UMaine News

Who can give insight to 40 years of student life at UMaine? Robert Dana.

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Ron Lisnet: Greetings, and thanks for checking us out on “The Maine Question” podcast. I’m your host, Ron Lisnet. In today’s episode, we will close a chapter in the history of the University of Maine. If you were asked to pick someone as the face of UMaine, you’d be hard pressed not to make a case for Robert Dana.

For 40 years, he has been not only a highly visible presence    it’s hard to miss his shock of white hair as he took his daily walks around the Orono campus    he’s also been a shaper and a leader for this community.

For most of those four decades, he has been the dean of students. During that span, he has served that role for more than half of the students who have ever attended UMaine throughout its entire history. Being the leader of a community as dynamic and energized as a college campus is not for the faint of heart. You’re dealing with young people who have a lot going on.

The highs can be super high. The lows can be serious and challenging. He has been in charge of filling multiple roles, everything from celebrating the major milestone of earning a college degree, to lending a shoulder to cry on, to being the stern parent when needed.

Through it all, he has helped create a community defined by three words, kindness, caring, and compassion. We’ll ask Robert how he was able to do that, about the changes he has seen these past 40 years and much more as he retires from the university. Welcome.

Robert Dana: Good morning. Wonderful to see you. For everybody who doesn’t know, it’s 12 degrees below zero today.

Ron: You have a little more time in your schedule for things like this.

Robert: Yeah. [laughs]

Ron: We were going to bring a rocking chair in as now that you’re retired, but we couldn’t find one in time.

Robert: I like that.

Ron: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Do you remember when you first set foot on the UMaine campus? What was the plan? What was the grand vision for 17, 18 year old Robert Dana?

Robert: I thought it was a miracle that I got here, to be honest with you. I had been a little lackadaisical in my high school career. I was very social and person of the people. Wanting to go to college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

I thought, “Maybe I’ll be a pharmacist.” I thought about going into the maritime industry. I thought about going into medicine to follow up to my father. When I got here, I was taken away by the bigness of it and all the opportunity. Wasn’t until I met my future wife that I began to settle down. That was a good thing.

Ron: You settled down at this point, right?

Robert: [laughs]

Robert: No. I’m not.

Ron: 50 years later.

Robert: I’ve been in a great business to keep me young and youthful. Students have kept me hopefully on the cutting edge of what the culture’s doing, but I feel a little bit settled down.

Ron: For those that don’t work in higher education, can you explain what a dean of students does? At its core, what is the job?

Robert: A lot of people think of deans of students as people in high schools, and those are mostly the disciplinarians, the folks who keep order. We, at a university level, our job is mostly to be the primary advocate for students, to decry bureaucracy, if you will, to push back the impediments to success.

We’re responsible, usually, for most everything outside the classroom. That does range, of course, from discipline, but where people live, how they live, how they get engaged, what support services they get, and generally to make the path to successful outcome more achievable.

Ron: You’ve had, certainly, a significant hand in shaping this community. What were the guiding principles, and how close did what actually transpired get to what you were like, “This is the ideal situation”?

Robert: It was easy to see that lots of students were coming to a place like this with every hope and aspiration that one could conceive of. They were coming here with all the expectations of their families and friends. It immediately became clear to me that in an environment like this, you do have to clear the way.

A lot of these students come, they’re very nervous, they’re anxious. For people coming from Maine, many of them were going to classes bigger than their hometown. It needed to make it a place where people felt welcome, where they felt they mattered.

My mantra became, quite early on, to be kind, caring, and compassionate. That was the message we delivered to everyone in student life, and hopefully, everyone at the university.

Ron: You never cross the finish line. You’re always working at it.

Robert: Which is one of the things that makes me feel like a young person still, is that every year, some thousands of people leave and some thousands of people come. There are people flowing in from other institutions. Yes, the work is never done. The culture and climate is constantly changing. You cannot rest on your laurels.

Ron: I know this is not news to you, but people in their teens and 20s, that is a dynamic part of life. How did you deal with the extreme highs and the extreme lows that come with that age group generally?

Robert: We always try to dignify students and to respect them, and to understand that coming into an environment like this with all of the expectations of what could happen to somebody and for somebody who were big. Horrible things could happen to people.

