On a Tuesday afternoon in early September, the classic college snack-trap — pizza, chips, and soda — sat ready to lure students at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. It was the first-ever meeting of the billiards club, and its founder hoped that free food would nudge the reluctant but curious into the room.
The first 15 minutes, no one showed up.
Then, slowly but surely, students began to trickle in. Shy side chatter eventually gave way to lively conversation about the club’s future. Even the name was up for debate: “Pool club” could be confusing, because prospective members might think it was a swimming club. Some students bashfully admitted that they didn’t know what billiards was before showing up at the meeting.
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
On a Tuesday afternoon in early September, the classic college snack-trap — pizza, chips, and soda — sat ready to lure students at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. It was the first-ever meeting of the billiards club, and its founder hoped that free food would nudge the reluctant but curious into the room.
The first 15 minutes, no one showed up.
Then, slowly but surely, students began to trickle in. Shy side chatter eventually gave way to lively conversation about the club’s future. Even the name was up for debate: “Pool club” could be confusing, because prospective members might think it was a swimming club. Some students bashfully admitted that they didn’t know what billiards was before showing up at the meeting.
As quickly as the talk grew serious about Billiards/Pool Club — the pending official name — it devolved into a brainstorming session about other clubs. One floated the idea of a robotics club, which at first drew playful ire as students accused him of “hijacking” the interest meeting. But then others piled on: An “eat the rich” club was proposed in jest, as well as a more sincere “life skills” club, where students could learn basic tasks like changing a tire or fixing a bike.
Prior to the pandemic, UVA-Wise had about 50 student organizations. By the fall of 2022, only 20 remained.
“Maybe I should’ve gone with that instead of billiards,” mused Steven Tyndall, the billiards club’s freshman founder. “I just thought billiards would be more fun.”
Immediately after the meeting, one attendee hurried down two flights of stairs into UVA-Wise’s revamped Office of Student Engagement to talk to Molly Land, its newest employee. Encouraged by his peers at Billiards/Pool Club, the student decided to make his “hijacking” robotics club a reality.
These moments of spontaneous synergy are why UVA-Wise created Land’s job as “vibrant campus community coordinator”: to help students bring new clubs to life — and defunct ones back from the dead.
When Covid hit in the spring of 2020, it profoundly disrupted higher ed. Over the next few terms, while many students came back to campuses, they tended to live a common Covid-era mantra: Go to class, eat, go home. Prior to the pandemic, UVA-Wise, which enrolls just over 2,000 students, had about 50 student organizations. By the fall of 2022, only 20 remained.
More than a dozen administrators and experts told The Chronicle that student organizations have been slow to recover. While some students don’t know where to begin with out-of-classroom engagement after the loss of crucial high-school years, others need convincing that coming out of their shell and joining student groups is worth it at all.
The dire levels of disengagement felt especially glaring at UVA-Wise, a tight-knit campus tucked in the Appalachians. Even the surviving clubs were often functioning as ghosts of their former selves, with fewer members and less participation.
“When you don’t see things happening, that just kind of validates the disengagement, and so we had to figure out a way to make it visible,” said Gail Zimmerman, vice chancellor for student affairs. “Just to say that this campus has a life.”
Leaving it up to time and old strategies to boost student engagement was not an option, administrators told The Chronicle during a visit to campus. Instead, the college bet over half a million dollars on a plan to revive extracurricular activities.
As students returned this fall, administrators wondered: Would it pay off?
ADVERTISEMENT
In his hometown of Lebanon, Va., population 3,000, Logan Smith liked that he could walk down the street or school hallway and know pretty much everyone.
That’s what Smith expected to find at UVA-Wise. He had heard stories of a place where he’d get to know his classmates and professors, where there were dozens of clubs and activities. One student told Smith that the campus’s winding sidewalks were often so busy that he’d only have elbow room to spare.
But when Smith arrived in the fall of 2020, the campus was a “ghost town.”
He was lucky if he saw two or three people a day. By the end of the semester, he wanted to leave. He considered transferring or moving back home to attend community college.
