Jeff Lail

I was dragged out of my mini-blogging retirement by tonight’s #sachat. I’ve heard this debate many times about how to leverage respect from administration for what folks in student affairs do. I wanted to share my opinion but was feeling a little stifled by the 10 million people involved in the chat as well as the 140 characters so I figured I would share my thoughts in longer form.

First, this discussion about developing “street cred” if you will for student affairs is essentially asking how you get administration (a nameless faceless entity, i suppose) to understand what we do. The inherent assumption is that they don’t understand or that they do understand but they don’t think it’s valuable. If we were going to stereotype the view of student affairs both within and without of student affairs, I believe that stereo type would be that we’re “in loco parentis” style baby sitters, we create play time for our kids, and we hold their hands and try to protect them from the big bad faculty. As with most assumptions, this is unfair. Some of the big bad faculty are ALWAYS looking out for students, and some within student affairs favor the approach of throwing students to the wolves over a touchie-feelie approach.

Personally, I find this argument about “admin doesn’t understand what we do” a little tired. If they don’t understand what they do, they’re no different from most people at high levels within organizations. They understand in theory what we do, but they don’t know in detail (isn’t this what that new TV show is about?). Here’s a realization that I think we all need: THEY DON’T NEED TO KNOW WHAT WE DO IN DETAIL. It’s not their job to know the details of our job, it’s our job to know the details of their job. I’m almost certain that most of us have only a basic idea of what our chancellors and VPs do on a daily basis even though we might like to think otherwise. To think that it’s their responsibility to understand every intimate detail of every job on campus is childish.

Second, without fail, the first answer to “how to gain respect” is assessment. Don’t think I’m about to slam assessment; I love assessment, and frankly I don’t think we assess enough. During my internship in grad school in student affairs assessment, the assessment reports that I looked at were PATHETIC and an absurd joke. Most departments in student affairs don’t take this seriously and most of these reports barely get looked at because they don’t actually assess anything that carries weight at a cabinet meeting. VPs might like reading anecdotes, but it’s hard to imagine a meeting at the VP level where an anecdote about how a students heart was touched is read; it’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that they have bigger things to handle. Another problem with assessment – as an old quote says “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”, sharing a bunch of stats does nothing because it’s so easily manipulated.

Third, I think student affairs speaks a different language than the rest of the campus. One of the main critiques you hear of faculty on research campuses is that they don’t have time for students because they’re doing research. However, I would frame it a different way – they’re doing research because that’s a huge part of their job – big difference. When we’re talking about “i had 15 students come to my workshop on getting along with my roommate” and they’re talking about 9 journal articles they got published, we’re really talking on two different planes.

So, what’s my point?

I think I’m essentially arguing for the progression of student affairs as a profession. We’re not that old, not nearly as old as the faculty profession and I think the discussion of “how to gain respect” evolves out of a desire to take our profession from something we can be proud of on the campus, not just in our staff meetings or in our student affairs christmas socials where we’re making christmas bags for our students with glue, yarn and glitter.

I have a couple suggestions, but I don’t think this is a comprehensive list.

1. what does the faculty use to establish their value to a campus?  I argued on Twitter that faculty establish value by publishing, bringing in students (recruiting), research grants and revenue from research.  If I were to summarize these thematically, I would call it “money and prestige”.  My question is how can student affairs bring money and prestige to the campus through our work.  I think the answer will be different for each office so I’ll not make more specific suggestions.
2. If we’re going to do assessment, it needs to connect directly with the mission of our office AND our division and meet scientific research standards.  Most of our assessment is a joke because we don’t know how to be research scientists.  Clearly this is time consuming, but if the profession is going to progress I think this is an area we clearly don’t bring our A game currently.  Do it right, connect with the standards of real research scientists or don’t do it.