them the leadership course. We taught them college student development. We taught some other third course. And I coordinated that and the meetings we had on that, and I brought my doctoral students in, of course, to teach those courses. And in my last year when I was phasing into, or not phasing, but because of retirement I couldn’t be directly as involved. One of them even headed up our dimension of the program and he went on to be a faculty member, and used that as his curriculum development experience.

Scarpino:         So, these, your students, were officers in the Navy who were then going to be detailed to Annapolis to teach cadets. These would have been captains and majors?

Komives:         Yeah, and there were some marines in there, too. They were officers. I don’t remember… because my son is in the Air Force, I know their ranks, but I forget the Navy rank system. But they were already officers.

Scarpino:         Were there any particular rewards or challenges associated with teaching military officers?

Komives:         Every stereotype we had about what they’d be like went out the window the minute they showed up in their first class. They were eager students. They were thrilled to be home, you know because they came off of... matter of fact, graduation, every year graduation a year later, there’d be all these little baby buggies parked out at graduation because they’d come home to their wives or husbands and they actually went through family building kind of processes as young people. But they were marvelous students. Their job was to go to school and be prepared, they took that seriously. They were bright, and we were teaching them and exposing them to things like social identity. We talked about LGBT development, we talked about racism, whiteness theories, we taught them lots of things. The kind of feedback we got was inspiring because they said, “nobody’s ever shared this with me,” or “I know I’m not supposed to talk about it, but you’ve made it okay in this classroom to do that. And I feel heard, or I feel seen.” And then we would always turn that back and say, “Okay, you’ve got students sitting out there in your classes who need to know you see them and you hear them too, and that you show them that you see them as a person.” I know there are other goals they have to meet, but we got marvelous feedback from them on the curriculum that we developed, how prepared they felt, because “you’re going to have a student come in and say they feel like committing suicide, you’re going to have a student come in and say they need an abortion. Students go through adult things in life and you may be the person they turn to, so how do you learn to have some comfort in dealing with being that faculty member for them?”

Scarpino:         Did you learn anything about leadership from them?

Komives:         Well, yes. Now, my grad students had the pleasure of teaching them directly. I was then supervising the grad students. But they learned a lot about how to bring those voices, you know, into the process when they were fearful that they shouldn’t maybe say anything. You know, if you’re supposed to ask and tell, then how do you bring it up in class? Well, we are the higher-ed institution that just will, and you deal with it, you know.

Scarpino:         You were Faculty Director of Minor in Leadership Studies from 2007 to 2012, what did that entail?

Komives:         First of all, Maryland has always had been a place that’s had leadership courses. We’ve had four to six or seven leadership courses taught largely through the Student Activities Office, and through the Student Affairs professionals on campus who would teach those. And, Maryland didn’t offer minors for a long time. You couldn’t get a minor at Maryland, it was just majors. And there were some concentrations and things, but they finally approved minors. So, we submitted, largely through Julie Owen and Craig Slack, who was the director of Student Activities. I was the faculty person on it, Julie was a GA in the office at that time...

Scarpino:         Graduate assistant... so she was a doctoral student...

Komives:         Yes, yes. And Craig was the director of the Student Activities Office. And we developed, and Julie did a lot of leg work on this, developed the minor in Leadership, all the paperwork and the curriculum. I then worked it through the faculty committee system, and we were able to get that minor approved officially at the university. And then it was credit-offered out of my academic department, because that’s where the courses had been launched. And they administered the minor, and I was the faculty director of it, so for curriculum changes for looking over the teaching evaluations, but they managed the system.

Scarpino:         You mentioned the fact that you were a Senior Scholar, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, what did that entail? I mean, there’s a title, but what responsibility comes with the title?

Komives:         Like many things, an academy can be a holding space for people who need a place. Like, sometimes a retired senator would align with the academy to have an office and a place to do things from. In terms of those of us that were on campus as fellows, we would usually look for a project we could align that would benefit the academy and benefit the campus. When I became a fellow, I agreed to, and actually we brainstormed this and I said I’d love to take that on. I headed up a leadership scholars network. And so anybody interested in the scholarship around leadership research and scholarship could come once a month to presentation and networking and meeting, and they provided the lunch. The provost’s office even paid for some of this, because it got all these people from different departments, and also people from athletics and the Human Resources Office, and the grad school, and, people who are interested in the scholarship… I made a point to say, we’re not saying roles, it’s not just for teachers in the classroom, it’s for anybody interested in leadership scholarship. So, we had these… and people in the community started coming to these. We would have fifteen to forty people depending on the topic, and always started about a half-hour late so people eat and visit and network, and then have a presentation and discussion. And it created wonderful networks across campus that broke down roles, flattened a lot of traditional hierarchies so that a faculty member from the College of Business might call me to be on a doctoral student’s committee because we met at those and they knew I had an interest in the topic. Or I would ask someone from Psych to be on one of my doctoral student committees because they were really cool, and they studied college students, too, and I didn’t even know it, you know, but they could be on a committee. And two of us put a grant together, proposal, that were across disciplines, but we could be in each other’s lives, we could network. We also started, not through the Burns Academy, but Craig Slack and Activities started a leadership educator network. He brought together people doing leadership education, like Human Resources, ROTC joined that network, that was Air Force ROTC. People from RA, the Residence Life people that were doing all the RA training, the orientation office with OA education, Orientation Advisors. They had regular monthly sessions and I went to a lot of those where they would, like, take the latest … like, the string slide, they would take that, figure out their own, how could you use it in your teaching, if the students took it, how would you use it in training? It was, how do you develop pedagogues that would be useful in a variety of settings? One group was doing scholarship, and there was a lot of overlap. Some people, like me, went to both, but I organized the one for the scholars.

