A little over a year ago, Nathan Baum was preparing to meet with Mary Desler for the first time, and he was nervous. At the time, the Weinberg senior was vice president and risk manager of Delta Upsilon, which was under investigation for a midget wrestling event. He knew the horror stories about her that had practically flyered the campus for the past several months: Blogs had referred to her as “Big D” and “her highness,” compared her to global warming and authoritarian dictators; an accusing letter to the editor was published in The Daily entitled, “Queen Mary Clobbers the Greeks.” He’d heard that halfway into a meeting with one student, she had ripped out her notes, thrown them in the trash and said, “OK, now tell me the real story.” “When you mention Mary Desler around campus – I’ve never ever met a person who has said anything nice about her,” Baum says. So he put on a tie and marched dutifully South to Scott Hall.
When he entered her office, she had a notebook and pen ready to record his version of events. “It was shocking the first time,” he says. “You haven’t even finished a sentence and she’s already writing down what you’re saying.” Whatever he said, it impressed the Associate VP of Student Affairs and Dean of Students so much she tacitly mandated an executive reorganization of the fraternity, with Baum in charge. Since then, he’s frequently dropped in on her, without an appointment, for heart-to-hearts sometimes lasting as long as 45 minutes. “Everyone says she’s out to get fraternities,” he says. “I really do feel like she has our back.”
Students started worrying about the survival of greek life at Northwestern and its support in the administration when the University Hearing and Appeals system suspended Delta Tau Delta in the summer of 2007. Desler did not run Delt’s hearing but she nevertheless became the face of the process and the administration, a pincushion for student frustration. With a heightened profile, her work followed her home; if she was ever able before to leave it behind she no longer could. Once, Baum says, when he stopped in to talk about a fraternity issue she told him, “I was just thinking about that last night.”
Last week Desler certainly had a lot to worry about. She’s teaching a graduate class called “The College Student” on Tuesday nights. She’s in charge of e-mailing mass notifications, and there was a problem at the Evanston water plant affecting off-campus students and an explosion that caused cross-campus power failures. A former NU student was indicted for the death of Matthew Sunshine last June from alcohol poisoning, the very thing the division of Student Affairs desperately tries to prevent. Some were saying that were students not so afraid of administrative wrath for alcohol-related hospitalizations, Sunshine might still be alive. In an A&O poll asking who would win in a three-way cage match – Desler, Jack Bauer or Chuck Norris – she was winning with 37 percent. People were whispering that she might resign. And she was engaged in a fraught back-and-forth with this reporter over whether she would grant a personal interview, something she ultimately refused.
Desler is wary of the press (she once hung up on a Daily reporter who called her at home) and Internet forums (in the summer of 2005, after students attacked a Medill professor in online posts, Desler told the Chicago Tribune, that Northwestern would run a “dog-and-pony show” to warn students about their cyber conduct). The paranoia isn’t unfounded: Her name has been in every major gossip blog and campus news outlet. “It has, unfortunately, been bandied about in the press and otherwise, in letters to the editor and things along those lines,” says Jim Neumeister, director of judicial affairs who reports to Desler. The exposure has vilified her, turned her into a Miss Trunchbull or Professor Umbridge; Neumeister says there are 15 or 16 people who work as a team on student conduct issues – yet she shoulders all the infamy. “Why is she constantly the number one news source on this campus?” says Medill junior Shane Singh who has worked with Desler as a board member of Wildcat Welcome, which plans new student week programming. At a recent meeting, Singh says, Desler picked up a copy of The Daily. “She said, ‘Oh, I just wanted to see if my name is in it today, ‘” he says. “There are constantly stories. It’s like a tabloid fascination with her, because many of them will never ever know the real her.”
The “real” Desler seems to depend on the circumstances of meeting her. “The first day I met her I was like, Wait, this is the woman that everybody’s afraid of?” Singh says. “I don’t know if that is because I’m not having ‘the talk’ with her.” That talk, Baum knows, can be scary. “She’ll look at her notes, look at you, look at her notes, shuffle some paper, and look like she’s found some contradiction,” Baum says. “She and I have joked around about how she tries to intimidate students and is notorious around campus. It’s probably not how she’s perceived at all by anyone else.” Others who have met with her have told Baum “they are surprised they are getting in trouble because she’s so nice.” (In one e-mail she wrote “smile” in parentheses – it was almost an emoticon.) A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Andrew Feldman, a Weinberg junior and former fraternity president who assumed I was writing a diatribe and begged me to stop: “Mary does not deserve to be targeted,” he wrote. “She is a very nice lady. It is unnecessary and even extremely disrespectful to treat her negatively. She is a scapegoat. As long as fraternities still facilitate underage drinking and are not responsible, Mary Desler’s job will continue to be very difficult and stressful.”