“I just felt like I had no friends,” he said.
Smith’s final hope for finding connection was winning a seat in the Student Government Association, the driving force behind campus life. His cousin, who had persuaded him to apply to UVA-Wise, was SGA president at the time, and it was one of the only clubs that met consistently during the first year of the pandemic.
Smith got in by accident: While he lost the election for freshman members, he had enough college credits to join the sophomore cohort, which had two vacancies. “It was kind of the catalyst that made me realize, ‘Hey, this gives me a greater purpose at college than just grades,’” he said.
Then the empty seats piled up. The organization’s fabric started to unravel. Members stopped showing up for meetings.
“People just don’t take pride in clubs and these leadership positions as much,” Smith said. “Before Covid and everything, winning a seat on SGA or anything else was like cream of the crop, like a big deal. But people see it as less of a big deal now, and being absent is no biggie.”
That indifference is a lingering ailment from the pandemic era, when students were in survival mode. They worried about loved ones getting sick and about getting sick themselves. With clubs largely shifting online, students didn’t have the energy to add on to their academic lives, especially if an interest meeting just meant another Zoom call.
By the fall of 2022, the student government couldn’t meet quorum most weeks. That was a big problem. Most campus organizations couldn’t get approved for funding or events.
“If we’re not able to meet quorum, we’re not able to have a proper meeting and to even hear out that allocation request or, in reality, to do anything about it,” said Brittany Horton, then a senior and student senator. “And so it just kept getting pushed back, pushed back, pushed back, pushed back.”
A handful of devoted students like Horton helped cobble together special meetings to approve essential agenda items for clubs. She tried everything to recruit new student-government members: emails, one-on-one conversations, even opening up some positions to anyone, regardless of whether they met the qualifications on paper.
ADVERTISEMENT
But students were checked out and burned out. The club that was supposed to keep other clubs afloat was sinking fast.
In the spring of 2023, Molly Land put on her best coach’s face, sat down with students, and tried to figure out what was going wrong in campus life.
Land came to UVA-Wise as a salesperson-turned-assistant-coach for the women’s basketball team. She soon joined the college’s Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, mainly working on compliance, but she wanted a more student-facing role.
Land thought she could bring authenticity to the job of rebuilding campus life — and remain open to students humbling her. “I’m 37. I don’t know what’s really cool to an 18- to 22-year-old,” she said. Students “can kind of keep you in check, like, ‘Molly, this is not it.’”
As Land got settled into the role, she convened student focus groups and quickly learned just how grim things were for campus clubs. “The big takeaway was that they were really struggling with recruiting and retaining members,” she said.
When students went online, many clubs lost the institutional knowledge they needed to keep organizations afloat. In the past, older students would pass information down and younger students would watch them thrive in leadership roles. Students returned to campus not knowing how to apply for funding, reserve spaces for rooms, or print fliers. It’s not necessarily that they didn’t want to be leaders — many didn’t know how.
What our world is missing is people who are on fire about something, anything, and if we get them plugged into that through a club and they figure out how to weave their major into it, that’s the money right there. That’s the magic.
Molly Land
For Zimmerman, the vice chancellor for student affairs, these problems were related to habits students built up while spending most of their time on screens. She began to call it “learned disengagement” — and knew the college had to do something about it.
“How do you break a habit?” she asked. “The easiest way is to replace it with something. So that’s what we had to create.”
That replacement was Land. It took eight months and one failed search to find her.
Land helps student groups with anything they need: paperwork, recruitment, connections to professors and local residents for organizing events. Sometimes, she’s just there to help with the little things that make the process a bit easier for students. “I show somebody every day how to send a calendar invite,” she said with a laugh.
Prior to the creation of Land’s position, a single administrator oversaw all student organizations, among several other responsibilities. Many of them didn’t have enough support. “Systems just weren’t easy, or they were broken,” Land said.
While Land’s new job provided a backbone for faltering groups, another essential element was lacking among most students: boundless energy.
ADVERTISEMENT
Jacob Alvord was one of the exceptions. As a resident adviser, Alvord saw clubs struggling to stay afloat and students wanting to be involved, but no one taking charge. He took matters into his own hands.