Scarpino:         One was Scholarship, one was Teaching....

Komives:         One was Scholarship, one was Education.

Scarpino:         ... education. I don’t know about the University of Maryland, but that sort of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary cooperation isn’t common on university campuses.

Komives:         No... but it doesn’t have to be that way, so we did it.

Scarpino:         To what degree did you help drive that along?

Komives:         Oh, a lot. A lot of that was, I think I had credibility, I mean I was known across campus in a variety of ways. When you invite people in, they’re thrilled to be asked. So the people not normally invited, like HR, or the VP’s office for Student Affairs were thrilled to be invited to something that’s intellectually challenging around a topic that you can share with your faculty. And the faculty found marvelous people they didn’t know had this brilliance and background. It was a win-win, to breakdown stereotypes and...

Scarpino:         You held a title, CSP Program Director, and you had it ’97 to 2001, 2004 to 2007, 2011 to 2012. What is that, CSP?

Komives:         College Student Personnel.

Scarpino:         All right, okay.

Komives:         Our academic department was Counseling and Personnel Services, and in it are various specialties. CSP was a big specialty, we were probably the largest of the programs. There was Counseling Psychology, School of Psychology, Counselor Education. We had a counseling-based program, and I headed, for various times... my partner in this was Mary Lou McKuene. She and I were the only two faculty for a long time, and she would be program chair, or I would be, depending on who’s going on sabbatical next. Then we got a third faculty member, and then a fourth. We ended up with about a five faculty by the time I was retiring. I was chair on and off through that process.

Scarpino:         I’m going to talk about some of your publications, just to get some information out here. In 1997, I think this one already came up, you wrote “The Role of Leadership Programs for Students: CAS Standards Contextual Statement. It’s in a book by T.K. Miller, who edited the The CAS Book of Professional Standards for Higher Education, Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education. Let’s get this in one place: CAS stands for?

Komives:         Council for the Advancement of Standards.

Scarpino:         All right. What is the significance of this, of the Council for the Advancement of Standards and you writing “The Role of Leadership Programs for Students, CAS Standards?

Komives:         Let me give some background to what the significance is. One of the things we haven’t talked about is when I came to Maryland in ’87, one of the things the vice chancellor and I wanted to get started was a National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs. It needed a hub, it needed a place that people could kind of find and connect ideas around, and there’s a whole set of stories about that. One of the things we also wanted to do working with a couple of associations, was bring leadership educators together that we knew were doing good things out there in higher ed but didn’t know each other and weren’t finding each other because they go to different association meetings and all. We did a whole lot of bench-marking and tapped about twenty people who had paid their own way to come to Maryland for two summers in a row for these National Leadership Symposiums. And out of that we developed things that would meet the needs of developing a field of leadership education, like new definitions of community that were more diverse-accepting, like starting a standard of practice for leadership programs. What things you must do to be a good program? What things would be optional? If you say you have a leadership program, what is it you’d better be providing that would be authentic and credible to students and the campus? That CAS standard came out of one of those leadership symposiums that I and three or four others then developed further, and took the CAS. CAS had existed since 1979, it was fairly new. It is voluntary standards of practice for particularly assessing the impact of programs and services for students and what outcomes they should be helping the campus create. CAS, then, has standards in all these different functional areas, and we asked them to create a standard for student leadership programs. And we presented with them one then that...

Scarpino:         So they did this at your request, or you and your colleagues.

Komives:         Yes. We asked them to adopt one, which isn’t their typical process we then find out. So CAS took ours and worked their magic with it, because they have some boiler-plate language that has to be in there, but they adopted it. Word-for-word, they went through it, adopted it, and then it went into the Book of Standards that is used for campuses looking at reaccreditation. When middle states or the Southern Association are coming, how do you make sure your Student Affairs programs are doing quality work at the level for your type of institution that should be expected?

Scarpino:         What are they measuring?

Komives:         It’s voluntary. But it’s a standard the profession agrees to. I then eventually went on the CAS Board, and then I became president of CAS in 2008, I think. It’s a confederation of about 42 national associations in high-ed already, all the way from college police officers to food service, to residence life, to orientation, to counseling centers. All those areas have their own associations and this is a confederation of them on the board of directors who approve standards across the ...

Scarpino:         What is the significance for getting CAS standards for leadership development?

