Category: Blog

From Student Affairs Professional to Student Affairs Scholar: Taking Charge of the Change You Want to See

by Vicki L. Wise (opens in new tab), Lisa S. Hatfield (opens in new tab)

FOR THE STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONAL:THE CHANGE YOU NEED TO SEE AT YOUR INSTITUTIONS We’re excited to share this article with you because at Academic Impressions, we believe that the change you need to see at your institution is often within your own control, and that your professional development is key to building the skills and identifying the opportunities to lead change at your institution and in your field. In this article by the authors of the book A guide to becoming a scholarly practitioner in student affairs, learn how positioning yourself as a scholar in student affairs can be critical to this process. If you could give voice to those who were marginalized, if you could change the field of student affairs through your voice, if you could create better collaborations across campus with our academic colleagues, and if you could share your insights with parents, students, and other invested stakeholders so that they know what we contribute to student learning and development, then why would you not? Student affairs practitioners need to engage in scholarship to give voice and to inform others about their impact on student lives. Scholarship addresses the concerns of stakeholders, and it is essential for professional […]

Financing and Planning Student Life Facilities

by Patrick Cain (opens in new tab), Daniel Fusch (opens in new tab)

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 […]

Best Practices in Student Housing Design

READ THE FULL SERIES 1. Executive Summary: The Changing Shape of Student Life Facilities 2. Financing and Planning Student Life Facilities 3. Best Practices in Student Housing Design (this article) by Patrick Cain and Daniel Fusch (Academic Impressions) 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. The survey confirmed that colleges are pushing harder for integration across student life facilities — residential, unions, and recreational facilities. And when asked how important it was to unify the design and placement of student life facilities, 51% believed there should be intentionality in this, and 31% said there must be intentional unity. Only 6% felt it didn’t matter. Now, we are following up with lead architects and consultants who work with student life facilities in higher education. For this article, we reached out to Treanor Architects because they have an extensive student life portfolio encompassing residence halls, dining halls and student unions. For over thirty years, they have served over 80 campuses and completed nearly 200 student life projects. We are excited about the experience and knowledge they bring both to this interview. In this […]

10 Tips to Improve Your Meetings

by Patrick Sanaghan (opens in new tab)

Most meetings simply don’t work and are a waste of precious time. Unfortunately, many higher education leaders spend much of their professional lives in these unproductive meetings. Higher education runs on thousands of daily meetings including committees, task forces, departmental meetings, and so on. When was the last time you participated in an engaging, productive meeting where you felt that it was a great use of your time and attention? When’s the last time you looked at your meeting calendar and said to yourself, “I am really looking forward to Tuesday’s committee meeting!” Here are 10 practical tips for improving your meetings, based on Academic Impressions’s powerful Meeting Diagnostic Tool (MDT): 1. To Lead or Facilitate? Senior leaders often ask, “Should I facilitate or fully participate in the meeting?” We have found that trying to be the leader as well as the facilitator is not a good idea. Facilitators move the group towards good decisions, use good processes, and are neutral. Often, a leader cannot be neutral about where a decision is going. Attendees know this and will wait until the leader signals his or her desired decision. We suggest that the leader appoint a neutral facilitator; this will allow the […]

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 (opens in new tab)

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 (opens in new tab)

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 (opens in new tab)

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 […]

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