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Established in 1924, the American CollegePersonnel Association is recognized for con-tinuing leadership in addressing issues and trendsin higher education and for quality professionaleducational programs that promote student devel-
opment and learning.The mission of ACPA is to promote thefollowing: • the education and development of the total student• diversity, multiculturalism, and human dignity • inclusivenessand access to association-wide involvement and decision mak-ing • affirmative action • the advancement and dissemination ofknowledge • the continuous professional development and per-sonal growth of student affairs educators • a sustained programof outreach and advocacy on behalf of students.
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MYRA MORGAN, PresidentUniversity of Florida
JEANNE STEFFES, President-ElectUniversity of Maryland–College Park
PAUL SHANG, Past PresidentPennsylvania State University Worthington/Scranton
RAYMOND QUIROLGICO, SecretaryUniversity of San Francisco
CONNIE FOLEY, TreasurerFlorida Atlantic University
DAWN PERSON, Affirmative Action OfficerCalifornia State University–Long Beach
GREGORY ROBERTS, Executive DirectorAmerican College Personnel Association
RICHARD JOHNSON, Core Council, Professional DevelopmentUniversity of Kansas
PETER MAGOLDA,Core Council, Generation and Disseminationof KnowledgeMiami University–Ohio
MELVIN TERRELL, Core Council, Professional IssuesNortheastern Illinois University
ROBERT CARUSO, Core Council, Member Services and InterestsWestern Carolina University
MONA HICKS, Core Council, Outreach and AdvocacyVanderbilt University
DEBORAH BARTON, Core Council,State and International DivisionsUniversity of Denver
CARLA JONES, Director for CommissionsKansas State University
PENNY PASQUE, Chair, Standing Committee for WomenUniversity of Michigan
TRACY DAVIS, Chair, Standing Committee for MenWestern Illinois University
SUSAN STUART, Chair, StandingCommittee for Multicultural AwarenessColumbia University
KAREN MYERS, Chair,Standing Committee on DisabilityUniversity of California–Irvine
JANE FRIED, Chair, Standing Committee for EthicsCentral Connecticut State University
KEITH HUMPHREY, Chair, Standing Committee on Lesbian, Gay,Bisexual, and Transgender AwarenessUniversity of Arizona
MARK GARRETT, Chair, StandingCommittee for Graduate Students and New ProfessionalsUniversity of Michigan
2003–2004 ACPA Executive Council Members
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TDEPARTMENTS
MARCH–APRIL 2004/VOL. 9, NO. 1
2 / WHY LEARN? WHAT WE MAY REALLY BE TEACHING STUDENTSBy John Tagg
We reap what we sow in higher education, John Tagg argues.An emphasis on tests, grades, and transcriptshas resulted in too many students darting through school with a grab-and-go attitude toward learning.
It’s time to stop, the author says, and imagine another way.
11 / COLLEGIAL TALK: A POWERFUL TOOL FOR CHANGEBy Frank A. Fear and Diane M. Doberneck
It is hard to envision how just talking among colleagues can actually promote real change.Instead of creating another formal committee, perhaps creating a few more opportunities to just talk
is exactly what is needed.
20 / COULD FIXING ACADEMIC ADVISING FIX HIGHER EDUCATION?By Mary Stuart Hunter and Eric R.White
Maybe not completely, but turning to one of higher education’s traditional responsibilities could go a long way toward providing many more students the support they need to build a purposeful
college experience.
26 / IN PRACTICE—THE BUDDY SYSTEM: CRISIS MANAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIABy Diana Goldstein, Cynthia M.Avery, and Jim Day
Before organizing a complex system for managing campus crises, consider the University of Georgia’ssimple approach.
29 / CAMPUS COMMONS—FRIENDBy Yvonne Poley
In times of trouble, this may be enough.
31 / WHAT THEY’RE READING—LEARNING TO SERVE, SERVING TO LEARNBy Katherine Demory Tadlock
Civic and moral development has been made central to the educational goals of the twelve colleges and universities profiled in a new book.
2ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
yOU ARE A COLLEGE EDUCATOR and, imagine for a moment, a member of aninstitutional committee—let’s say, the cur-
riculum committee.As you take your seat for today’scommittee meeting, you feel unsettled. On your wayto the meeting you’d had an odd experience, a freakcoincidence that has set you to thinking some ratherdisturbing thoughts.This is how it happened.
You were walking across the quad on the way tothe meeting when a student approached.You recog-nized her, in a vague sort of way, and had the feelingthat she must have been in one of your classes notlong ago, but you couldn’t quite place her.As youwere rifling through your memory banks for a name,
she approached you with a smile:“Hi, Dr. Jones, youprobably don’t remember me. I’m Jill Jackson; I wasin your class a year ago, but I just crashed and burnedat the end. I had some trouble and couldn’t keep up,so I got an F. But I want you to know that that bookwe were discussing, and the questions you raisedabout it, really got me to thinking. I finished readingit after the semester was over. I even made a coupleof my friends read it so I’d have somebody to talkabout it with! I want to follow up on the questionsit raised. I’ve decided to change my major and I’mback at school this term. For the first time I reallythink I know what I’m doing here, and I have you tothank. So have a nice day. Bye-bye.”
Are we teaching our students how to grub for grades
or how to learn in deep and lasting ways? The author offers a disturbing
glimpse at a superficial approach to learning our institutions may be fostering.
He also offers a reflective assessment of a deep approach waiting to be nurtured.
B Y J O H N T A G G
Why Learn?What We May Really Be Teaching Students
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on the quality of student learning.
3ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
Your mouth a bit agape, you managed somethinglike,“OK, sure, well, good luck to you,” as she walkedaway. Somewhat flushed, you continued across the quad,encountering twenty yards later another familiar face.This one you did recognize and you waved as heapproached.“Hi, Dr. Jones,” he said.“Remember me?Jack Brown. I had your class last fall, got an A. Boy, Ireally needed that A, and I studied really hard.Thanksfor a great class. Ha! I’m glad I don’t have to take yourfinal today, because I don’t think I’d get a single answerright. But I enjoyed the class.Well, take it easy.”
Again, somewhat bemused, you wound your wayacross the quad. The question arose in your mind:Which of the two students would you consider moresuccessful? Which one gives you more satisfaction, con-firms that you have achieved what you wanted toachieve as a teacher? Jill or Jack?
The success story here, you quickly decide, is Jill.Why? The learning experience Jill had in your classcontinued after the class was over, changed her under-standing, affected her decisions, her ideas, and herbehavior, and continued to do so a year later. It becamea part of her and she a part of it, so she was different forit. It’s not just that she changed her major. Had shebecome confirmed in her original choice of major,come to understand it better and embrace it more fully,you would have been equally satisfied. Jill carried thelearning away with her and made it her own. Jack, fromwhat little evidence you have, left it behind.
But what about the grade? Here too the contrastis stark. One student excelled and one flunked.Yet ayear later the grade has ceased to be valid evidence ofmuch of anything. It is overwhelmed by the evidenceof the students’ knowledge, behavior, and beliefs as theyhave developed subsequently.
Your preference for Jill over Jack, you realize, sug-gests something a bit unnerving about the way most ofus in higher education are doing business these days.Asyou made your way across the quad after your twochance encounters you had reflected on the paradoxthat, from the point of view of the institution whereyou work, Jack is a better student than Jill.The coinci-dence of these encounters coming so close together hadraised to your consciousness a concern that has doggedyou, in less explicit form, for a long time.Your sinkingfeeling had reached the pit of your stomach as youreached the door of the Emanuel Schmedlap Human-ities Complex.You suspected that if you were to mean-ingfully assess the results of that class for these twostudents today, a year later, your evaluation would beentirely different, perhaps the opposite of what it hadbeen at the end of the term.And it was not lost on youthat the implications of this fact go far beyond Jill and
Jack.You couldn’t help but think about some researchyou had recently read on student motivation and reten-tion of learning from one term to the next. Jack, youthought, spoke for many, many more students than Jill.But of course there was nothing you could do aboutthat. It was completely out of your control. So you haddone your best to set aside these disturbing thoughts asyou approached the room where the curriculum com-mittee was about to meet. On the agenda were new andrevised course outlines and changes in prerequisites formath and science.You aren’t sure you want to talk aboutthat today.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
WHAT,AFTER ALL, are colleges for? Whatare they supposed to do? Look at this greatenterprise of undergraduate higher educa-
tion—What is its function? What are the more thanthirteen million students doing in it? Or look at theinstitution in which you are involved—what are itsgoals? What would define its success?
An unbiased observer, looking at any organization,would look to its core processes, what its members do,what they get paid for, what it documents and records,and what criteria it uses for changing the way it doesthings. Kellogg and Post aim to make breakfast cereal,Ford and General Motors aim to make cars, hospitalsaim to make people healthier. Colleges, judged by thesame standards and by the evidence of their own doc-umentation, aim to have people take classes. It is as ifKellogg saw its function as grinding up great amountsof corn, or the RAND Corporation sought to fill asmany pages as possible with reports. Kellogg knowswhat the corn is for. RAND knows what the reportsare for. What are the classes for? There are a lot ofpotentially good answers to that question, but most ofour undergraduate colleges do not preserve any infor-mation about those answers.What they do preserve—the almost exclusive documentation of their work thatsurvives the class itself—is grades, transcripts. Kelloggmakes cereal; colleges make transcripts.
But that is not, I venture to guess, the reason thatthose of us who work at colleges have chosen to workthere.We did not sign on to be cogs in transcript-gen-erating factories. Indeed, we view it as a sure sign ofdeficiency in our students when they seem to befocused exclusively on grades, to view the grade as valu-able for its own sake rather than for what it should standfor.We view students like Jack, who thinks his A was thewhole point of the class, with ill-concealed disdain.Wesee him as a kind of academic Philistine, confoundingthe spirit of the law with, if you’ll pardon the expres-
4ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
sion, the letter. Confusing the means with the end.Wethink of our students as shortsighted and shallow whenthey place a primary value on the only thing our insti-tutions preserve and report about them: their transcripts.
HOW STUDENTS WORK
WHAT,THEN, should our students value?What do we want them to seek, to aimfor? This is not a hard question to answer.
We saw that answer, in living color, in Jill.Why is herexample so satisfying? Because she learned something,she kept what she learned, and she used it.
The difference between Jack’s and Jill’s grades is aquantitative difference. He got more points on a test thanshe did.The purpose of multiple-choice tests is to con-vert knowledge into numbers, to quantify.This processis inherently reductionistic; it reduces the full-colorrelief map of the student’s understanding into a two-dimensional, black-and-white cartoon.And the assign-ment of a grade on the basis of multiple-choice testsfurther reduces the delineations, leaving as the surviv-ing report a primitive blot.
If the difference between Jack’s and Jill’s grades isquantitative, however, the difference between theirunderstandings is qualitative. Even if our impressions ofJill and Jack are correct, we still have no basis for decid-ing whether Jill learned more than Jack learned.We do,however, have some evidence that she learned better thanhe did.And this, I think, goes right to the heart of whatwe value, of what we seek, in the educational enterprise.It explains our disappointments and frustrations, ourcomplaints and our bitterness, our satisfactions and oursuccesses.What we really want is quality, not just quan-tity.This is not to say we should never count or mea-sure the results; but if we do so, we want to be countingsomething of value. So how can we define quality?
Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard Uni-versity, raised this very question after several years as a“successful” teacher. He had begun to see evidence thathis students in introductory physics were not really get-ting it, even though they were doing well enough on
his examinations. He set out to investigate.Alongsidethe challenging and highly quantitative multiple-choicetests he gave in the course, he administered a set ofquestions developed by physicist David Hestenes at theUniversity of Arizona that sought to determine through“simple” and commonplace examples students’ basicconceptions of Newtonian physics.The results werestriking. One student asked, “Professor Mazur, howshould I answer these questions? According to what youtaught us, or by the way I think about these things?”(Which role shall I play for this test: Jack or Jill?) Andwhen Mazur paired “simple” qualitative questions with“difficult” quantitative ones on the same test, 40 percentof the students did better on the quantitative problemsthan they did on the conceptual ones.What was goingon here? “Many students,” Mazur concluded,“concen-trate on learning ‘recipes,’ or ‘problem solving strategies’as they are called in textbooks, without considering theunderlying concepts.” Many students, in other words,study as Jack did.The reason they cannot recall the cor-rect answers a year—or a month—later is that theynever really understood them in the first place.