Komives:         It was significant to be approved and part of that package. But also, then, anybody out there who is looking to create a leadership program can say, “Where do I begin?” And you say, “Go to the CAS standard, and it lets you know things you must do and things that you could do if you’re able to.” But you must have a mission statement. And your mission statement should be jointly developed with your campus, faculty and students, and it must be published. So, there’s some ‘musts’ that, oh yeah, I guess I need a vision statement. But it's a clear guide to what the field would say is quality, professional practice in people doing leadership education and the co-curriculum.

Scarpino:         I’m going to mention two of your publications, then ask you some questions. We have one called “Developing of a Leadership Identity: A Grounded Theory,” with you, Julie Owen, Susan D. Longerbeam, Felicia...

Komives:          Mainella...

Scarpino:        Mainella, Laura Osteen, Journal of College Student Development, November/December 2005. Basically, I pulled out a line or two... “universities were invited to nominate students who were exemplars of relational leadership who exhibited the theoretical dimensions of relational leadership.” The second one is you and John P. Dugan, The Handbook for Student Leadership, which you’ve already mentioned.

Komives:         That had more people in it. That handbook had, like, five people too.

Scarpino:         Okay, well...

Komives:         John Dugan and I have done articles on the multi-institutional study of leadership.

Scarpino:         This...

Komives:         I can tell you how this evolved...

Scarpino:         Yeah, I mean, you were writing in there about grounded theory associated with developing leadership identity. I was interested in what that grounded theory was, and how you explain or define leadership identity. In other words, where were you going with this? And then we can talk about the relational leadership model, which you’ve already brought up. But what did you mean by grounded theory?

Komives:         Grounded theory is a research methodology and qualitative methods that the outcome then becomes the methods that one uses primarily interviewing. Around having purpose of sampling of some kind around what you then engage in some series of interviews and usually over a long duration, like, might be three, couple-hour each interviews, so you’re developing that over time. And then you’re developing a connection of concepts that relate to the phenomena you’re studying to see if across the subjects of that study, if that hangs together as a theory then you then want to test out to see if this informs how you look at that phenomena in other people, and help explain it, or train for it, or predict it, or whatever. Grounded theory is a qualitative methodology. You’re not trying to prove something. You’re not trying to do random sampling and having generalizable findings, that’s quantitative methods. Good qualitative methods are trying to bring understanding, reveal meaning and relation of concepts, that you decide then by their credibility of the work that was done if it’s something you can apply to the people you know or the work you’re doing. In this case, what I was going to say to go back and pick a little bit up on; once you develop a model of some kind, or some kind of conceptual model, like the relational leadership model was a conceptual model Nance and Tim and I created out of our experience. But, then, the next you want to do is test it somehow. You want to see if you can bring some understanding to it by a research project. And in this case, how that develops was interesting. How does someone become able to know they’re a leader no matter what kind of setting they’re in or even if they’re not in charge of the group? But they know that it’s inclusive and ethical and it’s about purpose and they’re known to be somebody who is able to do that well. And you know people who can, and some who can’t. If someone’s good at that, how did they become good at that? Well, we used the purpose of sampling method of intensity sampling. We wanted people who evidenced this most all the time, and when you watched someone in action, they were really good at doing that. So we went to people who observed students and are around them a lot, like the director of the band, and a coach, and the director of the Honors Program, and hall directors, and we went to people that observed students working with other students in groups, the advisor of the Senior Council in student government and all that. We wanted a diverse group of people, and from that we selected those who were seniors so they had had a time to have college influence their development, because we wanted to know about that. But they also evidenced it as an identity. They could say comfortably, yeah, I’m a leader. And they also did it in this way. We weren’t interested in other ways. I didn’t care about people who had commanded and bossed people around. We wanted people who could do this approach well. And from that, we found the wonderful connections of actually a developmental model, that they started off as youngsters in leader awareness, whereas leadership is out there, but it’s other people, or it’s my mother, or Superman, or it’s God, you know, it’s the pastor at church, but it’s not me or my peers. None of us are... it’s out there. And then it becomes the second stage of that where you start to develop leadership awareness. I think it’s... I’ve forgotten my own stages here, but in leader awareness, you start joining groups, you’re participating, then you realize you’re working with other people. You may be good at it, you may like it. Someone says to you, someone gives you affirmation that you’re doing good, and then you get into leader identified. So, you’re identified as a leader. And that’s where you pretty much see leadership as hierarchical. And if you are the leader, others are dependent on you. If you’re a follower, you’re dependent on the leader. You want to help the leader do good, or vice versa. Then you go through -- and there are transition stages in all these. Then you go through a transition and there are things that happen in this very important transition that college influences, and I can describe those... but you get to this big interdependent stage where you realize leadership is really differentiated. Leadership is process. Sometimes you’re a leader, sometimes not. You still have a leader identity, but you may not be in a role of positional leader, but you know you’re doing leadership when you’re active in the group, contributing to it, and you’re comfortable in those settings doing that. Then we have the generativity, which is, you want to help other people learn to be better at leadership. You want to make sure that some of the things you started in your organization are sustainable and continue. And then you get the leader identified, which is, it’s part of you now. It’s part of you wherever you go. You could go to your first job and they’d say, “Would you chair a committee on something, or be on this committee?” And you say, “Yeah, I’ll be glad to do that.” 

