Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to four Decades at Gonzaga, a conversation with Gonzaga University President Thane McCullough.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Hope I can answer a few of these crazy questions for you.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Reflecting on his experiences over his nearly four decades in the Gonzaga community and talking about what's next.
I'm your host, Sarah Schwering, a two time alumna and Presidential communications specialist here at Gonzaga. My Gonzaga journey began 25 years ago when I first set foot on campus as a freshman. Hailing from the Seattle area, I had traveled to Spokane a handful of times, but it wasn't until that first day that I truly began to understand what a special place this is. For more than 10 years, I have worked alongside our guest, and it is my honor and privilege to play even the smallest part in sharing his story. Since 2009, Dr. Thayne McCullough has been at the helm of Gonzaga, playing a pivotal role in shaping the direction of the university as it navigates the complexities of of the modern educational landscape. From transforming our campus, to leading initiatives that prioritize academic excellence and student well being, to preparing the next generation of leaders, Dr. McCullough's leadership has had a profound impact on the world. In this first episode, we'll dive into what shaped Dr. Mukullo in his youth, what brought him to Gonzaga, and what those first few years were really like. So, without further ado, Dr. Mucollo, welcome. It's truly a pleasure to have you here.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much, Sarah. It's a privilege to be with you.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: So, Dr. Mercola, some people may not know that you grew up in la. What was it like growing up in Los Angeles? What were some of your favorite things to do?
[00:01:34] Speaker B: It was fabulous, quite honestly. I loved the sunshine. I loved.
The specific area that I remember the most was Claremont, which is the little city suburb around Pomona College where my father did his undergraduate work. And it was just super fun to be in that environment and to have friends and adventure in the neighborhoods and also kind of be very conscious of the fact that surrounding us were these amazing mountains and orchards and avocado groves and so this fabulous combination of warm, beautiful beach, kind of esque weather and abundance.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Love it. Did you always like school?
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I liked it at first.
I didn't like it later, but that's because my first few years were pretty solid and stable. And then we started moving around and there was a period where I had a different school every year for about five or six years. So it was very difficult to make friends and then be uprooted.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: And that was a big Part of why I actually found school challenging. It was difficult to fit in. It was difficult to acclimate to a new curriculum and teachers and environments, for sure.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: So during all those moves, was there any advice or guidance that your parents gave you? That's a lot of change.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Not that I recall. I mean, I think it was necessary. It was undoubtedly they were motivated by, you know, trying to do the most that they could for all of us. But different people are. Are differently adaptable, and. And I don't think that I adapted terribly well. And I'm not sure that they were conscious of how difficult that was for me either. So when you're little, you don't always often have the ability to give words to what you're feeling. I'm a very introverted person, so I tend to keep a lot of things inside. You know, I certainly have evolved over time, but I would have been an introverted little kid.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: So what brought you to the military? Did you have family members that were in the military? What inspired you?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Desperate necessity.
I was living on my own. I was barely out of high school and finding it very difficult in that period of time, which was the early 80s, to find a job that did any more than just pay the rent and barely did that. So I knew that if I wanted to go to college, if I wanted to advance to a better life, I needed to have an experience that was going to allow me to really have a jump start. And the military presented that as an opportunity. But it really was, you know, one of the very few things I could think of that. That might afford that opportunity.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: What were some of your favorite memories from your time in the military?
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Well, the military is, by its nature, especially from the beginning, pretty grueling. One of the things that I took away from that was a sense of empowerment, that there were things that I never knew I was going to be exposed to, and opportunities that basic training and advanced training and being with other people from a lot of different places creates for you that you never imagined for yourself, and the ability to know that you have mastered those things and that you've survived and that you've succeeded in some cases, makes it profoundly transformational. And I think that's the largest takeaway. There was a succession of experiences where I was confronted with challenges that were unprecedented for me, but they were expectations of military people in my position. And I was largely successful in ways that were very empowering. And out of that experience, I had kind of a rebirth of recognizing just what I was capable of and what many people are actually Capable of without necessarily realizing it unless they have an experience like that.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Yep, you bet. So after the military, you found yourself here at Gonzaga. How did you find Gonzaga?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Well, I had a very good friend by the name of Tom Simon, who is a friend to this day and lives in the Seattle area, with whom I had actually worked during our high school days at a summer camp over in the Seattle area. And he was a year ahead of me in school and had chosen Gonzaga. And so he introduced me to Gonzaga. I came to GU to visit him during my senior year and got snowed in.
