Tom Wesley’s UM-Dearborn connections are deep and sprawling. His first experience with campus was hanging out in the University Mall (now the Renick University Center) as a 10-year-old, eating Cottage Inn Pizza and playing Risk with his siblings, while his dad attended classes for his master’s degree. After graduating from high school, Wesley enrolled at UM-Dearborn himself — as did his twin brother. Both of them met their spouses here. He’s also worked on campus at two different times in his life in three different roles, including his current position as the student ombudsperson, where he helps students navigate the university bureaucracy and ponders practical ways to make it easier on everyone. Recently, we chatted with Wesley about his many UM-Dearborn ties, how things are going since moving back to Michigan in 2021 and his memoir-worthy love story with his wife.
UM-Dearborn and grad school were lifelines during the Great Recession
Wesley grew up in Dearborn Heights, but he says his center of gravity, especially after he got a car and a little more freedom, was always Detroit. He was fascinated by everything that was going on in the city, and when he came to UM-Dearborn in 2005 on the full-ride Chancellor’s Scholarship, he quickly declared an urban studies major. Wesley says his dream at the time was to work in the city’s planning office. But like so many who graduated in 2009, the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession threw a wrench in his plans. Fortunately, Wesley was able to stay employed. Shortly before graduating, he took on the newly created role of LGBTQA program coordinator in UM-Dearborn’s Office of Student Life. And with some encouragement from Dean of Students Amy Finley and then-Director of Student Activities Kris Day (now director of University Unions and Events), he started applying to grad schools. Given everything that was going on in the economy, he calculated that a career in higher education was as safe a bet as any and enrolled in Michigan State University's student affairs administration program.
A career in higher ed took him to California for a decade
After earning his master’s, Wesley got two offers for student affairs jobs — one at UCLA and one at Kent State University. West Hollywood sounded like a bigger adventure than staying in the Midwest, so with Led Zeppelin's “Going to California” in his head, he and his fiancée packed up and headed west. Over the next decade, Wesley worked at three different universities in Southern California. After two years at UCLA, he took a position as assistant director of student conduct at Occidental College, which Wesley notes is “mostly famous because Obama went there for two years before he went to Columbia.” “The first time I lived in a dorm was at Oxy. I was a live-on staff member. So it was me, my wife, Kendall, and our cats living in a freshman dorm,” he says. “It’s a small school, so you wear many hats. I was doing everything from checking students' keys in and out to having the conversations with them afterwards when they got busted for having weed inside the hall.” After five years at Occidental, though, Wesley says he never got the right opportunity to move up. So he ended up leaving the student affairs space to go to Pepperdine University to run online programs for their business school.
A Michigan — and UM-Dearborn — homecoming
As COVID hit, Wesley and his wife started thinking seriously about moving back to Michigan. “I had been at Pepperdine for about six months when the dominos started falling,” he remembers. “That year, in my family, we lost five people — not to COVID, but related complications. And like for a lot of people, it was this moment to ponder what I was really doing with my life. As an educator, I wasn’t going to buy a house in Los Angeles because that’s just how the economy works. So we decided that would be it. We decided to move back, and we crossed the state line on Dec. 31, 2020.”
The homecoming was a little rocky at first. To support the move, Wesley took a job working for his brother-in-law (also a UM-Dearborn alum), who’d recently purchased Between the Lines, a long-running LGBT-focused Michigan newspaper. “It was an interesting job,” he says. “But I really wanted to be using my higher ed degree, and here I was selling ads to big weed companies who were not exactly interested in the same things I was, while trying to pay freelancers and run a shoestring newspaper during a pandemic.” Then, after almost two years in that role, Wesley saw a job opening at his alma mater. It was a newer position in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, assisting doctoral students with career development. He got the job, which he held for nearly three years. Then, earlier this year, he landed an opportunity to use his student affairs expertise again, as the student ombudsperson in the Student Affairs office. Wesley says it’s an often misunderstood role — part complaint resolution, part figuring out how to make the university bureaucracy run more smoothly. “I think everybody who works this job sees it a little bit differently,” Wesley says. “And, yeah, I do field complaints. But I think my job is ultimately to listen to students, make them feel heard and then help them help themselves. Navigating the bureaucracy is challenging and frustrating sometimes. And students may be identifying things that we could fix. Part of my job is actually to learn from what we’re hearing and then suggest improvements at the end of the year. So I’m really looking forward to being in the job a little longer so I can get into that.”
A “complicated” UM-Dearborn love story
Wesley met his wife Kendall when they were both on the executive board of the Gay-Straight Alliance at UM-Dearborn. Funny thing: At the time, neither one of them identified as straight. But Wesley says he knew pretty soon after meeting her that he wanted to know more about her. “The more time we spent together, the more this issue came to a head. Like, are we dating or not dating?” he says. “It’s complicated, but I grew up kind of thinking I was a gay man. And in college, you spend a lot of time coming out to yourself, to others, to co-workers, trying to negotiate how you tell people this information and when. And then to all of a sudden go through this process again of, like, ‘Oh, by the way, all those things I just came out to you with — slight change.’ People really like you to fit in boxes. We even like ourselves to fit in boxes. But the more I live, the more I realize I don’t fit in that box and here we are.” He and Kendall just celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary last month. He works here. She works at Wayne State University. They bought a home that’s just a few houses down from the one Wesley grew up in. They’re feeling good about staying a while.
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Story by Lou Blouin
