After nearly a decade at WSU, filled with disputes and accomplishments, Teri Hall retires ahead of the spring semester
By Ainsley Smyth/The Sunflower
Teri Hall made an immediate impact on staff members when she arrived at Wichita State in 2017 for an interview to be the newest Vice President for Student Affairs. But her arrival was greeted with a tumultuous era for the university.
“I remember the day that this short, fiery woman walked into the ballroom of the Rhatigan Student Center for her campus interview like it was yesterday,” Assistant Vice President of Student Belonging Alicia Newell said to a crowd gathered to celebrate Hall’s retirement Monday afternoon. “She walked in with so much confidence that it was really impossible to ignore … Once she got to the podium and opened her mouth, she commanded everyone’s full attention.
“That day I took notes … It’s not because I had to, but because her message had touched me in a way that reignited my passion for working with students. Two things have stayed with me ever since.”
Newell read from the notes she had taken that day eight years ago.
She recalled Hall asking those present to shift from a “me mentality” to a “we mentality,” and emphasized the importance of building a strong team within the Student Affairs division.
“She reminded everyone in the room that we must work together at every level if we are truly committed to the success of our students,” Newell said. “Lesson two was her grand vision. And people are like, ‘Oh, she has a great vision.’ And I go, ‘Man, like, what’s this woman’s vision?’ And she comes in and she’s like, ‘connecting every student.’ I was like, that’s — that’s simple, but so powerful — to connect every student.”
At the reception in the Rhatigan Student Center on Monday, Hall’s colleagues — from students and employees to WSU President Richard Muma — shared similar stories: their first impressions of Hall, the work she had done to reorganize and reinvigorate the Student Affairs division, and growing to respect her as a leader who spoke with honesty and vulnerability and tried to connect with everyone she crossed paths with, even amid controversy.
Trial by fire
When Hall arrived at Wichita State from Towson University in 2017, she was adopted into a university in turmoil. Conflict between the administration, student government and student protestors rose over a variety of issues, including an increase in student fees to pay for the new Steve Clark YMCA. Students complained about the lack of transparency from the university.
In addition, Student Affairs had struggled to keep a leader before Hall arrived.
“It was really bad,” Hall said. “You know, protests on campus about the administration – even me at one point in time – and there wasn’t a lot of trust between student government and the administration.”
In her role as the head of Student Affairs, Hall was thrust into the fray to try to mend the rift.
She served as adviser for the Student Government Association during the administration of controversial Student Body President Paige Hungate. She became embroiled in conflict over an initiative to create an interfaith prayer space in the Grace Memorial Chapel. And she faced further backlash after kicking Sunflower staff and other local reporters out of a student fees meeting in 2018.
“Frankly, I probably didn’t Google as well as I should have, and so I don’t know when I came that I understood how bad it really was, and it was a little bit of a shock,” Hall said. “I just kept coming in every day and kept being who I knew I was and believed that in time, students would see me, students would trust me and that we could get on the right path.”
Muma said in his remarks at the reception that one of Hall’s “strongest legacies” will be “the development of positive and great working relationships between the student government and university administration.”
‘Connecting every student’
The second “lesson” Newell recalled from Hall’s visit became a catchline for Student Affairs, a driving force behind changes and new initiatives: “connecting every student.”
“That’s our goal — is to connect every student,” Hall said. “It could be to a student organization. It could be to The Sunflower. It could be in a class, working with faculty. It could be working out and doing stuff at the Heskett (Center) … it’s whatever that connection means. The goal was for us to help every student find their niche on campus.”
Hall and Newell also started Wuber in 2019, an initiative to help students out on the first days of the semester with rides to classes.
“I love Wuber, you know, the kind of joy you can get and the conversations you can have with folks on golf carts,” Hall said.
Even amid her day-to-day responsibilities, she still finds time to connect with students.
“We have the most amazing students here,” she said. “It’s just really — it’s fun to get to know students, figure out what they want to do, and try to have those conversations that might put them on a different track.”
One student that Hall “put on a different track” was Sam Belson. Now a teacher at Coleman Elementary School, Belson started in the School of Business. His relationship with Hall began before she was even hired at WSU.
When Hall’s name was announced as a finalist for the position, Belson sent her a friend request on Facebook. He was part of a student organization aimed at increasing student engagement with athletics and wanted Hall’s help.
