The Professional Student Affairs Administrator

Educator, Leader, and Manager

Roger B. Winston, Don G. Creamer, Theodore K. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415763387
• eBook ISBN: 9781134944378
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Styled as a complete update to the 1991 book "Administration and Leadership in Student Affairs", this work addresses issues of importance to student affairs professionals. Grounded in human development, learning, leadership, group dynamics, management theories, and social science research and evaluation methods, this book articulates the means for college student affairs administrators to function in the forefront of student learning and personal development initiatives. The book focuses on the three essential roles played by student affairs administrators: as educators who play a significant role in addressing the academic goals of their institutions, as leaders who help to shape the vision of their institution's student affairs practice and education mission, and as managers who are responsible for co-ordinating programs and services, supervising staff, and overseeing university facilities and budgets.

PART

I

FOUNDATION AND CONTEXT

Part I serves as the foundation for this book and for understanding college student affairs administration. Just as with a foundation for a building, Part I assists readers in acquiring a solid, commonly shared understanding of student affairs administration and the milieu in which it operates. As noted in the Preface, the authors have made several assumptions about the readers of this book; that is, they assumed that readers possess a basic understanding of the philosophy and operating principles that underlie student affairs administration and higher education in the United States.

In Chapter 1, Creamer, Winston, and Miller briefly discuss how student affairs functions conceptually fit into the educational schema of an institution and how the renewed emphasis of student affairs practitioners to become more directly involved in students’ learning finds expression. The chapter explores the roles of educator, leader, and manager that student affairs administrators are called upon to assume and provides historical and functional context for understanding how they complement, and sometimes conflict with, one another. Each role is examined in detail. The authors identify many kinds of skills and knowledge required of practitioners and describe the scope and function of practice associated with each. Finally, the authors address the question of professionalism: Is student affairs a profession? Can it be? Should it be? And how can practitioners enhance the continued development of the field?

Chapter 2, written by Kuh, Siegel, and Thomas, addresses four important questions: (a) What is collegiate culture and its various properties? (b) What are the core values of the academy and how do those values articulate with the cultures of student affairs, faculty, academic affairs, and other groups? (c) How are changing student demographics and other factors influencing campus culture? (d) What are the characteristics of the “culturally competent” student affairs practitioner as educator, leader, and manager? Only when student affairs administrators possess an adequate level of knowledge about the institutional culture within which they work can they hope to be successful in promoting the personal and educational development of students.

Dixon, in Chapter 3, tackles one of the most complex, emotion-laden, and perplexing issues facing American society and higher education today. How can those responsible for higher education attract, retain, and better educate more students of color and other minority culture representatives in our institutions? A heavy responsibility falls on student affairs to help create campus environments that are welcoming to minority students. Dixon points out that all in higher education, but especially student affairs practitioners, must become sensitive to both the pragmatic and the equity and fairness issues for moving toward a more inclusive teaching, learning, and living environment. He posits a useful model for practice called the Equity-Sensitive Perspectives model to guide student affairs practitioners toward achieving these difficult goals.

In Chapter 4, Elling and Brown address another pressing issue for higher education and student affairs: How do we utilize and manage the new electronic technologies to the service of higher education and its students? Change is occurring so rapidly in this arena that institutions have great difficulty in accommodating the change and even greater difficulty in foreseeing how such change may affect educational processes and students’ personal development. Equally important, how can institutions obtain the financial resources to upgrade essential equipment and software? The authors offer a primer on the currently most widely used technologies, provide examples of innovative and successful uses that enhance the educational experience, and scan the future to alert us about what appears to be on the technology horizon.

READING SUGGESTIONS

Our suggested approach to reading Part I is to read Chapters 1 and 2 before reading other chapters in the book because they are fundamental to understanding most subsequent sections. Chapters 3 and 4 are relatively independent and may be read in the order prescribed by reader interest or need for information. Because the topics of the latter chapters concern two of higher education’s more pressing concerns, it may be wise to read them before moving to other sections of the text.