TRUE QUALITY LEARNING
IN THE MID-1970s, two Swedish scholars, Fer-ence Marton and Roger Säljö of the University ofGöteborg, set out to explore essentially this prob-
lem; they sought to differentiate qualitatively ratherthan quantitatively between effective and ineffectivelearners.They embarked from the premise that “for theunderstanding of ‘what it takes to learn,’ a descriptionof what the students learn is preferable to the descrip-tion of how much they learn.” They gave students alearning task: read an essay and summarize it, solve aproblem.Then they interviewed the students aboutwhat they had done. On the basis of these interviewsand student performances, Marton and Säljö concludedthat different students approached the tasks differentlyfrom the outset. For example, when asked to summa-rize an essay, some students reported a series of claimsmade in the essay in the same sequence in which theyhad encountered them. Others explained the mainpoint or thesis of the essay and then related subordinateclaims hierarchically to the thesis.These two groups ofstudents generally described their approach to the taskdifferently. On the one hand, those who simplyreported in order the claims made in the essay madecomments like these:
“Well, I just concentrated on trying toremember as much as possible.”
John Tagg is associate professor of English at Palomar Collegein San Marcos, California, and author of The LearningParadigm College (Anker, 2003). His e-mail address [email protected].
The author would like to acknowledge the support of thePew Forum on Undergraduate Learning, which made thisarticle possible.
We love feedback. Send letters to executive editor MarciaBaxter Magolda ([email protected]), and pleasecopy her on notes to authors.
“. . . no, not everything, but more or less.”(p. 9)
The students who, on the other hand, found thecentral point of the article and used it to organize theirsummaries made comments like these:
“. . . I tried to look for . . . you know, theprincipal ideas. . . .”
“. . . and what you think about then, wellit’s, you know, what was the point of thearticle, you know.”
“I thought about how he had built up thewhole thing.” (p. 9)
Marton and Säljö characterized the first group ofstudents, those who simply tried to remember points inorder, as doing surface-level processing. Those who devel-oped a concept of the whole essay organized around itscentral theme were engaged in deep-level processing. Stu-dents who take a surface approach to a learning a taskare focusing on the signs—the words of the essay, thenumbers in the physics problem.Those who take a deepapproach are focusing on the meaning—what the signssignify, the ideas the author is presenting, the conceptsthe numbers represent. Marton and Shirley Booth, intheir 1997 book Learning and Awareness, put it this way:“Deep approaches were related to grasping the author’smessage, and surface approaches were related to mis-comprehending or missing the message altogether” (p.22). Subsequent studies have applied the distinction tolearning at all levels of academic work, in fields as dis-parate as history, physics, mathematics, art, and computerprogramming.
When I first read Marton and Säljö’s research, Iexperienced an immediate shock of recognition.Thesewere my students they were describing, in some casesnearly quoting, such as the composite students we metat the beginning. Jill, in our example, was taking a deepapproach to learning; in her first reading of the bookshe engaged with the ideas, the underlying meaning.That was what motivated her. Jack, on the other hand,took a surface approach.We see in Jack what we do notlike to see in our students: he studied for tests.We seein Jill the kind of student we want to have because wesee in her the characteristics of a deep approach tolearning: she studied for life.Why do students take theseradically different approaches? And is it really the casethat the fundamental choices that students make, whichdetermine the quality of their learning, are simply outof our control?
MAYBE I CAN’T CHANGE
WHY DO SOME learners approach a sub-ject or an idea in a way that makes itmeaningful while others approach it in a
way that makes it meaningless? In part it is because ofthe goals they adopt in approaching the learning task.
Broadly speaking, learners approach a task with oneof two kinds of goals: performance goals or learning goals.Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, inher 2000 book Self-Theories:Their Role in Motivation, Per-sonality, and Development, puts it this way: performancegoals are “about winning positive judgments of yourcompetence and avoiding negative ones” (p. 15).Withlearning goals, on the other hand, your aim is to“increas[e] your competence.”The student who sets aperformance goal wants the A.The student who sets thelearning goal wants the understanding—or more.
Marton and Booth describe a detailed study (con-ducted by Marton and several other colleagues) of a
One student excelled and one flunked. Yet a year later the grade has ceased to be valid evidence
of much of anything. It is overwhelmed by the evidence of the students’ knowledge, behavior, and
beliefs as they have developed subsequently.
6ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
cohort of students from the Open University in theUnited Kingdom in the 1980s.They asked these stu-dents what their conceptions of learning were andfound that the students’ self-reports fell into six cate-gories (the quotations are from interviews of the stu-dents):
Learning as increasing one’s knowledge:“Accumulation of knowledge.”“Filling myhead with facts.”
Learning as memorizing and reproducing:“Learning it up for exams and reproducingit.”“Drumming it into the brain and reel-ing it off.”
Learning as applying: “Take in informa-tion, see how it can be used.” “Turn itaround and make use of it in other ways.”
Learning as understanding: “Looking againat things that you know about but with aslightly different perspective—or seeingother people’s views on things.”“To have aprocess of thought that sort of ‘sets inmotion’ when you look at something . . .tackle looking at something in a far morelogical way.”
Learning as seeing something in a differentway: “Opening your mind a little bit moreso you see things in different ways.”“Beingable to look at things, from all sides, andsee that what is right for one person is notright for another person.”
Learning as changing as a person: “Ex-panding yourself . . . you tend to think thatlife just took hold of you and did what itwanted with you. . . .You should take holdof life and make it go your way.” “It’ssomething personal and it’s somethingcontinuous. Once it starts it carries on andit might lead to other things. . . . Youshould be doing it not for the exam but for
the person before and for the person after-wards. . . .” [pp. 36–38]
Marton notes that students in the first three cate-gories—learning as increasing one’s knowledge, learn-ing as memorizing and reproducing, and learning asapplying—view learning mainly as reproducing, as theaccurate reproduction of signs.Those in the last threecategories—learning as understanding, learning as see-ing something in a different way, and learning as chang-ing as a person—see learning as mainly concerned withseeking meaning. But we can also see that the first threelevels are chiefly concerned with producing a satisfyingperformance while the last three levels are concernedwith development and personal growth.Those who setperformance goals tend to take a surface approach tolearning; those who set learning goals tend to take adeep approach.
Why do students then pursue performance goalsrather than learning goals? The first and most directanswer to that question is that it is because of what theybelieve about themselves. Learning goals are goals forpersonal change. If the learning is to stay with you itmust become a part of you. If it doesn’t, you leave itbehind.The point was made forcefully by one of theinterviewees in Marton’s study who viewed learning asmemorizing:“When you have achieved whatever it waslearned for, then that’s it, it can go away, it’s disposable,you can get rid of it” (p. 36). My own students, in muchthe same spirit, often describe their goals for a course asto “get it out of the way.” Learning environments, fromthe perspective of performance goals, are obstructionsto be moved past and then discarded. Do you recognizeJack?
Students who have little faith in their capacity forcognitive change and development will tend not to setlearning goals. Carol Dweck has explored motivationand goal setting in students of varying ages and abilitysets. She has found that we adopt implicit theories aboutour own abilities in a given domain, and that these the-ories powerfully influence the kind of goals we set.Entity theorists tend to believe that their own abilities in
Is it really the case that the fundamental choices thatstudents make, which determine the quality of theirlearning, are simply out of our control?
a given domain are a fixed entity, not subject to change.For the entity theorist, the basic fact about his ability inathletics or math or pinball is that “you have it or youdon’t,” and in either case much time spent on it wouldbe wasted. Entity theorists, Dweck points out, aim onlyat “easy, low-effort successes, and outperforming otherstudents. Effort, difficulty, setbacks, or higher-perform-ing peers call their intelligence into question—even forthose who have high confidence in their intelligence”(p. 3).
Incremental theorists, unlike entity theorists, believethat their abilities are not fixed but malleable, subject todevelopment or decline.While entity theorists tend tosee effort as a sign of lack of ability, incremental theo-rists tend to see effort as the key to developing ability.For the entity theorist, trying hard is a sign of weakness;for the incremental theorist, it is the only route to suc-cess. Dweck found a clear and significant relationbetween the students’ theories of intelligence and theirgoal choices: the more students held an entity theory ofintelligence, the more likely they were to choose a per-formance goal, whereas the more they held an incre-mental theory, the more likely they were to choose thelearning goal.
Entity theory shows up in our students in a varietyof ways. I ask my students on the first day of class todescribe their goals for the class.The contrast betweenperformance and learning goals is stark and obvious.There are always a few who, like Jill, seem genuinely tobe seeking to develop their thinking and their abilitiesto meet new challenges. But the vast majority, like Jack,frame their goals in terms of a grade or a job. Many stu-dents do not seriously entertain the idea of substantialdevelopment or change in an academic setting.The stu-dent entity theorist, whether he considers himself tal-ented or terrible, is setting himself up for failure as alearner. Because learning goals are goals for personalchange, they are beyond the reach of the student asentity theorist, for his talents are frozen and immobile.Thus even very talented entity theorists are ill-suited tomeet the challenges of serious learning.As Dweck says,“Entering a challenging scholastic setting with a beliefin fixed intelligence seems to set students up for self-doubt, anxiety, and drops in achievement.The entity
theory puts a premium on immediate demonstrationsof intellectual ability rather than on mastery over time”(p. 32). And because almost all genuine mastery isachieved over time, this attitude seriously disables stu-dents’ capacity for quality learning.
What the entity theorist can do is try to ace thetest through scholastic legerdemain, to cram a certainamount of disposable knowledge into short-term mem-ory long enough to get the grade on the transcript.Then, as Marton’s interviewee so unforgettably put it,“it can go away, it’s disposable, you can get rid of it.”
THE BUTTERFLY POSSIBILITY
IT MAKES VERY LITTLE sense to blame studentslike Jack for their choices. It is easy for us to seewhat these students are missing, what they are
denying themselves, how narrow and short-term aworld they are selecting for themselves. But it doesn’tappear that way to them.As Robert Kegan of the Har-vard Graduate School of Education puts it,“If a cater-pillar doesn’t know its future has wings, it hardlyexperiences itself as land-bound” (p. 41).
Kegan argues in his book In Over Our Heads:TheMental Demands of Modern Life that as we grow olderand seek to meet the challenges of adulthood, we needto develop new ways of thinking about ourselves andabout our relationships to others and to the world.This“developmental transformation” is “the process bywhich the whole (‘how I am’) becomes gradually a part(‘how I was’) of a new whole (‘how I am now’)” (p. 43).We can see Marton’s categories of student thinkingabout learning as reflecting stages of development instudents’ realization of themselves as learners. MarciaBaxter Magolda of Miami University of Ohio has fol-lowed students in longitudinal studies through the fouryears of college and beyond, tracing the evolution oftheir attitudes and expectations. She has found that stu-dents develop a more complex and flexible epistemol-ogy as their sense of the relationship between themselvesand the world evolves to meet new challenges. Jim, oneof the students she tracked, expressed the most primi-tive way of knowing, which she identifies as “absoluteknowing”:“The factual information is cut and dried. It
7ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
Those who set performance goals tend to take asurface approach to learning; those who set
learning goals tend to take a deep approach.
8ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
is either right or wrong. If you know the information,you can do well. It is easy because you just read or lis-ten to a lecture about the ideas.Then you present itback to the teacher” (p. 43). Jim echoes Marton’srespondents who reported that learning consists of “Fill-ing my head with facts” and “Learning it up for examsand reproducing it.” Students who take a surfaceapproach to learning are effectively locked in absoluteknowing; they can grow only in the quantity of factsthey can accumulate. Students working in this frame-work of thought about their learning are the most ter-restrial of cognitive caterpillars, bound to branch orearth by myriad stubby legs, never glancing at the skyset so definitively above and beyond them.
These students find themselves, in Kegan’s tellingphrase, “in over their heads.” Set college aside for amoment: to meet the demands of work, of relationships,of citizenship, people need not simply to acquire morebits of information, but to constitute new frameworksfor understanding.They need not just acquisition butalso transformation, not just more facts but also meta-morphosis.The young person can rise from the worldof the “cut and dried” to the world of—well, of theworld.This developmental process, moving through sev-eral stages, aims at what Kegan calls self-authorship. It isprecisely self-authorship that important work calls for,in the personal, the public, and the professional realms. Itcalls for people who, in Kegan’s words, can “be self-ini-tiating, self-correcting, and self-evaluating rather thandepend on others to frame the problems, initiate theadjustments, or determine whether things are goingacceptably well. . .” (p. 168).To move toward self-author-ship is to embrace substantive and transformative learn-ing goals at a deep level.
Marton characterized the highest category ofthinking about learning among the students he inter-viewed as “learning as changing as a person.” But chang-ing perhaps fails to capture the trajectory of thesestudents quite fully.These students are certainly incre-mental theorists; they embrace the project of personalchange as a real possibility—but change not as randomvariation but as development into a new thing.Thesecaterpillars know they can’t fly, but they envision afuture in which they will.“You should be doing it not
for the exam but for the person before and for the per-son afterwards. . . .”“You tend to think that life just tookhold of you and did what it wanted with you. . . .Youshould take hold of life and make it go your way.” Jilltoo has grasped the possibility of remaking her way ofknowing; she has not reached but is moving toward self-authorship.They are still caterpillars, perhaps, but theireyes are on the sky.
