A student with the University of Iowa College of Law, does pull ups during an informational career exposition at the University of Iowa College of Law, Iowa, Jan. 25, 2025. (Collette Hagen/U.S. Marine Corps)
IOWA CITY (Tribune News Service) — When the University of Iowa campus comes alive every fall with moving vans and football games and falling leaves and stuffed backpacks, the sliver of students who identify as veterans often have the mindset, “I got this.”
“And then they have their first test, or they have their first rough go, and as the semester continues, I get busier and busier to the point where in the last two to three weeks, I struggle to find places to put everyone,” said Chuck Xander, the first and only UI counselor dedicated to veteran- and military-connected students.
“I’m not saying I turn students away,” he said. “But I will overbook myself to make sure I get everybody in.”
When the university created Xander’s position two years ago in fall 2023, he was the first veterans-embedded counselor on a university or college campus in Iowa, the first in the Big Ten, and one of the first dedicated to military-connected students in the nation.
Since that time, he’s held more than 550 therapy sessions with about 100 military and veteran students through the Iowa Veterans Education, Transition, and Support office — or IVETS — established in 2012 to serve UI students who are veterans or currently in the military, along with their families.
Xander’s clients have ranged in age, gender, military branch, and service experience.
“We have a couple students that came back after 20 years in the military,” he said. “They’re definitely not the 18-year-old student — they’ve got kids and even grandkids at that point.”
And they want to discuss a range of topics — from academic to military to personal.
“We’ve had students who maybe one of their military buddies committed suicide,” Xander said. “We’ve had students struggle academically. We’ve had students going through tough times in their own life, having maybe an anniversary of their own trauma ... also some drugs and alcohol things come up. So there’s kind of a very wide variety in what’s going on, and that’s what makes my position a little bit unique.”
Where some counselors specialize in certain issues — from anxiety to depression to trauma or addiction — Xander said he doesn’t work with just a certain subset.
“I work with all 12 colleges, I work within all of the university and really all the age brackets,” he said, but noted, “Military-connected veteran students, they’re typically older ... They oftentimes have either families or more committed relationships, and they have more requirements of life. They’ve seen or done things in the military that might affect them differently than someone who’s coming straight out of high school.”
Stigma-breaking
The university in the fall reported nearly 700 student veterans — including almost 150 members of a reserve or guard unit — nearly half of whom were attending on G.I. Bill benefits and just over half of whom were male, according to the UI Registrar’s Office. Nearly 1,890 veterans were enrolled across all three of Iowa’s public universities in the fall — its second-highest tally on record.
The UI campus has about 2,100 veteran and military-connected, all of whom have access to Calvin Hall-based IVETS services — like a student lounge, computer lab, free tutoring services, employment opportunities, advice on navigating and accessing veteran benefits, military policies, and scholarships, plus counseling through Xander.
Xander is among five embedded UI counselors — with others dedicated to students in the colleges of Dentistry, Law, and Business, along with Catlett Residence Hall.
When he first started two years ago, Xander said he had some stigma-breaking to do.
“A couple of the students were like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to meet with you and have my other friends or other vets see that I’m going in there’,” Xander said. “And so I’d meet with them in other undisclosed locations so that they could feel comfortable.”
Once those students warmed up and the counseling taboo began to lift within the UI veteran community, “They became like, ‘Oh well if other people are doing it and nobody’s saying anything.’”
“And then it became a pride point, like, ‘Oh yeah, I got an appointment with Chuck too. When’s your appointment?’”
Nowadays, Xander said students will just poke their heads in to say hey and even look out for one another via their embedded asset.
“If you see so-and-so, can you just check on them?” a student might say, according to Xander.
“Or I heard that they were going through a rough time with their significant other. Or, can you talk, I just failed my test, and I’ve never failed anything in my life,” Xander said. “In the military, you know, failure is not an option ... So figuring out how do we talk about those things, and it not be so overwhelming.”
Even today’s political climate can affect the veterans’ mental health.
“Absolutely, it affects their life from the standpoint of, what if I don’t agree with what’s going on politically? How is this going to affect my military benefits? How does this affect my VA health care. How does this affect those around me who I care about, who are in the marginalized community?” Xander said. “So it affects them ... And they don’t always feel comfortable talking about it with other peers.”
Whatever the issue, Xander said, he’s put in the work to earn the students’ confidence.
“They can trust me any time,” he said.
‘As a veteran myself’
Part of that stems from the fact that Xander is a veteran himself — having enlisted in 2000 while still in high school in Garwin, Iowa, where he came from a long family history of military service.
Xander was at William Penn University — studying psychology, sociology, criminology and human services — when Sept. 11 happened.
“I had class that morning, and I remember my neighbor said, ‘Hey, did you check the news?’” Xander said. “I had a current events course later that morning with one of our sociology professors ... and he was like, ‘Well, this lecture doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s talk about what’s going on.’”
Enlisting in the Iowa Army National Guard’s 234th Signal Battalion, Xander deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004 where he was stationed in Baghdad near the airport in what’s referred to as the Green Zone.
Once he returned home, Xander earned his master’s degree in mental health counseling from the University of Northern Iowa and spent nearly a decade working at the Iowa Juvenile Home in Tama, Iowa.
“I knew at that point that mental health and counseling was definitely where I felt the most comfortable,” he said.
Xander was working at the VA — counseling combat veterans and military sexual trauma survivors — when the UI job popped up.
“My wife said, ‘Did somebody look at your resume before they posted this? Because it fits you exactly,’” Xander said. “And that’s when I knew I really needed to apply.”
With two years under his belt, Xander said he hopes to keep helping UI students and inspire other campuses to focus mental health resources on their respective veterans.
“The biggest thing is just showing the need to other universities throughout the nation — how having an embedded therapist for military-connected students is beneficial,” he said.
“As a veteran myself ... I can tell you, I would have probably reached out for more therapy, both in undergrad and grad, had I had somebody I could trust that understood what being in the military is about.”
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