1

The Professional Student Affairs Administrator: Roles and Functions

DON G. CREAMER
ROGER B. WINSTON, JR.
THEODORE K. MILLER

Many student affairs practitioners have come to understand that for higher education to realize its educational potential and contribute to making its host nations more humane and just, all components of the enterprise must apply principles of student learning as affirmed by the Joint Task Force on Student Learning’s Powerful Partnernships statement sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), American College Personnel Association (ACPA), and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA):

Realizing the full benefit [of the application of principles of learning] … to the practice of teaching, the development of curricula, the design of learning environments, and the assessment of learning … depends upon collaborative efforts between academic and student affairs professionals—and beyond. (AAHE, ACPA, & NASPA, 1998)

Too often, divisions of student affairs in colleges and universities appear to be organizationally separated from other units, such as academic and business affairs, within the same institution. This separation, however, is only palpable on organization charts. The best and most effective institutions fully integrate student, academic, and business affairs in a manner that focuses all resources on a primary goal of higher education—student learning and personal development—and involves every organizational unit fully in the achievement of its mission. Mission statements and the institution’s “living mission” (Barr, 2000) (as demonstrated through language, history, location, purpose, academic programs, and campus governance systems) are crucial guiding directives for student affairs administrators and all other institutional educators and leaders. Student affairs professionals and other educators strive to fulfill the institution’s mission through their specialized educational programs and services. Furthermore, all institutional units—including student affairs—participate in multiple organizational roles and serve multiple internal and external constituencies, including, but not necessarily limited to, students, faculty, executive leaders, boards of trustees, legislative bodies and politicians, members of the media, and parents and families.

Such involvement in central institutional functions by student affairs practitioners is not new. Effective institutions have long viewed student affairs professionals as partners in the total educational enterprise. In 1976, for example, Miller and Prince in their now-classic book, The Future of Student Affairs, recognized the importance of fully integrating all educational programs and services. They argued that the mission of the institution is to educate the whole student, not only the student’s intellect: “Agreement on this principle is manifested in the way personal development goals are woven into the formal academic fabric of the institution and the way all the educators and staff members collaborate to encourage students’ growth” (Miller & Prince, 1976, p. 169).

Although fully integrated in higher education, student affairs programs and services function professionally as a distinguishable set of educational and management activities that occur mostly, though not exclusively, outside the formal classroom. The best administrators of students affairs strive continuously to create learning environments that represent seamless opportunities for student learning. These professionals apply the best principles of teaching and learning (AAHE, ACPA, & NASPA, 1998; ACPA, 1996) and employ the best practices of the field (ACPA/NASPA, 1996). Powerful Partnerships: A Shared Responsibility for Learning (AAHE, ACPA, & NASPA, 1998) is a call to arms via collaborative educational methods to promote student learning and personal development. The report documented multiple ways to employ collaborative methods and exhibits how higher education professionals of all types have roles to play in the application of learning principles. Likewise, the “Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs” (ACPA, 1996) included a similar call, especially to student affairs professionals, to commit to the achievement of the institution’s central purpose—to promote student learning and personal development. This report provided multiple avenues that student affairs professionals can use to accomplish their educational goals by remaining focused on learning as a central purpose. Continuing in this vein, Principles of Good Practice for Student Affairs (ACPA/NASPA, 1996), later expanded into book form (Blimling & Whitt, 1999), is a report of “best practices” in the field and emphasized the vital nature of active learning and the multiple ways student affairs professionals can work to achieve the institution’s and students’ goals.

The administration of student affairs programs and services has evolved from marginal or ancillary duties of faculty members to specialized functions central to effective institutions of higher education. These functions provide vital support to college and university students through such traditional programs and services as admissions, student financial aid, new student orientation, advising and counseling, career services, campus activities, recreational sports, health and wellness education, and residential life programs. Many longtime student affairs–provided services have indirectly supported the institution’s educational mission, such as maintaining order on the campus, assisting students to deal with the emotional demands of academic life and growing up, providing safe and comfortable housing, and managing the class registration system. These traditional roles have been expanded in recent years to include more intentional efforts to shape the student learning environment and to make the campus a more inviting place for those who have been excluded from or ignored by higher education in the past, such as racial and ethnic minorities; nontraditional-aged students; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students; commuting students; students with disabilities; and women. In addition, student affairs administrators are expected to address myriad student conditions that mirror the larger societies from which the increasingly diverse student population comes. They are expected to provide far-reaching services and environmental redesign initiatives to remove or lessen barriers to student learning and academic success. Contemporary student affairs administrators also must effectively provide services to the increasing number and diversity of students in part-time status at the institution, for example, or who never come to the campus, such as distance learners.