SOCCER IS TO MATH . . .
KEGAN AND BAXTER MAGOLDA bothconfirm that most college students do notmove very far toward self-authorship while in
college.The most significant developmental movementtakes place after students have left college.Why is this?This is the second and deeper answer to the question ofwhy students set performance goals rather than learn-ing goals.What sets students on a trajectory towarddeeper and more complex understanding of their ownpossibilities as learners? Or what holds them on thetreadmill of memorization and point-hoarding?Remember that self-theories are not global; they changewith different domains and in different contexts. Stu-dents’ self-theories are practical adaptations to the con-texts in which they find themselves.
For example, students tend to adopt an incre-mental theory in most cocurricular activities in whichthey choose to participate. Students who go out forsports or the band or choir or who audition for the-atrical productions usually work hard and practice alot—a sure sign that they are adopting an incrementaltheory about the activity.Why practice a lot unless youthink you can get better? Indeed, some students whoadopt an incremental theory in response to some tasksin a given domain appear to adopt an entity theory inresponse to other tasks or in other situations. Studentswho adopt an incremental theory in cocurricularactivities sometimes adopt an entity theory in theclassroom, even in the same subject or domain of knowledge.I have seen it myself—cases where the same student,exercising the same skill, sets learning goals in self-selected activities but performance goals in the class-room. Likewise, many students develop a much more
As Robert Kegan puts it, “If a caterpillar doesn’t know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.”
9ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
sophisticated and flexible way of knowing after theyleave college than they ever did when they were there.Why does this happen?
Return for a moment to Jack. Jack is a clear exam-ple of someone who set a certain kind of performancegoal in a particular context: he took a class with thepurpose of achieving a good grade.Why did he do this?Was he just a born grade-grubber, with no conceptionof development or personal growth? If you could seeJack play video games or volleyball or work hour afterhour with the small band he has formed in which heboth plays bass guitar and writes songs, you would notthink so. Indeed, if you watched Jack at the right times,in the right places, you would see an incremental theo-rist dedicated to self-improvement even at very highcost. But that is not when, where, or how you saw Jack.You saw Jack in your college class.Why was he so dif-ferent there, so narrow and limited and trapped in theshort-term and meaningless, such a grade-grubber?
Ohmer Milton, Howard Pollio, and James Eisonconducted extensive studies to discover how gradesaffect students and how students’ attitudes towardgrades affect their performance. They reported theresults in their 1986 book Making Sense of CollegeGrades. What they found strongly reinforces the viewthat students who set learning goals learn more, retainit better, and apply it more effectively than studentswho set performance goals. On the question of why somany students choose performance over learning goals,they found the most direct explanation in the designof the learning environment:
We feel that a student may be grade-orientednot because he or she necessarily wants to be,but because such an orientation is a plausibleand situationally effective way of dealing withthe traditional classroom environment. . . . Inmany instances, an instructor’s classroom poli-cies and procedures make such an orientationseem both logical and reasonable for the stu-dent. [p. 142]
Indeed, it is not just the instructor’s classroom poli-cies that we should examine in seeking to place respon-sibility, but also the policies of our colleges. Most of theassessment that places a value on student work reducesit to quantifiable points, and the student with the mostpoints wins the best grade.The only thing the collegepreserves about the student’s work in the class is thegrade.Thus, when students become grade-oriented theyare merely responding to the incentives in their envi-ronment.They put quantity above quality, prefer the cut-and-dried epistemology of successful test performanceto developmental growth in learning. In making thesechoices, they merely emulate their colleges; they valuethat on which their institutions place the highest value.
In this environment we would expect that studentswould become more, not less, likely to pursue perfor-mance goals and more surface-oriented in theirapproach to learning the more they are exposed to theenvironment.And the sad news is that that is exactlywhat we do find. John Biggs is a professor of educationat the University of New South Wales in Australia whohas also held chairs in education in the United King-dom, Canada, and Hong Kong. Surveying research onthe question, he concludes that “the longer most under-graduate students . . . stay in [college], the less deep andthe more surface-oriented they tend to become, and themore their understanding is assessment related.The ten-dency is almost universal. . . . Learning tends to becomeinstitutionalized” (pp. 34–35).
So the reason we have so many more Jacks thanJills is that we make them. Students take a surfaceapproach to learning because that is what colleges asinstitutions teach.
WHAT TO DO?
THESE ARE SOME of the thoughts runningthrough your head as you wait for the cur-riculum committee meeting to begin. You
know you will take up several proposals for newcourses, detailed course outlines to be examined in light
The only thing the college preserves about the student’s work in the class is the grade. Thus, when
students become grade-oriented they are merelyresponding to the incentives in their environment.
10ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
�
of detailed rules. But you know that these courses,whatever their subjects, will be designed very much likeyours, like the one that Jack and Jill took last year.Yoususpect that committees are meeting all over campus,making their own detailed decisions about otherdetailed topics.You have a growing conviction that thewhole process in which you are about to engage willsimply reinforce what you increasingly see as the sys-tematic failure of your college to create an environmentthat promotes a deep approach to learning and effec-tively supports student development.
You have half a mind to say something, to tell thecommittee about Jill and Jack, to ask them to think aboutthe system in which they are working, about theprocesses that work against their own deeply held prin-ciples.But you think you know what you will hear if youdo that.These are busy people.They have offices to getback to, work to do.You glance across the room at a col-league and you can already hear her objecting that this isno place for “philosophical digressions,” that the questionsyou raise go beyond the charge of the committee, thatnone of this is on the agenda.And she would, of course,be right.The curriculum committee, just like your class,has a tightly drawn “syllabus.” It has a set of specificassignments that you are supposed to perform. Theanswers to the committee “test,” you realize, are supposedto be cut and dried. If you want to get an A in curricu-lum committee, you have to do the assignments, accu-mulate the points, get the right answers.You look againat your colleague, whom you like as a person and admirein many ways, and you see Jack.You look around at theother curriculum committee members and you see anorganization like others at your college that is designedto take a surface approach, locked in its own way into theepistemology of absolute knowing. Its business is themanipulation of signs; the underlying meaning is not onthe agenda. If you open a can of worms, in this meetingor elsewhere, you feel that you are setting yourself up forfailure in a number of ways.You would be swimmingagainst the tide, going against the rules, raising problemsthat it is nobody’s job to solve—because nearly every-body’s “job” is part of the problem.
And then you think of Jill.You think of Jill whenyou think of failing—failing curriculum committee,failing faculty team player, failing the system—becauseJill did fail. She failed your class. But she used that fail-ure as a route to learning. She grew from it. She putquality above quantity. She embarked on the road toself-authorship by stepping into the failure and lookingbeyond it.And she has already become more than eitheryou or she expected.You had been privileged to see aglimpse of the transformation through which the wholewas becoming gradually a part of a new whole.The Jillwho chose to look beyond her failure became a part ofthe Jill she was making with that choice.
As the chair calls the committee to order, yourmind is in a state of exquisite disorder. Do you followthe algorithms, get the most correct answers, make thepoints? Or do you seek for meaning, try to grow, takethe risks? What should you say? What should you do?Who do you want to be?
NOTES
Baxter Magolda, M. B. Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-Authorship: Constructive-Developmental Pedagogy.Nashville,Tenn.:Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
Biggs, J. Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What theStudent Does. Buckingham, England: Society forResearch into Higher Education and Open UniversityPress, 1999.
Dweck, C. S. Self-Theories:Their Role in Motivation, Personality,and Development. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000.
Kegan, R. In Over Our Heads:The Mental Demands of ModernLife. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Marton, F., and Booth, S. Learning and Awareness. Mahwah,N.J.: Erlbaum, 1997.
Marton, F., and Säljö, R. “On Qualitative Differences inLearning: I-Outcome and Process.” British Journal ofEducational Psychology, 1976, 46, 4–11.
Mazur, E.“Qualitative Versus Quantitative Thinking: Are WeTeaching the Right Thing?” Optics and Photonics News,1992, 3, 38.
Milton, O., Pollio, H. R., and Eison, J. Making Sense of CollegeGrades:Why the Grading System Does Not Work and WhatCan Be Done About It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986.
11ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
PASSION IS WHAT ATTRACTED
many of us to the academy—
passion for new ideas, for remarkable
people, and for meaningful work.We
became part of the academy to pursue
these interests not alone, sheltered in ivory tow-
ers, but in the lively company of others equally
committed to discovery, learning, and engage-
ment. Most of us—faculty, staff, and adminis-
trators—were attracted to the idea of the col-
legium.As John Bennett, provost and vice pres-
ident for academic affairs at Quinnipiac
College, so expressively reminds us in Collegial
Professionalism, the collegium is neither a col-
lection of similarly trained individuals nor a set
of persons with common institutional affilia-
tions.The collegium’s defining characteristic is
the way colleagues engage one another.
COLLEGIAL TALK:A POWERFUL TOOL
for CHANGE
Is it possible to promote change in the academy by just talking?
The authors say “yes.” They present a deceptively simple
approach—one grounded in organizational theory—for getting
colleagues together to go beyond standard problem solving and
take campuses in surprising new directions.
B Y F R A N K A . F E A R and D I A N E M . D O B E R N E C K
For many of us, life in the contemporary academydoes not come close to this ideal; we yearn deeply for atime or place just to talk with one another about whatreally matters. Given the press of time and the need forefficiency, it is all too easy to take an instrumentalapproach to our interactions and relationships in theacademy. According to William F. Massy, Andrea K.Wilger, and Carol Colbeck, educational researchers atthe Stanford Institute of Higher Education Research,excessive specialization, the tendency to work alone,generational differences, personal politics, and lack ofcivility thwart faculty and staff engagement, creating anatmosphere of “hollowed collegiality” in all areas of theinstitution.These forces, coupled with growing compe-tition for students and increasing pressures for time,challenge us to relate to our colleagues respectfully andmeaningfully.
Facing such constraints, those of us who wish tocreate a more collegial atmosphere are often frustratedby what appears to be a lack of openness to change inhigher education. It is easy to feel thwarted when ourdiligent efforts to persuade institutional leaders tobecome more flexible and collegial are unsuccessful.Resentment can build when we are not granted per-mission to make institutional changes that we believewill bring collegiality back into the mainstream acad-emy.As Parker Palmer, independent scholar on educa-tion, community, spirituality, and social change, pointsout in The Courage to Teach, because institutional leadersby definition seek to preserve, not change, institutionalvalues and processes, advocates for change are “likely togive up if the organizational approach [to change] is theonly one they know” (p. 165).What if there were analternative to persuading institutional leaders to makeformal changes in the organization? What if another wayto promote collegiality existed? What if each and everyone of us—administrators, faculty, academic and studentaffairs staff, and students—were able to create collegialspaces by ourselves?
The authors’ experience shows us that the socialmovement approach to change might just be that alterna-tive. Social movements abandon the logic of the formalorganization—its rules, roles, and relationships—and itsemphasis on preserving stability through hierarchical
power. Instead, social movements rely on the informalpower of flexible networks that gain momentumthrough their committed members. Parker Palmerbelieves that social movements embody the “principleof flux and change; they are processes through which asociety channels its energies for renewal and transfor-mation” (p. 164).This alternative logic means abandon-ing the prevailing logic of power over, and thenimagining and enacting an alternative logic—power with.In other words, to lead change at our institutions, wehave to start not with formal power but with passion,according to Margaret Wheatley, organizational scholarand author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversa-tions to Restore Hope to the Future. She believes “we justhave to find a few others who care about the samething.Together, we will figure out what our first step is,then the next, then the next. . .” (p. 25).
SPACES FOR COLLEGIAL ENGAGEMENT:TWO EXAMPLES
WHAT MIGHT the social movementapproach to change look like in highereducation? How might its alternative logic
create spaces for collegial engagement? One of theauthor’s colleagues stumbled upon the answer one daywhen he observed,“We never have to talk anymore.Wework on committees, and teach, and do researchtogether, but that’s all work related. I mean we neverhave time to just talk.” He mused,“What if we were toorganize a colloquy?”After joining with a few otherswho cared deeply about the same thing, his passion
12ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
In other words, the colloquy is not associated withanybody’s formal responsibilities or job description; it is not owned by a campus unit or department.
Frank A. Fear is professor of resource development andserved as inaugural chairperson of the Liberty Hyde BaileyScholars Program at Michigan State University. He can bereached at [email protected].
Diane M. Doberneck is former academic learning coordina-tor for the Liberty Hyde Bailey Scholars Program atMichigan State University and now serves as an adjunct fac-ulty member. She can be reached at [email protected].
We love feedback. Send letters to executive editor MarciaBaxter Magolda ([email protected]), and pleasecopy her on notes to authors.
became the organizing force behind Michigan StateUniversity’s (MSU) Colloquy on Teaching and Learn-ing. For the past six years the colloquy has been con-vened as a special time and place for the MSUcommunity to gather once each year to talk about anissue that really matters—teaching and learning.
