We are faced with a crisis of communication within the academy. We are part of a community that is currently self-destructing, one in which the major players and the dynamics that affect them are increasingly at odds with one another. Our liminal placement within the college and university environment allows us to move between the divergent worlds of students and faculty as facilitators, educating each group about the particular needs, challenges, and goals of the other. In order to be effective in this cross-cultural facilitation, we must have a clear, defendable, and practical theory that reflects the mission, goals, and interests of the institutions where we work. Current research and practice indicate that common academic experiences, lead by faculty, students and staff and facilitated by student affairs administrators, are the most effective method of producing this critical communication. This paper will examine the climate and challenges to creating such a common language on college campuses.

Hardly any class of men [sic] are so difficult to be reached as students, and the undertaking so hazardous; but no class of men are so open to conviction, so alive to manly principle, so susceptible of good impressions, when the effort to aid them is judicious and worthy of their attention. (Reverend John Todd, 1854, p.5)

The Reverend John Todd opened The Student’s Manual with this sentiment in 1854, and I believe that, with appropriate changes made based on coeducation and principles of inclusion, it still captures the power, potential, and challenges of working with young people in the college and university setting. We, in student affairs, need to hear both the promise and the caution inherent in these words as we make policy and design the structure of support for the student experience. Most particularly, we must make this effort collective and collaborative, with excellent communication of process and product among academic and administrative sides of the house. I believe that the most critical element of this endeavor is the encouragement and facilitation of faculty-student interaction. The two communities are growing increasingly separate due to culture shifts and changing priorities. This dynamic is deeply detrimental to the student experience and to the mission of higher education in general. We who have chosen to involve ourselves with these young people must work to be, as Reverend Todd puts it, “judicious and worthy of their attention.”

How do we, as student affairs professionals, insure that we are indeed “judicious and worthy of [students’] attention” (Todd, 1854, p. 5)? We are faced with a crisis of communication within the academy. We are part of a community that is currently self-destructing, one in which the major players and the dynamics that affect them are increasingly at odds with one another. As administrators, we necessarily move between the divergent worlds of students and faculty as facilitators, educating each group about the particular needs, challenges, and goals of the other. In order to be effective in this cross-cultural facilitation, we must have a clear, defendable, and practical theory that reflects the mission, goals, and interests of the institutions where we work. In order to do this, we have to know and believe in the people around us.

Students
First, we must look at who is populating our classrooms and residence halls. Students today look very different than they ever have before. Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton give us an excellent summary of these changes in their 1998 book, When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today’s College Student. According to those scholars, students are proportionately more diverse in terms of race, gender, religion, politics, sexual orientation, and socio-economic background. Indeed, they define themselves more by those differences than by any series of similarities. Current traditional-aged first-year students were born in 1981. They do not recognize the names of many giants of their parents’ (and professors’) generation -- Barry Goldwater and Ralph Nader, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and the Camp David Accord, Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan (Levine & Cureton, 1998, p. 8). They were born the year after John Lennon was shot; they were five when the Challenger exploded and the nuclear reactor melted down at Chernobyl; they were eight when the Berlin Wall fell, pro-democracy Chinese students were massacred by their government in Tianamen Square, and the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. They were nine when the Gulf War began and ended (Levine & Cureton).

They distrust politicians and government (Levine & Cureton, 1998), and they are more concerned with issues than ideologies. They think the previous generation ruined the earth and the economy, but they believe their own generation has the ability to fix and preserve both. Their heroes tend to be local -- parents, teachers, friends, community members -- people who have directly and individually touched their lives. Suicide and binge drinking are up; as is community service (Levine & Cureton). They want to do well and to do good, but they do not believe they can do both. They do not ‘date,’ and over half say they have never seen a successful adult relationship. They want to marry only once and have children.

First year students do not have many “givens” in their lives (Levine & Cureton, 1998, p. 14). While previous generations had geopolitical fixtures like the Cold War and communism, the arms race, and apartheid in South Africa as benchmarks for good or evil, the only true constant for today’s college students has been change. They fear it and have been shaped by it in almost equal measure. As cliché as that sounds, it is important to recognize as we try to understand and meet students’ needs.

