The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration

George S. McClellan, Jeremy Stringer, George S. McClellan, Jeremy Stringer

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119101895
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

The Foremost Authorities on Student Affairs Address Issues Facing The Field Today

The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration is a comprehensive and thoughtful resource for the field, with expert insight on the issues facing student affairs. This fourth edition has been fully updated to reflect the most current and effective practices in student affairs administration.

New chapters address persistence, retention, and completion; teaching and learning; working with athletics and recreation; leadership; purpose and civic engagement; spirituality; and fundraising. Emerging populations are discussed throughout, featuring specific advice for working with veterans and dual-enrolling high school students. New material includes the role of student affairs in study abroad programs, student use of technology and using social media to serve students, working with student athletes, and more.

Professionals at all levels of student affairs administration need practical, timely, and applied information on the myriad issues that fall under the student affairs umbrella. This NASPA-sponsored guide collects the latest information, methods, and advice from the field's leading authorities to bring you up to date on the latest solutions and best practices.

• Learn about the dominant organization and administration models in student affairs
• Stay up to date on core competencies and professional development models
• Examine the latest literature, and consider both the newest and lasting issues facing student affairs
• Instructor resources available

As both the student population and the college experience grow more diverse, student affairs professionals need to update their toolset to face the broader scope of the field and the new challenges that arise every day. The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration provides invaluable guidance to graduate students and professionals alike, and is the one resource you should not be without.

PART ONE
Contexts of Professional Practice

Student affairs administration is situated in historical, institutional, environmental, economic, political, and national contexts. These contexts shape and in turn are shaped by our work as professionals. We begin our conversation about student affairs by examining several of these contextual dimensions. In chapter 1, Michael Coomes and Janice Gerda trace the historical development of the student affairs profession from its earliest iterations to the present day. They show how the profession has remained true to the essential goal of helping all students get the most from their college experience by adapting to new students, new institutional forms, and new imperatives. Joan Hirt and Claire Robbins, in chapter 2, focus our attention on the various milieus in which student affairs is practiced. They describe the impact of various institutional types and unique institutional missions on professional practice. In chapter 3, Jillian Kinzie and Victor Arcelus provide an overview of environmental theories applicable to higher education, outline approaches for assessing the conditions for student learning and success, and discuss the importance of assessing the impact of college environments on student success. The ability of students to attend college and to succeed in obtaining a college degree is often strongly influenced by economic conditions. In chapter 4, John Schuh describes the economic implications of demographic and social trends and the impact of legislative initiatives and state support on higher education and its students. In recent years fiscal pressures on higher education have resulted in stronger calls for institutional accountability. Sherry Mallory and Linda Clement discuss the implications of the accountability movement for the practice of student affairs in chapter 5. The final contextual piece in this first part of the handbook is the international perspective offered by Brett Perozzi and Enrique Ramos in chapter 6. They relate how the concepts of globalization and internationalization affect the practice of student affairs and share models of how student affairs is practiced in various international settings.

CHAPTER ONE
“A Long and Honorable History”
Student Affairs in the United States

Michael D. Coomes and Janice J. Gerda

Student affairs is a profession with a long and proud history of service. Today's student affairs professionals walk in the footsteps of women and men who, for more than 100 years, have loved learning so much that they dedicated their lives to colleges and universities and to their students. With creativity and grit, they quietly pushed the larger enterprise to adapt to new students and imagined better things in the service of students and the mission of a college or university. At its core, student affairs is the work of helping each and every student get the most out of his or her unique college experience.

It does not stop there, however. The ability of students to thrive and graduate is a short-term goal. As a profession, student affairs strives for nothing less than to change the world for the better. Although most student affairs work is done in the context of the college years, its goal is to be a catalyst for lifelong growth and curiosity, for worldwide citizenship and care for one another, and for a more just and humane society for generations to come. This work is done through seemingly mundane, day-to-day teaching moments and the very down-to-earth sharing of the student experience. All of the college experience is a learning lab for life. It is this paradox of audacious limitless goals and right-now pragmatism of the present that ties together student affairs professionals through its history.

To be sure, all good teachers care deeply about the educational experiences of their students. In that sense, student affairs shares its mission with the faculty. But over time, as higher education expanded, some positions were created that called for someone whose primary purpose was to step back and view both students and the college experience as a whole rather than in the context of a specific course or discipline. So, student affairs professionals are specialists in a larger universe of teachers and helpers. Not all who help students are student affairs professionals, but all student affairs professionals have as their primary purpose helping students.

In this chapter, we lay out some of the stories of those who have contributed to the development of student affairs as a profession. We also tell the story of how the profession has remained committed to its goal of helping all students realize the most from their higher education experience while adjusting to new students, new institutional forms, and new learning imperatives. We encourage readers to dig deeply into student affairs' professional history and values and write their own version of our profession's story.