You couldn’t be too black and white in your thinking. We always appreciated the fact that there’s something called human development, and that people are learning to accommodate an environment like this, to learning how to get along with each other, how to have relationships, who they are is changing.

I had a very broad band for behavior, and we had high expectations. Sometimes we’d say, “No, that goes too far,” but most times, we were doing what we call deaning and trying to get people back into a reasonable comportment so that they could succeed here.

Ron: They have to learn how to handle success too, right?

Robert: Yeah. Success is a big thing here. We don’t want people to be arrogant. We don’t want them to be pushy. We want them to understand that doing for others is really, really important. Success is measured not by just their grades, but by their humanness.

We spend a lot of time with people doing that, and people like it, they want it. I was reminded of people from a very fancy business school that I’ve met who are not very humanistic. Others from that school are humans, and they’re kind, caring, and compassion. That makes all the difference in the world.

We need to be decent to people. It can be a cold, cruel place out there. We should never add to it.

Ron: In terms of crisis situations or bad news, people always look at the headlines, and you experienced more than your share of difficult situations. You always were a very steady hand as you did that. Was that a learned skill? How do you tell people how to deal with crisis situations? You’ve had a lot of experience with it.

Robert: We did. There’s a lot of things that can go awry in a place like this, where you think about the multi thousands of students, lots of visitors. These are very appealing places for people to come who don’t have a particular home here but they want to come and do something. You always had to be ready for what was next.

Every day, I thought, “Hmm.” There was something I hadn’t seen before. That was true every day. My disposition, I was raised in a big, big family. There were seven of us kids. One sibling we had lost, so there would have been eight of us. It was chaotic there.

I was a middle child, so I learned to be a conciliator, and a fixer, and to take care of a lot of things going on there. That seemed to travel with me, but sometimes we had to step back and take a breath.

Ron: You’ve had to be a leader in all the ways that that word is defined. How did you learn to become an effective leader? How do you teach others to lead? Because that’s a big part of it, too.

Robert: It’s a big part of it. I just went to the very basic core of people are people. I did come to this later in life. I had a high impression of myself. My mother once told me, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” That refrain always came back to me.

The other refrain that was always there was we were raised in a very small town in Maine, but we were Jewish. I am Jewish, but we were raised in a relatively intolerant experience. I remember my father, who always said, “Well, we can teach people to understand and to have respect.”

That’s the way I looked at it, is they had to sometimes turn the other cheek. You can put your dukes up, but fighting and boxing doesn’t usually work, so I learned to be a good dancer.

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: I’ve seen that. That is definitely true. Obviously, UMaine is in the business of education, and that takes on many forms inside and outside of the classroom. How do you see the balance between living in a community like this and then the academic part and learning to grow as a person and a citizen?

Robert: You could come, I suppose, to a place like this or any institution like a university or college and you could become a very precise astrophysicist, or you could learn the structures of sentences, or you could learn the technical way to be anything, but you’d still be adrift in the world.

We do live amongst people. We live in a place with changing times. We need soft skills. We need social skills. We need to be people who actually care about something bigger than ourselves. That was always our discussion with students.

Don’t get too hung up on the technicals, get hung up on the bigger picture. One day, you’ll have to confront your end. When you do, you want to be able to say, “Yeah. I did the best I could. I tried to be a decent person.”

Ron: Is it a 50/50 balance, academics and the other side that you talk about?

Robert: I guess it is a 50/50. Obviously, when you leave here, you want a pliable skill. Most people do leave with that. When I talk to people    and I talk to a lot of people who graduated years ago    they usually are talking about the other side of the equation.

Yes, their academic bona fides are really good, they’re great at that, but they talk about the things that made them human beings. It’s interesting.

Ron: 40 years is a long time. I don’t have to tell you that. What’s changed and what’s remained the same about students or higher education in general? Any trends that surprised you or that you’ve taken note of?

Robert: Things have changed technologically. What you’ve heard about that, flipping over every 12 or 18 months, that’s really true. When I started here, we launched something called…I think it was called first class. It was an internal communication thing.

