Academic Advising

A Comprehensive Handbook

Virginia N. Gordon, Wesley R. Habley, Thomas J. Grites, Virginia N. Gordon, Wesley R. Habley, Thomas J. Grites

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118045510
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

One of the challenges in higher education is helping students to achieve academic success while ensuring their personal and vocational needs are fulfilled. In this updated edition more than thirty experts offer their knowledge in what has become the most comprehensive, classic reference on academic advising. They explore the critical aspects of academic advising and provide insights for full-time advisors, counselors, and those who oversee student advising or have daily contact with advisors and students.

• New chapters on advising administration and collaboration with other campus services
• A new section on perspectives on advising including those of CEOs, CAOs (chief academic officers), and CSAOs (chief student affairs officers)
• More emphasis on two-year colleges and the importance of research to the future of academic advising
• New case studies demonstrate howadvising practices have been put to use.

PART ONE

FOUNDATIONS OF ACADEMIC ADVISING

Thomas J. Grites

INTRODUCTION

The opening section of the second edition of Academic Advising somewhat parallels the initial edition in its overall content. However, new authors have identified and described new approaches, new information, new circumstances, and some new topics since the initial edition. These topics enrich the ever-growing thinking, research, and practices that provide the foundations for academic advising in higher education.

In Chapter One Terry Kuhn traces the evolution of three advising eras in American higher education and how they developed according to the purposes for which our various types of institutions originated. He also describes the personnel responsible for these advising environments as this evolution occurred, and he suggests that faculty and advisors collaborate in developing future theory and research in academic advising.

Peter Hagen and Peggy Jordan expand our theoretical foundations for academic advising in Chapter Two. They reinforce the developmental foundation that has guided the field for many years by examining several types of theories; they reflect on the new theoretical approaches that have stimulated various modes of thinking about and performing academic advising; and they challenge those in the field to continue this expansion.

Marc Lowenstein uses practical examples of dilemmas that advisors have likely faced in his analysis of the ethical foundations for academic advising in Chapter Three. The ideals and principles he describes provide a basis for advisors to understand their dilemmas better when trying to resolve them. He concludes with a set of supplemental statements to the NACADA Core Values.

Conversely, in Chapter Four Mary Richard cautions advisors about attempting to apply the law to individual situations without expert opinion. Her thorough review of the many aspects of the law that might directly or indirectly affect academic advisors in their roles provides a solid foundation for the areas about which advisors need to be aware when practicing their role.

The next three chapters in this section provide the foundation for what academic advising seeks to achieve—student success through teaching and learning that results in productive career and life planning. In Chapter Five George Kuh demonstrates the importance of quality academic advising through results acquired through the National Survey of Student Engagement. His descriptions of specific programs provide examples for review and potential application of certain elements of these programs in many institutions, and his review of five principles for effective advising provide a template for achieving this success.

Drew Appleby anchors the “advising as teaching” principle practiced by most contemporary academic advisors in Chapter Six. His comparison of the syllabus used in traditional classroom teaching to an advising syllabus provides the relevance, rationale, and utility of this academic advising tool and strategy.

In Chapter Seven Paul Gore and A. J. Metz examine the current theories and research in career development as they relate to academic advising. Their sample worksheet also provides advisors with a starting point in this process for use with their advisees.

Having read this section, academic advisors will have the complete foundation to enable themselves and their advisees to share the most rewarding and productive advising experience they can create and develop.

CHAPTER ONE

Historical Foundations of Academic Advising

Terry L. Kuhn

For the purposes of this chapter, academic advising will refer to situations in which an institutional representative gives insight or direction to a college student about an academic, social, or personal matter. The nature of this direction might be to inform, suggest, counsel, discipline, coach, mentor, or even teach. Such activities have occurred throughout the history of academic advising in higher education, and this chapter will briefly summarize the historical development of academic advising, characterize academic advising as it occurs in different institutional types, and discuss how to achieve advising as an examined activity by amalgamating theory, practice, and research.

