Tim Miller

The COVID-19 pandemic changed Higher Education in several significant ways. When it comes to student safety and well-being, it’s up to Student Support teams to fill in the gaps that the pandemic created, be that through creating social spaces that promote community engagement, or training students in personal safety. 

Tim Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs at James Madison University, took the time to speak with The Interview’s Co-Host, Max Webber, about student safety issues post-pandemic. Since his last appearance on the series, Tim has continued to focus on students’ mental and physical well-being, as well as launching new initiatives to assist students financially and socially.

Tim's Journey

Max: What’s been the most exciting project you’ve worked on since we last spoke?

New research shows that the final straw that causes students to decline living on campus, or drop out of university altogether, is usually less than $100 – a parking ticket, or a flat tire, or a spark plug that dies. Those issues are exacerbated by a policy that states: when a student’s financial needs are met, they can’t receive any further aid. As a solution, my wife and I decided to commit $50,000 of our own money to launch a student emergency fund, and we’ve already raised a further $25,000, so we can have it endowed immediately. Most of the scholarships that come from that fund will only be $150 but, as I said, that amount will make the difference between staying and leaving for James Madison students. We intend to keep giving to it so we can pay out to around 4,000 students every year, with our current goal being $100,000, so we’re very excited about the difference we can make.

Max: What are the things you’re focusing on to create a safe campus environment?

For us, there are a few factors that feed into student safety, the first being that post-pandemic students have lived in a protected environment, so we work to make our students aware of where they’re going, who they’re going with, and encourage them to use digital means like Air Tags so their family and friends can track them. The second thing is that our policies of respectfulness – holding doors, for example – often get misconstrued, and students end up holding doors open for people in their residence halls who may not live there, so we have to help our students understand the difference between friendliness and safety. Third, many of our students don’t lock their cars, their dorm room doors, or their houses in town, so we’re also seeing a lack of personal safety. We preach trust but verify, preserving an open and friendly mindset while encouraging vigilance, all without introducing anxiety.

Max: What are you doing to address the ongoing problem of hazing?

Students, especially after struggling with loneliness during the pandemic, are so desperate to belong that they’ll often allow themselves to be put through hazing. Virginia recently passed a hazing law after the death of a student, so we’re now required to train our incoming student population, and every student organization member for clubs and societies that have an initiation, on the laws surrounding hazing and our reporting processes. We’ve had more hazing reports filed in the last few years than at any time in our history, and that’s not because hazing has increased on campus, but because students’ understanding of what’s acceptable, and their willingness to report unacceptable behavior, has increased. We’re also part of a two-year pilot study around hazing, so that’ll allow us to learn more, and build initiatives tailored to our students. 

Max: How do you go about engaging students with critical topics?

Initially, we only did what we had to do to comply with the law, so we provided an hour and a half of training on these critical issues to groups of 4,000 students. Our goal next year is to decrease the size of those groups to 200 students by targeting fraternities, sororities, and other clubs in their chapter meetings. Smaller, shorter sessions will increase learning, but they’ll also allow us to go into student spaces, understand their culture, and ensure engagement. We also put a penalty in place that means if 100% of a group hasn’t received that training, they won’t be able to take on new members. Though it’s worked well to encourage engagement, I don’t love that method, so my hope is we can instead establish incentives like financial support or early access to registration for spaces in order to engage students.

Max: What are you currently working on to address attainment gaps?

We found that first-generation students don’t do as well since they have to manage the guilt of not being at home to support their families, as well as a lack of access to support staff who understand their unique issues. To combat that, we created our Reddix Center for First Generation Students to help them with everything from filling out forms to creating a community. More broadly, we’ve seen that over half of students who drop out do so because they didn’t feel a sense of belonging, so we’re continuing to help students find their place on campus, and gain those important social skills that they lost out on developing due to the pandemic. We’ve learned that there are so many reasons why attainment gaps form, and we need to look at all 22,000 of our students to find out how we can close those gaps. 

Max: With it being an election year in America, how do you facilitate open and respectful conversation among students?

Recently we had some students exercise their right to host a conservative speaker on campus. A lot of our students were unhappy about that, so they staged a protest, then a counter-protest was set up, and due to scheduling we also had a church service on campus. I thought it was wonderful, not necessarily because those students had productive conversations, but because they coexisted even through disagreement. To translate that coexistence into productive conversations, we’re piloting a program to teach students how to talk across difference, especially because we have not modeled that well as adults. We have to help students learn those skills to converse better than we have, and our James Madison Center for Civic Engagement does a lot of work to that end. We’re fighting an uphill battle, but it’s worth it because we’re building a better society. 

Max: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received during your career?

When I started grad school, my professor told the class ‘you are all replaceable’. It was hard to hear, but someone is indeed going to do your job after you and do it better than you did. What I took from that was to be humble – don’t assume you know an institution’s culture, and instead, come with humility, try to understand your workplace, and ultimately leave it better than when you arrived.