By Fritz Klug
News Editor
Western Michigan University’s Ombudsman Kathy L. Mitchell in her office in Sangren Hall room 2104.Chyn Wey Lee/Western Herald
When a student has a problem with a professor, when a university employee has a disagreement with a supervisor, who are they gonna call? The Ombudsman.
Meet Kathy Mitchell, Western Michigan University’s Ombudsman. Students, faculty, and staff come to her with questions and concerns and Mitchell points them in the right direction to help resolve it.
“We’re here because the sooner they can get to me for help, the easier things are to resolve,” Mitchell said. “When people come two or three semesters down the road and have an issue they need resolved it becomes more challenging, more red tape, and more processes that you need to go through.”
Mitchell has been on campus for 20 years, earning her undergraduate and masters degrees at WMU, working in the College of Education and Human Development’s Office of Field Placement (when it was the College of Education), an advisor in the college and an advisor for the Environmental Studies program.
Mitchell is a lone agent on campus, reporting directly to WMU President John Dunn, Ph.D. She began in July 2008 and currently has no affiliation with any department.
Mitchell sat down with the Western Herald in September to give an idea of what her job entails.
Western Herald: What exactly do you do?
Kathy Mitchell: That is always such an interesting question because no two days ever look the same. The issues that come here are so diverse – this office serves both faculty and staff, and both graduate and undergraduate students. You can imagine that there are all kinds of things.
So much of it is helping students understand what their options are in terms of late withdraws, grade appeals, if they are dismissed from a program, issues related to housing, issues related to financial aid, and in keeping in mind that this office does not solve those [problems], but sort-of acts as a facilitator to connect students, faculty, and staff with the people on campus that we need to be working with to try and get something resolved.
The other piece of it, when I talk about grade appeal program dismissal, the understanding is that there was something inequitable that has occurred. A student who gets an E at the end of the semester because they didn’t do they work, there is clearly nothing I can do for them except that you need to re-register for that class.
It’s not a fix all. But a lot of students find themselves in situations where they know they are in trouble but don’t know what to do or what the processes are to follow and sometimes it becomes a little overwhelming and intimidating so they do nothing, and that is about the worst thing to do, although I understand that that is the default – “I’m going to pretend that nothing is going on.”
The thing that I want to make sure I get across is that we have students who come to me with issues related to any number of different areas doesn’t necessarily mean there is something deficient with that area. Usually there isn’t anything deficient, it’s just understanding how things work. With financial aid I get a lot of students who come here because they’re in trouble with their student account because they are not making satisfactory academic progress from a financial aid standpoint. That doesn’t mean that from an academic standpoint they are doing OK, but it can really impact their funding. They come with a big balance and say, “I can’t register for classes next semester.” It’s not that financial aid did anything wrong, it’s that the students didn’t understand all the different repercussions of not passing classes and how that effects financial aid.
So it’s just a matter of students coming to me, telling me what their problem is, and me going “OK, let me make a phone call, send an e-mail, get with so-and-so and see what we can do to get you back on track.
Western Herald: So you have to deal with everything?
Kathy Mitchell: I do, I have to deal with everything on campus. Somebody at the Resident Advisor fair last week said, “so you’re like an RA times a million.” Yeah, so I guess I’m like the RA for the whole campus. Having been here for as many years as I have has made it a lot easier to do my job because I have some kind of prior professional relationship with most places on campus; so I know who to call on each place on campus.
Western Herald: How has it been your first year?
Kathy Mitchell: When I first started, I thought, “I am going to have all these people come to me with their problems and I can’t do anything, this is going to be frustrating.” I don’t tell people what to do. I don’t go to the professor and tell them “you have to change this grade, or you need to do this, how frustrating.” But as it turns out, not being the person who makes the decision at the end of the day is actually really empowering because it frees me up to be able to help work the system for students, faculty, and staff. So now that I have been in it a year, I understand that person who sits in this office shouldn’t be a decision maker. They should be a facilitator, a mediator, a problem solver, but they shouldn’t be a decision maker.
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