Every year or so, members of a small national group of student-affairs officers call a few of their fellow vice presidents with good news: They've been voted into the group. In more than a few cases, however, the reply has been, "What group?"
And that's just fine with David A. Ambler, secretary of the National Vice Presidents Group-University Student Affairs.
"We have not been very visible," says Mr. Ambler, whose day job is vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Kansas. "That was always purposefully done so as not to have a lot of people pressuring us to become members. The group did not want to be seen as a national association."
Instead, it chose to become a small, informal body -- one of many springing up in academe, some formed more than 30 years ago and some as recently as last summer. These groups cater to administrators seeking something that they say big, national associations can't always give them: professional development with a personal touch. It's not clear how many of these informal networks exist in academe, but it's easy to see why they hold such appeal.
The student-affairs group is a "dialogue-type organization," Mr. Ambler says, as opposed to one that puts on conferences with speakers. It was founded in 1967 by 14 vice presidents for student affairs who felt that their concerns were getting lost in the large national administrative groups. Today, about 25 vice presidents for student affairs belong to the group. Typically they hail from large public and private universities, and are invited to join either because they have established reputations as being effective in the job or they have studied and written extensively about the field.
Mr. Ambler joined the group in 1984; he now edits its monthly newsletter and "keeps its checkbook." Members pay $300 a year in dues to subsidize the group's three-day meetings held twice a year; the next gathering will be in July at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The chief student-affairs officer at the host campus for each meeting sends out a request for agenda items, Mr. Ambler says. Topics can include campus security, federal legislation that affects student affairs, enrollment and budget matters, mental-health issues on campus, and Greek life.
Despite its apparent exclusivity, Mr. Ambler insists that the group is informal and not influential: "The organization is not one that functions to affect national policy. It's purely a group for the benefit of its members."
Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, executive director of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, says her organization is aware of the vice presidents' group and calls it "a good thing." She notes that Michael Jackson, the president of NASPA and vice president for student affairs at the University of Southern California, is even a member of the informal group. "They have a very strong, loyal network -- one where they feel they can talk with impunity," Ms. Dungy says. They wouldn't have the same kind of intimacy at a NASPA conference attended by 3,600 people who are not only chief student-affairs officers but also staff members, she says.
Sometimes Ms. Dungy asks the small group which topics are on its agenda; for example, if alcohol abuse on campus is still a hot issue. Year after year, she says, the group tells her that it is. And budgets, she says, are a big issue this year. The topics, Ms. Dungy says, are not anything she hasn't heard of already but help her affirm that her association is offering programs on the right issues.
Another little-known group created solely to focus on its members is the Graduate Career Consortium. Mary Morris Heiberger, associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania, helped found the group for graduate career counselors in 1987 after a conversation with Julia Miller Vick, a graduate career counselor at Penn, and April Vahle Hamel, then an associate dean of arts and sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. The three talked about how they could benefit from conversations with fellow career counselors around the country about their jobs and how to do them better.
The consortium held its first meeting at Penn in the fall of 1987. "We called anybody we could find," says Ms. Heiberger, who writes the Career Talk column with Ms. Vick for this site. Half a dozen graduate career counselors attended, including ones from Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University. Today, the consortium's roughly 50 members work on career issues for doctoral students in the arts and sciences at institutions that belong to the Association of American Universities.
It's not intended to be a public organization, which is why Ms. Heiberger is guarded about some details. She declined to provide a list of current members or to say which topics have been covered at previous meetings or will be covered at the group's next meeting, in June at the University of Texas at Austin.
"It's really very informal," Ms. Heiberger says of the group, which has no president, no budget, no dues, and no officers. "It isn't really anything but an e-mail list in some ways."
Although she doesn't want to get into particular topics that members discuss, she says, "Just going around the room talking about what's new on campus" has been the most popular part of past meetings. "One of the big differences between our group and a conference is that, by and large, people are talking," she says. "They're not attending talks." National groups, Ms. Heiberger says, are too big to provide such a format.
That reality has prompted some members of large, national associations to form smaller ones. Last summer, Timan H. Nekritz, associate director of public affairs at the State University of New York at Oswego, met nine public-affairs colleagues at a Council for Advancement and Support of Education conference held at Duke University. Now the 10 unofficially call themselves "the CASE crew."
The 10 members -- who come from such institutions as Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and the University of Texas at San Antonio -- gravitated toward each other at the conference and ended up at a lot of the same sessions on public relations. They spent the rest of the conference together "sharing our thoughts and our strange senses of humor," Mr. Nekritz says.
At the conference, they vowed to keep in touch, although doubted they would. Mr. Nekritz says the 10 actually did stay in touch via e-mail to exchange ideas on how to do their jobs better. "A great thing about the group is that if someone goes through something and thinks they were treated unfairly by the media or encountered a problem they can just talk to us for advice," he says. It's also a support network -- "just knowing there are nine other people who can feel our pain." For example, one of "the CASE crew" e-mailed the group one morning asking for questions he could pose during a media panel discussion at his institution in case the audience didn't come up with any. Mr. Nekritz says five or six of his colleagues responded with questions in no time.
The group would like to meet this summer when "things slow down" and the academic year ends, Mr. Nekritz says, but as yet members don't plan on electing a president or paying dues. "Part of the attraction of it is that it's so informal," he says. "You don't have to do the big meeting once a year to get this kind of feedback."