In the Division of Student Affairs, Desler is second in command to William Banis and oversees several offices including Judicial Affairs, Residential Life and Fraternity and Sorority Life. Since August, the division has seen more than 500 police reports involving students. “Half of those don’t result in discipline or investigations,” Neumeister says. “People hear about the discipline and the conduct and oh my gosh this, and I don’t think they appreciate and understand what we are doing to try to protect and manage the health and safety of students. I’ve seen very little that says, ‘Oh, thank you for that.'” As part of her job, Desler fields as many as 20 calls a day from parents, she has said. She is the point person for faculty members who have an issue with a student. She also handles university-wide matters, like Dance Marathon and the student handbook, says Adam Cebulski, coordinator of McCormick graduate student life, who took Desler’s class as part of his own graduate studies. “I think a lot of her day comes in with judicial affairs, probation issues and the discipline. There are so many things that go into it, like knowing regulations, knowing the policies of the university, the policies of your mission statement,” he says. “She definitely has a lot on her plate.”
One night around 3 a.m., about three weeks into school in the fall of 2007, Max Harris was in his dorm when a student from down the hall came at his roommate with a hunting knife. Unhurt, they went to the police station, returning around 6 or 7 a.m. Later that day, Desler summoned Harris, then a Communication freshman, and his roommate to her office. “I felt like telling the Dean of Students was the next step in the chain,” Harris says. “I didn’t think that was going to get me in trouble.” He sat on the couch and Desler pulled up a chair. “I went in there and she just seemed like a grandmother, this nice understanding woman,” he says. “I told her the exact same thing I would have told one of my friends.” Harris was called in again, and this time ResLife Director Mary Goldenberg was there. “They were playing good cop/bad cop,” Harris says – Desler was the “good cop.” Later Harris and his roommate were put on disciplinary probation for two quarters for violating the first rule in the student handbook: “Physical abuse of any person or any action that threat
ens or endangers the emotional well-being, health, or safety of any person (including oneself).”
They were warned not to pursue a UHAS appeal – Harris heard that of the more than 20 cases the previous year, none were overturned – but they did anyway. Harris wasn’t nervous until he walked into the hearing. The seven-member board faced them on the far side of a long table, with Jim Neumeister in the middle. Desler sat on the closer side, about 10 feet away. When the hearing opened, he remembers, Desler began by reading the dictionary definition of bullying, and to illustrate its dangers she referenced the Columbine shootings. When it was his turn, Harris told the court, “This whole thing has basically been a witchhunt,” accusing them of unfairly amplifying blame. “Albeit I was not nice to them at all,” he says. “They retaliated against my being mad at them. Dropping phone calls out, telling me to meet with them during class times, telling me they could break the rules if they needed to.” (In an e-mail ordering Harris to report to her office, Desler wrote that they were finding him in violation of a number of rules and regulations.) After his speech, Harris had a bad feeling. “I looked over and I saw Mary just getting red in the face.” When the board deliberated, Desler waited with them in the hall. “She was being very nice and cordial,” he remembers. “I didn’t say a word to her. I was so livid.” The sanctions got worse – now Harris and his roommate were kicked out of Elder – and Harris got more miserable, finally deciding to transfer. Harris was written up on so many charges he started keeping a journal, but none of them held up in court. He believed Desler was targeting him. “She was a huge reason why I thought of leaving the school in the first place,” he says. “I would have had a target on my back for the next three years.”
Now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina, Harris is still upset, speaking excitedly and passionately about the case. “To this day, I would still ask Mary what did I do that got me in trouble, and she can never give me an answer,” he says. “Unfortunately she’s very good at what she does, which is upholding university rules, even though her office itself is willing to compromise the integrity of those rules.” To be sure, among students disgruntled by Student Affairs, Desler isn’t always the “villain.” “She was really nice and helpful, so, so helpful,” says a Weinberg sophomore who sought Desler’s guidance in preparing for UHAS and wishes to remain anonymous because the case is still pending. “That was the only positive experience I’ve ever had with Student Affairs. Everybody else had just been keeping us in the dark.”
In Fall Quarter 2007, the Division of Student Affairs was very busy. The number of students sent to the hospital had doubled from Fall 2006, to 25-30. Desler was worried. “She told me that some freshman had been found face down in her own vomit. No one had gone to help her,” says a Communication junior who dealt with Desler during that time. “She was saying what a horrible season it had been.” The frequent incidents had worn on Desler. She sanctioned the junior for an alleged drug offense, banning her from campus housing without waiting for results from the crime lab. When six weeks later police dropped all charges, Desler called the junior to say she’d made a mistake. “She totally had her tail between her legs,” the junior says. “She’s a totally scared lady. She really operates from fear. She treated me like I was some kind of criminal.” Though she says her mom will never forgive Desler, “at this point I feel bad for her,” the junior says. “I think she has a hard job. I think she doesn’t sort out the pressure and the stress of it well.”
That fall was when the mudslinging began; one blogger referred to the period as Desler’s “reign of terror.” Tension between Student Affairs and students seemed to reach a critical mass. A couple of seniors started a blog and Facebook group entitled Free Northwestern, “inspired by our friends’ feeling of helplessness as they dealt with the opaque and misleading tactics of Mary and her Student Affairs department,” says Devin Balkind, Communication ’08. “It was, and is, a therapeutic place where people can record their experiences for the benefit of others.”
