Profiles

Larry Lockwood, Office of the Registrar

	Larry Lockwood, assistant provost for enrollment services. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

Larry Lockwood has devoted his life to helping students succeed.

The 61-year-old Vietnam War veteran, who has served as assistant provost for enrollment services in the Office of the Registrar at The University of Iowa for the past seven years, has especially reached out to veterans over the years, ensuring they have what they need to succeed in higher education.

He recalls his own college days, returning to campus as a disabled veteran and the difficulties he had navigating the icy terrain of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater campus on cold winter days before accessibility was a federal mandate.

Lockwood was drafted into the military in 1969 while a sophomore in college. He spent six months in Vietnam until he was twice wounded in action. The second time, he lost his right foot and suffered other major injuries after stepping on a landmine.

Instead of letting the experience limit his life, Lockwood has used his empathy and insights to help other veterans over the years. He obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught for a few years, and worked at the University of Wisconsin for 29 years in various capacities, including his initial role as a veterans counselor with the Veterans Administration.

Lockwood is passionate about helping veterans succeed. At Iowa, he supported the creation of a student-generated UI Veterans Association in 2005 and the UI Veterans Center in 2006. He’s currently serving on a 14-member UI Veterans Task Force formed in May, charged with exploring whether this is a group of students to recruit to the UI campus and how to best support veterans in their transition from soldier to student.

fyi recently caught up with Lockwood to learn more about what he does in his current job, what motivates him both on and off campus, and why it is important to support the estimated 300 veterans who are currently attending the University—a number that Lockwood says is likely to double over the next two years.

What similarities and differences do you see between your own experiences returning to college as a veteran of war and the veterans today who are making that transition from combat to the classroom?

Today, we see that same thing happening to the troops who are injured in these terrible explosions where they lose multiple limbs, and then they come home and need to re-enter society and deinstitutionalize. But we have more people now with brain injuries and more people with post-traumatic stress disorder in this war than experienced in Vietnam because of the urban warfare that our troops are experiencing, house-to-house combat. There are other disabled faculty on this campus who were veterans back in the Vietnam era, but they stay hidden.

What is The University of Iowa doing to help veterans make a successful transition from soldier to student?

The University of Iowa has created a Veterans Task Force just this past May, of which I’m an active member, to look holistically at the best way to help student veterans. The UI Veterans Center, created in 2006, is part of the Office of the Registrar and it provides a lot of services and resources.

What we’d like to do here is tout The University of Iowa to seriously disabled vets. We’ve got all kinds of disability services on this campus. We have the hearing clinic. We’ve got a great hospital with UI Health Care. We have the VA Hospital, where they can receive additional treatment if need be. We have a campus that’s all on one level—if they come here for a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science degree, they can go to a classroom within a four- to six-block area. We have the Bionic Bus system, and we have a student support group at the UI Veterans Center.

Tell us a little bit about what drew you to The University of Iowa and your career as a registrar.

I was substitute teaching and working at General Motors, and I couldn’t get a teaching job because there were just too many social studies teachers who graduated that year. The VA called me and asked me if I wanted to be a counselor, and I thought that would be an interesting area. Had I not gone into veterans work, I wouldn’t have been in the registrar’s office, and with all the varied work in the registrar’s office, I would have never gone up through the ranks and drawn Iowa’s attention. It was an opportunity to lead my own office and take my experience and knowledge and bring it to Iowa and to help expand services to the staff and student here on campus.

What exactly does the Office of the Registrar do and what is an average day like in your office?

Our office provides services to the faculty for student rosters and grade lists and it provides services to the students to maintain their academic records and send transcripts to employers or to graduate and professional schools. I probably see a dozen students a day with different problems.

The one thing I like about my position is it’s not routine. Every day is different, and here at Iowa, you can provide input to administration for decisions to be made quickly—that’s not true at other large institutions where you have committees upon committees to look at a problem before it even gets to administration. We’re also becoming a benchmark institution for registrar services here.

What have been some of the greatest accomplishments for the Office of the Registrar?

Opening up student records to more staff and faculty so that people have access to help students. We’ve developed an imaging system on campus so that records can be all online instead of everybody having paper files in their office. We’ve developed a tremendous student data warehouse that departments can access. And Project MAUI (Made At University of Iowa) is the new student information record system implementation project that will replace our existing system.

If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be?

I’d like the office to be in one location. We’re in four different locations right now: our customer service group is in the basement of Calvin Hall; our technical group is in Macbride Hall; the Veterans Affairs office is in the Communications Building; and we have the veterans certifying area in the basement of Jessup Hall.

On days off, what will people most likely find you doing?

Fishing or gardening—or should I say, weeding. We have quite a garden—not vegetables but plants, since landscaping is a hobby. My wife, Linda, and I have three children, Nathan, Danielle, Courtneay, and two grandchildren, Addison and Rowan. We spend a lot of time with the grandkids.

What is the most unexpected thing that’s ever happened to you at work?

When I was at Wisconsin, the TAs went on strike, and they held me hostage in the hallway. They hung on to my legs and held me for about a half an hour. It was the Vietnam era where you had strikes and protests on campus, and the TAs were very adamant about what they wanted and so they struck at the building that distributed funds to the students. I just talked my way out of the situation.

What would your colleagues be most surprised to know about you?

That I’m a gardener.

What did you want to be as a kid when you grew up?

A priest. I was in the seminary in high school.

What was your first job?

I worked at Mercy Hospital in the kitchen, washing dishes and putting them away. I worked for a nun, Sister Agathon.

What was the biggest risk that you took and did it pay off?

Coming to Iowa. When you move from one location to another, it is a tremendous undertaking and very stressful on the family. Moving here to improve myself and to look into new challenges was a risk but it paid off.

by Lois J. Gray

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