People didn’t know. They would sit at their computers and communicate with somebody across campus, but they thought that they were anonymous. They would vent their spleens and try to assert their intellects or their disputation of authority, and got people in a lot of trouble.

You can just think from that day to today when people are Snapchatting, or Instagramming, or Facebook is fading quickly into the background. That’s changed a lot. The things that have not changed in students is their need to matter, their need for support, their willingness to do for others.

When we had COVID, which was a big disruptor, maybe a sea change disruptor, we’ll say. There was a political time there of isolation, separation, divide, and othering. When COVID came on top of that, people stepped back. The business of just worrying about myself or my own little environment took hold.

It was very scary for someone like us because you’ve got to be in the commons to make a difference. If people were stepping back, it was threatening the basis of what I thought of as higher education. It turns out that families and everybody who comprised of family, they were nervous. They were worried, and so they were self protective.

It caused a lot of ripples in society. They were very unpleasant. I think we’re coming back from that now, and people want to be part of the solution. They’re caring for each other, they’re open to each other.

Isolationism, while we still hear about it and there’s still pushes to big picture, I don’t see it here. I think students are reaching out, extending lifelines, and picking up each other and having each other’s back every day.

Ron: Those three words, kindness, caring, and compassion, how did you land on those, other than they begin with the same sound? Is that something that right from the get go, you came up with, or did it evolve over time?

Robert: I read something yesterday. You’re never supposed to use alliteration in any writing or speaking, so you’re right.

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: You broke that rule.

Robert: Kindness, caring, and compassion, they alliterate or whatever the word would be. I saw enough where people were, I think, self absorbed. I used to hear people say to me a lot of time, “We don’t want to set a precedent,” or, “That behavior is wrong.” There’s a lot of black and whiting of people.

People are saying, “I don’t want to be tied up into this chaos, so I’ve got to structure the world so that something like that doesn’t happen.” I used to find myself saying a lot to people, “Well, how would you like to be treated?” or, “If this was your child, how would you want to treat them?”

These people are coming. Everybody thinks they’re going to succeed here, and this is a place where you can succeed. If we all of a sudden become intolerant and just want to take care of our own needs, we’re not being very decent to people.

It was the golden rule. I go back to my childhood about that. No matter how badly we saw people being treated or we were treated, my parents always said, “Well, just treat people the way you want to be treated yourself.” It was burned into my thinking.

The kind, caring, and compassion, I remember saying it many times, “But we’ve got to be compassionate here.” Just think. You got to call a parent and say, “Your child is not succeeding here. We’re sending them home,” or, “Your child did X, and we’re not going to tolerate it.” Neither of those are compassionate or caring. Just be decent to people.

Ron: What you going to miss? What are you going to be glad that you don’t have to pick up the phone or do anymore?

Robert: I’d miss the students. I’ll tell you, the richness of my experience here, it’s almost incalculably huge. To go around campuses to see students and to want to engage with students, high fiving them, smiling with them, taking pictures with them, supporting them, being at their events, and showing them that we’re all in it together. I miss that terribly already.

What I don’t miss is the 24 hour day, seven days a week, 365 days, and I’ve only had a couple of days of that. I haven’t been woken up out of bed recently. I knew we were getting towards retirement time because for many, many, many years, I was always semi awake.

When the phone would ring, I would just start chatting with whoever it was [laughs] in the middle of the night. Now, as I move towards retirement, I realized I get a little anxious when the phone rang. I realized you can’t really be anxious because you can’t think clearly. I don’t miss that.

Ron: You were notable or famous, perhaps, for your daily walks on campus. I know you with your shock of white hair, you can’t hide from people very well. Interacting with people when you were doing that, was that the best part of your day in some ways?

Robert: Yeah. I love that. I did. I went every day on campus quite a lot and would walk four or five miles every day around the campus at different times. It was to see the campus. I used to bother my friends in facilities management because I would be taking pictures and calling them, and they’d always come and fix things.

Mostly, it was to see students. To have them try to get me up on a slack line or to tell me something they were working on, or would wander up where students live to see how they were faring. To me, it was just like oil being poured into my tank, so I’d go back.

I always told our staff, “Get out of these buildings. Go out and see these students because if you’re having a difficult day, if life is overwhelming, just go out. You’ll have a lot of sunshine poured into you.”

