March 13, 2008
NASPA
National Study Finds Widespread Hazing by Student Groups
Boston — More than half of college students who belong to campus organizations experience hazing, according to a national study presented on Tuesday at the Naspa conference here.
The culprits are not only fraternities, sororities, and athletics teams, but student groups of all kinds, says a report on the study, which was conducted by Elizabeth J. Allan and Mary Madden, both associate professors in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Maine at Orono.
For more, see The Chronicle’s News Blog.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Thu Mar 13, 10:14 AM | Permalink | CommentMarch 12, 2008
NASPA
Student-Affairs Officers as Unsung Heroes
Boston — This year’s Naspa conference gave members a chance to do more than share ideas. As they got together as a national group for the first time since the tragedy at Virginia Tech, many presentations and conversations turned to the identity of the student-affairs profession.
Some comments seemed to reflect an impression that student-affairs officers were the unsung heroes of higher education.
“We’re major players whose words should be listened to,” Michael L. Jackson, vice president for student affairs and enrollment services at the University of Southern California, said in one session here.
“We’re expected to be experts in everything,” added Dean Bresciani, vice president for student affairs at Texas A&M University.
In the conference’s closing session, Zenobia Lawrence Hikes, vice president for student affairs at Virginia Tech, rallied her “brothers and sisters.”
“Student-affairs professionals are indeed some of the most important people on campus,” she said. “Their responsibilities entail life-and-death decisions every day.”
The massacre at Virginia Tech, Ms. Hikes said, “will change the higher-education landscape for years to come.” She urged her fellow student-affairs officers to take certain lessons from it: Reach out to all students, balance public safety and the privacy of mental-health records, set up a threat-assessment team, improve security, and run active-shooter drills. But she reminded them, to applause, that nothing can stop a determined enemy and that there’s no such thing as a campus lockdown.
Ms. Hikes denounced violence in popular culture, particularly video games, and called on her colleagues to “be the groundswell of public opinion” against it. “If you are tired of watching … innocent students run for their lives across our campuses,” she said, “say, Enough is enough.” Several hundred people in the soaring ballroom did. And when she asked them to lobby to keep guns off their campuses, they applauded again.
“Student affairs is not just our profession; it is our calling,” Ms. Hikes told the crowd. “Our responsibility then is to foster a civil and just society. To do anything less is irresponsible.”
Sara Lipka | Posted on Wed Mar 12, 07:56 PM | Permalink | CommentNASPA
Options Abound to Outsource Services for Students
Boston — The bustling exhibit hall at the Naspa conference here revealed the increasing number of student services a college can outsource.
Beyond dormitory furniture and college-branded weekly planners, vendors hawked emergency text-message systems, alcohol-prevention programs, enrollment software, and laundry services.
It was hard to walk by any booth without being subjected to an eager pitch, which left some campus officials shaking their heads.
“It’s opportunistic,” said Michael Heflin, associate director of residence life at Buffalo State College. “These companies come up with things to make money off of.”
Many of the products and services are important, he said, but the outsourcing trend leaves less to a campus’s own administrators. “It’s almost taking the people out of it,” he said.
One vendor defended himself against charges of opportunism. ““We’re not just going to exploit higher education,” said Drew Chadwick, a former judicial-affairs officer who now sells related software for Pave Systems. “We’re looking for partnerships.”
Just then a campus staffer approached the booth and pointed to one of Mr. Chadwick’s displays. “This’ll knock out the Clery reports, right?” he asked, referring to the campus-crime statistics federal law requires colleges to submit.
The vendor assured him it would. “Well, there’s at least one module I want,” the customer said, grabbing a brochure and darting away.
Here’s a sampling of products and services promoted in the exhibit hall.
- Rave Wireless lets students set cellphone timers that alert campus police if they do not arrive at their destinations. “We call it putting a blue-light telephone in everyone’s pocket,” said Robert Jones, Rave’s director of marketing.
- University Parent produces printed guides, Web sites, and electronic newsletters for college parents.
- OrgSync sells software to help student groups plan events and keep in touch with their members, even as leaders turn over.
- Lifetopia tells colleges it will help them “put people in their place” — with a Web site where students can create profiles and select their own roommates.
- CourseScheduler offers software to help students choose classes at hours they can handle. Otherwise “they’re just going to slap something together” — at the risk of burning out if their schedules are unmanageable, said Michael Smyers, a recent graduate of Kansas State University who founded the company.
- With Snoozester, students can request wakeup and reminder calls, such as to start studying for a test a week in advance. This product particularly frustrated some administrators. “People have just stormed away,” said Neville Mehra, the company’s chief executive. But most absences from class, he said, are a result of oversleeping.
March 11, 2008
NASPA
Campus Officials Bid on Consultations and Sweatshirts
Boston — Naspa conference-goers scrambled to bid on an unusual array of items in a silent auction here today.
