Ken Harper is on the faculty of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he is an associate professor of visual communications and graduate program director for multimedia, photography and design. Dara Harper is a staff member, leading communications for Hendricks Chapel, overseeing a team of student workers who help spread the word about events, programs and services held by the chapel.

They are married. And although their relationship predates their time at Syracuse University, it’s an Orange Love story through and through. Not only do they both work for the University, but as of this fall, their two children (Rio ’26 and Amelie ’29) are undergraduates. Their family life has been situated around campus since Ken joined the faculty in 2008.

But to understand the full scope of their story, we must travel back decades, to a freak ice storm in Louisville, Kentucky.

Finding Connection in Unexpected Places

In 2002, Ken found himself in Louisville with hard luck following him. Within a few years, he’d lost both his parents, went through a divorce and experienced a string of layoffs. “I was living real close to the Earth,” Ken says.

A visual journalist by trade, he was living in a friend’s spare room and working at the local newspaper after a contract for another job fell through.

Looking for companionship, Ken joined a dating site. He got a ping from a girl who had listed “Fool’s Progress” by Edward Abbey—his favorite author—as “the last best book she read.”

Messages were exchanged and before long, Dara and Ken agreed to meet at a nearby restaurant for their first date, despite the rare winter storm dumping snow and ice on the city.

“This is back when people assumed it was likely you were meeting a serial killer if you were dating online,” says Dara, who at the time owned Infinite Bliss Yoga, one of the most popular yoga studios in Louisville.

The pair felt an immediate connection as they swapped stories and compared life trajectories, revealing they’d unknowingly been in the Middle East, in Uganda and in Arizona around similar timeframes.

“Basically, he was following me around the world trying to find me,” Dara says. Ken counters quickly: “Dara was following ME around the world looking for me!”

Ducking sheets of ice flying off semi trucks as he drove home on his motorcycle, Ken says his mind was stuck on their conversation. “All I could think about is how I thought this girl was really cool,” he says.

From First Dates to Forever

Dara and Ken were a couple after their second date, by all accounts, but Ken describes their falling in love as a slower, enveloping thing.

“We’d been together for about a year and a half,” he recalls. “I was on a rare vacation in Zanzibar and was reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ in a hammock by the Indian Ocean. With everything so still, I recognized the peace I felt around Dara. It was a point of clarity for me. A good relationship is like breathing—it doesn’t mean you don’t breathe heavily sometimes, like when you’re going uphill. But it’s natural; it feels life-sustaining.”

And their connection ran deeper than they initially realized.

During Ken’s darkest period years earlier, working night shifts at an ice cream factory in Indiana, he says he literally cried into the Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia he was making. When they later discovered it was Dara’s favorite flavor, they couldn’t help but laugh at the poetic coincidence.

“I was probably eating his tears all along,” Dara says with a smile.

Dara was preparing to open a new yoga studio when she found out she was pregnant with their son. She recalls carrying a then-6-month-old Rio in a papoose while visiting Ken in  his office at the Rocky Mountain News.

A year later, their daughter Amelie (Amie) was born.

When Ken decided to give teaching a shot, Syracuse University beckoned. Despite his love of the desert and dislike of winter, the opportunity at Newhouse was too good to pass up. Relocating the family again, this time to Syracuse, proved transformative.

Building a Life in Syracuse

Ken found his academic home among colleagues who became family. Homeschooling the kids, Dara wove the family into the University community, creating an environment where Rio and Amie grew up surrounded by visitors, scholars and journalists from around the world.

Through Ken’s work with the Newhouse Center for Global Engagement (of which he is the founder), their home became a gathering place for everyone from Liberian cartoonists to international fellows, giving their children the “direct gift” of growing up around diverse perspectives and global awareness.

“Working at Syracuse and Newhouse, specifically, it provides such a supportive environment to do your best work,” Ken says. “Having the kids grow up going to events and lectures here and connecting with folks from all around the world … it’s more than education—it’s the creation of this really rich environment and a sense of excitement about the world.”

Rio is now a senior, majoring in cinematography in the Newhouse School and minoring in computer science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. He spent time this summer in Alberta, Canada, as a Fulbright Fellow investigating biomedical robotics. Amie, a first-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences, is studying Russian language, literature and culture, determined to one day be a polyglot.

Dara and Ken say communication is at the heart of their relationship—which may not be surprising for a communications professional and a professor in a communications school. Over two decades, they’ve learned not just to talk, but to listen, and to time their conversations with care to navigate life’s challenges with mutual respect and clarity.

“Our relationship is like my relationship with U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ album,” Ken says, inspiring the headline for this story. “The first listen was good, but with each subsequent listening experience, new layers are revealed. The more I listen to it, the more there is always something new to unpack and to learn from and to enjoy.”

After 23 years together, they are still unpacking all those hidden gems.