Developing Respect for Student Affairs #sachat

Jeff

Developing Respect for Student Affairs #sachat

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.

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.
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.

Tags: administration, faculty, Higher Education, research, respect, Student Affairs

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:35 pm and is filed under #sachat, Assessment, Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.

jolawler

First, I am concerned about your assertion that most assessment done in our field is a joke. It is an unfair and inaccurate generalization that belittles the efforts of many professionals, graduate staff, and even undergraduates who conduct meaningful and well-designed assessments that influence and direct policy and practice on campuses nationwide.

Additionally, I cannot agree with the argument that we should not conduct assessment unless it can reach an ambiguously defined standard of "real research scientists." Statements like that simply further the myth held by too many in our field that assessment must be complicated, time consuming, and too difficult for busy professionals. Good assessment can be simple and straightforward, and can be developed and facilitated at the departmental level. It need not have the complexities we associate with the CIRPs, NSSEs, EBIs, etc. of this world.

Any good-faith attempt at assessment is better than none. Symbolically, it reflects a desire to know how we are doing and a desire to commit time and resources to it. Better yet, any assessment will help us ask more and better questions about ourselves, our efforts, our utilization of resources.

If we have to wait until we have the right personnel with the perfect instrument, then we will never achieve "research scientist standards" - or any standard, for that matter.
jefflail

Hey jolawler,
Thanks for your comments. I found out through the grapevine that both of these long comments were associated with the same address, so I'm going to respond to them in the same reply. I appreciate the fact that you thought about your response then came back and responded again. Clearly, you have a passion for student affairs and this topic!

I totally agree about respect and not whining. you are right on the money about the "white noise" that is an undercurrent in all of student affairs. Extremely well said. I think you should, frankly, consider blogging for this page as I think this deserves it's own post. Contact Tom or Debra (right side) if you're interested and I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.

My assertions about assessment were from my experience in research and assessment. Obviously, I cannot speak to every campus in the country as I'm sure things differ from campus to campus. However, I did work with one of the best known names on assessment, and I know her campus had 1 or 2 departments that were really bought in and doing meaningful assessment. The rest were just going through the motions (or appeared to not be doing anything at all of value). I think I can extrapolate that and say that much of our assessment is not any good. I saw that you are from IU-Bloomington. I would hope that if anyone is doing it well, that you are the one!

I think that we're going to have to agree to disagree about the value of a good faith assessment and saying that it's worthwhile because our heart is in the right place. That view is like saying that you found someone dying on the side of the street. Not knowing CPR or how to save a life, your heart told you that you SHOULD try to save the life. So you begin raising your arms above your head and begin pounding on their chest with all your might. Granted, you killed him and made his injuries worse, but at least you cared! Sadly, I don't think his family would share this view. To quote the incoming president of ACUI, "sometimes it is best to honestly say i don't know, but promise to take action on learning the answer." Rather than "good faith attempts", I would like us as a field to admit that we don't know but that we should know and go about seeking that knowledge. Let's be honest, learning outcomes and assessment of our programs (and research) are the dollars and cents of our field. We can't afford not to knock it out of the park.

Thanks for commenting. I hope you'll consider joining us as a writer!
jolawler

(Regarding your CPR analogy – I’d far prefer trying to help that person than to just walk away because I didn’t have the right training to do CPR. I’ll take the criticism for trying and failing than the criticism for not trying at all. Ideally, I have the CPR certification, or I know someone who does who I can call, but if I don’t have either, I have an obligation to still try.)

Our field has lifted assessment to such a vaulted position that it is almost a religion. It will save us, but we fear it! We think only certain special people are allowed to talk and engage, or, perhaps, commune with it. They stand at the podium (pulpit?) and preach to us and we believe. We talk about our colleagues who attend the assessment institutes as a different kind of person (I can hear my mother now:“I never realized it was such an important part of his life.”). We assume that anything other than the one and perfect assessment is a false idol and it will only lead to our demise.

Bah! Call it heresy, but that’s an inaccessible way to understand assessment and it pushes us away from it.

Assessment is not something above, beyond, and separate from our daily lives – it needs to be a way of approaching our everyday work. Assessment shouldn’t just be the "savior" from the "evil" of declining resources or critics from beyond – it should be a reflection of our desire to be accountable to ourselves and our own goals. Assessment shouldn’t be something we think about at certain times of the week or year – it needs to be incorporated into the perspective of wanting to learn more and get better.