The animosity was partially a product of strained Greek relations with the university. Delt had been removed and some felt the house had been a victim of an unsympathetic administration. Students worried that Desler’s office was following an agenda to rid campus entirely of Greek Life. “There was a sense of momentum,” Balkind says. “Mary Desler was like the next chapter in the ongoing saga of repressive Northwestern policies.” Desler was not the first to be labeled an enemy by the Greeks; OFSL director Kyle Pendleton left NU in 2006 after Greeks signed a petition calling for his removal. “It was the fight that we had. We thought the message was clear. It was disappointing,” says Balkind. “I just don’t like the way they do business.” In 2006, NU commissioned a Fraternity and Sorority Life Task Force report, and Desler stands behind its vision. (“It is the document that guides our work: our strategic plan,” she wrote in an e-mail.) It says nothing about suspending houses, but focuses on “the most troubling issues” like alcohol abuse and hazing. The Task Force “finally came to a point where we agreed that pretending these issues were not real … was neither responsible nor productive,” it wrote.
Perhaps it is inevitable for someone in Desler’s position to get a bad reputation among students. At the 2007 annual conference of the National Association of College and University Attorneys, she led a seminar called “Everything You Wanted to Know about Litigating against Students: The Customer Isn’t Always Right.” “Probably why everyone else hates her is because she always figures out that a violation occurred, Baum says. “She always tells me, ‘Why do you think the university loves me?’ She says, ‘I think it’s interesting that every student thinks I’m the devil but they only see the 10 percent of what I actually do and the university thinks I’m great.'”
Desler came to Northwestern in 1997 and took her current position in 2002. “She does hope and believe that most cases can be worked out through conciliation and formal reviews,” her predecessor Margo Brown told The Daily at the time. “She’s a very thoughtful person who is not going to be unreasonable.” Before then, Desler held similar administrative positions at North Central College in Naperville and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University where she worked as a hall director. She faced a challenge when the drinking age went from 18 to 21. “What a year that was,” she told The Daily in 2002. “It was hard on students and it was definitely hard on the staff.” Since then, she’s had to deal with scores of more nuanced cases. Former Northwestern VP for student affairs Margaret J. Barr asked Desler to help edit the second edition of The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration. Though Desler has no children of her own, she may see herself in a sort of parental role. When Desler went to college in the late 1960s, her parents “put me on a bus and sent me off to college. I got a letter a month,” she told NU’s alumni magazine in 2006. Still, she has dispensed “motherly advice” to those who pass through her office. (In the last chapter of The Handbook she considers in loco parentis – educators as surrogate parents -with no definitive conclusion.) After mistakenly sanctioning the junior, one weekend outside business hours, Desler picked her up off-campus, carried her boxes, packed them into her sedan and drove her back. When a student was arrested in 2004, Desler posted his $300 bail.
At one Wildcat Welcome meeting, Shane Singh remembers that Desler read aloud an article that purported to have traced a Facebook profile back to her, and laughed. “I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know how to use Facebook. I don’t look at students’ profiles on Facebook,” she wrote in an e-mail. S
tudent conspiracy theories about Facebook are so rampant that when Wildcat Welcome considered creating official Facebook groups for each class, they decided it was pointless. “They’re all going to think that it’s Mary Desler spying on them,” Singh says. The fear may stem from a perceived secrecy about the student affairs process, a hesitancy to talk openly with the press and a misunderstanding about what Student Affairs and Mary Desler actually do. “I know that she wants freshmen to be safe during the first week, I know that she wants there to be adequate social events, I know that she does not want off-campus partying that week. But I don’t know what she does with the other seven hours of her day, ” Singh says. On Unigo.com, a college review site, several Northwestern students cited Desler and the administration as something they would change. “The disconnect between the student affairs office and the student body is something that I don’t think anybody understands,” Singh says, “but it exists.”
For as many who expressed their appreciation for the Student Affairs process, many more came forward in force to tell their stories, disgruntled and wounded, some feeling a duty to voice their grievances that they might be redressed. To hear that would trouble Jim Neumeister. “If we don’t have a system people believe in and that they think is fair and that they think is honest and where they believe they are going to be heard, then I think we’ve lost part of the battle,” he says. “The integrity of our conduct system is a paramount concern.” But Neumeister has other things to worry about. This past Fall Quarter, the number of students sent to the hospital was up to 50; it had doubled again. “We are alarmed, we are really alarmed,” he says.
Some students are waiting optimistically for Morton Schapiro to take over as university president for Henry Bienen. They hope Schapiro, who brings from Williams College a reputation for prioritizing students, will make some welcome changes among Student Affairs. But some students believe that despite the current system’s unpopularity, it may work. “Maybe she’s some kind of anti-superhero, this type of placebo effect,” Singh says. “Oh, Desler’s watching – better not do anything.”