Readers are urged to examine the chapter by Susan H. Frost on “Historical and Philosophical Foundations for Academic Advising” that appeared in the first edition of this book (Frost, 2000). This current chapter intends to complement Frost’s chapter.

ERAS OF ACADEMIC ADVISING

The First Advising Era

Advisors in a designated separate role were not an aspect of American higher education at its inception. In 1636, the founders of Harvard College cast the mold for the liberal arts college in what was to become the United States of America. They created a four-year residential institution whose Puritan classical curriculum was designed to produce well-educated ministers, lawyers, and doctors for an emerging society. This institution would create “a society of scholars, where teachers and students lived in the same building under common discipline, associating not only in lecture rooms but at meals, in chambers, at prayers, and in recreation” (Morison, 1946, p. 12). Writing about his travels in the United States and Canada in 1818, John Duncan (1823) said that at Princeton “a President, two Professors, and two Tutors, form the whole corporation” (p. 169).

From 1636 until about 1870, the period that Frost (2000) identified as “Higher Education Before Academic Advising Was Defined,” all students took the same courses, and no electives were available. In this era, the college ideal was “a large family, sleeping, eating, studying, and worshiping together under one roof” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 88). The mind was viewed as a tool to be sharpened, and subjects like Latin, Greek, and mathematics were favored sharpening stones. Religion was included in the curriculum to ensure appropriate moral training. During this period “a president, two professors, and one or two tutors perform the whole duty of instruction and government” (Brown, 1862, p. 10). These small colleges had no student service professionals, administrators, secretaries, or custodial staff. The president and faculty served in loco parentis and assumed responsibility not only for students’ intellectual and academic lives, but also for their moral training and extracurricular activities. Getting everything done comprised their bundle of responsibilities.

Tutors supplemented the instructional staff of these small colleges. “A typical tutor was a young man in his early twenties who had himself only recently graduated from the institution where he was employed . . . [and] his chief duties were to hear student recitations and act as a disciplinarian and overseer of students under his charge.” Professors typically received appointments at their alma maters after having served in some nonacademic occupation, usually a pastorate. The “conditions precluded a professor from specializing: it was not at all unusual to find the same person teaching geography, mathematics, and natural philosophy; or Latin and Greek literature, plus history, ethics, and moral philosophy” (Lucas, 2006, p. 124).

By the 1870s, the general social climate had become very formal and rigid, and students were kept in line by an inflexible system of rules, regulations, and punishments. “No longer was it considered appropriate for faculty to speak with students on a personal basis; neither was it considered proper for students to approach faculty members” (Bush, 1969, p. 599). Students thought of faculty as a “necessary evil” and faculty treated students as an “unavoidable nuisance” (Veysey, 1965, p. 295). For many years there was disorderly conduct in the classrooms, chapels, commons, and dormitories that ranged from throwing spitballs at the professors, drinking, throwing food and utensils during meals, barring doors shut, cursing, and threatening to burn the president’s house (Morison, 1946). Rebellions often were directed at “bad food in the dining commons to restrictions on student activities and autonomy. Presidents, assisted by tutors, were constant disciplinarians” (Thelin, 2004, p. 21). This restrictive control widened an increasing gulf that divided students from tutors and faculty and continued until the elective system provided: (1) more choices to students, (2) better faculty interaction that softened relations with students, and (3) increasing use of seminars and laboratories (“the seminar and the laboratory lent themselves to a more intrinsically democratic relationship between student and professor than had the lecture method alone” (Bush, 1969, p. 605).

