Category: Blog

Financing and Planning Student Life Facilities

by Patrick Cain, Daniel Fusch

READ THE FULL SERIES This summer, we released an executive summary of the findings from a survey of institutions looking to add new student life facilities in the next year. You can read our executive summary here. Now, we are following up with lead architects and consultants who work with student life facilities in higher education. In this series of interviews, we are asking these lead experts to comment on the survey findings, trends they are noticing with student life facilities, and practical strategies they would recommend for colleges and universities that are seeking to take a more integrated approach to student life on their campuses. In this first interview, we have spoken with Eric Moss, director of the Student Life Studio at Ayers Saint Gross, and Julie Skolnicki on how institutions can adopt forward-thinking approaches to financing and planning student life facilities. 1. What especially struck you about the survey findings? JULIE SKOLNICKI, EdR.The Academic Impressions survey reinforces what we are seeing across the country: More thoughtful and integrated planning of student life facilities, but some ongoing challenges specifically related to funding hurdles. University planning for student life facilities has evolved significantly in the past 15 years: This evolution has led […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

by Daniel Fusch and Caleb Tegtmeier (Academic Impressions) The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific […]

Leadership Training for Department Chairs

by Jennifer Faust

Department chairs are the “front line” of academic management (whether or not, in fact, their positions are classified as management or as faculty) — yet most department chairs receive little or no training for their positions. There are reasons for this: Yet many problems that rise to higher levels of administration could be avoided or mitigated if they are handled by well-trained chairs in the first place. And institutions that neglect chairs do so at their own peril. Leadership training is especially critical now, given the pressures that tightened budgets, changing modes of delivery for instruction, increased demands for accountability, the growing diversity of the academy, and increased attention to employment law within academic institutions, all place on the expectations for department chairs. Why “Leadership” Training? Leadership training goes beyond other kinds of training. Indeed, the term “leadership training” might well be parsed out as a combination of training and leadership development: Developing a leadership training curriculum must take these features into account. The best training programs will both produce immediate outcomes and develop leadership skills over a sustained period of time. First, Identify Learning Outcomes What do your department chairs need to know, and when do they need to know it?Answering […]

4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Help Students Succeed after Graduation

by Stanton Green

Why, you might ask, should academic deans add this concern about students’ career preparation to their already unmanageably long list of responsibilities? As leaders of the faculty, deans need to serve as the programmatic agents of implementing a holistic undergraduate education. And deans provide the essential perspective of someone who observes the connections on a daily basis between how the university works and how students learn. Students best engage in their learning when they know how that learning fits into their lives. I do not mean to imply that students are selfish or myopic. Quite the opposite. Students implicitly, although naively, understand higher education as important to their whole lives. Our role as deans is to cross the bureaucratic barriers between academic and student services in order to teach students and how to apply these to growing personally and professionally. This has been a major focus of my work over the past 25 years as a department chair and academic dean: to connect academic learning with career development. Here are four practical strategies I have learned: four opportunities for academic deans to partner with career services: 1. Attend national career services and academic organizations with a cross-division team. Offer to attend local, regional or […]

End of Fiscal Year: Donors Don’t Care

by Lynne Wester

As fundraisers, we’ve just concluded a period of hustling to wrap up the fiscal year: working with donors, securing final gifts, and planning for the new fiscal year. Amid all the rush of this work, it can be easy to lose sight of something key: Most donors give because they want to make a difference and effect change. They give generously, but they also give in their own timeframes. Most of our donors don’t operate their households and thus their philanthropy on a fiscal year. Why then, do we insist that they care inextricably about our fiscal year end? Why are we constantly pushing them to give at times that meet our needs and not necessarily their own? Source: 2014 Charitable Giving Report from Blackbaud. If we look at the data from this Blackbaud study and others, we know that the giving season is November and December. That is when most people make their gifts and think about planning their generosity. It’s not that no one gives in April, May or June. I’m not saying that at all. But let’s be truthful: the large majority of donors don’t care about your fiscal year. Here’s a question I can pose to […]