Rising college costs have pushed many traditional-aged students into part-time jobs (Levine & Cureton, 1998), and the new majority (formerly known as non-traditional aged students) is bringing new occupational, developmental, and family considerations into our classrooms and residence halls. They are spending more time working and less time studying, yet their expectations for grading have never been higher. More students are graduating burdened by more student loans, and fewer believe that they will be able to pay them off. The combination of all these factors, and more, is a rising culture of consumerism among students, one in which they are focused on service, convenience, and the direct outcome of high-paying jobs entered into upon graduation. The concept of learning for its own sake has taken a back seat to practical, vocational application. The implications of these changes are many and will be examined in light of how they intersect with faculty later in this article. However, we will not be able to grasp the complexities of that intersection without a similarly in-depth look at faculty culture, here, at the turn of the century.

Faculty
Changes in faculty culture since the good Reverend Todd’s era have also been dramatic and consequential. Faculty, for the most part, are no longer clergy. The primary purpose of their scholarship has shifted from the moral development of students to the creation, development, and application of knowledge. The scope of that knowledge has broadened significantly as researchers redefine its parameters and grow increasingly responsive to rapidly developing technological questions and issues.

Scholarship in specific fields, however, is becoming more specialized as faculty pursue better, faster solutions to the challenges of a global community. The technological and practical demands precipitated by World War II and Sputnik, accompanied by the long shadow of graduate education and research, have dramatically changed the standards of faculty review and promotion. Consequently, undergraduate teaching has become relatively devalued when promotion and tenure decisions are made. Faculty are “specialists…part of a national talent pool” within their own disciplines (Glassnick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997, p. 7). As a result, faculty loyalties currently lie not with their institutions but within the national arena of their particular disciplines. In general, narrow departmentalism and intense vocationalism increasingly characterize higher education. Decentralization is the norm across campuses and within administrations.

This shift in academic priorities, combined with rising costs of education and diminishing allocation of funding, has had profound effects on faculty culture. As financial resources diminish and the number of Ph.D’s in the field grows in inverse proportion to available jobs, scholars are necessarily driven by marketplace demands. If aggressive publication leads most directly to additional funding and job security, then that is, appropriately, how faculty will focus their time and energy.

The late Ernest Boyer, of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, points out that such a dynamic is potentially damaging to the academy and its tradition of liberal education. Glassick, Huber and Maeroff, in the work carried on after Boyer’s death in 1995, note:

After World War II, teaching became less well-rewarded and service – which had been a proud tradition of extending knowledge beyond the campus – came to mean little more than being a good citizen, lending a hand when committee work needed to be done…When professorial priorities do not include teaching, advising, and building relationships with students, the intellectual and social environment of the college or university is weakened. (1997, p. viii)

They argue that the new hierarchy of academic tasks has led to a crisis of purpose throughout the academy, and undergraduate students feel that change in particular. They call for a broadening of the definition of scholarship, far beyond the narrow confines of research where it now resides, specifically to include those interpersonal aspects of an educational community that are currently being neglected.

Increasingly, we, in the academy, must justify our mission, goals, and purpose in the broader society. In order to return to the foundational principles of liberal education, colleges and universities need to be clear about their mission and how it is articulated and integrated into the curriculum, policies, and culture of the institution.

The solution to these cultural challenges lies in an ecological approach, one which recognizes that student behavior is often a function of their environment (Banning, 1987). We are looking to change the environment, and in order to do that, we need to understand the behavioral ramifications of student-faculty interactions as they currently exist.

There is an increasing gap in the expectations students and faculty hold for one another. Faculty believe that students are not properly prepared for the classroom; indeed, students are spending less time on scholarship and some lack basic proficiency in reading, writing, and computation (Boyer, 1987). Appropriately, many scholars do not think it is their place to provide remediation for these skills at the college level. Chickering (1969) and Perry (1970) have provided partial explanations of that dynamic through a psychosocial lens. Chickering notes that, particularly in the first two years of college, traditional aged students are more concerned with fitting in, making friends, and developing a sense of self than with intellectual development. Perry points out that, when they enter college, those same young students are often dualistic thinkers and have not been exposed to the more complex ways of knowing that form the spheres and vocabulary of their professors.

Professors also have different behavioral and attitudinal expectations than what is currently exhibited in many classrooms -- chronic lateness, poor attendance, little active engagement, disrespect for authority or for one another. Interestingly, on some campuses -- the University of Vermont for example -- faculty and administration are establishing codes of conduct for themselves, recognizing that a certain degree of poor role modeling may be combining with some natural questioning of authority to produce unacceptable classroom behavior. And finally, many of today’s students expect progressive, active teaching methods that some faculty are not familiar with or do not subscribe to (Levine & Cureton, 1998).