The introduction of curricular electives in the 1870s initiated the need for advisors to guide students in the successful pursuit of their chosen paths. Also, the broader curriculum required faculty specialization, which brought the pansophic approach of faculty to an end. As institutions grew in size and complexity, and as more was demanded of faculty members in the way of research and service, traditional faculty responsibilities gradually unbundled, spawning new roles and positions, one of which was the academic advisor. The need for academic advisors was recognized by President David Bates Douglass at Kenyon College. President Douglass’s action was described by Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States, then a junior at Kenyon College, in a June 1841 letter written to his mother. In that letter he said:

A new rule has been established that each student shall choose from among the faculty some one who is to be his adviser and friend in all matters in which assistance is desired and is to be the medium of communication between the student and faculty. This I like very much. My patron is a tutor in the Grammar School who has graduated since I came here. (Hayes, 1841, p. 54)

Hayes’ enthusiasm for the new practice may have been spurred by his ability to choose his “patron.”

The Second Advising Era

Frost (2000) called the era from 1870 through about 1970 “Academic Advising as a Defined and Unexamined Activity.” Beginning in the 1870s, American higher education institutions began to include more practical courses as alternatives to Greek, Latin, and other traditional courses. As more courses were offered in this new elective system, students could have choices. Instituting an elective system was controversial for those who wanted to preserve the classical curriculum. Developing an academic advising process was one answer to those critics, who feared that the elective system used unwisely by students would result in a less focused education. For example, the elective system that President Eliot instituted at Harvard in 1872 (Thelin, 2004) was later defended on the basis of Harvard’s having a Board of Freshman Advisers, who helped students make appropriate choices among elective subjects (Rudolph, 1962). In 1877, Johns Hopkins had a system in which students could choose from seven groups of courses, each group being similar to today’s “major.” Hopkins also had faculty advisors (Hawkins, 1960) in “recognition that size and the elective curriculum required some closer attention to undergraduate guidance than was possible with an increasingly professionally oriented faculty” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 460).

President Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins University, whose initiatives helped to usher in this second advising era, not only used the word “adviser” to refer to someone who gave direction to a student concerning an academic, social, or personal matter, but stated the responsibilities required of the role. In 1886, Gilman showed keen understanding of the undergraduate advising role when he wrote that:

The adviser’s relation to the student is like that of a lawyer to his client or of a physician to one who seeks his counsel. The office is not that of an inspector, nor of a proctor, nor of a recipient of excuses, nor of a distant and unapproachable embodiment of the authority of the Faculty. It is the adviser’s business to listen to difficulties which the student assigned to him may bring to his notice; to act as his representative if any collective action is necessary on the part of the board of instruction; to see that every part of his course of studies has received the proper attention. (p. 565)

Gilman appears to have had an idealistic view of the advisor-advisee relationship. In reality the advisor system “degenerated into a perfunctory affair involving only brief, impersonal interviews” (Veysey, 1965, p. 297). For instance, Morison (1946, p. 403) states that the Board of Freshman Advisers at Harvard “did little except address the entering class en masse, approve study cards, and invite the advisee to a pallid luncheon at the Colonial Club.” While these systems were designed partially to help students choose among electives, they were also intended to diminish a growing gulf between students and faculty (Veysey, 1965). Thus, institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins identified “advisors” with specified expectations, but they paid little attention to the relative success of their advising processes. Although the concept of advising was beginning to be defined, it remained an unexamined activity.

By the 1920s, “most colleges and universities were busy perfecting various systems of freshman counseling, freshman week, faculty advisers, and before long the campus psychologist as well as the college chaplain would join these many agencies in giving organized expression to a purpose that had once been served most simply by a dedicated faculty” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 460). Rudolph lists examples of such advising systems at Wesleyan University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon, Iowa State University, Columbia University, Emory University, Denison University, University of Miami, Stanford University, Ohio State University, and Marietta College.

As student support systems proliferated during the 1930s and 1940s, a more student-centered philosophy within higher education emerged. This philosophy was described in the 1949 Student Personnel Point of View (SPPOV) issued by the American Council on Education,

The student personnel point of view encompasses the student as a whole. The concept of education is broadened...