Distinguished Teaching Award winner Catherine Waggoner has rebooted herself in mid-career to learn about and now teach podcasting.
Directed to topics they knew and cared about, her bright students responded with the care and enthusiasm people of that age can bring to any table.
I was asked to help students reshape early drafts of their stories and invited back to listen to the finished products of “Witt World: Our People Our Stories,” a snapshot of campus concerns at the time of a historical presidential election. Here is a summary.
The happy “Childless Cat Lady”
J.D. Vance’s comments that the nation was “effectively run … by a bunch of childless cat ladies … miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made …” brought to election year politics the smell of an untended litter box.
The air seems cleared by McKenna Clark and Autumn Kriegbaum’s facts-only explanation of why Wittenberg Education Professor Erin Hill tells students at the outset of each semester that she is single and childless.
“I introduce myself that way because I want people to know that you can live a happy and thriving life without children — that sometimes people choose that” just as “I chose teaching because I see it as an act of service and a contribution to the community.”
Belief that single women are anti-family forces Hill to belabor the obvious: “I would not have become a teacher if I did not care deeply about young people. But I think I knew very early on that I could nurture and care for young people even if they weren’t my biological offspring.”
As for feeling miserable: When she says, “I have a really beautiful life that I feel very grateful for,” one can almost hear a contented purr.
“Crisis at Wittenberg”
After a dirty dozen headlines from Springfield’s time as ground zero of the campaign, Sophia Meek and Parker Salowich cut to a tape of Wittenberg President Michael Frandsen just after the “pet-eating” debate.
“I learned about it from 400 miles away or wherever I was on a three-day bike trip with some friends. I was aware of the threats that had come in starting on Thursday.”
Enter Lt. Lee McCartney, the head of Wittenberg police division, who was on campus “communicating directly with Springfield detectives, Sheriff’s Office, FBI, Homeland Security. I mean there was a lot of different agencies involved.”
“Without a doubt the highest point of tension was when an individual student was named in one of the threats,” Frandsen recalls.
Then came the rush of questions: “How do we know when it’s safe to bring students back? How do we know when … to take the cameras down? You know, how do we unwind?”
Frandsen processed it with his “partner in everything,” wife Sharon, “a great sounding board (and) a great level-set person (who) helps me from getting too high or too low.”
“Some people were angry about having to shut down, some people were angry about athletic contests being cancelled,” he says. “But when I had the chance to talk to student or a parent about …. the things we were doing, they were understanding and appreciative …
And, to him, “the resilience the campus showed — but particularly students — was gratifying.”
The pillars of empowerment
“From Dumpster Fire to Championship” is Dominic Smith and Bailee Lyons’ story about the 2019 Witt grads volleyball players and now Witt coaches Nathan Matthews and Ryan Roark.
After playing for four years at the founding of Wittenberg’s men’s team, then being an assistant coach to a University of Kentucky women’s team that won a national title, Matthews came back to a struggling men’s team.
It’s sobering to hear him say, “I wouldn’t do it again.”
“I knew how important it was to empower the players,” he says, but prolonged failure had left a scar too deep, and he found himself in recruiting season “going to all-state players and being like, “Don’t look at the dumpster fire behind me.’”
He promised them a program “striving to be the very best we can possibly be.”
“I feel differently now. We have a bunch of upperclassmen that have won back-to-back championships. They’ve been through it and get it.”
Says assistant coach Roark, “This is the greatest team we have ever had – driven guys who want the highest success … and to play to the very last day possible.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
The university of adversity
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
Two members of Wittenberg’s 1977 Division III national champion basketball team tell Dawson Scott and Cameron Casto they found the answer on floor of the old school gym.
“Our coaches (led by Larry Hunter) would create adversity in practice,” says current Wittenberg Athletic Director Brian Agler, the team’s star point guard. “They wanted to make it hard and challenge you on a daily basis (so) what you see in games isn’t new.”
“That’s important … because you’re going to be dealing with (adversity) for the rest of your life. You need … the mental capacity, the toughness, the resiliency, to push through.”
Teammate Alan Watson, who returned to Witt as a volunteer coach, speaks to the value of that experience outside the gym.
“Having a great reaction to a tough boss is really an art. There is some value in learning from, ‘Hey, you messed up. It’s a part of the learning experience. You have to take that criticism … and make the adjustments.”
“The best thing for me (at Wittenberg) was professors and coaches that told me ‘Never quit learning.’”
Credit: Barbara J. Perenic
Credit: Barbara J. Perenic
Naming that tune
Told with Nathan Berger and Kikubi Tole, “Behind the Bench: Inside the Life of a College Athletic Trainer” opens with Wittenberg football player Miles Amadi injuring an ankle.