Scarpino:         Part of the task here was to find seniors at the university who fit this trajectory.

Komives:         No, seniors who evidenced this kind of leadership and then see how it developed and it turned out to be this developmental trajectory.

Scarpino:         The research product was figuring out what this developmental trajectory was.

Komives:         Yeah, and then if you’ve seen the graphic model, things were happening at each stage. Aspects of the self started interacting with the groups that one’s in. You don’t just develop leadership all in a garret by yourself writing books. As you engage with other people, you’re learning things about you and them and you have continuity in some of those memberships. So, those things engage. And then you start going through other stages of seeing leadership differently and then seeing yourself differently in it, and then it becomes this interdependence. One of them did not evidence... well let me say this, there’s something called a negative case analysis. We developed a theory that everyone was in those interdependent stages. The people who nominated them really did see them clearly and that was good. We had one person who didn’t, but that was good, too, because it fit, it showed the model worked. That person wasn’t there yet. That person was still in hierarchy as their view of leadership.

Scarpino:         You did the research project. You worked with these seniors. You developed this hierarchy.

Komives:         Developmental model.

Scarpino:         Developmental model... so, what I’m going to do is just list the steps that you just talked about narratively. Do you understand what I’m asking you to do? In other words, the steps somebody went through.

Komives:         Okay. A person... they all have a story and I won’t go into the stories. That would take too long.

Scarpino:         In other words, I’m thinking about somebody who’s coming to this cold.

Komives:         There are a couple of articles on it and it’s used lots of places and it is also, I will go through the steps. I want to say the way this has been useful to us is, one might use a certain theory of leadership in their leadership program, like “Servant Leadership” by Robert Greenleaf. The LID model – leadership, identity, development – then becomes a scaffolding of complexity and how you might approach elements of servant leadership’s concepts to students who are at different stages of their own identity. They would see things differently. They would meet new challenges in it. So, you build a program that has more complexity. The basic story of the model would be to say the youngster, and it’s not age-based, we’re not saying that these have ages attached. But there were some sequencing of experiences that happen, so, someone who is a youngster and quite young doesn’t see leadership as anything to do with them. It’s always external and often a public figure like the president or their mother, but it’s not a personal thing. They then start raising their awareness about leadership by being in groups and seeing even peers, they begin to realize peers can be leaders. And they’re enjoying the group experience, they’re learning to relate to other people. They don’t see themselves as a leader necessarily, but they’re seeing it’s happening. They’re identifying there’s something going on here. Then the leader-identified stage is the leader does leadership, followers do followership. And the leader’s job is to get the job done, and in some way engage the followers in doing that, hopefully nicely, but it might not be. And sometimes you do it all by yourself as the leader because you don’t want to trust other people to do it so you put out the yearbook by yourself your senior year in high school, and wonder why everybody hates you. So, there’s that stage. Now, most people in the United States believe that’s what leadership is, is leader-follower, where the responsibility is is with the leader, because we grow up in organizational hierarchies, and that’s how we’ve learned it to be. Then this transition starts to happen. Like, the job is too complex for you to do by yourself and you realize you’ve got to depend on other people or it won’t get done, or other people should. Or you learn some language of leadership and you begin to see some other capacities that you have that you really are doing but didn’t know that was leadership. Or, I mean things start happening. Or you are in a minoritized group, like a gay male in the group, or a black student who now your leadership is being attributed differently by other people and you realize that you should own your wonderful inclusion that you’re doing. Then you get into the interdependence with everybody needing each other. And you see leadership as a process, and that it’s fluid, that you can be a leader and be a participant or be a follower, but you have an identity now of: I know how to do leadership to some degree, I’m comfortable with that, and I can play any role in the group and be contributing to its success. And then I want to make sure others behind me get good opportunities and that I can help bring them along. So, I want to make sure the officer who follows me has a good chance of being successful at it by leaving them the notes that I have in my notebook, and all that. And you then, in more complex stage of the leader identified, it’s a part of your identity, just like being male or female, or what your race is, I can be a leader. I mean, I am. I’m not one who can’t get anything done or is… I see my interdependence with others and that I need to be part of a process. Now, those aren’t necessarily better stages, they are more complex than they fit this theory, but most people are in most of our culture values, leader, follower, leader identified stages. And, so our question, the key question to determine that is, what do you think leadership is now, and what did you used to think it was? And when I ask a student that, or anybody that, and if they say well, the leader is in charge and the follower is supposed... that’s a leadership-identified. Good. How can you be good at that, be real good at that? But someone might say, “Well, I used to think it was when the follower could boss everybody around. Now, I see we need each other. And if I don’t have a group that has talents that I’m missing, we’re not going to get anything done. We need a talent-filled group, so I try to get people in my group who bring things I don’t...” well, they’re in a more advanced stage.

