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Globe-Trotting Dorm Chief Shares Vision of Friendlier Living
Interview and story development by Andrew Chapman, Briteny Dies, Jennifer Jones, Channing Lankford, Carlee Macon, Nicole Robinson, Mee Vang, and Tyler Wilkinson.
Oldenburg (right) at The Hilltop
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He has traveled to 49 states and 36 countries, including Cuba, Brazil, and China. He has lived for the last two years in Alaska. Now Todd Oldenburg has landed at Mars Hill College to be the new director of residence life.
For Oldenburg, who grew up in North Carolina, it's like "coming back home." His goal: to help make the college a home away from home for each and every student.
"Our first job is to build community, to be friends, to bring people together," he said during a recent interview with Hilltop reporters.
"I want people to feel comfortable knowing each other. I want people to feel comfortable in their living environment. I want the staff and students in each residence hall not only to know each other, but to feel they have an obligation to that group. That they feel like, hey, when I crank my stereo up too loud, that bothers other people and I need to consider them. I want the residence halls to be a place people can go and say, "I feel comfortable here. This is my home.''
Oldenburg comes to Mars Hill with more than a decade of experience living and working in residence halls, and he knows that "there are as many different ways to do residential life as there are colleges."
Davidson College located north of Charlotte stimulated his interest in residence halls. "My best friends were people who were on my freshman floor."
Students at Davidson are required to live all four years in the dorms. All the freshmen live together with two upperclassmen called "hall counselors" in each hall. "It was a really neat kind of experience. We were all in it together and knew each other."
When he got married to Claire Shippey last December, three of the six Davidson friends who attended were friends he met on that freshman floor.
"I think that's pretty neat that I made those friends and that it lasted that long," said Oldenburg, adding, "I still have those friends 15 years later."
After graduating from Davidson with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1990, Oldenburg was hired as a student life instructor at the North Carolina School of Science and Math. "A little sense of adventure," he said, made him go west to Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he was a hall director in the dorms and earned a masters degree in education in college student services administration.
He went on to coordinate or direct residence life programs at Eastern Oregon University for five years and Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage for two years.
In between, he went around the world on a ship with 800 students on a Semester at Sea Program in the spring of 2002.
"When I'm not growing in my personal professional life, that's when I decide it's time to move on," he said.
All those experiences have given him many ideas about what makes life run smoothly in a dorm, and for what constitutes community--- whether it is on a big campus, a little campus, public or private, on land or at sea.
At Mars Hill, "What I've been able to do is come in with a fresh set of eyes and say, "Why do we do this? Why is this the system that is used? Is there a way we can sharpen it, refine it, make it better? That's what my priority has been --- to try to examine everything and ask, "Why do we do it the way we do it?"
He wants residence hall staff to find a medium point between being overly authoritative and too easy. "I'm not saying, look the other way. I'm saying that we're going to assume people are doing the right thing unless we have reason to believe otherwise."
The main job of staff, he said, is to build "a warm welcoming community." That in itself will increase safety. "If we create an environment where students want to hang out, and they know each other's names, and they know who goes into whose room, if they see someone walking out of someone's room that they know doesn't belong there, they're going to say something."
He doesn't want to have to "monitor" students. "All of you are adults."
Oldenburg has ideas for change, but he wants to start small, making small steps. "You can't come in as the new guy and start telling everybody else what to do and start changing everything…change will happen slow. I'm running a marathon, not a sprint."
One small change will be to get the pool tables in Myers and Huffman re-felted. "We shouldn't have duct tape on the pool tables." And he wants to get a new TV for Gibson because they can't change channels. "Easy fix. Anytime I can do those little things, I'll try to do them."
Another change he is overseeing is to allow dorms the option of extending lobby visitation hours to 2 a.m. This may work better in some dorms than in others, in part because of the way the lobbies are set up. "It concerns me that there is no place for students to hang out after hours."
He supports the idea of a 24-hour community area on campus where male and female students could hang out after dorm visitation hours have ended, but he does not have the power to make that change.
He also supports changing empty spaces --- such as the basement of Stroup --- into areas for student activities. "I'd love to use that space." He plans to get feedback from residents. "How do you want to use this space? What do you want to see happen?"
One thing that will be harder for Oldenburg to change is the physical living condition of students. "I'm not in charge of maintenance. I am in charge of making sure maintenance knows what needs to be done. And so that's what my role is - to make sure I can be the advocate for living conditions. If your ceiling is falling in, that needs to be done now."
Oldenburg says he will try to be involved in "all aspects of living on campus - everything from student programming to trying to be involved in the construction of the new residence hall."
Of the approximately $26 million raised so far in a campus capital campaign, $3 million has been earmarked for renovating existing residence halls. That amount is in addition to the money being spent now to build a new dormitory. "I've been told to think about what I'd put at the top of my list to get fixed with that $3 million," said Oldenburg.
To those close to him, Oldenburg is more than a director of residence life. He is also a traveler, husband, and friend. He likes Ultimate Frisbee, photography and music - especially country music singers Lyle Lovett and Alison Krauss. He calls himself a "travel bum" and was exploring the world long before his Semester at Sea experience, which took him to ten countries ranging from South Africa and India to Vietnam and Hong Kong.
After spending more than a decade living in dorms, Oldenburg has decided that's enough. "At this point in my life, living on campus is not what I want to do." He and his wife, who have been married less than a year, live in West Asheville. His wife works as a counselor in the Madison County public schools.
Todd Oldenburg can be contacted on the third floor of the Wren College Union in the Student Life Offices. His extension is 1406. His e-mail address is toldenburg@mhc.edu
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