Ended up spending several days in Spokane and specifically on campus. And Gonzaga at that time was much smaller. Everybody knew everybody, and it was a very intimate experience. And I got to know some of the faculty who were teaching the classes he was in. And it was a great introduction to the. To the campus and a sense of who was here and what people were like. And I found it very fun. And it really became kind of my image of where I wanted to be. That became kind of an inspiration while I was in the military.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: You bet. What would you say are some of your top favorite memories as a student, once you became a student?
[00:07:17] Speaker B: I have lots of them. I mean, training pigeons on the fourth floor of College hall as part of our psychology work was fun and interesting. Really getting a sense that the people who were here were good people and they came from places that up till that point were completely foreign to me. They were foreign lands like Montana.
And, you know, as a city kid who had lived in large cities, coming to see and experience some of these places in the Northwest that are so beautiful was a part of it. I served as a residence hall staff member and that was super fun and got to know a lot of kids who were wonderful and inspiring and experiment with the concept of creating community and being part of co creating that with other people who, some of whom I am fortunate to know to this day as well.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: What made you choose the field of psychology?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: It was the faculty, really. I mean, I actually, I came here thinking I'd go to law school, and so I had a mind to maybe major in political science or sociology, but I took an intro psych course from a faculty member by the name of Mike McBride. And Mike was really good at his work and he was very inspiring and compelling, and I really enjoyed studying that field, and so it kind of drew me in.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: So you were also student body president. Talk to me about that journey.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: That was very accidental. Well, not accidental, but it was very ad hoc. So I spent three years almost year round at Gonzaga because I had three years worth of money from my Veterans Education Assistance Program with which to work, and that was the primary source of resources for me. So I really needed to finish in three years if I could. So I actually spent summers working here as well and taking classes. And as I was wrapping up my senior year, I began applying to clinical psychology programs. But I really wanted to go to the best program that I could get into. So I was applying to programs that, you know, in the Ivies and really elite programs. And slowly in succession, I got rejection letters from each of them. And basically the source of that was not my academic work. It was that those programs were all looking for people who had done a lot of research as part of their undergraduate experience. And Gonzaga is not a research institution. And it doesn't. It did not certainly at that time afford many opportunities for undergraduates to participate in published research.
So I found towards the end of that year that I might have to stick around and beef up my research experience.
And so, on a lark, I ran for GSBA president and won.
But after that happened, and as we were approaching graduation weekend, one program that I had applied to, realizing that experimental work, research work, was going to be a necessary element of my portfolio, they sent word that I had been accepted. And that was at the University of Oxford in their psychology department. So I then faced a dilemma. I had been elected student body president for the following year, but now I had this amazing offer from Oxford. And so in the end, through a lot of discussion and discernment, I decided to go to Oxford, which means that I was the first and the shortest lived student body president in Gonzaga history.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Probably still today.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Well, first day of the Gonzaga Student Body Association. I should qualify that because we had previously been known as the Associated Students of Gonzaga University asgu, and I was the first GSBA president.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: And the shortest tenure.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yep. All summer long.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: All summer long.
So you've talked a lot about your relationship with Father Coughlin, Former president Father Coughlin. Talk to me a little bit about, especially as a transfer student when you came to Gonzaga, your first experiences with Father Coughlin. Talk to me about how you first met him. Some favorite memories before you left to go to Oxford.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Well, Father Coughlin was a distinctive figure in that, as a university president.
I think students always bring their own images of what a president is and what a president does. An important figure in the sort of ethos of the institution. But Father Coughlin had a infectious affection for people, and he was quick to smile. He loved greeting people, and he Loved making people feel.
