If education is not neutral, then I have to accept responsibility for what and how I am teaching students. This is a tremendous obligation as well as an opportunity. With this charge, student affairs educators are agents of social change rather than those who maintain the status quo. The purpose of education is to empower. As none of us exist alone, it is impossible that one could become empowered without the help of others.
True empowerment involves dialogue and exchange.
The excitement of the concept of empowerment, the opportunity and responsibility of being an educator, and the realization of my role as an agent for social change overwhelmed me as a graduate student. I retired to my coach for hours at a time when I felt the outside world was too much to bear. I had an immature mind-set about student affairs professionals. Just as adolescents struggle with the realization that their parents make mistakes, I struggled with the realization that student affairs educators have flaws. As an undergraduate student I believed my mentors to be the models of pure educators, their only concerns the development of students and communities.