Rows of tables displayed embroidered napkins, sports memorabilia, several University of Illinois sweatshirts, maple syrup, and one-day consultations with leaders in the field, like Janet E. Walbert, president of Naspa and vice president for student affairs at Arcadia University. Proceeds will go to the Naspa Foundation, which supports research on higher education.
“Ten minutes left!” George McClellan, unofficial auctioneer and vice chancellor for student affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, yelled to passers-by as he urged them to check their bids. “Don’t lose a dream for five dollars!”
Sara Lipka | Posted on Tue Mar 11, 08:14 PM | Permalink | CommentNASPA
Virginia Tech Officials Share Stories of Tragedy and Recovery
Boston — More than 500 staff members from colleges around the country gave a panel of Virginia Tech officials two long standing ovations here today at the Naspa conference.
“Y’all should work for FEMA,” one misty-eyed audience member told the panel, praising its commitment to serving students.
It was the first time the group of five student-affairs officers had spoken publicly about dealing with the tragedy on their campus almost a year ago. “On the morning of April 16, higher education as we knew it was rocked to the core,” said Zenobia Lawrence Hikes, Tech’s vice president for student affairs.
All of the speakers shared details of their own experiences. Edward Spencer, associate vice president for student affairs, remembered alerting the housekeeping staff not to empty trash from West Ambler Johnston Hall, the dormitory where two students were killed. Richard Ferraro, an assistant vice president for student affairs, recalled escorting a reporter who had posed as a parent out of a special briefing for the families of the victims. Tom Brown, dean of students, talked about negotiating bereavement airfares for relatives and tracking 32 funerals to make sure the university sent a representative to each one.
Virginia Tech assigned one staff member to each family of a deceased student, a decision Ms. Hikes questioned. “Really a full-time social-worker position is what it was,” she said. “To put that responsibility on top of them given the magnitude … that’s something in hindsight we would probably re-evaluate.”
The liaisons talked with relatives at all hours of the day and night, they said. They packed up belongings in apartments and negotiated difficult relationships between divorced and separated parents. One family asked Mr. Ferraro to help get their son off a waiting list at the college he wanted to attend, so he wouldn’t have to be where his sister died or near her killer’s hometown.
“I had been very composed, you know, because you have to be,” Mr. Ferraro said. But when he heard that the college had admitted the student, he choked up on the telephone with the family. “I couldn’t get the words out,” he said. “I finally croaked out, ‘He’s in.’”
The student-affairs officers here talked about coordinating deliveries by police officers of the items survivors had left in Norris Hall, the site of the main massacre. The administrators also set up tours of Norris, led by police officers and counselors, for students who felt it would be helpful to go back into the building.
Crisis mode lasted a long time, the speakers said.
“I think all of us here wondered, When will it end? And it doesn’t,” said Donna Ratcliffe, director of career services. “You build endurance, you build wisdom, and you do what you can to do what’s right.”
Ms. Ratcliffe and others thanked the countless colleagues at other institutions who had supported Virginia Tech. One staff member passed out Hokie-colored maroon-and-orange candy in the audience.
With help from the Library of Congress, Virginia Tech is now cataloging more than 90,000 items well-wishers sent in sympathy, including a 100-pound rock from the Mississippi River and a signed life preserver from the U.S. Coast Guard. The archive will help researchers understand how people grieve, said Guy Sims, an assistant vice president for student affairs at Tech. An art gallery at the university will open an exhibition of some of the items next month.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Tue Mar 11, 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comment [4]NASPA
Ordering Students to Register for Text-Message Alerts
Boston — Emergency text-messaging systems are now common on college campuses, but in most cases students sign up for the notifications voluntarily.
That has to change, Margaret A. Jablonski told a roomful of administrators here.
“We’re in a bind about when do you determine that you’re going to make giving the cellphone information mandatory,” said Ms. Jablonski, vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There only 5,000 students — less than a fifth of the population — subscribed to the alerts.
But soon Chapel Hill will ask all students for their cellphone numbers during registration. “It’s something we have to just bite the bullet and do,” Ms. Jablonski said.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Tue Mar 11, 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comment [12]NASPA
Despite State Economies, Lots of Jobs Here
Boston – Eight hundred jobs in student-affairs offices. More than 1,100 job candidates. And almost 10,500 interviews.
Those were the record numbers produced by Placement Exchange ’08, which took place over the weekend here before the annual Naspa conference. The job fair was packed this year because the association joined with four related groups for the event. But is also seems that hiring – in student affairs, at least – hasn’t been discouraged by the dim economic outlook in many states.
“We haven’t seen an impact on jobs yet,” said Kevin Kruger, associate executive director and director of development for Naspa.
We caught up with one job candidate, Justin M. Yates, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University who had 10 first-round interviews and four follow-ups, all in four days. “Oh, my gosh, there were so many jobs,” he said.
