Hi, Dr. Bethany Flora here. I want to spend just a few minutes before each of
the sections that i will be teaching telling you some personal stories. Really
local institutional kind of policy level stories that i have or just personal
experiences related to some of the readings that you have been assigned
both in the How College Affects Students section and then i'll also be adding a
personal story for the diversity and access section. The How College
Affects Students reading is truly a seminal piece of work that any professor
of higher education probably keeps on the bookshelf and i have seen
administrators of higher education keep these in their office. So we are
presenting you with a piece of work here that we think will carry you through out
the next season of your career probably. What Pascarella and Terezini have done
in this book is they have distilled a lot of research both cognitive variables
and non-cognitive variables in the student development process related to
the higher education experience. We want you to enjoy this work. We want you to
highlight and distille in your reading analysis some of the key themes and
findings that you find most insightful related to maybe your current role as an
administrator or as a faculty member at a community college. You know I was
fortunate to study under Dr. Don Creamer and Dr. Creamer was the Guru, the driving
force behind the Council for the Advancement of Standards. This is called
CAS C.A.S CAS standards. The Council for the Advancement of Standards is a body
of work around non academic unit program review. So we are probably all familiar
with SACS and Professional Accrediting Body Programmatic Review requirements,
but i wanted to spend them sometime briefly here talking about non-academic
programmatic review. So these are reviews of programs like student affairs units
on your campus or other auxiliary units on campus, even dining services for
instance has a CAS standard related to it. Dr. Creamer and his colleagues believe
it was very important to elevate and
enhance the role of all co-curricular and curricular and go back and think about
the cognitive and non-cognitive variables in student development. He
believed that in addition to academic program review these support programs
are the academic affairs and the Student Affairs could come together and also
advanced a set of standards related to student outcomes for those non academic
units. I wanted to bring your attention to this, because I believe as you
familiarize yourself with the CAS standards and also the academic program
review standards on your college campuses you can see how those work in
concert to really articulate using empirical evidence how college does
affect students. We can all talk about the way it affect affects us and we can
tell stories about the impact but truly to be leaders of higher education we
also need to be scholars who can talk about the research contributions and the
learning outcome contributions of the work that we do. So as you're going into
this book I know it's a lot of reading but I do want you to take time to
familiarize yourself with your academic program review process at your
community college and also the CAS standards i think the CAS standards will
be very important to you as you move forward because we are seeing more
student affairs units and development within community college campuses as
there's an increased attention on recruitment and retention and success of
students. We see the interplay of both co curricular and curricular importance
at the community colleges. Now I'm going to leave you with a little bit of hired
irony always tend to throw out some hired irony and i write this down
because i wanted to i'm going to read it to you because it's it's just it's just
as it's a true story it's what happened to me.
So Dr. Don Kramer was leading the program and retiring and I was
interviewing for my doctoral program and I was so nervous right because this is
the Guru of of Student Affairs in higher education and so I go into the room it's
a one-on-one setting close the door sit down
we talked about my experiences and he asked me very point-blank he said,
"Bethenny what is your opinion of the role of students on a college campus?"
Well he had already highlighted the fact several times
that I was an academic administrator not necessarily a student affairs
administrator and so I was very eager to impress him and to articulate that you
know I'm an utility player right and so I told him all about my commitment to
students and that that the undergraduate experience in particular was what it was
all about and I think I babbled for a while, but when I finished Dr. Kramer
looked me square in the eye and he said, "Bethenny students are a byproduct of the
University and the sooner that you accept that the more successful you will
be you will be here.," and I sat back in my seat and do not know what to say.
Fast forward and I'm walking back from a meeting across campus with a Vice
President for research and he gets kind of quiet and I say," Bill what's, what's
wrong" and he said, "Well you know Bethenny, I'm getting ready to retire and you know
what keeps me up at night?
We've made it all about research, we forgotten about students, we've really
forgotten what it's all about."
And he was so somber and so quiet and so how interesting that the student affairs
guru at that campus told me it was all about research and the research guru
told me it was all about students and you know I think it's both and so I
believe how college affect students really does bring together both you're
seeing the symbol piece of research to use in your conversations to help
convince the public of the importance of a college education but we're not going
to lose our focus that it is all about the student. It is all about their
learning and about their learning outcomes. So enjoy this book. I can't wait
to hear your thoughts related to the readings and I'll see you online soon.
Thank you.