Critical Issues for Student Affairs: Challenges and Opportunities

Critical Issues for Student Affairs: Challenges and Opportunities BY ARTHUR SANDEEN AND MARGARET J. BARR JOSSEY-BASS/WILEY BOOKS, 2006; 237PP. Reviewed by Barbara Lauren "Since the time of the earliest colonial colleges, there has been an expectation that 'something' beyond subject mastery would occur as a result of the higher education experience," Arthur Sandeen and Margaret Barr declare in their wideranging and well-organized new book, Critical Issues for Student Affairs: Challenges and Opportunities. American colleges and universities have always been expected to graduate students who can become citizens, not just specialists or technicians. In this sense, the authors endorse the observation of other commentators: "Student affairs is largely an American higher education invention. " The authors are well equipped to provide a useful, and usable, overview of this distinctive field. Each has a long career in student services: together they have more than 45 years of experience as vice presidents of student affairs-Sandeen most recently at the University of Florida, and Barr at Northwestern University. The authors open with a brief but illuminating overview of how the field came to exist. They point out that as higher education became more specialized in the late nineteenth century, the larger universities felt the need to appoint some official who was to interest himself in the welfare and progress of the individual student as a "whole person. " The position of "student affairs dean"-in fact if not in name-was invented by Harvard's pioneering president Charles Eliot, who in 1890 appointed a young English instructor, LeBaron Russell Briggs, to be the "dean of Harvard College. " Similar appointments at other institutions followed. Such appointments "represented an effort to retain some of the humane values of the old-time college. " The duties of these new deans were barely sketched out. Indeed, when Stanley Coulter was appointed dean at Purdue in 1924, he inquired of the governing board what his duties might be and was informed that "they did not know but when I found out to let them know! " These origins suggest the wide-ranging but amorphous nature of the student affairs field. In eight succinct chapters, Sandeen and Barr survey leading issues for today's practitioners: * What is the essence of this type of work? * What are the advantages and disadvantages of its placement within the organizational structure-in the president's office versus in the provost's (or other academic) office? * What kinds of diversity initiatives are most appropriate for the student affairs office to undertake? * How can the student affairs office itself attract and retain a diverse staff? * What are the pros and cons of different funding sources for the student affairs office-student fees or direct institutional support? * What additional or changed services should the student affairs office provide for distance education or other nontraditional educational settings? * What is the role of student affairs in assessment? * And finally, to what extent should student affairs (and by extension, the institution) be responsible for the lives and choices of students? Each chapter has an introductory overview of topics to be discussed, followed by a well-organized discussion, in which the major topics and the sub-topics are clearly set forth; a useful set of "Suggestions for Action"; and a concluding Summary, in which the authors emphasize that concerted effort directed toward the topics just discussed is necessary to further the interests of both the students and the institution being served. One of the many strengths of the book is the candor the authors display about the ambiguous nature of the field, especially in its early years: "Was it part of the faculty, part of the administration, or did it occupy some ambiguous position between the two? …