A nudge from his friend landed him as vice president of Spirit Haven, an organization that advocates for religious inclusion. He’s treasurer of the philosophy club, which he helped revamp twice. And after two failed leaders of the gaming guild, Alvord is now president.
Alvord also took over leadership tasks for clubs he’s not in charge of. He’d plan interest meetings and ensure they were signed up for the activities fair.
He started to think, “Well, who’s gonna run it if I don’t?” (He’s ended up in 10 clubs this year.)
Still, even with Land’s support and Alvord’s willingness to lead four clubs at once, hand-holding student organizations through the start-up process was just the first piece of the puzzle.
As chancellor of UVA-Wise for the past decade, Donna Price Henry realized long ago that engagement was built into the small college’s DNA. What Henry didn’t realize was just how much the campus needed its student organizations — until most of them were gone.
“I don’t know that I would have thought before Covid just how critical they are to the development of the student,” she said. “But when you begin to lose them or you lose the grass-roots way that things operate, you need to think of new ways to provide that support and help students to understand how to move forward.”
Comfortably at the helm of a golf cart one recent afternoon, Henry rolled past Crockett Hall, one of the original buildings on UVA-Wise’s campus. She gave a short, well-practiced history lesson: On a snowy December night in 1953, local residents convinced a University of Virginia official that the tiny agricultural town needed a college.
Today, UVA-Wise still has the same mission: Educate young people from the region and convince a lot of them to stick around. Anywhere from one-third to half of its students in a given year are the first in their families to go to college, and nearly all receive financial aid.
With so many students who don’t know much about college when they arrive, “we just have to handle things a little bit differently,” Henry said, “and because of that, this whole student engagement, student activities, life on campus to engage students is really critically important.”
Hiring Land was the starting point for a broad overhaul of how UVA-Wise approached student engagement. The student-affairs division was reorganized, and a dedicated Office of Student Engagement took shape, with three full-time employees and a hub in the heart of the student-activities center.
UVA-Wise spent nearly $250,000 on staffing, restructuring, and new funding to support programming. An additional $300,000 went to an outdoor recreation court for basketball and pickleball, as well as a gaming hub with nearly 20 different consoles.
To tie all these efforts together, administrators tried to further engage students in the place where they retreat the most: their phones.
The campus paid $10,500 to contract with Modern Campus, an education-technology company, to use its Presence platform. The Presence app puts everything students need to get involved — club meetings, university events, and more — in one place. Those with greater ambitions can use the app to file their candidacy for student-government elections.
ADVERTISEMENT
In case students aren’t convinced on why they should download yet another app, the college has gamified it: Students can earn points by attending events or taking on leadership roles. They can then spend them at the swag shop that’s packed with everything from T-shirts to TVs. Prizes cost between 50 and 500 points, and students earn about 10 points on average for every event they attend. A couple weeks into the fall semester, 43 percent of students had attended at least one event.
As students continue to track attendance and score points, the college can keep tabs on the numbers in real time and adapt its approach if certain students aren’t engaging.
“I feel like we’re really in the thick of it right now,” Land told The Chronicle. “I’m really curious by the end of the year to see: Did these ideas that we had and our process — did it work?”
This fall, Logan Smith sat at a wooden picnic table with his back to the new outdoor basketball court, where students were passing a ball around and yelling in good-natured competition. Smith fidgeted with his red UVA-Wise keychain as he spoke, stopping midsentence to greet two women walking by with a, “Hey, how are you guys?”
A few minutes later, Smith raised his voice to address another student, who looked up from their phone and waved. “Good to see you!” he said, smiling.
This semester has brought a different energy to UVA-Wise, administrators and students told The Chronicle. Smith has finally seen the bustling campus he’d heard so much about. He’s built a community, fostered close relationships with his mentors and professors, and joined several organizations. He’s also become the student-government president.
“This is the first year it actually feels like college again, and it just seems like everyone’s really buying in,” Smith said.
In September, student-government elections rolled around. Colorful campaign posters dotted bulletin boards in every campus building.