And he made me feel very uncomfortable at new student orientation, when standing on the stage welcoming the incoming class, he asked the one student from the state of Texas to please stand up. And I also didn't realize he was talking about me because my parents lived in Texas and Texas was my home of record for the military. But. But he was thrilled to see a student from Texas because he was from Texas and nobody came to Gonzaga and Spokane from Texas. So we actually met one another, literally, on opening weekend, and he invited me to lunch and we began a kind of friendship.
He was the one, actually, that I went to when I was trying to figure out whether to stay and. And be GSBA president and do research or go to Oxford. And he said, you really have to go. I learned a lot about him because when I became a student, he was probably around halfway through his tenure, which was a long tenure, And I got the chance to really get to know him and to understand about his aims and desires for the institution.
And then in the later years after I became an employee, I got to work with him and to know even more closely some of what he thought, and it was just fabulous foundation for me.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: When you were a student, did you ever think that you would work at Gonzaga, let alone be the president?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: No, I really didn't have any aspirations to be at Gonzaga longer than it would take to complete my degree. It was a series of kind of fortunate happenstances that occurred that brought me back. But, no, I really had imagined going on and doing a PhD in clinical psych and becoming a therapist or a clinical worker, maybe in a hospital. So, yeah, it was never part of my worldview.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: What would you say was your toughest class?
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Hmm, that's a good question. I think probably the most difficult courses I had were actually in biology.
I didn't consider myself to be terribly strong in science. I had not had a great foundation in science.
And the teacher that I took the biology course from was very, very esteemed, but I found very complex, and I found the work to be very complex. So I must admit I wasn't terribly successful at it.
But Gonzaga really demands of all of its students that they wade into waters that they're probably not entirely comfortable with as part of the core experience. And I think that's a good thing. I think testing the limits of what we're capable of mentally and academically and psychically is a part of the experience that's really important and valuable.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: So many people know that. You met your wife Julie here during your time at Gonzaga. Tell me about that. How did you meet Julie?
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Well, the first time I met Julie was when she was a resident, a first year student in the residence hall that I was the residence director of.
And I largely did not know one another, but we kind of knew of one another as people kind of come to know who's in their residence hall.
After I returned from my first year at Oxford, I was employed in residence life once again, this time working with the residence hall staff. And she was by that time an RA who was in Catherine Monica Hall. So it was really through the experience of working together and the training that we were doing at that time that we got to know one another much better and became friends.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: What is something that very few people, if any, know about you during your time at Gonzaga?
[00:16:59] Speaker B: That's a difficult question to answer because I feel over time I've been very disclosive about some of the things that might be most surprising. But I guess I would say that whereas the military helped me understand that I was capable of many things that I didn't really realize, especially physically and psychically, I feel that I still faced many challenges with my own self image intellectually. And so my methodology for studying was to spend many, many hours poring over the material that was being taught and actually develop lecture notes as if I was the teacher of that material. And I would go to places like College hall or the basement of Jepsen after it was built, and I would find an empty classroom and I would lecture out loud to the class using the notes that I had created and the outlines I had developed. I had a very low sense of self confidence in ability to master material. And that method allowed me to rehearse out loud and to find different ways of really trying to acquire the information.
And what I came to kind of realize through that process is that there are many different ways of acquiring information. And I was highly motivated to do as well as possible because I knew that I wanted to go on into some very selective programs. But that methodology probably sounds weird, but in fact some of the notes that I created in that process I actually did use after I went on and became an adjunct faculty member. So they were reasonably decent, at least for that time.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Do you still have those notes?
[00:18:57] Speaker B: Probably not anymore, although there may be a few lurking around.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: So you talked about your transition to Oxford. Talk to me about your time there. What did you learn that helped form you as a leader?
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Well, Oxford is of course an institution that has a reputation that is prestigious in the English speaking world and probably in the International world of education. It is a very old university, and a lot of very important discoveries were made by people who were resident there and were part of the quote, unquote, faculty, as we would call them today. But it's a center of learning that has given birth to a lot of ideas and right up until the modern era has been a really important center for the generation of knowledge and the transmission of important concepts and information out into the world. So it was daunting. You know, there's this experience of feeling like you're being followed around by somebody who may tap you on your shoulder and say, you know, actually, we made a huge mistake. You're not supposed to be here at all.
