Over at Slaves of Academe, Oso Raro rants about student life professionals. The Dean Dad offers a defense of student life offices on procedural grounds (which is how I found the original piece).
It's hard to judge how much of the original rant is humorous exaggeration. There are some reasonable elements to his critique of student life programs, but there's a lot of dumb stuff in there, from the classic "back in my day" lament to the suggestion that what we really need is for faculty to do the things that student life people do now. As much as my eyes roll at the thought of mandatory diversity training programs run by student life, they roll farther, faster at the thought of having those programs run by faculty.
I haven't been in academia all that long, as such things go, but I've spent a good deal of time involved with student-oriented programs and committees. A detailed defense of the student life office would require me to blog about local politics to an inappropriate degree, so I'll just leave it at this:
In my experience dealing with outside-the-classroom student life issues, the people who have been most consistently right are the student life professionals. They know what our students are thinking about, they know what our students want, they know what will work and what won't. They know where we are and how to get where we want to be better than almost any member of the faculty.
They are also consistently overlooked, underappreciated, and at times outright belittled by the faculty.
Six or seven years ago, I might've agreed wholeheartedly with Oso Raro. In the past few years, though, I have gained a better appreciation for what the student life staff does. They have an extremely difficult job-- I couldn't do it-- and they do it well and with admirable professionalism. If you think they're superfluous, spend some time really looking into what goes on in their offices, and see if you don't change your mind.
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Thank you for the kind words - I will send this to my son who is a Student Life Professional.
I agree that Student Life professionals do a lot of unappreciated work.
I do think that sometimes not enough emphasis is placed on the 'professional' part... the tales students tell about things that come from the mouths of some of our academic counselors are anything but professional.
Also, I have a HUGE beef with "student government" -- my experience on several campuses tells me that this is much worse than High School student government... less representative and more power-hungry... So, perhaps the Student Life Professionals need to do a bit more guiding of students in that regard.