The concept underpinning the colloquy is straight-forward—devote two mornings each year to open con-versation on matters of interest relating to teaching andlearning. For the first two years, 1998 and 1999, the col-loquy engaged MSU faculty, staff, and students in dia-logue on matters relevant to MSU. In subsequent years,nationally prominent figures were invited to participatein the open conversations—Robert Barr on the learn-ing paradigm in 2000, Parker Palmer on the courage toteach in 2001, Ervin Laszlo on ecological sustainabilityin 2002, and Christopher Uhl on forging stronger con-nections between who we are and what we teach in2003. Roughly half of those participating each year—from forty to three hundred—are newcomers to the col-loquy, coming from across campus and beyond. On thesurface, the colloquy may resemble any other facultydevelopment summer workshop or conference. How-ever, something much more sophisticated and powerfulis at work below its surface.That force makes itself evi-dent in the way the colloquy is organized each year.
From the beginning the colloquy has not been theresponsibility of a standing committee or a distinct cam-pus unit. Instead, a network of colleagues, many ofwhom have attended a past colloquy or have expressedan interest in attending the upcoming one, organizesand hosts it.The cross-campus network, characterizedby fluid membership and rotating leadership, is open toanyone who is interested—faculty, staff, graduate stu-dents, and community members. In other words, thecolloquy is not associated with anybody’s formalresponsibilities or job description; it is not owned by acampus unit or department. It is an ongoing, voluntaryeffort designed to create a space for collegial engage-ment. It exemplifies the social movement approach toorganizational change—individuals organizing around
issues that matter to them and working with colleaguesthey prefer.
What might emerge from the social movementapproach to change in a more traditional academic set-ting? How might the collegial spirit of the colloquycome to life in the classroom? The Liberty Hyde BaileyScholars Program in MSU’s College of Agriculture andNatural Resources is one example of using the alterna-tive social movement logic to create a space for collegialengagement in an academic setting.Working with cam-pus colleagues and university administration, in 1998 theauthors launched an undergraduate program in whichstudents, staff, and faculty design the curriculum collab-oratively. Instructors, often a team of tenured faculty, aca-demic and student affairs professionals, and graduatestudents, do not take charge of the classroom. Insteadthey function as learning conveners in a space devotedto connected learning, where questions such as Who amI? What do I value? What is my worldview? How do Ilearn? and How do these connect? are explored in anempathic, respectful environment. Connected know-ing—not separating oneself but instead viewing oneselfand others in relation to the subject—comes from theseminal feminist scholarship of Mary Field Belenky andher colleagues in Women’s Ways of Knowing:The Develop-ment of Self,Voice, and Mind. As Belenky and her col-leagues explain, entertaining these questions reflectsconnected knowing, or viewing oneself and others inrelation to rather than separate from the subject. In aBailey classroom, students and faculty organize learningexperiences collaboratively, building the curriculumfrom scratch, in relationship to matters of mutual inter-est. In doing so, the students gain important life skills inwhat Kenneth Bruffee calls in a recent About Campusarticle, “the craft of interdependence.”They learn toexplore topics with intense personal—not just aca-demic—relevance.The outcomes in the Bailey programare often remarkable.When given the opportunity, stu-dents take the lead in organizing learning experiencesfor themselves and in inviting others to learn along withthem. For example, Bailey students regularly make pre-
13ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
The colloquy exemplifies the social movement approachto organizational change—individuals organizing
around issues that matter to them and working with colleagues they prefer.
14ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
sentations at national conferences, such as the AmericanAssociation for Higher Education’s Conference onLearning for Change.The hallmark of their presentationsis engaging the conference participants in either experi-ential learning or dialogue, so that each session is at leastpartially cocreated right then and there, based on theideas and input of the conference participants. Similarly,recent senior scholars chose to organize a university-wide conference as their capstone experience.They col-laborated with campus faculty to learn more about thephilosophy, strategy, and techniques of collaborativelearning and then invited interested faculty, academic andstudent affairs professionals, and other students to a one-day interactive conference on collaborative learning. Ina similar way, Bailey scholars—faculty, staff, and stu-dents—often engage one another in explorations thatgenerate learning shared with others.“Meaning Makingand the ‘Learning Paradigm’:A Provocative Idea in Prac-tice,” published in Innovative Higher Education, stands outas a recent example.
Are these students extraordinary? Certainly theyare, but not in the traditional academic sense.This is notan honors program for the academic elite. In the BaileyScholars Program, four-year scholarship winners andstudents struggling to maintain good academic standingwork side-by-side with distinguished professors, aca-demic staff, and graduate students.What brings themtogether is a shared commitment to learning and dis-covery in an open, respectful environment. Being aBailey Scholar is voluntary, as scholars are invited to self-select into the program.There are no applications, noris there a selection committee charged with admittingsome students and rejecting others.What attracts schol-ars is the chance to be intimately involved in shapingthe learning agenda around their passions and interests.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NETWORKS AND
NETWORKING
THE COLLOQUY and the Bailey ScholarsProgram are demonstrations of how an alter-native logic in higher education can create the
collegial spaces that faculty, staff, and students deeplycrave. In different ways, they have re-created the essenceof collegium and have come into being through asocial-movement and networked approach to change.What do these programs have in common with othernetworks that create spaces for collegial engagement?They share a commitment to interdisciplinary explo-ration, an egalitarian nature, a yeasty temperament, and abias for action.
First, networks are inherently interdisciplinary—cross-ing departmental and professional lines rather than mov-
ing up and down organizational and administrativechains of command.The colloquy brings colleaguesfrom across campus together with members of neigh-boring communities for conversations that bridge typ-ical town-and-gown divides. The Bailey ScholarsProgram brings together faculty, staff, and student schol-ars from more than fifteen departments in the Collegeof Agriculture and Natural Resources. Recently, facultyscholars have included an academic librarian, a leader inresidence life, and an administrator responsible for diver-sity and pluralism.
Second, networks tend to be egalitarian. Each yearthe colloquy’s planning committee assembles a newgroup of individuals interested in hosting the event.Status doesn’t matter—each person’s voice is honoredin the planning phase and during the colloquy itself.Similarly, the Bailey Scholars Program seeks to blur thedistinctions between faculty, staff, and students, creatinga culture of respect and trust that crosses the institu-tion’s traditional divides—between student and teacher,faculty and staff, community and university, novice andknower. In both cases, faculty, students, academic andstudent affairs staff, and often off-campus partners par-ticipate as peers engaged in connected learning activi-ties.
Third, networks are yeasty in temperament. Newideas are actively exchanged; the resulting synergy pro-vokes participants to think new thoughts. For example,during the 2001 colloquy, faculty from the College ofEducation engaged with teachers from a local schooldistrict during one of the roundtable discussions—cre-ating a rousing dialogue between scholars and practi-tioners. It is not uncommon for individuals withdifferent perspectives on the same issue to listen to andlearn from one another. For example, in the BaileyScholars Program, animal rights activists learn from fam-ily farmers who run intensive livestock production facil-ities, and vice versa. Such interactions inevitably createa certain amount of churn, yet a respect for differentviewpoints keeps the space safe for dialogue and healthydebate.
Fourth, action attracts many people to networks.Among other things, networking promotes interactionamong like-minded people who are committed todoing something together.This shared commitment toaction on an issue of importance is the core aroundwhich the networks form. Other networks on our owncampus are based on an action agenda on issues such aswomen in international development, community foodsystems, and environmental sustainability.
The reality is that the power of networks and net-working is often undervalued because networks oper-ate beneath the surface of the organization—they follow
an alternative logic, often operating informally andinvisibly within the institution.The authors believe it istime to make the invisible visible by recognizing thepower of networks and by valuing them for what theyare—alternative means for change in our institutions ofhigher education. In The Post-Corporate World, DavidKorten, founder and president of the People-CenteredDevelopment Forum, describes these new forces ofchange as inherently populist—people at the grassrootslevel taking charge, connecting, and working as col-leagues to achieve a shared vision.“Nobody seems to berunning the show,” writes Vickie Robin of the NewRoad Map Foundation,“but many networks are orga-nizing around issues and concerns, and activating othernetworks, when the time is right, to get jobs accom-plished” (p. 1).
NEW APPROACHES TO LEADERSHIP
WHAT DOES LEADERSHIP look likewhen nobody seems to be running theshow? How does the work get done with-
out a strong or charismatic leader? Clearly the colloquyand the Bailey Scholars Program are products of a verydifferent kind of leadership. Neither grew out of abureaucratic, highly structured, mechanistic approach toorganizational change. Instead both the colloquy and theBailey Scholars Program are products of social organiz-ing, similar to grassroots community organizing. Socialmovement or networked approaches to leadership canbe characterized as nonhierarchical, self-organizing, andparticipatory forms of collegial engagement. KathleenAllen and Cynthia Cherrey, scholars of academic leader-ship and student affairs, in Systemic Leadership: Enrichingthe Meaning of Our Work describe networked leadershipas different in form and function from bureaucraticapproaches. Instead of exercising hierarchical leadershipdesigned to achieve goals established at the top, networkleaders enable collegial connections, helping people findthe ways and means to work together on matters thathave intrinsic meaning. Network leaders understand the
limits associated with getting people to buy into others’agendas, with the heroic leadership of a few, and withmechanistic management styles that leave little room forpassion, creativity, or innovation.
Debra Meyerson, organizational researcher at Stan-ford University, describes how networked leadersbecome individual change agents within an organiza-tion. In her study of corporate cultures, Tempered Radi-cals, she discovered that these change agents, rarelyrecognized as leaders, began by leading lives of personalauthenticity.Tempered radicals are employees at all orga-nizational levels who stick to their values, assert theiragendas, and provoke learning and change withoutjeopardizing hard-won careers. Rather than acquiesceor disengage from the institution, they take an activestance by finding constructive ways to infuse their val-ues into the organizational culture. This infusedapproach to leading organization change is quite subtleand deep, grounded by passionately held personal val-ues. Robin writes about this emerging group of pow-erful people who live according to life-centered values.These values are embedded in a humanistic and holisticview of the world and embodied in a commitment toindividual enlightenment and renewal. Individuals areengaged by contributing actively to the vitality of fam-ily, community, and work systems.
Like Meyerson and Robin, Parker Palmer believesthat leaders who employ a social organizing logic tochange start from a place of authenticity, where personalidentity and integrity meet. In the last chapter of TheCourage to Teach, Palmer notes that a social movementor network begins with one individual who reaches acritical decision point in her life and turns away fromthe divided life to embrace a life where internal valuesare brought into alignment with external or institutionalcontexts. “When that happens to one person, andanother, and another, and another, in relation to a sig-nificant social issue,” Palmer believes,“a movement canbe conceived” (p. 167).
Individuals for whom personal authenticity andwholeness are key values draw on an alternative logic as
15ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
Questions such as Who am I? What do I value? What is my worldview? How do I learn? and
How do these connect? are explored in an empathic, respectful environment.
16ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
leaders.They often engage in collaborative, participatoryforms of leadership and take person-centeredapproaches with their colleagues. Leaders who followsocial movement or network logic seek to do the fol-lowing:
Energize others through the power of invitation andunderstand that the work is invigorated by the energy of vol-unteers. Both the colloquy and the Bailey Scholars Pro-gram persist because organizers step forward voluntarilyand take time to make it happen. In doing so they offercolleagues the gift of engaging one another in dialogue.
Enable participants to create something together. Oneby one—and for personal reasons in each case—col-leagues come forward to help with planning or to par-ticipate in the event. They work out everything ascollaborators—creating an ad-hoc and co-owned orga-nizational form—in an environment where everyonehas a voice and all matters are open to negotiation.
Accentuate the power of discovery. Truly collegialspaces cannot be organized and enacted mechanisticallythrough preplanned routines. Everything emerges. Itproceeds uniquely—never predictably, often surprisingly,and sometimes mysteriously—and always successfully.
Encourage imagination, experimentation, and freedomfrom tight control. Fullest potential is achieved by lettingthe system unfold naturally of its own accord, as advo-cated by Danah Zohar, organizational researcher, inReWiring the Corporate Brain. If higher education is toachieve its potential as an environment dedicated tolearning and growing, people must have license toexplore, imagine, and experiment.
Affirm and practice the qualities of the postheroicleader. Unlearning modern methods of leadership andplanned change is required even though those methodshave worked in the past and continue to have a place.Network leaders embrace the philosophy of CharlesHandy, who asserts that leadership needs to be empow-ering and generative, a means to develop others’ capac-
ities. In The Age of Unreason, he writes,“the post-heroicleader lives vicariously, getting kicks out of other peo-ple’s successes” (p. 166).
THEORY OF NETWORKED PRACTICE
JUST AS THE social movement and network per-spective requires new leadership practices, it alsonecessitates new ways of looking at organizations.
