3 minute read
DR. STAN CARPENTER Love of education kept alumnus forever in college
Dr. Stan Carpenter Texas State Dean
Love of education kept alumnus forever in college
BY PHIL RIDDLE
Dr. Stan Carpenter loved college so much he never left.
The self-described “quintessential first-generation college student,” latched onto higher education and made it a career.
Now dean of the College of Education at Texas State University in San Marcos, Carpenter credits his Tarleton experiences as his springboard to academic success.
“They gave me the opportunity to become a leader and to build friendships that I have to this day,” he said.
One of eight children born and raised in Stephenville, his high school guidance counselor warned him to manage his expectations.
“He told me not to aim too high,” Carpenter said with a laugh.
When powerhouses Rice University and MIT wooed the National Merit Scholar, he stayed home and enrolled at Tarleton.
“I was very unsophisticated,” Carpenter said. “I probably couldn’t have made it in Boston or Houston at that time, but I never took a backseat to anyone. Everything I’ll ever do began at Tarleton.”
A 1972 graduate with a degree in mathematics, Carpenter earned his master’s in student personnel and guidance from Texas A&M and his Ph.D. in counseling and student personnel services from the University of Georgia.
Through the years he held a variety of administrative roles at Texas State, including department chair, and also spent nearly two decades on the Texas A&M faculty, where he launched and directed a nationally recognized master’s degree program in student affairs administration.
From 1987 to 1997, he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
“Dr. Carpenter has provided exceptional leadership throughout his years at Texas State,” said President Denise Trauth. “Our College of Education has an extraordinary tradition of providing excellent teachers and other educational leaders for the state of Texas, and Dean Carpenter has built on that record.”
Carpenter has presented at more than 150 conferences and is author or co-author of more than 95 journal articles, book chapters and other professional publications and reports, focusing on professionalism and leadership in student affairs. In 2010 the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators named him a Pillar of the Profession.
And it all started with his decision to come to Tarleton.
“Tarleton was small enough and understood its mission to take kids like me and care about us,” he said.
Carpenter did odd jobs around campus to pay for his education. “I was washing pots in the dining hall for $1.05 an hour and taking jobs on the side,” he said. “I had worked 35 jobs by the time I graduated.”
Once a month, he would go to the bursar’s office for an accounting and to draw money for expenses, with the rest earmarked for tuition. During summers, he’d work to make enough to come back. At Tarleton, he became involved with Alpha Phi Omega, a national service fraternity. For more than 40 years he has not missed a meeting, along the way absorbing the core principles of leadership, friendship and service.
He served a four-year stint as APO president, and was the driving force behind construction of the fraternity’s national headquarters. “Everybody has their volunteer work,” he said. “The service really sounded good to me. It was the kind of work I could do with a higher ed career.”
Preparing for retirement this August, Carpenter easily recalled the three best days of his life—the birth of his daughter, his marriage and his first day as a professor in 1985.
“I understood when I walked into that classroom that I had found what I was supposed to be doing. Higher ed is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
No wonder he never left.
