By now you've likely seen stories (http://wapo.st/1mcff41) about Yale students creating an improved course selection website, which was subsequently removed by the Yale administration (and then recreated by another Yale student http://bit.ly/1jEZyAa). Both of these efforts, and Yale's response to the original student-created site have received attention on Twitter, where I noticed it thanks to #sachat. Patrick Love (@pglove33) posed the following question:
"When will we (coll admins) learn to engage Ss before taking action? "
I (@drbbourke) responded with a question of my own:
"are we here for students, or ourselves?"
If college administrators are really working on college campuses to help students learn and grow, then let us all take a lesson from the censorship of these Yale students. We have close to two dozen foundational documents that offer guidance in our work with students in post-secondary education. (Some great resources on our field's foundational documents can be found at the Student Affairs History Project http://www2.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/cac/sahp/pages/resources2.html). What is the singular focus of these documents? The student. Even in the early documents (Student Personnel Point of View of 1937 and 1949), in which the activities of the student personnel worker were laid out, the student was the focus.
If the focus of the work in student affairs is student learning and development, then why do we focus on things that aren't student learning and development? The answer: we choose to focus on ourselves. I'm not suggesting some narcissistic turn. What I'm talking about is when our focus is more our own involvement in the student experience, than on the student experience. Or in the case of the Yale administration, we aren't ready to admit when students perform better at our jobs than we do.
I imagine if you're reading this blog, you have likely described yourself as being student-centered at one time or another. I hope that @JLChase_ keeps posting reading assignments of student affairs foundational documents to #sachat, and that some heed his advice. We need to treat them as living documents that guide our work with students, not historic relics that we pretend to read in grad school. These documents offer some great perspectives on what it truly means to be student-centered.
My hope for student affairs educators is that we create systems, process, policies and procedures that help us help students learn and grow. Working with students shouldn't be about to-do lists or creating experiences for students. Our job, as educators, is to create conditions through which students can have meaningful experiences - even if that means creating a system that runs laps around the one you made.