They can no longer be understood as places with orga-nizational charts and rigidly defined roles and responsi-bilities. Instead, organizations must be thought of asoverlapping, interconnected webs of relationships. InHidden Connections, physicist Fritjof Capra describesorganizations as “communities of people who interactwith one another to build relationships, help each other,and make their daily activities meaningful at a personallevel” (p. 99).These webs of relationships strongly res-onate with the concept of collegium. How might thesewebs of relationships operate in the college or univer-sity setting?
A markedly different theory informs leadership,planning, and organizing in the social movement andnetworking perspective. In Whose Reality Counts? Puttingthe Last First, Robert Chambers, an international devel-opment professional, describes circumstances like thecolloquy or the Bailey Scholars Program as the reversalof the normal—where power and control are decen-tralized, individual responsibility replaces authoritativeresponsibility, and creative paths are pursued rather thanfixed sequences followed.This approach would seem toinvite dissolution and impede longevity.Yet every col-loquy has been organized successfully, and the BaileyScholars Program has attracted remarkable scholars forthe past six years. How is this possible? Why does ithappen?
Two reasonable interpretations in the literature lendcredence to this alternative way of understanding orga-nizations based on the alternative logic of the social
Being a Bailey Scholar is voluntary; there are noapplications nor a selection committee. What attracts scholars is the chance to be intimately involved in shaping the learning agendaaround their passions and interests.
17ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
movement or network: Harrison Owen’s idea of OpenSpace and Dee Hock’s concept of chaord. Owen, anorganizational consultant specializing in the transfor-mation of organizations around spirit, describes thehypothesis of Open Space in his book The Power ofSpirit: “Concerned human beings, gathering of theirown free will and regardless of social status, education,ethnicity, or economics can quickly (almost simultane-ously) create effective organization productive of sub-stantial results, without extensive preparation andmassive amounts of external assistance” (p. 8).The fourprinciples of Open Space offer more specific guidance:Whoever comes are the right people.Whatever happensis the only thing that could have.Whenever it starts isthe right time.When it is over, it is over.Translated intocolloquy terms, this means that colleagues are invited toengage one another in an environment where theymake it up together.This means that anybody can stepforward to organize the colloquy, everybody is invitedto participate, and those who attend the colloquy cre-ate the learning agenda, right then and there.As in theBailey Scholars Program, activities take place in real timeas participants gather at the table to envision and thenenact.
Whereas Open Space principles helped us gaininsight into the process of collegial engagement, theorganizational development work of Dee Hock helpedus better understand the form of collegial engagementwe created. In Birth of the Chaordic Age, Hock introducesthe term chaord, an invented word combining the wordschaos and order. He and his colleagues conceptualizedthis form nearly forty years ago while experimentingwith organizational alternatives associated with thecredit card industry. Hock defines chaord as a self-orga-nizing, self-governing, adaptive, and nonlinear organismthat blends characteristics of order and chaos. Chaordsare positioned at the edge of chaos—an unstable zonebetween certainty and turmoil that researchers havefound to spur imagination and stimulate novelty.Chaordic planning is based on the belief that people aremost creative and energetic when they are free to worktoward ends they value, using means they prefer.
Chaords require minimal structure, rules, and hier-archy.The only glue necessary to hold a chaord togetheris having clear purpose and a set of guiding principles.The purpose of the colloquy was clear from the begin-ning—to create a time and place for colleagues fromacross the university to explore the important teachingand learning issues of the day.The purpose of the Bai-ley Scholars Program emerged early on: to create acommunity of scholars (faculty, academic and studentaffairs staff, and students) dedicated to connected learn-ing and lifelong personal growth.With time, experience,and reflection, a set of guiding principles emerged fromboth the colloquy and the Bailey Scholars experiences:
Self-determination. Colleagues organize aroundlearning issues that matter to them. As we havedescribed in the colloquy examples, colleagues volun-tarily step up and offer ideas, achieve consensus ondirection, and then take responsibility for organizing acollegial space for engagement. In the Bailey ScholarsProgram, faculty, staff, students, and community mem-bers envision authentic learning experiences for them-selves and invite others to join them in envisioning,doing, and reflecting on the experience.
Open participation and low boundaries. All are invitedto participate in organizing the colloquy, regardless oftitle, position, or field. Newcomers are especiallyencouraged to participate. They spur innovation byenlivening and enriching the idea pool. For example,Lansing School District teachers—persons who had notparticipated in earlier colloquies—heard about Collo-quy 2001 through MSU colleagues.The teachers par-ticipated in the overall planning effort, organizing athematic session with Parker Palmer for their teachingcolleagues in the school district.
Ease of operation. “Keep it simple” is an operatingrule. Participation is blunted if transaction costs are high.Consequently, in both the colloquy and the BaileyScholars Program, planning meetings are brief and lim-ited in number, and support work is kept light andshared. E-mail is used extensively to invite participationand to communicate about opportunities. E-mail recip-
Whoever comes are the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
Whenever it starts is the right time. When it is over, it is over.
18ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
ients are encouraged to forward the announcements tocolleagues they feel might be interested in joining.
Decentralized leadership. All involved are remindedto model distributive rather than centralized leadership.Colloquy organizers take a minimalist approach to col-loquy planning to ensure that participants have ampleopportunity to define the agenda and influence direc-tion. For example, rather than plan the colloquy agendain advance, an inviting question, such as “Thank you fortaking the time to be here. How might we best spendour time together?” often gets the ball rolling on collo-quy day.The answer allows for an agenda to be createdon the spot. In the Bailey Scholars Program, adminis-trators and staff follow a similarly scaled-back approachto management, setting only minimal conditionsrequired by the institution.
Egalitarian ownership. Volunteers plan the colloquyas citizens of the university rather than as unit repre-sentatives. Organized for the good of the whole, thecolloquy is enabled, not owned. In exchange for fund-ing, administrators do not impose boundary conditions;they frequently participate as colleagues in the collo-quy, seeking to benefit from engaging with others ontopics of mutual interest.This egalitarian approach isalso reflected in the Bailey Scholars Program. Studentshave equal say with faculty in program operations anddirections.As an example, the program’s mission state-ment—called the “Declaration of Bailey”—was createdcollaboratively.
THE CHALLENGE: BECOMING COLLEGIAL
THOUGH WE YEARN for the intimacy asso-ciated with the collegium, educators are woe-fully unpracticed at engaging one another
respectfully. For starters, conversations have a tendencyto devolve into debates unless the norms of dialogue—like those suggested by skilled practitioners such asLinda Ellinor and Glenna Gerard, Margaret Wheatley,
and William Isaacs—are clearly communicated andobserved.These norms require us to shift away fromseeking power over others to embracing power with them.Wemust abandon the fundamental academic position ofproving intellectual competence by seeking to influenceothers by the power of our words.We must also be will-ing to acknowledge one another as equals (faculty, staff,students, and community members alike) by listening—really listening—to what is being said.As Isaacs, organi-zational scholar, urges in Dialogue and the Art of ThinkingTogether, for dialogue to work we must “relax our gripon certainty and listen to the possibilities that result sim-ply from being in a relationship with others—possibili-ties that might not have occurred otherwise” (p. 19).
Being truly open to the unknown is difficult. Itgoes against our grain because we have been seduced bylogical explanations and dazzled by linear models oforganizational change.We are so wedded to predictabil-ity that, often without realizing it, we close ourselves offto the unexpected possibilities that emerge from ourengagement with one another.When our full concen-tration is on the details of getting our work done theright way, often the most efficient way, we forget to slowdown and connect with one another meaningfully. Inthe mad rush to finish we lose sight of ourselves and ofour humanity.As a consequence, we lose our ability toengage one another as colleagues.
Finally, our desire to know what to do is, in and ofitself, one of the greatest impediments to creating col-legiality. Collegiality is not about knowing the way for-ward but about discovering the way together. Theauthors are often asked, How do we create spaces safeenough for collegial engagement? What do we need todo to become more collegial? These questions reveal animportant underlying paradox: Collegial engagementhas very little to do with what you do; it is more abouthow you go about doing what you do. There is noguide.There is no list.There is no recipe. Collegialitycannot be implemented or mandated or planned into
Ultimately collegiality requires being open to newpossibilities, acknowledging and respecting oneanother as equals, listening deeply to what othersare saying, and slowing down to think about and reflect on what was shared.
19ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
existence. Collegiality is not about knowing what to do;it is about a different way of being in the world.
From our experience we have learned that creat-ing a space for collegial engagement is messy, unpre-dictable, and challenging. Ultimately collegiality requiresbeing open to new possibilities, acknowledging andrespecting one another as equals, listening deeply towhat others are saying, and slowing down to thinkabout and reflect on what was shared.Above all else,being truly engaged means being open to the influenceof others; it requires us to abandon our position ofknowing for one of learning. Consequently we mustalso abandon our planned models of organizationalchange for the alternative logic of the social movementor network, where the power of individuals organizingaround issues that matter to them and working withcolleagues they prefer may be unleashed.
Never think “This approach can’t possibly work.”It always does if you give it a chance.The learning isrich.The experiences are memorable.The outcomes areoften extraordinary. Just imagine what would happen ifwe were to ask “What if?” and conclude “Why not?”What would happen if we were to join with a few oth-ers who care passionately about the same things andthen together figure out what the first step is, then thenext, then the next. . . .
NOTES
Allen, K., and Cherrey, C. Systemic Leadership: Enriching theMeaning of Our Work. Lanham, Md.: University Press ofAmerica for the American College PersonnelAssociation and the American Association for CampusActivities, 2000.
Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., and Tarule,J. M. Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books,1986.
Bennett, J. Collegial Professionalism:The Academy, Individualism,and the Common Good. Phoenix: Oryx Press for theAmerican Council on Education, 1998.
Bruffee, K. “Cultivating the Craft of Interdependence:Collaborative Learning and the College Curriculum.”About Campus, 2003, 7(6), 17–23.
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: Integrating the Biological,Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science ofSustainability. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Chambers, R. Whose Reality Counts? Putting the Last First.London: ITDG, 1997.
Ellinor, L., and Gerard, G. Dialogue: Rediscover the Power ofConversation. New York:Wiley, 1996.
Fear, F., Doberneck, D., Robinson, C., Fear, K., and Barr, R.,with Van Den Berg, H., Smith, J., and Petrulis, R.“Meaning Making and ‘The Learning Paradigm’: AProvocative Idea in Practice.” Innovative Higher Education,2003, 27(3), 151–168.
Handy, C. The Age of Unreason. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardBusiness School Press, 1990.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999.
Isaacs,W. Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York:Random House, 1999.
Korten, D. The Post-Corporate World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999.
Massy, W. F., Wilger, A. K., and Colbeck, C. “Overcoming‘Hollowed’ Collegiality: Departmental Culture andTeaching Quality.” Change, 1994, 26(4), 11–20.
Meyerson, D. Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference toInspire Change at Work. Boston: Harvard University Press,2001.
Owen, H. The Power of Spirit. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler,2000.
Palmer, P. J. The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1998.
Robin,V.“Vicki Robin’s Corner: Engaged Living.” The NewRoad Map Foundation [http://www.newroadmap.org/vrengaged.asp]. Retrieved Dec. 24, 2002.
Wheatley, M. Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations toRestore Hope to the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002.
Zohar, D. Rewiring the Corporate Brain: Using the New Scienceto Rethink How We Structure and Lead Organizations. SanFrancisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1997.
Ann Austin, David Cooper, Patricia Farrell, Phyllis Grummon, andParker Palmer contributed to the development of this article.The expe-riences described here would not have taken place without the selflessdedication of numerous Michigan State colleagues, including TomEdens, Richard Bawden, John Duley, Cathy Larson, Patricia Enos,Ron Whitmore, and Terry Link, and without the support of multipleMichigan State administrative officers, including Provost Lou AnnaSimon and Assistant Dean Richard Brandenburg.We also thank for-mer assistant provost Martha Hesse for encouraging us to explore theideas presented here.An earlier version of this work was presented byFear, Austin, and Farrell at the 2002 American Association forHigher Education conference.
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?I
T WAS THE FIRST REALLY WARM
day that spring, and I could hear more
than the normal amount of student chat-
ter outside my office window. As I turned
to finish plowing through my e-mail mes-
sages, a soft knock came at my door.There
stood a student I didn’t recognize, looking as if
he had lost his best friend.He asked if he could
come in to talk. Recounting his troubles, he
became more and more despondent.The sum-
mer school schedule had been published earlier
that week, and the one course he needed if he
were to graduate in August was not slated to be
taught during the summer session. He realized
he would not meet the graduation require-
ments, delaying his graduation until December.
20ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
COULD FIXING
ACADEMIC ADVISINGFIX HIGHER EDUCATION
B Y M A RY S T UA RT H U N T E R A N D E R I C R . W H I T E
Not completely, but as the authors suggest, advising may be a very good place to start.
