Palmer's Hall of Honor – Professional Friends

It’s time for another edition of my Hall of Honor. This time, I want to talk about colleagues who, for lack of a better term, have become my “professional friends.” No, this doesn’t mean that I have to pay them to be my friends. It simply means that these are people I probably would not have encountered if not for our connections professionally.

The two hardest aspects of this edition of the Hall are [1] knowing that I’ll inevitably, inadvertently forget to include someone and [2] dealing with the fact that my list of professional friends is probably too long to make for compelling reading. I’m not sure how to deal with the former issue without reading like one of those lame “thanks to everyone we forgot” tributes on the sleeve of a CD. As for the latter, I think I’ll begin by trying to keep my narrative brief and by breaking this into several entries. To keep things manageable, I’m only going to include four honorees in this post.

(Honorees . . . heh . . . right . . . like any of them are going to mention this “honor” in their resumes.)

Randy Comfort

Let me start with Randy Comfort. When I became the director of admissions and financial aid at Western Baptist (now Corban) College in 1991, I had a strong desire to see Christian colleges in Oregon work cooperatively to serve students. Randy was the director of admissions at George Fox University at that time and since Fox was and is the “big” Christian college in the state, I knew I needed their buy-in to make anything happen. I called Randy and he readily jumped on board to help me co-found, so to speak, the group we named Oregon Christian College Admissions Personnel. The admission directors at the seven Christian colleges along I-5 met regularly, worked together to promote Christian higher education and we even put together a drive-in workshop in 1993. It was a lot of fun.

Shortly after I left for Kentucky, Randy took a new job at Greenville College in Illinois and we continued to keep in touch, even traveling together on recruitment trips in Texas and Oklahoma (where we took advantage of the really high speed limit on the freeways!). He’s now at SpringArbor University in Michigan and even though we don’t have much contact anymore, I still see him as one of my first “professional friends” and a real source of encouragement.

Dan Crabtree

The first time I saw Dan Crabtree was in a workshop at a NACCAP conference in the early ‘90s. There was a discussion about academic scholarships and Dan, who worked at Wheaton College in Illinois then, spoke forcefully against merit-based aid and said all financial aid should be need-based. I turned around and, having never met the man, said, “You have no clue how things are for the rest of us in the real world.” Yeah, I was pretty mouthy back then, too.

The next year, at the NACCAP conference in Pennsylvania, I believe, Dan and I struck up a conversation in a dorm hallway and I think that’s when our friendship began. Since then, we have served together on the NACCAP board of directors, roomed together at several NACAC conferences, been in the Cora! Cora! Cora! fantasy baseball league together, helped guide NACAC’s Christian Fellowship special interest group, and co-authored an article recently in the Journal of College Admission. Dan has a keen mind and a surprisingly diverse background and group of interests. When it comes to dialogues about professional issues, I think we are like iron sharpening iron.

Martha Pitts

Martha Pitts has the ridiculously long title of Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Management and Director of Admissions at the University of Oregon. When I moved into the Oregon University System in 2000, I doubt too many people would have wagered money on Martha and I becoming good friends. The small campus, conservative Baptist, button-down boy and his big university, liberal, Birkenstock-wearing, diet Coke drinking counterpart. (She won me over on that last point . . . I’m a diet Coke guy myself now.) I had the opportunity to get to know Martha through OUS meetings and when I served under her presidency on the PNACAC board in ’02-03. I rapidly gained an appreciation for her ability to articulate her perspective and to see all sides of an issue.

I also love that she simply is who she is. There are no false airs with her. Martha and I share a propensity for speaking our minds, though she is a little wiser in how she chooses her words than I may be at times. I enjoy talking with her about weighty issues in our profession, knowing that she is very knowledgeable and insightful. We can argue about these issues and even though she often is better informed than I am, she always treats me and my perspectives with respect.

Greg Vaughan

I thought about only having three new “inductees” in this Hall of Honor “class,” but my friend, Greg Vaughan, was sorely disappointed (and rightly so) when he was left off my last list of honorees so I told him to be patient, he would show up in the next edition.

I got to know Greg, who is the Senior Director of Enrollment Management at Biola University in California, first through service on the NACCAP board and later in the Cora! Cora! Cora! fantasy baseball league, where he justifiably bears the nicknames “His Royal Smugness” and “Eeyore.”

Greg is just a great guy working at a great school. I value the fact that we can occasionally share our frustrations, challenges and concerns with each other. And it meant a lot to us when he made our home one of the stops on their cross-country family trip when we lived in Kentucky (but only because he didn’t have any friends except us between Indiana and New York, I suspect). Greg is still bitter that I let him fly Jeannette and me all the way to LA to interview for the financial aid director position a few years ago, only to say we weren’t interested even before we returned home. What he refuses (yes, refuses) to appreciate is the fact that no one else could have convinced me to even consider that opportunity.

To read about other members of the Palmer’s World Hall of Honor, go to my posts from March 21, 2005 and June 29, 2006.