The title “Dean of Students” is a throwback, and I’ve always liked that. When I found myself holding that title, first at a large university and then at a small college, I imagined myself as a link in a chain going back more than a hundred years, serious yet wry educators staring down a miscreant freshman one minute and comforting a lonely sophomore the next. I liked that it made clear my highest priority: students. Whatever else might have been swirling around a campus, I knew that my primary focus, my raison d’être, was to tend to the welfare of my students.