Yet we know that student-faculty interaction outside of pure intellectual pursuit in the classroom has positive effects on almost every facet of students’ -- and often faculty’s -- educational experience. Astin (1977, 1984) tells us that faculty involvement is the single strongest indicator -- above all other student or institutional involvement -- of student satisfaction, higher rates of retention, and academic success. Are these not the goals of higher education? They are, and I believe that it is up to us as student affairs professionals to use our knowledge of both cultures to unite these increasingly divergent factions. We must integrate the foundations of liberal education and the specific mission statements of our particular institutions to rebuild our lost sense of community.

As student affairs professionals, we need to make student-faculty interaction easy and convenient. That is our responsibility, for faculty bear the primary responsibility for introducing students to the Lockean theory of a social compact that will govern their behavior, their responsibilities, and their intellectual inquiry. Throughout their tenure, students will begin learning the give and take of communal living that will allow them to be successful, responsible, productive members of society. They will have to agree to a “compact among individuals, in which they cede a certain portion of their autonomy for what is defined as the greater good. In exchange, they receive common services, protections, and agreed-upon freedoms” (Levine and Cureton, 1998, p. 147).

The mission statement of each institution is an articulation of that contract, and it provides students, faculty, and administrators alike with a blueprint of what their campuses can achieve through common goals. For is such a statement not a campus compact to provide the framework of a purposeful community? And are teaching and learning not central functions within that community? As University of California at Berkeley professor Sheldon Rothblatt points out, “college is the natural home of liberal education, the primary form of higher education, where the well-being of the self and the problem of the self and society are central” (as quoted in Boyer, 1987, p. 8). Students see the faculty, much more than administrators, as the gatekeepers of that community, the ones with the knowledge and the skills to help students identify and achieve their goals. Indeed, faculty are the best ones to induct students into the evolving academic community, one with tradition, structures, privileges, and responsibilities. Without that sense of tradition, the continuity and integrity of the academic community is lost. We should be giving students the sense that they are being inducted into a new world that has two components -- one local, the other global.

We know from our work with multiculturalism that close contact and the development of common goals work to debunk stereotypes and encourage integration among groups that define themselves in terms of difference. Boyer speaks to the applicability of those lessons to our current tensions:

To accomplish this essential mission, connections must be made. All parts of campus life -- recruitment, orientation, curriculum, teaching, residence hall living, and the rest -- must relate to one another and contribute to a sense of wholeness. We emphasize this commitment to community not out of a sentimental attachment to tradition, but because our democratic way of life and perhaps our survival as a people rest on whether we can move beyond self-interest and begin to understand better the realities of our dependence on each other. (1987, p. 8)

Clearly, this endeavor is critical in the development of young scholars and citizens. There are many obstacles to students who see themselves in terms of their differences rather than their similarities. Political and cultural shifts have colored their view of and respect for traditional authority. Problems such as the rise in substance abuse and the suicide rate (Levine & Cureton, 1998) indicate the need for a comprehensive effort to bring the reality of community back into college life. Faculty need to play a dominant role in that effort.

Some faculty are already asking such questions of themselves. Mark Edmundson, English professor at the University of Virginia, queries:

Are we really getting students ready for Socratic exchange with professors when we push them off into vast lecture rooms, two and three hundred to a class, sometimes only face them with graduate students until their third year, and signal in our myriad professorial ways that we often have much better things to do than sit in our offices and talk to them? (1997, p. 39)

Gregory C. Farrington, president of Lehigh University, challenges his colleagues, saying, “We get paid not only to teach but to mentor, and we better do that well” (Bronner, 1999, p. A15). These examples illustrate that there are faculty out there who recognize the crisis within student culture, the arms-length attitude currently popular, and their own implication in the problems that result from the combination of cultural influences. That gives us something to work with.