Certainly, developing an appropriate skill set is important. I challenged your assertion because the skills needed to do good assessment are not necessarily as complex as most seem to assume, i.e. one need not become an assessment priest or priestess. The most basic of data analysis can be very telling, and we should not be discouraging people from doing it just because they think ANOVA is yet another Student Affairs professional organization. And as you noted in an earlier response to another comment – the ability to observe behaviors, ask questions, and evaluate environments is of tremendous value, and one need not be a devotee of Boas, Mead, or Malinowski to conduct meaningful qualitative assessment.

I am not suggesting that aiming low is appropriate – we should always be striving to get better (and when we stop trying to get better, we need to get out of the field – a theme we need to emphasize more often, by the way…). But getting better is a process. Extending your baseball analogy, swinging for the fence usually leads to a lot of players striking out. I played baseball and I struck out a lot. And I mean a lot, even though I did hit one home run when I was 8 – in practice – the pitch was high and to the outside. But I quit baseball because I was told “you’re not any good” and yeah, I struck out a lot. (Did I mention that I struck out almost all the time?)

Our message cannot be “if you can’t hit a home run in the game of assessment, then don’t even come to the plate,” or "if you strike out, then just quit." People need to try, always, and we need to be encouraging them to grow and get better – dare I say, to develop and learn? We want them to experience the small successes that hone their skills and motivate them to get better. A single, then maybe a double, and eventually hit for average – because the successful teams need more than the power hitters. And there are many teams that thrive without a bona fide star in the clean-up spot. If your team can afford a power hitter, or you develop one from your current roster – then wonderful! But don’t wait until you have that all-star to begin assessment!

Some people will never be home-run hitters, but that doesn’t mean their efforts have not yielded powerful and important results for the team. So for those who want to quit, fine – but I really hope people will keep trying because assessment cannot only be for the high and mighty.
jefflail

I'm not sure how you got that I think people should just quit? "To quote the incoming president of ACUI, "sometimes it is best to honestly say i don't know, but promise to take action on learning the answer." Rather than "good faith attempts", I would like us as a field to admit that we don't know but that we should know and go about seeking that knowledge." That's not quitting. That's stepping our game up and learning how to be good at it. Big difference.

Thanks for commenting!
charlie m

jeff, your dodging and weaving away from your own words. you said to not try if you can't do it right. not starting is quitting before you start. and you said that trying and good faith efforts weren"t good enough and that hitting it out of the park is the only option. so the other guys right to callout both you and the president of acui, if your quoting them right.
on my midsize public campus where their cutting programs lefts and right we try to do assessment all the time with no budget for it and with no people who ae particularly expert atit. sometimes the assessment we do is weak. then sometimes the assessment is strong but the results arent so hot. but we GET CREDIT from all parts of the university for what we're trying to do. good faith efforts go a long way even when we pretty much "strike out" beacuse our vpsa and vpfinance take notice and give us credit for trying even though we know we are not going to hit it out of the park. and we get called into present to the faculty senate twice a year to show them what we're up to. there are some real jerks in the senate but they give us big time credit too for what we are trying to do with our programs and assessment even when that stuff isn't working perfetcly.
good faith efforts are actually worth a lot more on my campus than you and the acui president think. just showing up and putting yourself out there and owning what you do and having the guts to stand in front of others is how you get respect. behaviors and effort are worth a lot even ifyour outcomes are not what you hoped they would be.
to all the people out there who think you got to be perfect with assessment stuff, you don't have to be. you have to try with an honest effort and put yourself outt here. even if you don't have the phd and even if you can't knock it ou tof the park.
jefflail

Charlie, I have no idea what you're saying here...have you even read my responses?

The ACUI president said "sometimes it is best to honestly say i don't know, but promise to take action on learning the answer." How is that quitting? How does that even come close to quitting? Honestly, that wasn't even in reference to assessment, but it doesn't really matter; that statement doesn't even sound like anything similar to quitting. Going and gaining more knowledge on a subject that you're not well-versed in has absolutely nothing to do with quitting, instead it is a reasoned response to a personal assessment of one's skills and knowledge. I wish that you would have carefully read my responses instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction.

That being said....I agree that getting out there and standing up for your programs in times like these are important. Thank you for sharing your perspective and I hope it inspires others to step out and do their thing as well!
Guest

Your assessment of what value the faculty bring to a campus is a bit problematic and it reflects what student affairs practitioners often forget about higher education. Regardless of what we have been taught and socialized to believe in our paths to this field, in our culture the faculty *are* higher education. Without the faculty, there is no Academy, there is no higher education, there is no curriculum (as we know it), there is no campus, there are no students, and there is no Student Affairs.