When you've realized that, you know, they don't even bother counting how many Nobel laureates they have, it just doesn't, you know, it's just overwhelming. But it was very. Actually very challenging as an environment for many reasons. I found, as I would imagine, many of our own international students find many cultural differences that were challenging to overcome. English is the language, but that doesn't mean it's the same as American English. And so trying to understand what people were saying with different dialects of English, the fact that it was a very international community and there were brilliant people with whom I lived and worked and all of that was very intimidating. There were people who were anti American and they were on the faculty and they had positions of power.
And so there were a lot of different cultural realities that required new learning. But it is a place that I have a lot of affection for and ultimately became quite accustomed to and integrated with. So it's always going to be an important part of who I am, and also a place that I enjoy returning to, as does Julie. We love what Oxford stands for, the experiences and challenges that we overcame, and also it's a beautiful city and a wonderful environment.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: So in 1990, after your time at Oxford, you returned to Gonzaga. What made you want to work in the field of higher ed?
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Well, here again, it was sort of a happy accident because actually, what had happened is I had gone to Oxford for a year and ran out of money. It was my plan to be there only a year, but I actually did enough work that they asked me to consider moving from a master's degree to a PhD. So I agreed to do that and realized I would have to return for a second year of residency. And at that time, the currency differential between the English pound and US dollar was huge. The cost of living in England was immense. And so I really didn't have the money to stay, which would have been the ideal. So instead I cast about to see what I might do to work and earn the money necessary to return. And that became a conversation with our vice president for student life at that time, Sue Weitz, who happened to be adventuring together with another colleague in Europe. And I met up with her, and that ultimately resulted in this position. The first position that I held at gu, which was coordinator of residence life, which I returned after that first year at Oxford to take up. But I was here for two years and then returned for my second year of residency at Oxford. But that was the foundation of my beginning of work at Gonzaga.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: So you mentioned your role in residence life. You've also held pretty much every leadership position, I would say, here in financial services, teaching in the classroom, associate academic vice president, among others. So other than president, what has been your favorite role working at Gonzaga?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Probably my favorite work has involved teaching, even though I taught part time for the psychology department, and I would teach a variety of courses as they needed them. I loved the experience of being together with our students, and I loved in particular, the foundational courses that allowed them to get a good rooting in the discipline and also along the way, to share a little bit about what I had learned and experienced in my own journey. Our students are the reason that we exist and the purpose of our work. And so that is probably always going to be the thing that I look back on and consider to be the most rewarding and the most enjoyable. We just have fabulous students, and they do go on and do great things. And to have been a little part of some of their journey in that fashion is something that I. That I really enjoyed.
The formal position that I probably appreciated and enjoyed the most was actually that of acting academic vice president. And it was because our faculty are also tremendously talented and doing amazing work. And being in a position to try to be of support and to be a part of that dimension of the work, though it was relatively short, was also. It was very complex. It was very, very intense, but it was very rewarding as well.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: So my last question today is, what was it about Gonzaga's mission that made you want to stay connected for a lifetime?
[00:25:25] Speaker B: I think that Gonzaga plays a vital role in the development of those who we expect are going to play important, significant, contributive, you know, roles in our communities and in our professions. Gonzaga is a place where really super talented and gifted people come and they seek the opportunity to become much better and much more capable of functioning as leaders and as contributors in their professions, and they're very intentional as they come in about sort of carrying an image of themselves that is, in my experience, described by that aspiration.
And I think we're incredibly lucky to be a part of that, because every culture needs people who are generous and who are talented and who seek to make a difference. And there are many different ways of doing that, obviously. But every culture needs that, and I feel like Gonzaga is playing an important role in continuing to enable that to happen.
It's a noble purpose. It's an important purpose, and I think society and the body politic and communities expect that and they hope for that, and that's why we enjoy so much support.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: I want to thank you so much, Dr. McCollo, for your time today. Stay tuned for the next episode, where we will talk through the early years of Dr. Mercullo's presidency, share stories of some of the most impactful people in his life and career, and discuss some of the biggest challenges he's had to face over the years. We'll see you next time. For more four decades at Gonzaga, a conversation with Gonzaga University President Lee Merculo.