Scarpino:         Is it common for people to go all the way through that process as undergraduates? Not everyone of course...

Komives:         No. And some, probably most college students are in, like most adult humans in Western culture are in, the leadership identified stage. But many do. It’s a more comfortable way of being for some women. So, some that are more relationally-oriented anyway find in this approach that what I’m doing is leadership. That’s so affirming to realize, I am a leader when I am doing those things, and I need to honor and trust that. And then for some men to realize, I need to either change some ways I have approached things, because I have been victim of toxic masculinity. Or, that my caring side that values relationships with people is really treasured in groups, and I should honor that. So, we begin to see things change.

Scarpino:         You were, I think, a primary investigator on a multi-institutional study of leadership. You presented the findings that ILA in November of 2006 with John Dugan and Julie Owen. At that point, I think there were fifty-two participating institutions with different levels of leadership programming. The sample size, 165,701. Respondents, 63,095, return rate of 38 percent, which in my world is astonishing. We’ve already talked about who Julie Owen and John Dugan were. Can you talk about, what was this multi-institutional study of leadership? What was its purpose?

Komives:         Absolutely. Well, just like we talked about, the relational leadership model got developed and the research study out of that became this grounded theory. When we developed the social change model of leadership, which was done with a grant out of UCLA, and that’s a major.. that was an Eisenhower Grant from the federal government. There’s a certainly big story behind it. I was so honored to be asked to be a part of that group. There were about ten people, or nine people. And we wanted to develop a youth leadership model in the ‘90s to get away from all of that terrible corporate stuff that was not what people wanted to be teaching students. That model then got readily adopted, social change model. So, it had, it had seven C’s to it. It had an individual set of C’s of things that we thought the individual needs to expand capacity. There’s a group set of characteristics, and then there’s the community, and we call those citizenship values, around social change. So, the individual values are consciousness of self; commitment; and congruence. The group set of values are common purpose; collaboration; controversy with civility; and the citizenship value for community and society, I mean the value for that one is citizenship, which meant both being an engaged citizen of any organization or community you’re in that matters to you, but also how coalitions of groups can work together to accomplish change at a community kind of level, all around social change. That model had been developed. One of my doctoral teams back at Maryland, I had a doctoral team that was shadowing me in that experience, one of them started developing a measure of that model, and she did that for her dissertation, Tracy Tyree, so she developed the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale. Another one used the data for his dissertation on leadership with LGBT students. So, the team was really working to advance it, to try to study it. And then John Dugan became the Assistant Director of Student Activities and one of my doc students, and John and Julie were talking one day about, “We really need a national database.” This is for the field had evolved by 2003 or ‘4. “We need a national database that’s theoretically grounded in some model that people are using that we can test and see how to improve it.”

Scarpino:         And this would be the social change model.

Komives:         And this would be the social change model... and we need to have diverse types of institutions and a lot of diverse people, and we wanted to do what is called critical quant work. So, it was going to be quantitative, because we could have giant sample sizes, but do it critically so that we were asking about transgender status, and dealing with race and racial salience in more complex ways than studies had been doing. And even so these Native American students, for example, the criticism about quant research is often they’re the asterisk that says not enough sample to analyze because they’re more…well, a study this large, we were going to get enough people and you could look at transgender students, Native American students, Latina. So, anyway, John and Julie were talking about, “We really need a national database, and Tracy’s instrument might be useful.” And John came over and said, “Would you join us in a project; we would like to do a project, but we know we can’t, we would like you to be in our project.” I said, “That’s perfect. That’s exactly what we need to be doing.” So John and I were the co-PIs. We decided for the first administration of the instrument nationally that we would select fifty diverse campuses that we picked from around the country of those who applied to be in the study. That we would therefore get institutional diversity, community colleges, private, regional, etc. And that they could do a comparison sample if they wanted to add subjects, but they would do a certain size sample if they so big, and the whole population if they were a certain size. And, we would give them reports matching their type of institution to the other types so you could have comparison groups. A really wonderful design. We had a nineteen-member research team of Student Affairs professionals, me as a faculty member, master’s and doctoral grad students, some who didn’t even know the statistics yet because they hadn’t had the course. But, and they all did it volunteer, nobody was paid to be in this. I mean, I had a job.

Scarpino:         You had an Eisenhower Grant that was somehow...

Komives:         No, no, no, no, no... that was the grant that developed the model, that was the UCLA grant. We were now working with that as the theoretical model, and we were using Tracy’s instrument that had been developed for her dissertation and revised it some. We put the call out for that. And this is also the peak and the height of the Assessment Movement. So, campuses were desperate for assessment data and information that they could show how their students stacked up with others, and what they were learning or not learning. We had presidents calling us, and provosts calling us saying, “Please pick us, we need to be in your study because we need this data.” Well, we picked fifty places, and the beauty of it is, my department just thought this was amazing. They said, “How did you find all this?” I said, “They paid to be in it.” So, we’ve charged them $2,000 or something like that for which they would get a data disc back and…

Scarpino:         And they did it... they paid.