Time proceeds linearly; however, stories do not. This is especially the case of a story as complex as the development of a profession. Rather than one event leading clearly to another, events occur sequentially, concurrently, and recursively. The image of a tree with many roots helping to develop a trunk and a trunk supporting many branches may be a better metaphor for the story we tell in this chapter than that of a river that flows inexorably from source to sea. Our story does not unfold in strict chronological order because we have focused our attention on how the work of serving students has changed over time—different sources of influence have shaped that work at the same point in time. Rather than leaving one story to join another for the sake of chronological consistency, we have decided to complete the different story lines and present the facts in nonchronological sequence.

The First Student Affairs Professionals

When did student affairs start? This is a natural question, and a deceptively difficult one. Because we have retroactively named and defined this profession, we can not simply look up what those in the past wrote. We must make some judgments about what fits our definition and identify our professional ancestors from the perspective of the present. So, in the past, who on a college campus did the job of helping students to get the most out of their college experiences?

For much of the history of American higher education, colleges and universities were very small communities with student bodies that numbered in the dozens or hundreds. For example, in 1770, 413 students were enrolled at Harvard College and 338 were enrolled at Yale (Thwing, 1906). The small number of faculty members and the president or a few other administrators could easily facilitate the entirety of the whole student experience (Leonard, 1956). More important, their students were very much like younger versions of themselves (that is, male, White, and Christian), and imagining what it might be like to be a student was a fairly easy and intuitive activity.

In 1833, the leaders of Oberlin College started a daring experiment. They decided to admit women and men, and in 1835 they expanded their experiment in equality by admitting African American students. Although today we might imagine that the African American men had unique needs, what stood out then was the new idea of a woman college student. Suddenly, faculty and other leaders could not just rely on their own personal experience to intuit what a student needed. As women students entered more colleges, and some colleges were founded just for them, male leaders were at a loss to decipher the mysteries of what women students needed. To solve this problem, a number of presidents began to create positions largely filled by women who would focus only on women students and their needs. Some of the first titles for these positions were preceptress and lady principal (Gerda, 2007).

At first, the most obvious unmet needs to be addressed by these new women administrators were social, such as how to protect women students from the kinds of social errors that could ruin their reputations for life, or how to maintain the expectations of restrictive and modest clothing with the need to study and live in the college community. But over time these early professionals and their students made it clear that the deeper issues of available career paths, employment opportunities, and mentoring were also factors in whether or not women students got the most out of their college experience (Nidiffer, 2000).

By the 1890s, the women who filled these positions were increasingly well educated and were given roles pertaining to the academic needs of women students so that they could address issues beyond just the social. To reflect this broadening of responsibilities, the title of dean of women was created. In 1892, President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago tapped Alice Freeman Palmer (then president of Wellesley College) to be the dean of women, signaling the prestige and importance of the position. Palmer negotiated to begin the job with an associate, Marian Talbot, who ultimately crafted the position and set a standard for the many deans of women across the country. In a 1910 speech, Gertrude Martin of Cornell University remarked, “I am sure that it was the University of Chicago that really made it fashionable, though her dean of women was by no means the first” (Martin, 1911, p. 66). The position proliferated.

At about the same time that the University of Chicago was implementing the position of dean of women, another prestigious university was redesigning ways to think about the student experience as a whole. Harvard University did not have women students. It did, however, have women graduate students, and they had new and different needs from the men of the college. In 1890, President Charles Eliot decided he could not manage student relations and his burgeoning responsibilities for faculty, finances, and facilities, so he created a position titled dean of the college and appointed the well-respected and beloved faculty member LeBaron Russell Briggs to the position. Briggs's primary responsibilities were to attend to undergraduate student needs (as opposed to focusing on subject matter or teaching) making him unique at Harvard for his focus on students (Findlay, 1938).

The appointment of many deans of women across the country and Briggs's appointment as dean of the college at Harvard prompted a re-examination of the needs of male students (Findlay, 1938). Men could see the advantages that women students gained from having an advocate, and administrators elsewhere wanted to emulate Harvard's model. As the twentieth century began, some institutions tapped a faculty member who already had a student orientation to focus on the student experience as a whole. Thomas Arkle Clark, an English professor at the University of Illinois, had already gladly worked on student life projects. In 1901, President Andrew Sloan Draper began to formalize some of those roles, and Clark would become legendary for his oversight of the men of Illinois. In 1909, he was given the title of Dean of Men (Fley, 1978; Gaytas, 1998; Schwartz, 2010).

The Beginnings of a Profession

These early student affairs pioneers conducted their important work of helping students “face the academic rigors and social freedom of campus life” individually and independently (Schwartz, 2010, p. 3). However, what establishes a profession as a profession is not the work of any single person (regardless of how professionally that work has been conducted), but rather the desire of a group of individuals to work collectively to establish, maintain, and enhance a professional identity. This work includes deciding who is allowed to claim membership, set expectations for members, study the nature of the work, and set long-term goals. I...