Ron: Now we’re going to test your editing skills on the fly here, but some stories. Any stories to share, people, situations, challenges to overcome, funny, weird stuff? I know there’s probably several racing through your head right now, but what could you share with us? Anything come to mind?

Robert: I do have a funny thing. It caused a whole new business here. We had won the hockey championship in 1993. That was one of those nights I got a call, I think it was about 2:00 in the morning.

They said, well, there was quite a lot of hullabaloo occurring out on the mall, maybe a semi riot and a huge fire, and what were we going to do about it? I said, “Well, I’ll come up.” I came up, and there was maybe 500 students and a big fire. Somebody had just driven a snowmobile onto the fire. If you haven’t seen me in person, my stature is…it’s at five foot six.

Ron: Being generous, but yes. [laughs]

Robert: Being generous on a good day. I waited into the crowd, and I thought, “I don’t see. [laughs] What am I doing? I’m going to get up there and tell them to disperse.” I waited in, and a football player picked me up. Just wrapped his arms around me and picked me up. I thought, “Oh, I’m getting thrown into this fire.”

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: He picked me up, and it was like a trophy. “Dean Dana, Dean Dana.”

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Robert: Then they all left. The fire got put out, and it was good. I remember that night. We had lots of things like that, whether it was bump stock, or senior celebration, or Maine Day. We had all sorts of times where people were really happy. Those are the fun times.

Ron: As we’ve alluded to, you’ve been at this a long time. Where do you see all this headed, higher education? Any idea what the next four years or maybe a smaller chunk of time looks like? Where do you see this all going?

Robert: The University of Maine’s been around for 160 years.

Ron: You’ve been here for 25 percent of that time. That always blows my mind.

Robert: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot. Higher education, in its current iteration, has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s a desire for this and a need for it because you need people to be highly trained. That business of the other side, well rounded students, that’s really true.

I know there’s a big push to online education or places where people never have to step foot on a campus. That will serve a purpose for people, but in terms of improving the society and keeping people engaged with each other and knowing that they have a responsibility, it requires a place like this.

I think states will realize that public higher education’s really important to their health and they’ll continue to support it. I hope the support won’t go down. I hope it’ll go up because the cost of college is a lot. For people all over the globe, it’s a lot. It has to be an accessible opportunity. It can’t be viewed as a luxury. It’s something we all need.

Ron: You can’t replace being part of and helping as a young person to learn how to shape a community, be part of a community, be part of society like that.

Robert: You got to be in it. You’ve got to learn about relationships and communication, you’ve got to learn about selflessness, and you’ve got to learn about supporting the other. Just sitting behind a computer, you don’t get that. We shouldn’t become univariate in our thinking. We’ve got to be big thinkers.

Ron: I know you’re only a couple of days into your retirement, but we appreciate you coming back so quickly and sharing time with us. What’s next? What plans do you have, if any, formed right now?

Robert: My wife and I are in negotiations on how to accommodate each other, because of course, I’ve been here basically morning, noon, and night for a long, long time. Our children are all grown. Cookie, my wife, has been retired for two years. We’re learning to accommodate each other. I’m repelling her hobbies and trying to acquire my own. [laughs]

Ron: Is there a honey do list in there?

Robert: There’s a big, long honey do list, fix that, fix this. I have no real malleable or saleable skills in that respect, so I’ve been looking on YouTube, but I’m sure I can cost myself a lot of money and a lot of problems. We’ll do that. We’re going to go do some travelling.

Ron: Nice.

Robert: We’ll take care of our grandkids. One cool thing I did    which I will see if it comes to fruition    I had seen on the Internet something about being a notary public. I said, “Oh, I think I could do that.”

Ron: [laughs]

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Ron: I had to take a test.

Ron: The next career.

Robert: [laughs]

Robert: I’m waiting to hear from the state. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll put up a sign    notary public. [laughs]

Ron: Thanks so much. You’re going to be missed.

Robert: Thank you so much. It’s delightful, and I love UMaine.

Ron: Thanks, as always, for hanging out with us. You can find all of our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud, UMaine’s YouTube page, as well as Amazon Music. Questions or comments, send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. This is Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.

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