USAO welcomed a new Housing Operations Director, Dr. Delton Gordon, in October 2024. Gordon has extensive knowledge and passion for what he does throughout his background, which he will draw upon during his estimated year here at USAO.
Gordon elaborated on his plans for the university in the coming year. He believes that USAO should be a home away from home, and plans on spending the summer to make the spaces across campus welcoming, preparing the staff to help students build a community for themselves. Additionally, he and the university housing committee plan to update the furniture in community spaces around campus, with several other infrastructure-type projects in the works.
Gordon also believes that university housing is important to students.
“I’ve spent over 30 years paying attention to residence halls, first as a student and then as a professional. I lived on campus for 12 and a half years of my life. The residence halls on this campus are incredible compared to many that I have lived in and worked around. I believe with a little modernization and updating, our halls will continue to be a major contributor to the success of USAO,” Gordon said.
Gordon found his love for what he does early on, tracking it back to college in his years at Oklahoma State University (OSU). However, that was not without first preparing for something completely different.
Gordon spent a lot of time in the hospital as a child, and he believes that interacting with the people within the medical field gave him the dream of working in it.
“Going off to college, what I found out is what I liked about all of my science classes are all of the things we did as a group, the group projects,” Gordon said.
Once he reached his upper-division work and began doing work alone, Gordon realized it was not what he wanted to do. He felt that it was an intensely competitive atmosphere, which did not align with his passions, thus making it unfulfilling for him.
Gordon got involved in many groups on-campus, such as working in the residence halls and the Student Government Association of OSU. What sparked his love for working in housing was simply asking about what it was like.
“I knew the people who ran housing pretty well because I met with them regularly, or they were my advisors, and I was just like ‘what do you do? You seem to have fun,’ and so that kind of started me on this journey,” Gordon said.
Afterward, he then went and interviewed campus academic programs to decide who was going to have him in their programs. When he met with Dr. Kay Murphy, who ran the program that studied adulthood and human and family science, his passions were solidified. His last couple of years in the undergraduate program focused on group projects and the study of people, and he knew he found what he wanted to do.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he then attended Emporia State and obtained his master’s degree in counseling education with an emphasis in Student Personnel Services. This served his goal for working on a college campus, specifically in the residence halls. During his time at Emporia State, Gordon was a graduate Hall Director, supervising a group of Resident Assistants (RAs) who oversaw the hundreds of students living in the residence building. Gordon felt that working with his peers furthered his ambitions.
Gordon has spent 25 years working with college students, and only one of those was spent working outside of housing. He spent a year working in leadership programs and orientation in Kansas, but felt it was not the same as working in housing. Gordon has worked at Kansas State University, Tarleton State University, Oklahoma State University, Arkansas Tech University, and now USAO.
When working on his PhD, Gordon studied emotional intelligence and has the opportunity to use that in his daily work which is something he finds to be most rewarding about working at USAO. He believes that his passion lies in helping students move successfully through the process of building their own emotional intelligence.
Whitley Brown is a second-year communication major at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.