Word has it, Mr. Yates added, that some candidates had as many as 20 first-round interviews: “It’s a cool process that you can get so many interviews in at one place.” For Mr. Yates, the blitz resulted in the offer of an on-campus interview at a large university.
Elyse Ashburn | Posted on Tue Mar 11, 03:08 PM | Permalink | CommentNASPA
Movie May Promote Violent Stereotypes on Campuses
John Dunkle is worried about a stigma being attached to students with mental-health issues and to students who are Asian males. A movie due out this spring could make matters worse for both groups, said the director of counseling and psychological services at Northwestern University at a session here today.
In Dark Matter, loosely based on shootings at the University of Iowa in 1991, a Chinese graduate student becomes violent in response to academic politics at the fictional Valley State University.
Northwestern officials are already discussing how they will try to debunk the stereotypes, Mr. Dunkle said, as about 200 administrators scribbled down the movie’s name. “I am very concerned about the potential impact of this film on our campuses,” he said.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Tue Mar 11, 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comment [2]March 10, 2008
NASPA
Campus Safety: Reporting the 'Creepy Dude'
Boston — The tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University have led colleges around the country to try harder to identify and help troubled students. The University of South Carolina’s Behavioral Intervention Team is one viable model, its chairman, W. Scott Lewis, told 100 campus officials at the Naspa conference here.
The team gets together weekly to evaluate disturbing behavior, which anyone can report with an online form. Maybe it’s a roommate with suicidal thoughts, a pupil behaving erratically, or simply “creepy dude — freaks me out,” said Mr. Lewis, assistant vice provost for judicial affairs and academic integrity at South Carolina. One time, he said, a student’s parent filed an incident report.
Usually the team responds with a “soft intervention.” This past fall, after a student died in a fall from a fifth-floor window, a faculty member reported another student who had posted a related comment on Facebook. “I guess the guy on the fifth floor had the right idea,” the student wrote.
The team asked residence-life staffers to check in with him and encourage him to seek counseling, Mr. Lewis said. “We’ve got people who do this very, very well,” he told the standing-room-only audience. “Use them.”
In another recent case, Mr. Lewis said, a student turned in an exam on which he had written nothing but, “If I kill them and myself, will they stop following me?” Within 45 minutes, the intervention team convened, located the student, and dispatched a few campus officials, including a police officer, to talk to him.
As it turned out, Mr. Lewis said, the student had already raised concerns among faculty members and classmates. “Everybody had a snapshot of what was a very long film,” he said. But not everybody knew what to do with the information they had.
“We were not marketing ourselves aggressively enough at all,” Mr. Lewis said of his team. Resident advisers and teaching assistants, who have some of the most frequent contact with students, turn over like crazy, he said.
And a team like South Carolina’s is only as good as the tips it gets. So Mr. Lewis goes to as many meetings of faculty and staff members as he possibly can. “Anywhere they’ll let you talk,” he told the crowd, “go talk.”
Another challenge is keeping the team lean and agile enough to be effective, Mr. Lewis said. As more administrators work with his team, they want to be part of it. “But you can’t add people for political reasons,” he said. “This is far too important.”
Sara Lipka | Posted on Mon Mar 10, 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]NASPA
Colleges Face Soaring Public Expectations of Higher Education
Boston — Public expectations of colleges and universities seem reasonable, if you ignore the complexities of higher education, speakers said at a Naspa session here this morning.
Years ago, if a student didn’t finish college, people would think he or she was responsible, said Jeanne Miller, associate vice president for student life at the State University of New York at Oneonta. But now, mainly because of high tuition, she said, colleges are held accountable when students drop out.
Generation X parents are as serious about accountability as state and federal lawmakers are, Ms. Miller said. “If our legislators are all about ‘Show me the money,’ the parents are ‘Show me the value.’” Younger parents — “stealth fighters” instead of the baby-boomer “helicopter parents” — call colleges to ask, for example, how professors are using technology to improve teaching, and why administrators haven’t yet found internships for their children.
When students go from one institution to another, parents expect a seamless transition, said Ronald Herron, vice president for student and university affairs at Southern Connecticut State University. Prompted by concerns that students lose credits in transfers from two- to four-year institutions, the Connecticut legislature has proposed a common course-numbering system for higher education, he said, drawing groans from a packed room.
Many states, Mr. Herron pointed out, are considering measures similar to Connecticut’s. Expectations of seamlessness are so pervasive that references to “K-16” are becoming “P-20,” he said, for preschool through grad school. On the federal level, legislation to renew the Higher Education Act proposes more reporting requirements for colleges and universities than ever before, said Carol Graves Holladay, who represents the Consortium on Government Relations for Student Affairs.
Federal legislators and their constituents, Ms. Holladay said, expect colleges to — among so many other things — make sure students use the Internet legally, ensure fire safety, and report and find missing students.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Mon Mar 10, 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]