An Intentional Approach to Faculty Collaboration
BY JAMES R. APPLETON
The student affairs profession needs a paradigm
shift in its rhetoric and a more intentional
approach to collaboration with faculty leadership and faculty colleagues. Our own language
has limited the perceived value of student affairs
professionals on our campuses. We have unwittingly separated
the campus by using the language of “the curriculum” and the
“extracurricular” or the “co-curricular.” Even worse, we reinforce the two worlds of the campus by describing the
“academic” and “non-academic” programs.
We need to put our arms around the entire college or
university as the academic program and recognize every single
contact point with the student as the educational program.
Every part of creating a learning environment and fostering
student learning should be viewed as the academic or educational experience. Some of it occurs in the classrooms, some
in the computing centers and laboratories, some on residence
floors or on athletic fields, some in faculty homes, and some
through chat rooms.
The faculty role is in transition from that of holder of the
world’s knowledge to facilitator of the learning process. This
offers renewed opportunity for SSAOs if they understand
clearly how students learn, what contributes to their learning,
and how that learning can be evaluated. To be players in the
educational effectiveness arena, SSAOs must be successful in
bringing the resources of faculty and student life personnel
into more effective partnerships and collaborative programs.
On more campuses than one might imagine, academic leadership and administrative staff, including student affairs, are
often engaged in hands-off relationships or adversarial relationships. Often neither is aware of what the other is doing or
of their priorities for student learning. This is not difficult to
understand for a number of reasons.
• Faculty are generally intensely focused on their own
endeavors and may see collaborative efforts as unreasonable
demands that threaten their freedom and time.
• Some faculty misunderstand the huge task of managing
services and a community that functions akin to a city.
• Some student affairs professionals are defensive when it
comes to faculty relations and what it
takes to be a talented classroom teacher
with a scholarly agenda.
• Student affairs staff give a lot of
attention to developing programs that
claim to bring the intellectual life into
the campus culture. But there is a
tendency to deliver these programs to
faculty for their blessing rather than
engaging faculty in the formation as well
as the delivery of education provided in
settings beyond the classroom. As a
result, limited integration of the education mission with student culture occurs.
Bring Faculty to the Table
Student affairs staff may want to contemplate the following
ideas when promoting collaborative efforts with faculty.
• Consider naming a working group representing all
primary academic sectors (including student affairs) that
would study two topics over a full semester: the dimensions of
development posited by such theorists as Chickering and ideas
about a campuswide focus on student experiences as presented
in Learning Reconsidered (NASPA, 2004). The group can
address such questions as: How can we build a campus
learning environment that maximizes the development possibilities for these students? Release time for participating
faculty would make a statement about institutional commitment to this effort.
• Build orientation and enrollment management programs
with sign-off required by both faculty and student affairs staff.
• Engage faculty directly in orientation and community
service programs and multicultural centers, not to manage the
day-to-day activities, but to help determine how these
programs contribute to the overall learning objectives.
• Give faculty who choose to incorporate service learning
projects into their classrooms the appropriate administrative
support.
• Engage faculty directly in the debriefing and re-entry
programs for students who spend semesters abroad.
• Develop a complementary education program for residential students in their living environments by engaging faculty
leadership and deans in the goals and details of such programs
to parallel classroom objectives.
A new vision is required by both faculty and SSAOs to
ensure collaboration and joint planning in an intentional and
deliberate learning community that meets institutional objectives for student learning. Faculty should be encouraged by
their deans and administrators to participate in this collaboration, and tenure reward structures should take these efforts
into account through teaching, research, or service credit.
Student affairs staff should have the ability and foresight to
serve as resources for faculty and contribute to their success.
This role should influence job descriptions and hiring patterns
to be sure that the skill sets exist to assist faculty who advise,
offer internships, provide career counseling, and schedule
campus programs. SSAOs understand the realities of the
working adult and the generational traits of today’s traditional
age students—information that can benefit most faculty in
their own work.
James R. Appleton served as a member of the NASPA Executive
Committee during its formative years beginning in 1973, and was
NASPA’s president in 1974–75. Currently chancellor at the University
of Redlands in California, he was a faculty member and SSAO at
two universities before serving as vice president for development at
the University of Southern California and president of the University
of the Redlands.