Eventually, Belson went to work for Hall as a student assistant. Initially, he was hesitant because of his busy schedule at the time but began working a few hours in the Student Affairs office.
“One of the big things about Dr. Hall is that she sees potential, even if you don’t always see it,” he said. “For her, she wants to find people the right spot to be in.”
Hall’s influence also helped Belson figure out what he wanted to do after school, changing directions from his previous plans.
“She was able to affirm this concept of – ‘do what seems right.’ And then it worked out really well, because I added education, and I got both of the degrees. And I really love what I do now.”
In addition to her impact on individual students and staff, at the reception Muma highlighted the changes Hall has made to Student Affairs and the overall student experience on campus.
“She helped create opportunities and experiences that educate and equip and empower students here at WSU,” he said. “She’s always and forever coming to my office, telling me, ‘I got an idea.’
“She reorganized the Division of Student Affairs to more clearly articulate the functional areas of that division, to make sure people understood what the responsibilities were. She did that more than once. ”
Ongoing struggle
Hall’s job has never been easy. She sits on the SGA student fees commission, where there have been plenty of tough conversations about budgeting and raising student fees over the years.
As WSU’s student body grows, Hall said, the proportion of students who are enrolled full time and pay full-time fees has decreased. So higher enrollment hasn’t meant higher fee revenue, and fees have been raised to meet the demand for greater student-facing initiatives.
Contention over the Student Affairs budget and the budgeting process early in her term led Hall to give up the chair position, and her vote, on the student fees commission.
“Funding in higher ed is challenging, right?” Hall said. “Especially when so many of the departments and Student Affairs are funded through student fees. It can be a contentious process to go to a student fee hearing, but yet, of the 10-plus million dollars, 95% of that comes to Student Affairs departments.
“You can imagine how it is to help support (program) directors through that process, and to not take it personally… but also then to help convey to students our goal isn’t to raise — we don’t want to go in and be the ones that want to raise fees all the time.”
The past year has presented new challenges. A shortfall of funding overall due to shifts in enrollment and a decline of international students, combined with an error in the system predicting student fee revenue last year, brought more struggles to the ever-difficult budgeting process.
And a federal executive order — targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and policies in higher education — left Hall and other university leaders grappling with how to protect WSU legally while also adequately serving students.
“This past year has been challenging,” Hall said. “Trying to figure out a path forward through all the executive orders and stuff coming from the state government, and try to still — making sure that through it all — that we’re following the law, that we’re doing what we need to do, but yet still supporting students in whatever way that we can.”
Time ‘to do something else’
Although the work never ends, Hall said she realized it was time to let someone else take on the responsibility of managing Student Affairs, or as she put it: “It’s time for somebody else to pick up the baton and take it the next leg of the relay.”
The search for a new vice president for Student Affairs is ongoing, with finalists yet to be announced.
“I have amazing directors and amazing staff who are experts in their fields and are doing really good things,” Hall said. “I always thought that my job was to let them do their thing and then to remove the barriers that they were encountering. My advice to my successor would be, ‘Get to know them, hear what their challenges are, and then be a change agent and a problem solver in the spaces where they see right.’”
Stepping away during a time of new challenges isn’t easy.
“Because it was so hard in the beginning,” Hall said, “to leave now, nine years later and (for it) to be so hard is a little shocking. But it is. I’ve come to really love it here. I’m not leaving because I’m unhappy. I’m just leaving because it’s my time … I just kind of felt like I’d done what I could do.”
Hall has many ideas for what to do with her new free time. She’s moving to a house in Delaware with her partner, close to the beach. She’s also working on a children’s book about the adventures of her rescue dogs, Wrigley and Hope, and has thought about volunteering to read to children at the library and to help with wildlife.
“There’s a maritime animal rescue where sometimes if a sea lion washes up on shore, they need volunteers to go and sit by the sea lion so that people won’t bug it,” she said.
Hall, who’s in recovery from alcoholism, also wants to compile stories of others in higher education who’ve struggled with the same thing.
“I’ve already got about 10 or 12 former students and colleagues who have said they’d share their stories,” she said. “I think I need twice as many of those, probably for a book. So that would be the goal in the next couple of years.”
All her plans sum up to one thing:
“I’m just really ready to do something else,” Hall said.
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Sunflower