There are many ways to facilitate this cross-cultural communication, and as student affairs professionals, we should be well-versed in them. We can invite faculty into the residence halls for programs. We can escort our students to speakers and forums on campus and in the community, and we can attend floor meetings and faculty senate meetings alike. Many schools, including the University of Vermont and the University of Maryland, College Park, have living/learning programs that institutionalize this concept. Those programs are effective but expensive, and they are not necessarily practical for many campuses. However, many other schools provide seminar-style classes for students and faculty to discuss concepts around the educational mission, such as what it means to be part of a community, how to define that community, or how to develop a sense of self while also trying to fit in. These are often called First-Year Seminars, University Seminars, or University 101, and can be credit or no credit, graded or pass/fail, mandatory or elective. First year students at the College of New Jersey participate in an interdisciplinary core course taught by faculty and student affairs staff (Joint Task Force on Student Learning, 1998, p. 7), which is an excellent example of the collaboration I am calling for. Just like the living/learning structure, however, that program may not work for every campus. Individual institutions should implement the structure that works best with that organization’s existing culture. Most important to remember, though, is that the issue deserves an institutional response, as it is an institutional problem.

Lehigh is already well on its way, as the president of the university clearly understands and supports a definition of scholarship beyond pure research. The element of high-level administrative support, in curricular, pedagogical, and financial terms, is absolutely critical to this process. This discussion of mission must be woven into the fabric of an institution in such a way that it is easy for all elements – faculty, students, and staff – to understand, buy into, and debate its virtues.

I will use the University of Vermont (UVM) as an excellent example of both the problem and the solution. Ostensibly, its mission statement applies to each member of the community. The student handbook, The Cat’s Tale, claims that, “UVM is an educationally purposeful community seeking to prepare students to live in a diverse and changing world…We aspire to be a community that values respect, integrity, innovation, openness, justice, and responsibility” (1998, p. 4). Those are communal values that can be interpreted in individual ways, thus allowing for freedom of expression and from conformity, but which also provide a framework for discussing those elements that bind us together. Those concepts should be discussed constantly on campus, in classes and in meetings, in the student newspaper, and on the bus. They should be, and are, integrated into orientation and residence hall living.

Connections, the “first-year seminar” model UVM employs, starts the discussion with first-time, first-year students in an attempt to help them begin to see themselves within the framework of a purposeful community. It sounds like a great idea, but the architects of this experience – primarily student affairs professionals – constantly run into obstacles. Some faculty are unaware of the movement or theory behind providing a common first-year experience. They do not want to come teach these classes, the first academic experience a new UVM student has, because scheduling requires that they be held on Sunday. Students are not at all sure who they are, or even where they are, when they arrive on campus in August, so they rarely take the initiative to spark intellectual debate around these ideas. It is here in the practice that we see the problems caused by the cultural conflict described earlier in this paper.

This is where we, as student affairs professionals, can contribute to the common ground. We move between the worlds of students and faculty with ease (in theory) and should be well-versed in the vocabulary of each culture. We should know what is working, and what is not, for students and faculty within the educationally purposeful community. It is our responsibility to keep current on that perspective, but also to notice gaps in the understanding faculty and students have of one another and the broader mission of the college or university. We must listen to the concerns of both sides, with an ear always toward finding correspondence.

Astin, A.W. (1977). Four critical years: Effects of college on beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Astin, A.W. (1984). Student involvement: A developmental theory for higher education. Journal of College Student Personnel, 25, 297-307.

Banning, J. C. (1987). The ecology of outcomes. Change, 3, 1-4.

Boyer, E.L. (1987). College: The undergraduate experience in America. New York: Harper and Row.

Bronner, E. (1999, March 3). In a revolution of rules, campuses go full circle. The New York Times, pp. A1, A15.

The Cat’s Tale. (1998-1999). The University of Vermont Student Handbook and Planner.

Chickering, A.W. (1969). Education and identity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Edmundson, M. (1997). On the uses of liberal education: As lite entertainment for bored college students. Harper’s Weekly, 297, 39-49.

Glassick, C.E., Huber, M.T., & Maeroff, G.I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Ernest L. Boyer Project for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Joint Task Force on Student Learning. (1998). Powerful partnerships: a shared responsibility for learning. A Joint Report of AAHE, ACPA, and NASPA. June 2.

Levine, A., and Cureton, J. (1998). When hope and fear collide: A portrait of today’s college student. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Perry, W. G., Jr. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.

Todd, J. (1854). The student’s manual. Northampton, MA: Brigman and Childs.

Julie W. Innes earned a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Virginia in 1994 and is a second-year student in UVM’s HESA program. She currently serves as an Assistant Complex Coordinator in the Department of Residential Life.