To accomplish these vital functions, student affairs administrators must perform as educators, leaders, and managers. The professional student affairs administrator must integrate these roles fully to meet the needs of students and their college or university. Further, the professional student affairs administrator must perform these duties in large and small institutions, in public and in private institutions, and in institutions of all types, including community colleges, liberal arts colleges, state and regional institutions, and research universities.

Professional student affairs practitioners can be, and often are, powerful partners (AAHE, ACPA, & NASPA, 1998) with faculty and administrators in making students’ educational experiences intellectually stimulating, practically applicable, and personally meaningful. They promote student learning and personal development through the execution of multiple educational activities that are fundamental to the basic purposes of higher education and they execute them using principles of collaborative and active learning.

Other functions that student affairs divisions perform in higher education are essential to organizational efficiency and effectiveness and the institution’s educational mission. These functions are best performed by persons who are both knowledgeable and experienced in designing and operating mechanisms that assure the smooth and effective operation of the institution and also promote the educational and personal development of all its students.

Persons who are employed to attend effectively to both the educational mission of the institution and the organization’s maintenance requirements in ways that are consistent with the historical values and ethnical principles of the field are known as professional student affairs administrators.

This chapter provides a conceptual foundation for the discussions throughout the remainder of this volume by describing student affairs administration as an essential component of higher education’s most basic purposes. It also presents an integrated model of the student affairs administrator as educator, leader, and manager and examines the professional stature of student affairs in higher education. Each aspect of this conceptual scheme is briefly described here but is expanded upon in Chapters 2–16.

EDUCATION AS A MORAL ENDEAVOR

First, it is important to underscore the basics of higher education and to describe the relationship of student affairs to those functions. The raison d’être of higher education is to enable individual development in a context of creating and maintaining community rooted in democracy. This view of the purposes of education at all levels is articulated by many educational philosophers and recently in a particularly articulate fashion by the eminent educational philosopher and reformer, John I. Goodlad, in his acclaimed In Praise of Education (1997). Thus, higher education, indeed all education, is concerned with two purposes: providing the means for achieving individual goals related to self and insuring that individual development occurs in a context that promotes and sustains a democratic society. Goodlad pointed out that there is considerable tension between these two purposes, but for education to fulfill its most basic function in society, one purpose cannot be promoted without the other. For these reasons, education, and thus the administrative function, is part of a moral endeavor. Education is moral because it is intimately concerned with both the individual and the community. This focus is different from moralistic or self-righteous behavior; rather, it recognizes that all education is moral in that it focuses on these two inextricably intertwined purposes. To imagine it otherwise is to be thinking of something else, according to Goodlad (1997).

As asserted throughout this book, professional student affairs administrators function as educators, leaders, and managers. The educative role must ensure that the college or university functions over which the administrator presides are actively and unswervingly engaged in promoting both individual and community development. In the role as leader, student affairs administrators must marshal resources from the environment—human, physical, and fiscal—and bring them to bear on the tasks and activities within their domain of responsibility. The purpose for these environmental manipulations should always be accomplished to promote the educational mission of the institution, which is development of the individual—mind, body, and character. In the manager role, student affairs administra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Writers
• Part I: Foundation and Context
• Part II: Parameters of Professional Practice
• Part III: Managing and Administering
• Part IV: Teaching and Inquiring
• Part V: Leading and Visioning
• A An Introduction to Legal Research
• B American College Personnel Association: Statement of Ethical Principles and Standards
• C NASPA: Standards of Professional Practice
• Index