Komives:         Yeah, sure, and they worked with their ... we had some scholarships and things that we got a grant for, but mostly they paid through contracting with us for it. So, we ended up with, it turned out, and HBCUs were in it, and community colleges. We picked fifty-two campuses in the bottom, and we worked them all through. IRB, and how do we administer it and ….

Scarpino:         Institutional Review Board for people who don’t follow this.

Komives:         That was so successful and took us… we got beautiful reports. John did a great job with this in particular, but beautiful reports back out to the campuses. Then two years later we decided to do it again, but open it up to anybody who would just like to do it, and then offered it basically every other year, and then annually. And it’s gone on annually then for about ten years since then. So, now it’s about a 500,000-student database if you amalgamated all of them. And it’s about 400 campuses, some of whom have been in it ten times. Because every two years they might do it to track the development of the improvement of the programs on their campus and doing leadership.

Scarpino:         Is that all U.S. campuses?

Komives:         No. The design is for U.S. campuses, but we started having campuses from Canada asked to be in it, so we re-normed some of the instrument to fit the Canadian. For example, we used a word like “proctor” instead of “faculty advisor.” So, you change some words. And then, the University of Monterey wanted to be in it, in Mexico, and John is fluent in Spanish and translated it, and then they back-translated so we made sure it said what we were asking and administered it there. And, we published an article on the psychometric subhead in that Spanish version from Mexico, and those students ranked higher than the U.S. norm students on this model. Then it got picked up in Qatar and other places in Europe, and so it has, it now has ten or eleven countries that are involved on same basis administering this.

Scarpino:         You were co-founder of National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs.

Komives:         Yes.

Scarpino:         What was that?

Komives:         That was when I came to Maryland in ’87, when Bud Thomas, the vice chancellor, he asked me, because he’s paying part of my salary. Remember, they brought me in at a nice salary. Well, that’s because Student Affairs contributed to that salary. And I said, “What would you like me to do to be helpful to Student Affairs?” He said, “Well, I hope it’s leadership things like you want.” I said, “Absolutely.” So, he agreed to fund a GA and have Maryland host the National Center for Leadership Programs that now is still going on, at this point 30-some years later. And we sponsored activities in like that National Symposium, a newsletter. They added, not of my doing, but added a Leadership Educator Institute every other December, and it’s for people who are new, like the boss says, “Start a leadership program here.” And you go, “Where do I go to do that?” Well, you go to the Leadership Educator Institute where that’s all that it’s about. You’re there the whole time, all about college leadership education. And there are other groups that have come along too, like Association for Leadership Educators. But this clearinghouse sponsors that activity. We’re building a network and a community and practice of leadership educators that will do quality work because of the CAS standard, and are bringing scholarship out on a regular basis that advances these approaches.

Scarpino:         You were co-author with Nance, right, Lucas? Timothy...

Komives:         McMahon...

Scarpino:         McMahon...

Komives:         Uh-huh.

Scarpino:         ... of Exploring Leadership for College Student Who Want to Make a Difference,                           originally published in 2013. I believe it’s in its third edition.

Komives:         That is a third edition. It was originally published in 1998. The first one was ’98.

The relational leadership model is in that, yeah, and then we’ve had two editions since then.

Scarpino:         Okay. As I looked through that, and when I was reading the preface, I ran across this quote, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about. It says, “leadership is not something possessed by only a select few people in high positions. We are all involved in the leadership process, and we are all capable of being effective leaders. Through collaboration with others you can make a difference from any place within a group or organization, whether as the titled leader or as an active member.” We kind of already talked about this, but I’m going to ask you a question anyhow and try to get this in one place. When somebody reads this whole thing, how do you want them to conclude that we are all involved in the leadership process?

Komives:         I think any group of people that are together, that’s informal or formal, informal might be a friendship group, for example. Formal is an office, you know, staff. But any group that gets together is engaging in a process that helps them do their work together and advance some purpose or mission. And that I’m calling the leadership process

Scarpino:         Third edition, and that’s my mistake on dates here, the third edition is the 2013, but first one was in 1998. If you had to set modesty aside, how would you assess the impact of this publication? Third edition now.

Komives:         Well, I’ve been thrilled with its impact. It met a need. I mean, that was one of the first textbooks out then. It’s full of quotes from students about their experience and how they came to an awareness. It’s full of things that apply to the student experience. People found it very teachable. There’s an instructor manual that went with it free, that allow for activities and PowerPoint, you know, ways to actually... you take good people who want to deliver a good model that they do like, and we provide the teaching materials and tools, and they were able to then use that and... I have students come up, I’ll you one example of... I have to give you a couple of examples, but one is: It used to be when I would be teaching at Maryland, students would come in and want to be in my Leadership Educator class, and they could spell the word leadership, but that was about all they knew about it. They never studied it. And then it got to be, people came in to Maryland, and they said, “I had your book my freshman year in college and it made me want to go into this field, and I wanted to come here and study because Maryland was doing good things.” Or, “I went to Florida State because I had that book,” or whatever it was. So, the book affirmed for lots of people that, if there are people out there wanting to use this approach, I want to be part of that, not only for my life, but I could do a career and be a part of that somehow. My son goes off to Purdue his first year and he called me and he said, “Mom, I’m in a leadership class. Guess whose book we’re using?”

