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[drspouse]

Teach me to stick my neck out...

I have been ranting privately about SpouseU's campus atmosphere, which I feel (and others agree) is centred around drinking and (male) sports. I'm not sure we're unique here. I do feel that it lets us down in attracting some types of applicants (and I'm an admissions tutor), so I had a bit of a rant on email to our Dean of Student Experience or whatever hu calls huself. For example, we have awards for outstanding "rounded" students, and sports cups, and plaques glorifying those who have drunk a large amount. Guess which order the size of these awards come in? I had a couple of suggestions for improvements so...

Now the Dean has suggested I apply for a role that is coming up which is a 25% buyout. Gulp... Not hu's role but lower down.

I am not really sure this would be for me, I have the ideas but not the experience (I'm not involved in anything like this currently on campus e.g. I'm not "patron" of any student societies, I am not a voluntary personal tutor for other disciplines which is one option we have, and I don't socialise on campus). But I do have a mature student for a spouse and I socialise with a lot of students off campus through my volunteer work.

I'm just curious if anyone has done something similar, was it helpful, or a poisoned chalice? Did you actually get any research done?

[qrypt]

I've never had a major role, but I was on a "student experience" committee for a couple of years.  The person who ran it was an audit-culture flunky -- she was clearly more interested in creating the paper trails that enabled us to say "We care about student experience!" than she was in the student experience.  The main thing I remember from committee discussions was the notion that we were going to buy tables on rollers for the seminar classrooms, so that they could be easily reconfigured for different pedagogical goals.  Or something. 

If you would have institutional support for doing something about actual student experience, then perhaps you would find it worthwhile and make a difference of some sort.  I suspect that's a big "if".  Of course it would also require some organizational capability on your part. 

[drspouse]

Although I think there must be some "making teaching lovely" aspects to this role, there's a similar structure for teaching, so this is a lot more about extra-curricular (e.g. our "rounded students" awards).

But I bet there would be a lot of moaning about the buses, and how the sabbs don't listen, and how the taps don't work in the residences...