On the first day of voting, Land held up a blue-and-yellow flier that advertised a first-year student running for a position in the freshman senate. Land had met the excited student just before classes started.
“He came into my office and said, ‘What’s the deal with this election?’ and I told him, ‘The deal is you should run,’” Land said, grinning. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any competition, but we aren’t gonna tell him that.”
About 18 students ran for nine open positions, and the organization has no vacant seats. The election took place on the student-engagement app for the first time, and 178 students voted, up to three times as many as participated during the peak pandemic years.
Horton, the former student leader and 2023 graduate who now works in the college’s diversity office, sat in on the first student-government meeting. To her, it was unrecognizable. The room was full of new officers eager to be sworn in, groups of friends who came to support them, and even interested members of the student body.
“It was a very beautiful thing to see,” Horton said.
As of November, UVA-Wise has exceeded its pre-pandemic tally with 56 approved student organizations — including the now-official Appalachian Billiards Association — and seven more in the process. Students have come to Land with such ideas as creating a weightlifting club and reorganizing the Women in STEM Club. Even the student newspaper, which died out during the pandemic, is on the rebound.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Students have really responded that they want this type of leadership and they want this accountability,” Land said.
Land has been crucial in helping revive engagement, Smith said. The new app is up to 800 unique users. Not only does it encourage students to be more involved, Smith said, but it also helps clubs communicate better so they aren’t holding events at the same time.
“They’re listening to our concerns, and they’ve invested the time and money to create these new positions, this whole new office solely for students,” Smith said of administrators. “It’s really good to see because we’re the customers of the college, and if your customers are happy, your business should be happy.”
Land often talks to students about how a campus-leadership role can translate to their careers. Her go-to question for students has always been, “What is your dream job?” Post-Covid, they’ve struggled to respond.
It’s up to Land to persuade students about the difference between a “cookie-cutter résumé” and the experiences that could actually help them land their dream job, even if they don’t have one yet.
Eventually, she hopes she can take a step back and let students take the lead. But right now, she knows she’s needed.
“What our world is missing is people who are on fire about something, anything, and I think if we get them plugged into that through a club and they figure out how to weave their major into it, that’s the money right there,” Land said. “That’s the magic.”
Alexander Jones has already felt the magic.
Jones, a freshman, had never even heard of UVA-Wise before he found out he was waitlisted at the University of Virginia’s main campus. The letter he received invited him to join Year in Wise, which guarantees admission to waitlisted students from Virginia if they go to UVA-Wise for one year and complete introductory courses. Jones accepted.
At a new-student orientation during the summer, Jones met Land for the first time. “And she was like, ‘Yeah, if you have an interest or talent or something and you want to be able to show it off on campus, we are going to help you do that,’” Jones recalled.
He took the bait, telling Land about his love of video journalism and some of the human-interest stories he produced in high school. Land then told him all about the college’s old TV club, which folded at least a decade ago. She followed up with a big question: Did he want to take the lead on bringing the club back?
Jones was in. As soon as he arrived on campus, he reached out to Land, and she got the ball rolling. Since then, he has been busy meeting with faculty members and recruiting students. The university’s communications office emptied out the old TV club room, which had been storage space for years, and taught Jones how to use all the equipment.
“If I never had that interaction” with Land, he said, “I feel like I wouldn’t have had as much motivation to really show off my talents here because I wouldn’t have really known how much they really wanted that.” Land’s enthusiasm, he added, “pushed me over the edge to really want to start something.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Jones wants to use his new video club to help UVA-Wise better tell its story — “what makes Wise, Wise.” At a large university, Jones said, bureaucracy and limited resources might have hampered his experiment. He’s been surprised by the community he’s already built at UVA-Wise, which has been a “huge motivator” for him as a student leader.
It has motivated him to reconsider his future, too. UVA-Wise might not be just a one-year detour anymore.
Erin, who was a reporting fellow at The Chronicle, is now a higher-ed reporter at The Assembly. Follow her @GretzingerErin on X, or send her an email at erin@theassemblync.com.