Scarpino:         It was that one...

Komives:         And it was that one. And I said, “Well, how’s it going?” He said, “Well, I’m hiding out. I don’t put my last name on my name tag.” And he said, “I’ll wait till about the third week to tell people, you know, who I am.” And someone outed him, and said, “Isn’t your last name the same as the lady who wrote this book?” So that was really funny. But, I often had people say, “I hadn’t read anything in high school or up to now that had connected me with me, and helped me see how I could do this better.” So, I think, we’ve been tickled to see the resource it provided for leadership educators, and then the response for students who use it.

Scarpino:         I’m going to respect the time here, and I’m going to ask you some wrap-up questions, but...

Komives:         I’m sorry we’re out of time, I mean, I’m loving this.

Scarpino:         No, I mean, we’re probably going to run a few minutes, but I don’t want to really abuse this, so... As you think about the United States and the general state of the world today, significant political divisions in the United States, somewhat of a little threat to popular sovereignty and democratic government, changing climate and the climate crisis as a direct result of human action, poverty in the midst of plenty, war in Ukraine, I mean I could keep spinning this out, do you think that in this country and in the world we’re facing a leadership crisis?

Komives:         Absolutely, sure. I mean, how can you say we aren’t from that?

Scarpino:         What do you think is the nature of that crisis? How do you connect these things up with leadership?

Komives:         Well, there are many discussions about issues where the solution always posed is, we need more and better leaders. That’s often the resolution that some analysis comes to. I think we’re also going to now need more and better ethics, and more and better value-based decisions, and more and better commitment to a greater good than the individual outcomes that people seem to be advancing. It’s really discouraging. I am very discouraged to look at some of these status things. I think if I were to place effort and money anywhere right now, I would be taking us back to a democratic citizenship and principles of civic engagement and civic leadership with courage. The kind of courage to say, we’ve got to talk about how this country has handled Native Americans and black people, and we’ve got to look at the systems and structures that perpetuate oppression or discrimination, or learn how to listen and talk with each other. But this is really discouraging. A terrible thing for me was when Congress became a place where compromise is a bad word, and if you compromised you weren’t enough of a party loyal to have the confidence of your party. Then we’ve lost everything. Once compromise is gone – you can have differences of opinion and vote differently, but if you couldn’t see that you could give and take for a greater good, then that was the death knell to me of terrible things were coming.

Scarpino:         But that really reflects a crisis of leadership, isn’t it?

Komives:         Oh, yeah.

Scarpino:         When Congress doesn’t seem to be able to compromise...

Komives:         Yes, and we could all use examples of that now, and we’re…. yes, exactly. And that worries me, how do we get out of that? Matter of fact, I used to say, “I wish we could enroll Congress in some of these courses, you know”...

Scarpino:         Well, that’s my next question, do you see a way forward?

Komives:         Well, I would choose to do it through youth. So we’re working through people who are going to go out and be these leaders and become the people in their communities that hopefully would bring better approaches and values to that. The public leadership people are working on their level, the sustainability people. There’s lots of us working on this, and somehow it’s if you work in your sector, you can try to... I’m not going to be able to probably try to change Congress much, other than voting and working for candidates or whatever. But I can work with youth to see that we can do this differently, and hopefully they would take that forward. But it’s going to take all people working in leadership at all levels, public, NGOs, leadership practices in general. And, yes, you’ve got to have hope. I remember years ago, Elie Wiesel addressed one of our national conferences, and at the end he took a question from the audience... he took questions of all things...

Scarpino:         Elie Wiesel you said...

Komives:         Elie Wiesel, yeah, Dr. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, marvelous person... but he took questions from the audience, and this one young man asked him, “After all you’ve been through, how have you maintained such hope?” And he paused like 30 seconds, a long time from the stage, and he said, “What’s the alternative?” There is no alternative to hope, and I would add to that, critical hope. Critical hope means we look at how we can do things better as a community with regard for each other, but build on the need for equity and knowing that there’s struggle through that process. And if we don’t acknowledge the struggle, you now, that some people are going to be fearful or angry and not happy, then you can’t whitewash that away. You’ve got to deal with that. Like my James Baldwin quote, “Not everything that’s faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced.”

Scarpino:         Professionally, personally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you?