I am not endorsing or accepting the dynamics that seem to exist on many campuses between traditional academic and student affairs units. Nor do I suggest that student affairs is not of critical value. But to understand student affairs, we have to understand the environment in which we work – and it is an academic environment. We are student affairs administrators, after all – emphasis on the word “student”.

If I can channel a theme in Peter Magolda's "Proceed with caution: Uncommon wisdom about academic and student affairs partnerships" (About Campus, Jan-Feb, 2005), one of the issues we need to address is how we don’t seem to fully comprehend who we are, what we do, or the values we bring. In the context of SA-AA collaborations, he explained "...there is a far greater need for these two subcultures (SA and AA) to understand themselves before embarking on a quest to learn about the other. …to become aware of the cultural boundaries they create and to understand that who they are as individuals and as a subculture influences their actions and interpretations." (p.20)

After over a decade in the field, I believe that there is something seemingly almost universal in the culture of student affairs – it is the everpresent, unquestioned, white noise about the field not being respected by:
1. faculty
2. administration
3. parents
4. trustees
5. legislators
6. all of the above

This white noise is expressed implicitly in graduate preparation programs and throughout our literature. They will be referenced tomorrow in Chicago at the Placement Exchange, and in the halls, receptions, and sessions at NASPA and ACPA. It is the theme of this blog. When it comes up, student affairs professionals will agree blindly with one another, and the person with the guts to challenge this "given" will be chided as idealistic, anti-student affairs, or simply naive.

If we want respect, then we must act respectfully. We must not whine about people "not understanding what we do." We must not devalue others and then expect them to value us in return. We must be willing to engage, listen, compromise, and work outside of our own silos. We must recognize our own biases and challenge ourselves not to succumb to group think. We have to stop picking fights when someone says "dorm" (or "frat," or whatever) or scoffs at us calling ourselves "educators."

We have to get over it, grow up, and get back to work. We have to accept our place in the machine of student learning, and always seek new ways to mesh with others who are influential in the lives of our students. We have to model the very behaviors and attitudes we hope to see from others.

Do as much assessment as we wish – if we continue to complain and whine and blame everyone else, we will continue to fall short of our potential in helping our institutions and out students achieve their goals.
meghanlarissa

I completely agree. The only way to earn respect is to grant it. Faculty are the foundation of universities.

As an academic advisor, I am very connected to faculty, who are also connected to our students as faculty advisors and, being at a non-research based institution, their emphasis is teaching. Their input on student issues is so important to recognize.

Make friends with faculty. I have a beer with faculty on a regular basis. Since student affairs is a "relationship oriented" profession, we should think about all our relationships, not just those with students and each other. We need to stay connected to everyone on campus, because that's how our students will form the connections for their success. Because isn't that what students affairs is about? Foster relationships with faculty, because they are our colleagues as well.
joeginese

My comments are in my new blog. Thanks Jeff!

http://josephginese.wordpress.com/
jefflail

Sarah, reading back over my post, I was worried I would get a comment like along those lines. However, as a researcher, you adhere to standards, correct? I was more speaking of heading towards the standards that researchers on the "academic" side use for their research with student affairs assessment work, as well as turning student affairs into a more research-oriented profession. I can tell you were offended, but I promise that no offense was meant :)
Sarah

Actually, not offended at all :) I think it's good discussion. We too easily fall into "did the student like the program?" rather than measuring learning outcomes.

I wish that student affairs practitioners had more time to be researching and publishing, but again, going back to the earlier SACHAT, we're expected to do more with less, and things like publishing have to go :-/
jefflail

ha, good!!

My point is that I'd like to see us as a profession move in that direction. For instance, when some know it all young professional like myself is assessing his profession in 2035, I hope he sees a profession that is knocking the research end out of the park with similar standards to those that professors are held to in their research and publishing like mad men about the things that they're learning about what makes our students tick.

I roll my eyes a little bit at the do more with less argument. Welcome to scarcity, one of the fundamental concepts of economics. However, scarcity forces us to evaluate what's important. If what's important to us is respect and moving forward as a profession, these are some ideas about what that might look like.
Sarah

Re: Point 2 - Who determines what "real research science" is? Case in point - I'm a qualitative researcher. My research typically doesn't involve a lot of numbers or standard deviations or the like. I still think it qualifies as real research science, and I think all of my professors would argue the same - it's just a "newer" form of doing research that aims to give voice rather than numbers. Honestly, I think there's ultimately value in both kinds of research.

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