Kendall Basham, who graduated in May 2017 from Southeast Missouri State University, always had been an admirer of the university president, Dr. Carlos Vargas-Aburto. To surprise Basham on her birthday, Dylan Kennedy, a senior and vice president of Southeast Missouri State’s student government, went to Vargas’s office and arranged for the president to join the friends for lunch.
“She said that if he had commented on her Facebook, that it would just make her day,” Kennedy explains. “So I decided to take that a step further.”
On a fall afternoon in 2016, as the two students ate lunch in a conference room on campus that Kennedy had decorated with balloons for Basham’s birthday, Vargas and his wife, Pam Vargas, who works as the director of research and grant development at Southeast Missouri, joined them. During their meal, Vargas chatted with Basham about her school life and her plans for the future and shared stories about his own college experience.
“Talking to students one-on-one is extremely powerful,” he says. “There’s this perception that the president is too busy, and I am totally against that. It’s important that the students feel that I can sit down with anybody and talk about anything.”
A humble beginning
Vargas was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, to a working-class family. His parents had not finished high school, but they emphasized the importance of education.
“My father and my mother always instilled in us a desire to learn, to read and to improve ourselves,” he recalls. “Now that I look back, I realize how positive and powerful that motivation was.”