Komives:         Well, Obama did. I was thrilled when Obama was elected. And his intelligence, and his interest in bringing people together, I was then constantly disappointed when Congress wouldn’t just support what are seeming to me logically good ideas and approaches. But I certainly looked up to Obama. I looked up to Hillary Clinton, I think she had also vision. But those are political leaders. I mean, there are people close to me that I looked up to and admired. The president of the University of Maryland, Brit Kirwan, who would be a white male president standing at press conferences saying, “This institution has discriminated in its history of black people, and we, indeed, need to be putting money into scholarships for black Marylanders to come to this institution to undo what has been harm that we have caused people.” I mean, to have a leader like that who would even say, “we’ve been wrong, and we’ve got to do something better,” that’s somebody you admire because it was a courageous statement. Maryland was under a desegregation order even in my time there in the ‘80s.

Scarpino:         Professionally, what sustains you?

Komives:         What sustains me?

Scarpino:         Yes.

Komives:         Oh, relationships and the people. The chance to work with people who have a shared vision that we know we can all do our part for. It’s not a competitive thing. I think every association I’m in is full of people mostly who really want everything to be better, and we can all do a part in that.

Scarpino:         When you look back on your career, what are you proudest of?

Komives:         The generativity of all the people I had a chance to bring along with me in it who are doing wonderful and even better things than I did. You know, they’re out there taking on the new challenges and being willing to be the people who take on some of the societal problems and I’m ready to now go to bed and retire and go to sleep on. And then also, two marvelous kids and grandchildren and, you know, the family pieces you have to acknowledge.

Scarpino:         Yes, grandchildren are wonderful. Again, as you look at your career, are there some things that you wish would have been different, would have turned out differently?

Komives:         I’d have to say no, because you know other opportunities then came along. I wish they hadn’t dissolved the Division of Student Affairs at Tampa, but if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gone to Maryland. And that came, that Maryland, if they called me… if the Division was making progress in Tampa and they called and said, “Would you apply for this faculty job?” I’d say, “Oh, I’d love to, but no. We’re really finally getting things turned around here.” I wouldn’t have done that. I might have been a college president, but I’d already decided I didn’t need to do that.

Scarpino:         The fact that Tampa pulled the rug out from under you was really something that helped change your career and your life.

Komives:         Sure, and the key thing is, I realized how resilient I am. And I realized how the hard and good work I tried to do was really seen by people as valuable, and that I was going to be okay. I can support my family and be fine.

Scarpino:         I don’t mean this question to sound morbid, but what do you hope your legacy will be? How do you want to be remembered?

Komives:         Boy, it feels that way, you feel like you’re at your own funeral at these legacy award things when you get all this... I’m getting amazing feedback and wonderful support from so many people. So, I think I want the legacy to be that she helped shape and create a field of leadership education to bring collaborative approaches that people courageously can use to try and make the world a better place. And that I helped a whole lot of people feel empowered to do that in their own work, and that that, exponentially, has grown.

Scarpino:         I’ve got three more questions that are relatively short ones: We talked, maybe it was this morning, about you when you were 19 years old. So, suppose you were a Dr. Who or somebody, and you had a magic TARDIS machine and you could talk to your own 19-year-old self, what would you tell her?

Komives:         I would probably say, “Keep it up.” You know, that what you’re doing and the person you are is going to carry you well into your adult life, that your future is going to be fine. So, trust your gut and know that those good values are going to keep going. I wouldn’t go back and change something. I wouldn’t, oh, I wish I was thinner, or I wish I was... those things you just forget about it somewhere. Being old means you don’t have to fold your stomach in anymore, you know, like that’s nice.

Scarpino:         I’ll remember that.

Komives:         The way I framed it when I’ve used it in speeches, when I saw those posters, and I did think of it as a letter from my former self. Usually, people ask you to write a letter to your former self. And that one from myself said, “Susan, I hope you keep doing this stuff because this mattered to you at 18,” and it still matters.

Scarpino:         Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t?

Komives:         Oh, my, I wouldn’t want to go back and correct anything. There were things that I did, or that we accomplished in there, as things that helped move leadership education along that we didn’t dwell on, but I think that’s fine. Like, how the social change model came about, and the importance of that. You know, because we packed a lot in.

Scarpino:         We did. Can you briefly tell me how the social change model came about?

Komives:         That’s okay, I think we are, we are...

Scarpino:         That relates to the final question: Is there anything you wanted to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say?

Komives:         I certainly have enjoyed it, and you’ve taken it to a level that got me deeper into some things. It’s fun to see the themes, you know, that over a life, like, I’m 76... it’s also fun for me to see how much I still love it. I just have so thrived and enjoyed this work with marvelous people doing something important and valuable. It’s been really a pleasure. I have lived a great life. I wish my mother wasn’t killed in 1980 in a car accident. But those things you can’t undo, and that happens. But if I died tomorrow, not to be morbid, you know if a bus hit me tomorrow, everybody around me should know she felt loved, and she felt like she made a difference, and she did.

Scarpino:         Well, I’m going to turn these recorders off, but before I do that, I want to thank you on behalf of myself, the Tobias Center, and the International Leadership Association for being gracious enough to sit with me for a little bit over four hours.

Komives:         Well, thank you, thank you.

Scarpino:         All right, you’re welcome. Let me stop these things here.

(END PART 2 OF INTERVIEW)