“I didn’t feel anything until I started running again and after that I went to go talk to trainers. Each day went by when I would ask: Could I do this? Could I get back in here? Could I run again? And I would hear no, no, no.”
Welcome to the world of Wittenberg athletic trainer Ellen Crosbie.
“(We) have a job where everybody loves us when we do our jobs and then everybody hates us when we do our jobs, because if you’re out you don’t like us; if you’re in, you’re all happy.”
Coach Robert Landers says football adds a hot sauce to the mix: “It’s a gladiator sport, right? So, we are trained to push through pain … to push through adversity. Sometimes there’s a trainer, they have to be the ones to protect you from yourself.”
But it’s not always that simple, Crosbie says.
If on the right path “we have great medical staff that we can call” backs the trainers up with an “OK, stand your ground.”
“But sometimes (we’re) boggled as to how we’re getting this kid back when they’re not responding. And other times “we send them down to doc, and he’ll be like, ‘No, you guys are completely off” – and in each instance playing time and player health is in the balance.
That, Crosbie says, “is why we all have to stay in tune with each other.”
Just a number
The rumor, Noah Virts and Ethan Davis tell us, is that the cooks are no longer permitted to call students by name at Post 95. Of course, that’s the very place where students away from home for the first time find a new home in gatherings around a dinner table.
We then meet Ms. Lavonda, who has been at Wittenberg for 40 years calling out names and serving up “a very kind grandmother vibe” as tasty as home cooking.
Visiting parents get the same. Lavonda recalls telling a mother: “If your son is bad or actin’ up in here can we spank him.” Just before the laughing began, the mother said, “Hell yeah.”
“It’s not that they don’t want to call the names of the students,’ dining hall manager James Acres tells the podcasters, but because the Get Ap brought in to handle orders, doesn’t do names; it only does numbers.
Virts and Davis put their finger on what gets lost in a world of digital efficiency.
“This place is built (on) … kind people (like Ms. Lavonda),” and “the true story is that there (are always good people no matter where you go.”
But Aps can make them harder to find.
Bailey lives on with her name
Daniel Gladden and Matt Gerardi (of New Carlisle) tell us Melanie Barrett, who entered Wittenberg in 2017 planning to major in music changed her major because of a major change in her life.
It was the death that year of her sister, Bailey, had been born with a rare form of epilepsy that caused her to be deaf, blind and wheelchair bound for her 10 years.
After her passing, “I walked into (entrepreneur) Professor (Kevin) Steidel’s office one day and said, ‘Hey, I have this coat that I made for my sister, and … I think I want to make more of them and name them after her.”
From then on, she was all business.
“It was amazing to see her drive, Steidel says. “We spent weeks figuring out how to make her idea a reality -- everything from the materials to the design details”
He pointed her to Tiger Tank, a campus funding modeled after Shark Tank.
“The teachers were incredible,” Barrett adds, “and the alumni were huge too — Scott Waters, especially.”
Although Barrett says forgoing parties and sorority life was hard,” I think every college student should consider” taking steps “to focus on the kind of person they want to become.”
She has become the CEO and owner of Bailey Bug LLC of Springfield, which began making coats and blankets to fit people in wheelchairs and now licenses products for people in hospitals and nursing homes.” “The most rewarding part is that Bailey still lives on.”
“My mom always said, ‘No one’s really gone until the last time their name is spoken.’”
That’s major, indeed.
Roots of change
Pre Phillips and Tim Smith take us to a dorm room in Myers Hall on April 4, 1968. There, Ron Woods, Class of ‘69, is reeling from news that Martin Luther King Jr.’s has been slain.
Woods: “You’re sort of sitting in a chair in shock thinking to yourself this cannot be correct, this must not be correct, it absolutely will not be correct, although while knowing that it is correct.”
It was time to react.
Smith says, “the creation of the 10 demands … the CBS (Concerned Black Students) movement sent to the faculty … made it clear that if these demands (about equality on campus) were not met (it would) ignite a walkout and protest.”
“We announced,” Woods says, “that we will be leaving the university till such time we did receive (a) response that we felt was responsive. We marched across the campus toward the student union.”
“We assembled our leadership their leadership on a Saturday morning, and came to an agreement that ended the walkout and put into motion to several things that Wittenberg began then and still is continuing its journey on.”
Pre Phillips then talks with Neavon Boyken, the current president of Concerned Black Students about the status of that journey today.
Boyken: “Often, you know, I’m labeled immediately when I step into spaces.”
As a Black male playing football, others seemed to assume he was at Wittenberg for that alone. Instead of having a story that will “speak for itself among others in the campus community,” he says, “you get labeled into this definition of what a black man is.”
As president of CBS – and in a time of nation backsliding on racial issues, he says he is “fighting for the narratives of other Black students” to be recognized on their own terms.
About the Author