While advising by itself certainly can’t change the curriculum and co-curriculum,
it can create a vital connection between students and their education—
helping them to become more reflective and strategic about the choices they are making
and the learning they are engaged in.
21ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
His week had been spent fretting over telling hisfamily about his predicament, and calculating the addi-tional cost of earning his degree and his lost earningsdue to the delay. He lamented the missed opportunitiesof his educational experience and said he was barelymanaging to stay awake during long days followingsleepless nights. He was sheepishly coming to see melate this Friday afternoon after boldly and successfullycircumventing the advising system since declaring hismajor as a sophomore.
This student is not alone. Every year thousandsmanage to dodge advising systems.What is regrettableis not just that they may not graduate on time (an enor-mous burden) but also that they have missed an oppor-tunity to shape a meaningful learning experience forthemselves. Academic advising, well developed andappropriately accessed, is perhaps the only structuredcampus endeavor that can guarantee students sustainedinteraction with a caring and concerned adult who canhelp them shape such an experience. Fifty combinedyears of academic advising experience have convincedus that advising can serve as the hub of the undergrad-uate experience, with linkages to curricular and co-curricular programs on campus. Under the guidance ofan academic adviser, students can clarify the purposesof their college attendance, achieve vital personal con-nections with mentors, plan for the future, determinetheir role and responsibilities in a democratic society,and come to understand how they can achieve theirpotential.
Our belief is that effective academic advising is nowmore important and relevant than ever.After a half-cen-tury of unprecedented growth and a massive outpour-ing of funding, resources from states and the federalgovernment as well as private granting agencies are dry-ing up.The outlook for students is equally worrisome.Some states are pulling scholarships from students whotake longer than four years to graduate.The job marketis not as good for graduates as in the past, and tuitioncosts are climbing for students and their families.As thecost of higher education increases, so do the expecta-
tions of students and families. Parents are more intrusivethan they once were, and many students expect anddemand more from institutions in return for theincreased costs. In terms of maximized resources, build-ing a sound academic advising system is an investmentin effective goal clarification by students and more effi-cient progress to program or degree completion.Heightened service expectations are met when studentsreceive the high-quality, sustained attention of an insti-tutional representative who can guide and mentor them.
The challenge is to create an academic advising sys-tem that students, faculty, staff, and administrators viewas essential, not peripheral, to the educational experi-ence. To create such a system means understandingexemplary practices as a new program is developed oran existing one is improved.The payoffs, as the institu-tions described here and many others have discovered,can be substantial.
CHARACTERISTICS OF QUALITY
ADVISING PROGRAMS
WHAT FOLLOWS are the characteristicsthat we believe are essential to an effectiveacademic advising system.Taken together,
they offer the greatest opportunity for advising to beseen by staff, administrators, faculty, and most impor-tantly students as central to the academic enterprise.
Mission Statements. The most obvious, thoughoften-neglected, place to start is an institutional aca-demic advising mission statement.A mission statementis a vital foundation for the goals and objectives of anadvising program.Without such a statement, advisingcan be misunderstood as a function of the registrationprocess alone: signing forms, filling out curriculumcheck sheets, setting registration appointments, and hop-ing that students follow the appropriate coursesequences toward their intended degrees.
Crafting a mission statement requires thoughtfuldeliberation and input from a variety of constituents.Amission statement should be an organic, evolving doc-
The challenge is to create an academic advising systemthat students, faculty, staff, and administrators
view as essential, not peripheral, to the educational experience.
22ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
ument, revisited periodically as students, resources, andperhaps even philosophies of advising change.A well-crafted statement is a clear declaration to the entire aca-demic community that advising is important andvalued.As a delineation of the parameters of advising, itfosters mutually satisfying expectations between advis-ers and advisees and lays the foundation for assessmentefforts.
Hamilton College’s advising mission statementleaves little doubt what the activity means at this insti-tution:
Academic advising at Hamilton College isone of the many ways in which studentsengage with faculty on an individual basis.Advisers and advisees work together to crafta unique, individual academic plan basedupon each student’s strengths, weaknesses, andgoals. Hamilton College views the advisingrelationship as an on-going conversation thattranscends mere course selection and attemptsto assist students as they explore the breadthof the liberal arts curriculum, experience col-lege life, focus on a major concentration andprepare for life after Hamilton.
Clearly, the expectation at Hamilton is that student con-tact with advisers will be on an individual basis.Adviseesand advisers together work on examining the nature ofeach student’s unique educational experience within thecontext of individual abilities and interests.The fact thatHamilton College recognizes that advising goes beyondcourse selection into the realm of an ongoing relation-ship sets expectations for both the adviser and theadvisee. Finally, the significance of a liberal arts educa-tion, the role of a major and the co-curriculum, and theacknowledgment that students are being prepared for alife beyond their baccalaureate degree, are clearly stated.Such a well-articulated statement, although not the solefactor necessary for good advising, offers the appropri-ate starting place.
Standards and Values. The work of achievingand maintaining quality in academic advising need notbe approached in an ad hoc fashion; nor does the qual-ity wheel need to be reinvented. Many professions, bothwell-established and emerging ones, have a set of stan-dards and guidelines by which to operate.Academicadvisers can turn to the Standards and Guidelines forAcademic Advising as promulgated by the Council forAdvancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS)and endorsed by the National Academic Advising Asso-ciation (NACADA), available at http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/Research_Related/CAS.htm.These standards and guidelines, first published in 1986and subsequently revised, can serve as the basis for estab-lishing institutional advising programs and for ongoingprogram assessment.
These CAS standards call for implementation ofprinciples for ethical practice. NACADA, through itsStatement of Core Values (see http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/Research_Related/corevalues.htm),provides such a guide for ethical practice. Academicadvisers frequently confront ethical situations and arefaced with tension between advocating for students andadhering to the policies and regulations of the institu-tion.Adherence to the NACADA values enables advis-ers to make decisions on the basis of established codesof conduct and can increase the likelihood of all stu-dents receiving equal treatment.
Academic advising, well developed and appropriatelyaccessed, is perhaps the only structured campusendeavor that can guarantee students sustainedinteraction with a caring and concerned adult.
Mary Stuart Hunter, a former academic adviser for undecid-ed students, is currently director of the National ResourceCenter for The First-Year Experience and Students inTransition at the University of South Carolina. Her e-mailaddress is [email protected].
Eric R. White is executive director of the Division ofUndergraduate Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.He currently serves on the board of directors of the NationalAcademic Advising Association. His e-mail address [email protected].
We love feedback. Send letters to executive editor MarciaBaxter Magolda ([email protected]), and pleasecopy her on notes to authors.
23ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
Advising Structures. The general character ofan institution should guide the structure of academicadvising.An institution with a large population of stu-dents identified as exploratory or academically unde-cided should employ advisers who are comfortable withthe needs of exploratory students, who believe academicexploration is a positive attribute, and who do not allowstudents to declare majors or make academic decisionsin haste. Conversely, at colleges where students areadmitted with the understanding that they know whatthey want to study and have little room to explore alter-natives, the advising program should make available tomatriculating students advisers possessing specific disci-plinary expertise.At institutions where academicallyunderprepared students are admitted, the advising sys-tem should allow time for remediation and give studentsthe opportunity to change academic direction as easilyas possible.
Leadership. An advising program viewed as essen-tial has a leader with authority over the resources andpersonnel necessary to achieve the mission of the advis-ing program.Too often, an institution appoints a directorof academic advising to oversee faculty advising systemsand yet gives the director no input into promotion andtenure decisions. Motivating faculty advisers is difficult, ifnot impossible, in a setting where advising is notrewarded, where faculty bristle at the notion of havingtheir work assessed, and where the authority to mandateattendance at advising workshops does not exist. Direc-tors without formal authority are often put in the diffi-cult position of advocating for the very best advising buthaving to persuade on the basis of their own charisma.
At a large, decentralized institution, there may beno single person in charge of all advising. In such a case,advising is frequently delivered unit by unit, in academicdepartments or in combination with specialized centersfor student subpopulations (for instance, exploratory stu-dents or student athletes). Bringing together advisingleaders in a decentralized culture from across campus tocoordinate advising efforts may prove to be a workablesolution.
Staffing. Faculty are generally hired with theassumption that they will teach in the classroom, engagein research, publish in their field, and secure grants tosupport their work.The rare hiring process gives spe-cific weight to individuals who demonstrate the char-acteristics of good advisers: patience and a willingnessto listen to students in a one-on-one setting. Indeed,some faculty members may not even realize when theyaccept a teaching position that they will be expected toadvise students. Under these far-from-ideal circum-stances, giving junior faculty members advising respon-sibilities immediately may not be in their best interest iftenure and promotion decisions are based on researchproductivity.At a later point in a faculty member’s pro-fessional life, advising responsibilities may be more wel-come. Indeed, some institutions have found that facultynear the end of their career make exceptional adviserswho mentor students and receive satisfaction by sharingtheir accumulated wisdom.Working around current sys-tems may be the best option when advising is not priv-ileged at levels equal to other faculty duties.
A second, viable option is to employ professionaladvisers. For professional staff advisers, advising is theirprimary, and in some cases their only, responsibility.Many campuses have created specialized positions foradvisers working with student subpopulations such aspremed and prelaw students, first-year students, at-riskstudents, and high-ability or honors students.At somecampuses, the physical setting for advising is designedfor a specific population—as is the case at Miami Uni-versity of Ohio, where first-year students are advised bya professional academic adviser who is also the directorof their residence hall.
Technology. Networked advising technologieshave freed advisers from routine, bureaucratic tasks suchas completing curriculum check sheets. They allowadvisers to engage in the teaching and mentoring that isat the core of academic advising. Electronic degree auditsystems eliminate the need for advisers to complete rou-tine forms, and institutional databases afford advisersaccess to aggregate student characteristics and demo-
Assessing adviser effectiveness and evaluatingprograms should lead to recognition and rewards,
yet this is one of the most vexing components of any advising program.
24ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
graphics. With this information, interactive advisingmodules tailored to student characteristics can be createdto allow students to complete advising-related tasksunder the guidance of a program written by advisers.Students are now able, by way of interactive computeradvising systems, to drop courses by communicatingwith a virtual adviser. In the computer-assisted advisingenvironment, students with particular issues (veterans,athletes, financial aid recipients, students heading towarda particular major) can also be identified and informa-tion particular to their situation can be built into the sys-tem.The ever-expanding menu of networked advisingtechnologies includes interactive systems such as Penn-sylvania State University’s “eLion,” which permits stu-dent access to common information and allows them toobtain answers to typical questions.The face-to-faceadviser-advisee relationship is freed for mentoring andlong-term educational planning.
Advising Councils. A recent, and especially pos-itive, trend in academic advising is the establishment ofadvising councils to provide structured oversight. Suchcouncils are typically campuswide in scope and ofteninclude students in their membership.They serve as avenue for recommendations for change in policies andprocedures, and in some cases they have the authority toconduct evaluations on service delivery. Institutions withsuccessful advising programs also have advisers servingon myriad campuswide committees where they advo-cate for advising in curriculum and policy decisions.
Program Evaluation. Evaluation makes pro-gram improvement, commitment to continuous qualitygains, and thorough examination of what is and isn’tworking possible. Quantitative measures can beemployed to document the efficiency and productivityof advising. Surveys of student satisfaction with advis-ing and measures of the advising load and log ofappointments can gauge productivity.A benchmarkingstudy can yield valuable information on program effec-tiveness as it measures against models elsewhere.Advis-ing systems central to an institution are regularlydeveloping better measurement instruments and evalu-ation strategies.
Wheaton College in Massachusetts has instituted acomprehensive assessment program taking into account,
among other variables, the outcomes expected fromquality advising. In work that is highly interactive andrelationship-dependent, qualitative measures are essen-tial. Focus groups with various constituents, individualinterviews, and telephone surveys can produce richinformation not attainable by other means. Studentreflections are particularly powerful for conveying theimpact of advising.
As the academy shifts its emphasis to learning out-comes, advising must be part of the equation. It isimportant to know what students are learning throughthe advising process and how what they are learningaffects their educational experience. Understanding theconsequences of advising on student learning canenhance the central role of this activity in the academy.
Assessment of Adviser Effectiveness. Amongthe many approaches to assessment of individual adviserperformance are directly observing adviser-adviseeinteractions, reviewing written statements of advisingphilosophy, counting the number of students seen andtotal number of advising interviews conducted, andreviewing advisee satisfaction.Whatever the methods,assessments should arise directly from the goals of theprogram. For faculty advisers, assessment often resem-bles the assessments of teaching effectiveness and shouldbe folded into the prevailing reward system. Specificassessment instruments should be tailored to the uniqueactivities of professional advisers. A comprehensiveassessment effort calls for self-reflection on the part ofboth adviser and advisee.
