Quick: How many people can you name who work in your institution’s office of student life?

At Slaves of Academe, the pseudonymous Oso Raro suggests that faculty members ought to give more thought to the rise of student-services bureaucracies:

[T]he Student Life professional represents a new cadre in the academy, one imbued with considerable power and influence over the structuring of students’ social lives and, consequently, some of their relationship to the dynamics of the classroom.

Among several other points, Oso Raro argues that there’s a serious – and often needless – chasm between classroom instruction and student-life programming on the same topics. For example, most students at O.R.’s institution receive “diversity training” produced by the student-life office. But during classroom discussions of the same terrain, O.R. says,

[H]alf my time is spent unraveling the messages, axioms, and truisms of the diversity trainer when students must confront, again intellectually, difference, power, and oppression. Some conundrums cannot be ended with a group hug, unfortunately.

At Super Bon!, Jonathan Sterne of McGill University tips his hat to Oso Raro. Just the other day, he says, he visited the office of McGill’s Dean of Students and “marveled at all the things that go on in the building about which I know absolutely nothing.”

Sterne frames the faculty-student life gap in a sunnier way than Oso Raro, however:

[P]rogressive faculty probably have a whole group of allies in this other wing of the university of whom we don’t even know to avail ourselves. Having once worked in academic advising, I, at least, should know better.

In The Chronicle in 2005, Adam Weinberg of Colgate University took a skeptical look at the rise of student-affairs programming at American universities.

(Photo by the Flickr user dubaddict. Used under a Creative Commons license.)