Two Longtime Houghton Faculty To Retire: Lastoria

After 33 years, Michael Lastoria will be retiring from his position as Director of Counseling Services at the end of this semester. Lastoria has been vital to the growth of Houghton’s Counseling Center, as well as student support systems in general.

Lastoria was key in some of the integral parts of the Houghton campus as we know it. In the mid-eighties, Lastoria started what is now known as the Center for Academic Success and Advising (CASA) to support students with learning disabilities. Lastoria said, “obviously it was meeting a need,” and as part of the program’s growth it was transferred to its current management. Lastoria also drafted Houghton’s policies on sexual assault and sexual harassment. “That was also something that we did that I feel pretty good about,” said Lastoria, “Our sexual harassment policy and procedures I think had its beginning in the early nineties, and I played a major role in that.”

Lastoria described his relationship with the college as “a good marriage.” “The college invested in me along the way for those 33 years, and I think I gave back on that investment,” he said. An example of this is the family studies minor, “a popular minor,” said Lastoria, which was co-created by Lastoria after Houghton gave him support to pick up the specialty of marriage and family therapy at the University of Rochester. Lastoria said that while many people may disagree over the state of the college on LGBTQ concerns, he has “been instrumental in at least shaking the tree” in terms of how LGBTQ topics are approached in discourse on campus. It is a conversation familiar to Lastoria who has published various research over the years on the sexual behavior of college undergraduates including a 2013 study surveying 19 Christian campuses nationwide.

Cindy Hannigan, Administrative Assistant to VOCA and Counseling Center, who has known Lastoria for over six years said, “I think one of the great things Dr. Lastoria has been able to do in his time at the Counseling Center is to be the very human, likeable, and widely-known face of the Center.  He’s helped to make it a less intimidating place by getting to know so many students in classes, in chapels, in SPOT, on panels… really everywhere on campus.”

Wendy Baxter, who has worked in the Counseling Center for 19 years said, “It has been a really great experience working in this office…he’s really grown this center over the years.” Both Hannigan and Baxter cited Lastoria’s sense of humor as a contributor to, as Hannigan described it, creating a “very easy-going atmosphere” in the Counselling Center. Baxter said, “Mike just has a really fine way of interjecting humor into situations, and humor is important.”

Baxter said she appreciates “the professionalism, the availability, and the accessibility” with which Lastoria conducts himself. She said it has helped her grow as a therapist, and offering this accessibility to students and staff alike has been central to how he “has represented the counselling center well outside of this office.”

Next year Lastoria will continue to teach the classes he currently teaches and may continue some counseling, but retiring from his position as director will leave him working at about half-time. He said, “I still have energy to work and to contribute. Whether or not I do that at Houghton after next year that’s left open, but I’m certainly willing and desirous of doing that.”

Lastoria said he is looking forward to “that time expansion…not having to squeeze everything in at once,” and hopes to audit a few courses in theology, history, and art – some core liberal arts classes that he wasn’t exposed to in his undergraduate degree at Rutgers University in Ceramics Engineering.

Lastoria, who has travelled to Israel, London, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ecuador for the college, said he also looks forward to being able to take “short trips when [he] just feel[s] like it.” He hopes to play more golf which he described as his “passion” and looks forward to having time to do things like keeping up with yard work he currently tries to s