LCC instructor looks out for student veterans. He was one himself.

It’s not unusual for student veterans at Lane Community College to stop by Michael Sámano’s office to talk. Maybe they’re feeling overwhelmed. Maybe scared. Maybe they feel out of place among the younger students on campus.

Sámano understands. In September 1989, that student might have been Sámano himself, fresh off a six-year stint in the U.S. Navy.

“It took me three years to get my quote unquote ‘two-year degree’’’ at LCC, he said in a recent interview. “There were a lot of things that intimidated me and petrified me. When my students are here with me, and they’re feeling the weight of the world on them, I’m like ‘Hey, you got this.’”

In part, he offers those words of encouragement as a nod to those people who had the same message for Sámano years ago, when he was a struggling student.

Hey, you got this.

These days, the 62-year-old Sámano is the coordinator of LCC’s ethnic studies program. He is the founder of the college’s Maxwell Student Veteran Center, which helps veterans get degrees and transition to civilian life.

On Monday, Nov. 9, at a ceremony at LCC to honor Veterans Day (the school held the ceremony Monday because it’s closed on Veterans Day), Sámano was the featured speaker and briefly outlined his life’s path: “For me, how I know my life is, OK, 19 years as a civilian. Six years in the Navy. And then from 1989 to now, I have lived my life as a veteran. I’m not a civilian. I know that for a fact.”

‘All worked up’ about the Soviets 

Sámano, a Mexican American, grew up in west Eugene as a “pretty damn shy kid” and graduated from Willamette High School. A counselor at Willamette told him he wasn’t college material.

The results of an aptitude test he took at school suggested three potential careers: One of them, ironically, was teaching. Sámano wasn’t buying it, in part because he suffered at the time from a huge fear of public speaking.

“I got so pissed off,” he said. “I was like, what a waste of my time.”

But he still was interested in attending college, and so he joined the Navy in order to get money for school.

He served on the USS Moinester, searching for Soviet submarines. “That was our big mission, and all that kind of yesteryear crap,” he said. “Like when we’re watching the Olympics, my family makes fun of me because I get all worked up about the Soviets.”

Don’t misunderstand: There’s plenty about his military experience that he values. But he also understands when a student veteran in his office is starting to question some of the political motivations behind military actions.

And although he met plenty of good people in the service, that wasn’t universally the case.

He was a “legal yeoman,” so anytime that somebody got in trouble on the ship, he would know about it. “And there was a lot of hazing that went on behind closed doors that was horrible,” he said. “And I imagine now, for some of those people, they’re walking around in society and they might be seeing a therapist for the rest of their lives.”

So when Sámano started classes at LCC in 1989, he was interested in keeping some distance between himself and the rest of the student body.

“I was a computer science major because, quite honestly, I had seen the worst that humanity had to offer. And I was 23 years old. I felt ancient. I felt burned out. I think I got into computer science because I thought maybe I’ll just work with machines.”

A problem with that plan emerged: “The classes were super boring. Oh, and there was a little thing called math that I didn’t have a grasp of.”

Fortunately, he had to take classes in other areas. He took sociology classes and then psychology and found them fascinating. 

After getting his LCC degree, he transferred to the University of Oregon, and professors there saw potential in me long before I ever saw it myself, and they started pumping me up, talking me up to graduate school” at what is now Cal Poly Humboldt.

‘Everything locked into place’

Fast-forward to August 1996, when Sámano got a call from Sacramento City College. The college needed to make an emergency hire because another teacher had walked out of the job. The brand-new teacher — still working through his fear of public speaking — was “walking toward this classroom, and my heart is beating out of my damn chest. And I’m handing out the syllabus, and I started going over the syllabus, and then everything locked in place. Right at that moment, man, I knew 100 percent that that was what I needed to be.”

He joined the faculty at LCC in 1999, with the charge to resurrect the school’s ethnic studies program. 

He has a broad definition when people ask this question: “What is ethnic studies?”

“The majority of us are able to kind of get along with one another. And there’s other people in our society who want to burn crosses on my lawn. And this (ethnic studies) is to try to get at theories about why people act the way that they act.”

The end goal, he said, is simple: “Ethnic studies is just to have students who end up being kind people who are respectful.”

Maxwell Student Veteran Center

Sámano’s involvement with LCC’s Maxwell Student Veteran Center started over a lunch in the college’s Renaissance Room between Sámano and a college vice president. The VP asked a question: How would Sámano imagine a center supporting student veterans?

“I’d have a one-stop shop for them,” he answered. “I’d have courses focused on them.”

Great, the VP said. We’re applying for a grant.

Sámano didn’t think the college had a chance at winning one of those grants.

Months later, Sámano received an email from someone else on campus, saying, “I can’t believe we’re going to be working close together for the next two years.”

Sámano emailed her back: “I think maybe you sent this to the wrong person.”

She had the right person: LCC had won one of the grants. 

As work continued on the center, he met Robert Maxwell, who helped start the automotive program at LCC. Before that, during World War II, Maxwell had thrown himself on a hand grenade, saving the lives of his compatriots. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor.  

Maxwell, who lived in Bend after he retired and who died in 2019, was the obvious namesake for the center, but Sámano said Maxwell “didn’t understand why we were making a big deal about him.”

Today, Sámano is no longer directly involved with the center, but he still occasionally hangs out there. 

“I like where everyone can be together, and I like that there’s a place where you can just kind of literally let your hair down or whatever. … I find a lot of student veterans, they think that this world is so separate from where they were, and they don’t see how those skills relate to their training. It’s like (I tell them), you have time-management skills down pat. You have self-discipline. You have this, this and this, and here’s how those can be successful in a classroom.”

On Veterans Day

Veterans Day is meant as a way to show appreciation to, well, veterans. For Sámano, it’s a day that generates mixed emotions.

“I used to feel kind of uncomfortable with people thanking me for my service,” Sámano said, 

Now, he said, he understands that those good wishes are coming from a good place. “So I’ll just say, ‘Hey, I appreciate it.’”

But there are limits: He doesn’t want either of his sons to enlist. “My boys came out of the womb with me saying, ‘No. My dad served, I served. That’s enough.’”

Sámano, being a big science-fiction fan, has one exception: If the invaders show up in spaceships, “and you have to join the Earth defense forces, that’s different.”

It all ties into his world view.

“As I tell my students, I love living in this region. If they graduate and choose to live in this region, I want them to be just nice, kind people, literally help a grandma cross the street. If they feel like they want to be jerks, then I would invite them to just go live somewhere else. That’s it. That’s probably my overarching agenda.”