ACUHO-I Award Winners Named
Phyllis McCluskey-Titus and Gerry Kowalski are teachers and practitioners through and through. During their extensive careers, they blended these roles and have been influential in making campus communities better for students and staff. For these contributions, they were named joint recipients of the 2024 ACUHO-I Award.
Phyllis McCluskey-Titus was praised by her nominators, who summed up her accomplishments with the phrase "two careers, a single purpose." She worked 18 years as a practitioner and then 23 as faculty with the purpose of strengthening and furthering the profession. Starting with her first professional role as an assistant hall director at Western Illinois University (WIU), where she completed her master’s in college student personnel administration, she has been a tireless advocate of research informing practice. From this first role at WIU, she progressed through the ranks of campus housing for the next 18 years, fine-tuning her skills as a practitioner. This segment of her career included these roles: residence hall director at Syracuse University, quad coordinator at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, assistant director of housing for residence life at Florida State University (FSU), and associate director of university housing at FSU.
McCluskey-Titus started her turn from practitioner to faculty during her last three years at FSU. During those years, she completed her doctorate in higher education administration and taught in the College of Education within the Department of Educational Leadership as an adjunct professor while she worked as associate director of university housing. The pivotal moment came in 1999 when Illinois State University appointed her as an assistant professor in the College of Student Personnel Administration and as the coordinator for the master’s program. Her nominators wrote, “Thus began Phyllis’ substantial and storied 23-year ‘second career’ in American higher education, from which student affairs and college and university housing programs directly benefited.”
If she wasn’t teaching, she was publishing and presenting research and advising graduate students with the latest knowledge for practice in hand. However, this busy schedule did not deter her from serving in several positions with ACUHO-I. She was editor of The Journal of College and University Student Housing, chair of the Commissioned Research Committee, faculty for the James C. Grimm National Housing Training Institute, coordinator and judge for the annual conference case study competition, volunteer for the annual conference program committee, and a scholar-in-residence for the annual conference. She was awarded the ACUHO-I S. Earl Thompson Award in 2006 for her service and held leadership positions within SACSA and NASPA who named her a 2022 Pillar of the Profession.
Her champions for the ACUHO-I Award described how integral this faculty-practitioner relationship is to the work of campus housing: “Our administrative partnerships with these sorts of academic programs and their faculty enriched our own work, provided an important bridge to critically needed graduate-level personnel who served in essential residential life program roles within our respective departments, and codified an immutable relationship between the students’ academic studies and a practical/foundational employment opportunity upon which to build a career. Dr. Phyllis McCluskey-Titus represents the best attributes of the ‘practitioner/teacher’ paradigm.”
She retired from Illinois State University in 2022 (with Professor Emerita status) and has served two different interim roles in academic and student affairs at Illinois Wesleyan University since then.
Gerry Kowalski currently holds the tongue-in-cheek title of "chief porch inspector and consultant," but his distinguished career started on the campus of Trinity University where he helped create the role of assistant director of residence halls. From there he went to the University of Pittsburgh where he worked as the assistant director of residence life and attained his doctorate in education and leadership. He went on to work at Virginia Tech as the director of residence life and education, another position he helped create, and he held it for 17 years. He also taught as an adjunct professor in the higher education program during his time there. He then launched the next step of his career at the University of Georgia where he was executive director of university housing and would stay until his retirement in 2017. And again, he served as an adjunct professor in their higher education program and, as his champions note, “he provided sage advice and engaging learning opportunities for the professionals of the future.”
Kowalski is known for his unwavering support and mentorship of students and colleagues. “Gerry is a person of the world, always giving back to others over the decades of time he served in our profession,” said his nominators, and his service to ACUHO-I proved that. He served as a faculty member and as co-chair for the James C. Grimm National Housing Training Institute. He also served on the Advocacy and Influential Leadership Task Force, the Conference Program Committee, the Research and Information Committee, and the Board of The Journal of College and University Student Housing. He presented at many ACUHO-I annual conferences and was a presenter at the ground-breaking 2010 Southern African Housing Summit with ACUHO-I. He also served as president of VACUHO and presented regularly at state, national, and international events for campus housing. In 2015, he was inducted into ACUHO-I’s Parthenon Society, which is the highest honor the ACUHO-I Foundation bestows on a campus housing professional, and he was given the James C. Grimm Leadership and Service Award in 2020.
Kowalski’s commitment to building the connection between knowledge and practice continued in his retirement and remained unwavering during the pandemic. In 2021, he hosted a podcast called “A Campus Housing Conversation from ‘The Porch’” to connect retired colleagues across the nation and to reflect on the pandemic and the state of the profession. Then in 2022, he co-authored an article with Kathy Bush Hobgood in Talking Stick that highlighted survey data about the most relevant skills and competencies a senior housing officer needs for their work. Once again, he was working to fill a gap of knowledge within the campus housing profession in order to improve the residential experience for students and the professional development of staff. His champions note that “Gerry is a connector of people and is so very deserving of the Association’s 2024 ACUHO-I Award.”
McCluskey-Titus and Kowalski will be formally recognized at the 2024 Campus Home. LIVE! conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Read more about other 2024 award recipients here.
Journal Addresses Liberatory Practices
The 2024 theme issue of The Journal of College and University Student Housing, “Emergent and Liberatory Residential Life and Housing Practices” (Vol. 50, No. 3), explores the idea of looking at residence life and housing practices in radically different ways. Guest editors Rachel Wagner from Clemson University, D. Chase J. Catalano from Virginia Tech, and Susan Marine from Merrimack College harnessed research that embraces thinking outside the way things have always been done in campus housing and imagining what communities could be like if professionals changed how practices were developed and completed. They welcomed questions about issues such as how practitioners can develop practices that center the well-being and inclusion of all the humans involved and how the profession can put aside long-held biases and create practices that support the development of modern living-learning communities that liberate the humans within them. They invite the profession to consider and discuss these questions and more and imagine the future of campus housing communities.
In the issue, authors share what they imagine for the future. Jess Silvia and Catalano explore queering living-learning communities to interrupt heteronormative spaces on campus. Gudrun Nyunt, Yuan Zhou, Emily Sandoval, and Christine Bender envision residence life departments that prioritize well-being. Emily Braught, Harrianna Thompson, and Cassie Govert re-imagine the experience of live-in professionals to create a better work/life balance and to confront the urgency demands of their work. Jackson M. Matos invites dreaming about liberation for Latinx students in residence halls and centering them in those spaces. Kaleigh A. Mrowka, Rafael Rodriguez, Erin Baker-Meno, Ravi Bhatt, Jeff P. Godowski, and Kelli Perkins imagine building stronger and more inclusive communities using restorative practices. Carrie Kortegast, Lauren Teso, and Katy Jaekel envision shaping supervision as a liberatory practice. Kelvin Roberts and Marine provide a critical assessment of duty rounds and how Black professionals can be harmed by sometimes negative interactions.
Welcome Home
ACUHO-I welcomes members who joined in March and April 2024.
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