It was, unofficially, the strangest move-in in the short history of the UNO dorm known as Maverick Village.
Thomas Wallace, the dorm's newest resident, didn't bring the requisite PlayStation 3 or a laptop.
Instead, he lugged in his record collection. Herbie Hancock albums. Hits from the 1970s.
He didn't unpack any cargo shirts or many T-shirts. Instead, he hung up his suits and ties and starched shirts in the dorm room's closet.
Every morning Wallace emerges from his dorm room wearing one of those suits and takes the short stroll to the university's administration building.
He walks to the second floor, to the corner office suite, where he is the University of Nebraska at Omaha's new vice chancellor for student affairs — the man responsible for enrolling, disciplining and protecting students, and also finding them an on-campus place to live.
After work, the 54-year-old returns to Maverick Village, where this summer he lives next door to the students he oversees.
“It's amazing,” said Wallace, sitting on the standard-issue Maverick Village living room chair. “I'd forgotten how students think, how they operate. I'm remembering now.”
Wallace's unusual summer living arrangements came about because of a scheduling conflict.
He wanted to start work in mid-June, getting a head start on his first UNO school year after 21 years as an administrator at the University of Mississippi.
His wife and three children had a million activities — work, dance recitals, packing — to finish up in Oxford, Miss., before moving to Omaha in August.
So after taking the UNO job, Wallace posed a question that other UNO administrators hadn't previously heard.
“Do you think I could live in the residence hall?” he asked.
The reply: Do you really want to do that?
“I laughed and said, ‘Yes, yes I do.'”
A group of students helped Wallace move in June 12, a Saturday. Not that there was much to move — he'd brought mostly clothes, his records and an antique-looking television.
Wallace's first look at his residence hall room reminded him how much times have changed.
The rooms at Maverick Village look more like middle-of-the-road apartments, complete with full-sized kitchen, living room and bathroom. And Wallace has one big advantage over the rest of the village's residents — he gets a whole apartment to himself instead of sharing it with two or three roommates.
Since moving in, the new vice chancellor has met dozens of students, he says, saying hello in the hallways and chatting with them when he takes out the trash or parks in the garage.
He faced a daylong dilemma in the laundry room. He wanted to dry his clothes, but the dryer was already full. He waited for an hour, and the owner of the clothes didn't show.
He went back to his room, then checked the laundry room every few hours.
The clothes in the dryer didn't move.
He called his wife.
“She said, ‘Just take the clothes out of the dryer,'” said Wallace. “‘That's what a student would expect you to do.'”
So he unloaded the mystery clothes onto the counter. They didn't disappear until the next day.
“There's no way I leave my clothes in a public laundry room for a whole day!” he said. “But that's understanding the students. It's good — I need to understand.”
Wallace has noticed two Maverick Village problems he thinks he can fix easily enough.
He'll get more trash cans placed in the residence hall parking garage after realizing that there weren't any — and that some students simply dumped trash out of their cars, dirtying the garage for everyone.
And he's discovered the student shortcut from the garage to the residence hall's front door, a well-worn dirt path that cuts through the front yard. Wallace is hoping to get the shortcut paved soon.
He's also noticed that the students are quieter than he imagined they would be. They observe the 10 p.m. quiet hour. They are respectful to him and to one another. They seem proud of Maverick Village, he said, like it's their neighborhood or small town.
Wallace plans to move out of the dorm Aug. 4 and into a west Omaha home. He's excited to reunite with his family, but he thinks he'll miss the short walk to work and his college-age neighbors.
“After living here, I can say students' value systems are really very much like the rest of ours,” Wallace said. “Sometimes you hear people talk about kids being different. They really aren't.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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