Beyond Workshops: How RIT Incentivizes Faculty Development

by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions Competing demands on faculty time is frequently an obstacle to designing successful faculty development programs. “Events are not always successful because of people’s schedules,” explains Lynn Wild, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and The Wallace Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. That’s why it is critical that faculty development move beyond just offering occasional workshops. To empower more consistent and integrated faculty development, RIT’s approach is to offer: Faculty development grants (through partnership with academic departments) Grants for faculty mentoring A series of faculty talks showcasing faculty work, modeled after the Ted Talks These may be options that you can adapt for your own institution. We talked recently with Wild to learn more about RIT’s approach and what has made it effective. 1. Faculty Development Grants “We’ve found that when you partner with an individual or department or college, you have a built-in audience and interest, and you can expand from there.” Lynn Wild, RIT RIT partners with faculty in providing a wide range of grants to support faculty development. Grant support is available for tenure-track faculty to pursue individual faculty development goals, and that support was recently expanded to add a […]

A Conversation in Fundraising We Need to Have

We asked Jason McNeal to share the philosophy behind his unique handbook and why he feels that training on effective contact reports can be – in the long term – a game-changer for development shops. An interview with Jason McNeal (Gonser Gerber LLP), author of  Writing Meaningful Contact Reports: A Handbook for Fundraisers. AI.Jason, thanks for this conversation. To get started, why do you think this handbook is especially needed?Jason McNeal.Every higher-ed institution is looking for the advancement part of the enterprise to be as effective as it can possibly be. Part of that effectiveness relies on how well we know our donors. And the mechanism for showing evidence that we know our donors well is the recording of our business with them. Contact reports do that for us. They capture the most important aspects of a donor’s contact with the institution and hopefully provide permanently records that so that the advancement shop can build a body of knowledge about that donor and their relationship to the institution. But how effective are we, actually, at doing that? AI.Could you say more about that, Jason?Jason McNeal.Well, here we have this very important component of our work — that is key to becoming more effective […]

Disintermediation: The Changing Demands of Alumni Relations

by Christine Tempesta

When I hear an alumni relations professional say that alumni relations programs have been disintermediated from their alumni, more often than not, I cringe. The theme of disintermediation, or the thought that social media and other technologies have decreased the alumni’s “need” for their alma mater, crops up often, and while it should signal a change to which we as alumni relations professionals must adapt, it is often misused as an excuse for why our programs are dying. The Challenges We’re All Facing It’s no wonder that the alumni relations profession is facing dynamic change. Since the founding of the oldest alumni association at Williams College in 1821, the profession of alumni relations has been built on traditions of the alma mater. Looking back instead of looking forward, alumni associations love to celebrate long-held traditions, and prefer to stick with existing programs, services and people because “we’ve always done it that way.” For many institutions, the typical set of activities includes a homecoming, reunions, alumni directory. Historically, these have been possible primarily because the alumni association was the glue that connected long lost friends to one another and to the institution. But, with the advent of the internet, even prospective […]

Creating a Culture of Advisement: Engaging Faculty in Advising

by Christopher Romano, Joseph Connell

Sometimes you don’t just need to change advising procedures; you need to change the culture of academic advising on campus. A few years ago at Ramapo College of New Jersey, our enrollment management division surveyed faculty, first-year students, and upper-class students to learn where students turned for help in making academic decisions as they progressed through the curriculum. What we learned was striking: Further, over 57% of first-year and 47% of upper-class students did not even know who their academic advisor was. What this survey told us was that we didn’t just need to improve our advising procedures; we needed to create a culture of advisement on campus. 3 Keys to Changing the Culture Knowing that a culture of advisement is as dependent (if not more so) on buy-in and commitment from faculty than buy-in from administrative units, we embarked on the creation of an overall academic advisement plan for our campus, which included a series of action plans that hinged on three key change management strategies: Engaging faculty in academic advisement is essential to advancing Ramapo’s work — or any college’s work — in student success. Here’s what we did to engage our faculty: 1. Modeling the Change We […]

Investing in Donor Relations for Athletics

by Lynne Wester

As our colleges and universities venture to fundraise even more and more dollars, we must not overlook an area of support that brings many donors in our doors early on in their experience with us: athletics. At some institutions, athletic success can equate directly to donors and dollars, and at others it is part of the natural fundraising ebb and flow. With this said, what role does donor relations play in athletics? Now more than ever, athletics fundraisers need to focus on donor relations. Here are four reasons why: Focusing on the donor and their generosity, not on the gift and its amount is central to these efforts. Donor relations can often help bridge the gaps and transition donors from transaction to behavior. Great donor relations can provide meaningful reminders of what motivates our donor base and can incite passion among our fans and supporters. For that reason, coordinating athletics fundraising and central university advancement is crucial to the overall fundraising success of an institution. The key in both areas is the donor. If we keep our focus on donor relations, then the core becomes centralized in a more cohesive fashion. Rather than an “athletics” donor or an “institution” donor, these […]