After 17 years at the University, Edward Whipple is taking his passion for student affairs to the national level.

The vice president of student affairs will begin his commute to Washington D.C. as the first person to become a senior fellow at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, an organization that consists of 13,000 members on campuses across the nation. He has been involved with NASPA for thirty years in his higher education career.

“This was an opportunity that I couldn’t really pass up and it sounded really exciting,” Whipple said.

Whipple said he will have the opportunity to create a lot of the responsibilities that will focus on working with other vice presidents nationwide on student affairs issues, working with other higher education associations in Washington D.C. and lending input to public policies that affect students.

Kevin Kruger, NASPA’s associate executive director, said Whipple is well-known in the higher education world and praised his student affairs expertise and his writing and presentation abilities.

Kruger also cited Whipple’s “tremendous international experience,” which will be valuable as NASPA examines the globalization of student affairs.

“We should really get a nice package of skills that are going to be real valuable to NASPA with Ed,” Kruger said.

Whipple’s international experiences began with spending his junior year of college in France, and he said that international experiences can provide educational experiences for everyone.

“People need to understand and appreciate individual differences, and you really get that through international experiences,” Whipple said.

Whipple said his experience helped lead him to his involvement in diversity programs around campus.

Emily Monago, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, said Whipple last worked with her to hire a full-time staffer for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the center would have been impossible to start without his support.

In addition, he has performed in the Office of Multicultural Affairs’ annual dinner theatre program and attended many of the program’s events.

Monago said he was very good at providing feedback for diversity peer educators after listening them speak over dinner.

“I can’t think of anything that we’ve done through the Office of Multicultural Affairs that he wasn’t very supportive of,” Monago said.

His support of students was felt in many organizations across the campus since his hiring in 1994. The office of student affairs worked to develop learning communities, first year experiences, initiated a crisis team for emergencies, reorganized the student affairs program in 1995 and created a dean of students area to “create a focus on student engagement,” Whipple said.

“A lot of the learning that you get does not occur in the classroom, so how do you piece that together?” Whipple said. “Our job in Student Affairs is to make those connections and help students make connections on the academic side as well as on the … co-curricular part of the experience.”

His emphasis on providing a good learning environment outside of the classroom is reflected in his involvement in planning the Union’s renovations a decade ago.

Whipple said the former Union was known as the University Union, as opposed to the Student Union, and that University Activities Board was the only student organization office located there.

“I felt that if the campus was going to have a strong student community, it needed sort of the … living room on campus,” Whipple said. “I think the Bowen-Thompson Student Union has been a successful part of student life and has certainly focused on the importance of student life outside the classroom.”

Whipple also had a hand in influencing student life outside of the University. City Municipal Administrator John Fawcett said Whipple’s effective communication skills helped keep a good rapport with the University and the city, often citing students as examples of the community’s strengths.

“The approach that he’s taken over the years has … diminished this “us versus them” type of mentality that typically exists in a university/community setting,” Fawcett said.

One way Whipple stayed connected to students was teaching graduate courses in higher education and student affairs. He said he will not teach in his new position but hopes to get back into it eventually.

“I felt it was important to get in the classroom on a regular basis to listen to what students were talking about,” Whipple said. “If I didn’t listen to what students were talking about … my own administrative work would have suffered.”

Whipple emphasized his successes were the result of a team effort with his fellow workers and students.

“I’ve been very impressed with Bowling Green students,” Whipple said. “I would not have stayed around for 17 years if I hadn’t been.”