Rewards and Recognition. Assessing advisereffectiveness and evaluating programs should lead torecognition and rewards, yet this is one of the most vex-ing components of any advising program. For facultywho serve as academic advisers, pressing issues includeaccounting for the time spent advising, assessing thequality of their advising, and being rewarded for advis-ing.To situate advising among important faculty duties,some institutions have begun to define it as a teachingactivity and to recognize it in faculty tenure and pro-motion decisions. Difficulties also exist for reward andrecognition of the staff adviser.Although in the profes-sional advising field this activity is considered teaching,most professional advisers are classified as staff and are
A recent, and especially positive, trend in academicadvising is the establishment of advising councils to provide structured oversight.
25ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
not in the tenure-and-promotion system.An argumentcan be made for moving professional staff advisers intothis system, as with librarians on many campuses.Thisstructure for staff advisers currently exists at the Uni-versity of Hawaii, where staff advisers are expected toconduct research, publish, and seek grants, in additionto fulfilling their advising duties.A shift of this kindnecessitates a change in the educational and professionalqualifications of applicants for academic advising posi-tions.
For both faculty and staff advisers, rewards andrecognition often come in the form of an annual adviseraward, support for professional travel, and other profes-sional development activities. One might argue that onsome campuses even a better parking space might serveas a sufficient reward for an outstanding adviser.
Adviser Development. Thorough initial train-ing and preparation and a continuing education com-ponent are fundamental to producing effective advisers.Topics in an effective program include current studentdevelopment theory, campus-specific student demo-graphics, institutional policies and procedures, legal andethical dimensions of advising, effective and appropri-ate referral strategies, and an understanding of studentexpectations of the advising relationship. Periodic in-service training opportunities contribute to continuousdevelopment of advisers and to maintenance of a high-
quality advising program. Professional developmentactivities for advisers are also desirable. Making period-icals, journals, and newsletters related to academic advis-ing available and supporting conference attendance foradvisers can contribute to their continued professionaldevelopment.The Master Adviser Program at SouthwestMissouri State University is an award-winning effort tosystematically provide faculty and staff advisers withhigh-quality training, evaluation, and recognition.
IN THE EARLIEST American colleges and uni-versities, students studied under the tutelage of ateacher, mentor, and adviser.The mentor-protégé
relationship was central to the educational process, andadvising and teaching were inseparable. Over the cen-turies, as higher education expanded, institutionsbecame more complex and the single-tutor model wasreplaced by a network of specialized instructional andsupport structures.Through these changes, the academicadviser has continued to serve in the role of mentor andguide.Thankfully, many institutions consider academicadvising central to education; they embody the criticalelements we have described here.Advising—the stalwartsoldier of American higher education—is a powerfulstrategy for managing in an era of shrinking resourcesand rising expectations that has actually been available,in various guises, for centuries.
Some institutions have found that faculty near the end of their career make exceptional advisers who mentor students and receive satisfaction
by sharing their accumulated wisdom.
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26ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
INpractice
THE BUDDY SYSTEM—CRISIS MANAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
A crisis on campus generally means pulling together a complex institutional support network to deal with a tangle of academic and personal issues. In the case of the University of Georgia
it may mean something as simple as having a buddy to rely on for help. Here’s a program based on this simple idea.
By Diana Goldstein, Cynthia M. Avery, and Jim Day
ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON late in thesummer of 1998, the housing managementteam at the University of Georgia received
unwelcome news. Students were scheduled to arrive oncampus in less than forty-eight hours, when the state firemarshal announced that a newly renovated buildingwould not be cleared for occupancy.Almost two hundredstudents would be unable to move into their campusrooms.We members of the housing management teammet to discuss options for dealing with this challengingsituation. In addition to coordinating the physical aspectsof the dilemma, we considered how the practical diffi-culties and added stress of the situation would affect stu-dents and their families.We knew it was important for usto ensure that students not feel lost in the system andoverwhelmed to the point that their first days in schoolwould suffer.This brainstorming session resulted in form-ing an approach we call “the buddy system,” which hasnow been used by the housing department on two sub-sequent occasions and has broad applicability to others.
Of course, this approach is nothing new. It is basedon the practice, familiar to parents and teachers, of“holding hands with your buddy so that no one will getlost.”This practice from childhood became an impor-tant aspect of our unique response in managing this dif-ficult situation.The management team decided to askstudents to delay their arrival on campus. Nine staffmembers volunteered to contact the students who werescheduled to move in on Sunday, and each spent muchof the weekend speaking to the affected students andtheir families and responding to the individual circum-stances surrounding their move.
The buddy system at UGA has become a single adhoc response mechanism within a larger responseframework that allows professionals to sensitively addressstudent concerns in an unexpected crisis.The systemdepends on volunteers from the full-time staff who arewilling to take on an additional helping role in con-necting with individual students in a way that extendsbeyond their typical job responsibilities and that, in thecase of some volunteers, may be outside their workduties altogether. At a time when a bureaucraticresponse might be expected, the buddy system allows apersonal touch.
ULTIMATELY this personal outreach is whatmakes the buddy system so effective in managing
a crisis situation. Students, especially at a large univer-sity, typically do not expect this level of personal con-cern when they face an obstacle and are pleasantlysurprised with the individual attention afforded by thebuddy system. In their book Improving Higher EducationEnvironments for Adults, Nancy Schlossberg,Ann Lynch,and Arthur Chickering explain that if students believethey matter, a negative situation can be managed in away that promotes the students’ future success.Throughthe buddy system, each student is able to put a namewith a face at the Department of University Housing,and they each know their buddy is working on theirbehalf to improve their situation.According to MorrisRosenberg and B. Claire McCullough, in an articlefrom Research in Community and Mental Health, “matter-ing is a motive: the feeling that others depend on us, areinterested in us, are concerned with our fate . . . exer-
27ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
cises a powerful influence on our actions” (p. 65).Thisgesture of concern is as important as the actual assis-tance provided.Although this system has been used suc-cessfully in the housing department at UGA, thepossible applications to other areas are obvious.
When the housing management team identifies acrisis and determines that the buddy system is an appro-priate response, volunteer “buddies” meet to brainstormavenues for assistance and to be matched with the stu-dents in need.An important component of this firstmeeting or “briefing session” is a review of expectations.These expectations includea recommended list of stepsthat should be followed toestablish a relationship withstudent buddies, appropri-ate information pertinentto the crisis situation thatmust be relayed, and areview of limitations. It isimportant for staff buddiesto understand the emo-tional strain the situationmay place them under andto be aware of the impor-tance of establishing appro-priate boundaries for thesupport they offer; forexample, staff members arenot expected to transportstudents or their depen-dents in their personalvehicles or use their per-sonal money to support the students’ needs.
The buddies make the initial contact with students.Typically, staff members provide office, home, pager, andcell phone numbers so their student buddies can contactthem at any time.Through this initial phone contact andthe relationship that ensues, students are able to receiveinformation, ask questions, and have a personal advocateon their behalf within the housing department.
The buddy system, developed as a result of thebuilding renovation delay, was revived later in the year
with a smaller student group under an even more seri-ous circumstance. In February 1999, a devastating firein the early morning hours at the family housing apart-ment complex caused the displacement of twelve fam-ilies, a total of forty individuals most of whom wereinternational students, including infants and senior cit-izens.This crisis called for a quick response from thedepartment staff and other agencies both on and offcampus.At the scene of the incident, university repre-sentatives collaborated with the Red Cross fire coordi-nator to find temporary housing for the displaced
families. Fortunately, thecampus conference centerhad vacancies and was ableto accommodate strandedfamilies.The buddy systemoffered a close relationshipthrough which they couldask personal questions, seekclarification when informa-tion was unclear, and obtainhelp overcoming obstacles.
The day after the fire,housing department mem-bers held a meeting withthe families at the confer-ence center to keep theminformed about the reloca-tion efforts and how thedepartment was working tomeet their needs. In addi-tion, a counselor from themental health service on
campus was available to provide support and informa-tion about available services. Staff buddies were on handat this meeting to assist families with their immediateneeds because concerns regarding the safety of thestructure prohibited residents from entering the build-ing.After ensuring that primary needs were met, thebuddies continued to work with the Red Cross repre-sentative to furnish assistance in the form of grocery andclothing vouchers from local retailers. Unfortunately,none of the families had renter’s insurance. But the newsof the need for clothing and other items spread quicklythroughout the surrounding community.An outpour-ing of support filled a large community center lounge,which became the makeshift relief center.Additionally,professors and academic departments were notified ofthe special circumstances these students faced.
After the officials deemed the apartments struc-turally safe for reentry, maintenance staff entered andremoved large pieces of roofing debris, soot, and water.After the fire debris cleanup was completed, residents
THE BUDDY SYSTEM AT UGA HAS
BECOME A SINGLE AD HOC
RESPONSE MECHANISM WITHIN
A LARGER RESPONSE FRAMEWORK
THAT ALLOWS PROFESSIONALS
TO SENSITIVELY ADDRESS
STUDENT CONCERNS IN AN
UNEXPECTED CRISIS.
Diana Goldstein serves as a consultant to the Department ofUniversity Housing at the University of Georgia. Her e-mail address is [email protected].
Cynthia M. Avery is director of residential education at SanDiego State University. Her e-mail address is [email protected].
Jim Day is director of university housing and adjunct assis-tant professor of counseling and human development servicesat the University of Georgia. His e-mail address [email protected].
28ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
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and their buddies were allowed to enter the building forthe daunting task of boxing up whatever they could sal-vage.The housing department found accommodationsfor the families at apartment complexes near schoolsattended by the college students’ children. Buddiesarranged for boxes and trucks to assist the families withtheir move. Furniture was made available by the hous-ing department warehouse and donated by the com-munity.
Once relocated to their new apartments, familiesand their buddies visited a local food pantry, gathereditems from the relief center, and tried to make anaccounting of items destroyed in the fire. Staff membersassisted in locating computers, having damaged itemsrepaired, laundering clothes, gathering donations forspecific items such as medical equipment, and contact-ing local libraries to have fines pardoned for materialsdestroyed in the fire.The buddies maintained contactseveral times a day duringthe process of relocation tonew apartments and con-tinued to do so in theweeks following the fire toassist families in any waypossible. The manager ofFamily and GraduateHousing remembers that“managing the outreachfrom the community” wasa monumental task. Thebuddy system made thetask of distributing themany donated goods mucheasier; the families could identify their needs and get theinformation passed along through their buddies.
THE BENEFITS of this system to the students andtheir families were myriad. But many staff mem-
bers refer to this period as a personally meaningful timefor them as well.The housing department mechanicalengineer was paired with a South Korean family withtwo small children. He felt a strong connection withthem, saying that he and the student, a physics major,“clicked like good friends.” Once the crisis was over, hewas invited to a traditional Korean meal in their newhome. He noted that the opportunity to provide assis-tance to a student from another culture made the expe-rience even more valuable to him as a professional.
A staff member who is now retired from the uni-versity continues to maintain contact with the SouthKorean family he helped, which includes a father,
mother, son, and daughter.The staff member recallsmeeting them the day after the fire and helping movetheir belongings in his truck to their new apartment afew days later. Over the next two years, as the fatherwas completing his degree, the families shared authen-tic Korean meals, concerts, and parades together.Thefamily now lives in Massachusetts,where the fatherworks at Harvard University. He says the staff memberwas a “great help with moving and settling down . . .and provided physical and spiritual help to my family.”The staff member adds that the experience was a try-ing one for students and families, but he describes par-ticipation in the buddy program as “a very rewardingactivity” for him.
The department used the buddy system againrecently when a residence hall renovation necessitatedmidyear closing of a building. In this particular situation,the students’ needs were not as urgent. Many com-
mented that they did notneed the extra assistance,but the fact that an offerwas made was both reassur-ing and appreciated.
In some cases, the ran-domly assigned relation-ships blossomed into lastingfriendships.The buddy sys-tem has become an estab-lished response mechanismin the organizational cul-ture of the housing depart-ment at the University ofGeorgia.This reminder of
the important lessons from our childhood can makemanaging campus crises easier in the future:“hold handswith your buddy and no one will get lost.”This basiclesson can move students facing a crisis on campus froma position of feeling marginalized to a position of mat-tering, thus further supporting their resilience, persis-tence, and retention at the institution.
NOTES
Rosenberg, M., and McCullough, B. C.“Mattering: InferredSignificance and Mental Health Among Adolescents.”Research in Community and Mental Health, 1981, 2,163–182.
Schlossberg, N. K., Lynch, A. Q., and Chickering, A. W.Improving Higher Education Environments for Adults:Response Programs and Services from Entry to Departure. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989.
ULTIMATELY THIS PERSONAL
OUTREACH IS WHAT MAKES THE
BUDDY SYSTEM SO EFFECTIVE IN
MANAGING A CRISIS SITUATION.
29ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
“I
FRIEND
When life is difficult, what a companion can do
By Yvonne Poley
WANT TO HELP, but I’m not sure what’s theright thing to do,” worried Annie. She continued:“Idon’t know whether to tempt her with food when she’sdoing her not-eating thing, or to say something whenI see her stuffing herself and I think she’s going to throwup. I’m afraid I’ll make things worse rather than better.”
Annie was asking me about her best friend, Eliza-beth, who appeared to have a body-image problem andsome disordered-eatingpatterns.As a counselor ina college counseling cen-ter, I am often asked tohold a single session for astudent who is concernedabout how to be helpful toa friend who may be introuble.
I explained to Anniethe guiding principle fordealing with a friend who isexperiencing psychologicalproblems: stay within therole of friend to yourfriend. Do not get involvedin trying to fix the disordered parts of her life.This isapplicable to situations in which the friend is sufferingfrom depression, or an addiction, or body-image and dis-ordered-eating problems.“Whatever you say to Elizabethabout her size or her thinness or her eating or her starv-ing, you probably won’t be able to get it right. She willfind a way to misinterpret or distort what you hope willbe helpful comments. If you say she looks good, she’ll say,‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’ If you sayshe’s too thin, she’ll say,‘You’re just trying to get me toeat.’A friend cannot fix another friend’s personal prob-lems, but she can offer the healing power of friendship.”
Friendships usually revolve around shared experi-ences (first-year tragedies, battle scars, and victories) andinterests (“working out together when we can maketime to go to the gym”). Friends share a joint history(“Remember the night when . . .?” and “what we didduring the big snowstorm”), day-to-day concerns, andplans (about papers, classes, guys, and other friends). SoI encouraged Annie to engage Elizabeth this way, as a
friend, to love her friend,support and reassure her,remind her of her strengthsand her foibles, and stayengaged with her in the roleof friend.
At the same timeAnnie was following ahands-off policy about relat-ing to Elizabeth throughand about her eating-disor-dered self and symptoms,this disordered and hurtingpart of Elizabeth did needsome attention. So it be-came important for Annie
to encourage Elizabeth to seek professional help.ThisAnnie did. It was because of her that at the beginning ofthe following semester I found myself facilitating an ini-tial session for Elizabeth, with Annie sitting in the officewith us.Annie’s presence created a level of comfort forElizabeth that allowed her to talk to a complete stranger.
CampusCOMMONS
Yvonne Poley is a therapist in the Counseling Center atMarist College in New York. She specializes in working withclients who have eating problems and maintains a privatepractice in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Her e-mail address [email protected].
HER FRIEND’S PRESENCE
IN MY OFFICE CREATED
A LEVEL OF COMFORT
THAT ALLOWED HER TO TALK
TO A COMPLETE STRANGER.
M
F
30ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
�
With her friend beside her, Elizabeth found the courageto say “I have hated my body for as long as I can remem-ber, and I am so sick of feeling this way.” She offered hersecret misery to Annie and me, and so began our semes-ter of work on transforming body image.
Y EARLY MEETINGS with Elizabeth wereexploratory, the middle ones were challenging, and thefinal ones became exciting. Elizabeth and I closelyexamined current habits and activities to identify whichfostered positive body-esteem. She worked on promot-ing them and adding some new activities to the list, suchas getting regular exercise, dressing in comfortable cloth-ing, working on keeping good posture, and not check-ing her stomach in the mirror at every possibleopportunity.
Elizabeth slowly became aware of all of her nega-tive self-talk, challenging it and replacing it with thepositive (“I am stronger andshapelier than I used tobe”). She began a journalto record the cultural mes-sages she was receivingfrom the world around herabout attractiveness andbody size, and she started tounderstand that her owninsecurities about her sizeand worth were exacer-bated and reinforced by thecultural premium placed onan ever-more-slender fe-male form. She began to listen to the voices of thewomen in her classes and in her residence hall, whospoke about themselves in a self-deprecating tone, withput-downs about how imperfect they looked. She stud-ied advertisements and media messages that promotedextreme thinness in women as the hallmark of beauty.
The amazing thing was that at every step on theway,Annie seemed to be walking with Elizabeth on thejourney. Back in the residence hall, if Elizabethexpressed a doubt about how she looked,Annie coun-tered with,“Just let it go.We have to be across campusin six minutes.” If Elizabeth complained “I feel so fat,”Annie would ask her,“Do you want to go for a shortrun with me?” From our talk,Annie understood thatElizabeth would have to fight her own internal battlewith self-hate and body prejudice.Annie’s job was tostay out of the battle and to be firmly grounded in therole of friend.A true friend is not competitive, judg-mental, or critical.Amidst the storm and stress of col-lege life,Annie was an unfailingly positive presence.
Elizabeth was able to look to Annie for acceptance,diversion, and loving patience.
As Elizabeth began to eat regular, moderate meals,Annie ate them along with her while they conversedabout homework, their latest heartthrobs, and plans forspring break.When she thought Elizabeth was becom-ing consumed with negative body thoughts, she wouldsay,“Elizabeth, get a life!”This was as close as Annie evercame to interfering with Elizabeth’s personal self-hatingdemons.
Although I never talked with Annie again after theinitial joint session, Elizabeth would tell me about theirinteractions. It was as if Annie were our unofficial in-real-life member of Elizabeth’s therapy team.As Eliza-beth practiced and used the self-help tools learned inthe therapy,Annie was there to support and reinforceher friend.The tide began to turn.
In March, they shopped for clothes to wear inFlorida over spring break.Elizabeth reported that itwas fun to shop for clothes;in fact, she loved her newsummer clothes, and theirsize was truly irrelevant toher. This felt like a majorvictory in a collegiateatmosphere where youngwomen who wear anythinglarger than a size six keepvery quiet about the fact.Elizabeth said that she wascontinuing to eat regular,
well-rounded meals prior to the trip.This constituted asmall miracle on a college campus where most youngwomen report two weeks of a starvation diet prior tospring break vacation.
OLLOWING spring break, Elizabeth said that shehad sported a two-piece bathing suit and actually feltcomfortable in it. She and Annie swam, hiked, rested,and made new friends. During a session in May, Eliza-beth wrote a letter to her body and expressed what shenow liked and enjoyed about it: her strength, her mus-cles, her endurance, and her lovely hair. She apologizedto her body for having hated it and promised to herselfthat she would continue the treatment plan that washelping her transform her body image.
A motivated client and a caring therapist are usu-ally a powerful team. In Elizabeth’s case, the participa-tion of Annie—as support person, cheering squad,partner in health, and most of all friend—proved to bethe crucial element in her positive transformation.
THE AMAZING THING WAS THAT AT
EVERY STEP ON THE WAY, ANNIE
SEEMED TO BE WALKING WITH
ELIZABETH ON THE JOURNEY.
31ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
LEARNING TO SERVE, SERVING TO LEARN
A new book explores campus-wide responsibility for educating citizens
By Katherine Demory Tadlock
EVERY DAY, when I walk to my office on theCollege Green at Ohio University, I pass by theClass Gate. On the gate is an excerpt from the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which reads “Religion,morality, and knowledge being necessary to good gov-ernment and the happiness of mankind, schools and themeans of education shall forever be encouraged.”WhenI exit through the other campus gate, I pass under theinscription “So depart that daily thou mayest betterserve thy fellow men, thy country, and thy God.”
I am sure these quotations were posted as inspira-tion to generations of students who might pause toreflect on the meaning of the words and apply the ideasbehind them to their lives. Echoes of similar sentimentsand exhortations can be found at colleges and univer-sities across the country.The motto of my undergradu-ate alma mater, Willamette University in Salem,Oregon, is non nobis solum nati sumus (not unto ourselvesalone are we born). Methodist missionaries foundedWillamette in 1842, and 250 years later the motto is stillsalient for an institution, situated across the street fromthe state capitol, that has produced generations of clergy,teachers, and legislators.The Morrill Act, passed by
Congress twenty years after Willamette’s founding,resulted in the creation of land-grant institutions inevery state, with their mission to prepare graduates forpublic service and provide scientific research to supportagricultural and industrial development. A centurybefore that, the country’s founding fathers expressed thebelief that education was the cornerstone of a successfuldemocratic experiment (see, for example, Merrill D.Peterson’s The Portable Thomas Jefferson and DavidMcCullough’s John Adams).
In Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergrad-uates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility, AnneColby,Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, and JasonStephens suggest that higher education retains a criticalrole in developing the skills of citizenship and fosteringthe sense of responsibility that in turn leads to engage-ment.Although a growing body of research has docu-mented the impact of service learning and demonstratedthe link with social problem solving, relatively little hasbeen written about a broader institutional approach tosupporting civic and moral development.Through acase-study approach, Educating Citizens examines howtwelve colleges and universities have made civic andmoral development central to their educational goals.
THE INSTITUTIONS profiled range from smallliberal arts and community colleges to large
research universities and a military academy.They areurban and rural, with quite differing clientele. Each hasmade civic and moral learning a central part of theundergraduate experience.The effort to foster civiclearning is approached holistically as an intentionaleffort by campus leaders, including key administratorsand faculty. Careful attention is paid to clearly laying outeducational goals and the means by which those goalsare assessed, and there are provisions to move beyondthe classroom to community interaction.
Katherine Demory Tadlock is director of Graduate StudentServices in the Graduate Studies Office at Ohio University.
We love feedback. Send letters to executive editor MarciaBaxter Magolda ([email protected]), and pleasecopy her on notes to authors.
EDUCATING CITIZENS: PREPARING AMERICA’SUNDERGRADUATES FOR LIVES OF MORAL ANDCIVIC RESPONSIBILITYAnne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont,and Jason Stephens352 pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (2003), $28.00
what they’rerreading
32ABOUT CAMPUS / MARCH–APRIL 2004
The skills of citizenship include critical thinking,moral reasoning, and the ability to recognize problemsand take an active role in finding solutions. It is strikingto note that what makes civic and moral education suc-cessful at the profiled colleges and universities parallelswhat we know about effective teaching and learning asdescribed by a generation of researchers, among themErnest Boyer,Alexander Astin, George Kuh and associ-ates, and Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini.
THE CURRICULA developed by the profiledinstitutions incorporate active learning through
individual and group projects, which create opportuni-ties for students to apply learning beyond the classroomto real social and community issues.This may occurthrough a traditional service-learning experience, orhaving the student study a political issue related to hisor her profession. For example, a multidisciplinarycourse at California State University, Monterey Bay, hasjuniors and seniors in thephysical and behavioral sci-ences engage in an in-depthproject that incorporatesresearch, analysis, synthesis,and evaluation of a public-interest issue with bothenvironmental and socialdimensions.As part of thecourse, the instructors chal-lenge students to examinetheir own attitudes aboutpolitics and political action.The final projects focus onthe relationship betweeneconomic booms and unin-tended social and environ-mental impacts.This kind ofin-depth experience rein-forces learning, encourages students to synthesize infor-mation from a variety of sources and disciplines, and isan opportunity to build a sense of competence in thepolitical realm.
Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, and Stephens note thata large number of students entering college have par-ticipated in some form of community service, in partbecause of the emphasis on civic education at the sec-ondary level. At the same time, many have not beenpolitically active and may even find politics distasteful.“In order to be civically and politically engaged, peoplehave to care about the issues and value this kind of con-tribution. . . . People also have to believe that it matterswhat they think and do civically and politically and thatit is possible for them to make a difference” (p. 122).
Integrative interdisciplinary courses and learning com-munities offer a particularly strong opportunity toencourage involvement by facilitating integrative think-ing and cumulative learning.
A pluralistic and fractionalized society requires peo-ple with skills to examine problems and wade throughdivergent opinions in an attempt to build consensus andidentify options. Programs that place students in com-munity organizations and local government furnish aconnection between theories and models presented inclass and the actual interaction between competingideas, divergent opinions, and the realization that solu-tions may in turn create problems. But these programsalso encourage students to think more deeply and crit-ically about the issues involved, acknowledge opinionsand options different from those they hold, and debatethe consequences of a particular action or choice.
With an ever-increasing number of people partic-ipating in higher education, Educating Citizens shows
how colleges and universi-ties are in a unique positionto create environments,through the curriculumand co-curriculum, thatencourage and supportmoral and civic develop-ment. Contemporary criti-cism of American societymaintains that people aredisengaged, social institu-tions are held in contempt,voter participation showsan alarming lack of engage-ment, and what passes forpublic discourse is oftenshrill and unyielding.Afteran upsurge of patriotic andneighborly feeling follow-
ing the tragedy of September 11, 2001,Americans seemto have slipped back into their old habits of self-imposedisolation from each other and from civic life. Many of uswork at institutions where a motto asserting the con-nection between education and democracy is literally setin stone. In an era where democracy seems under attackfrom forces internal and external, now is the time torevitalize the vision of our founders and help our stu-dents become good and useful citizens.
NOTES
McCullough, D. John Adams. New York:Touchstone, 2001.Peterson, M. D. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. New York:
