SEM in Canada was edited by Susan Gottheil of the University of Manitoba and Clayton Smith of the University of Windsor, two people with extensive experience in helping institutions align their processes to meet their enrolment goals. Almost 30 different Canadian higher education professionals have contributed their time and expertise giving the book both breadth and credibility. Smith and Gottheil lead the way with an overview of the SEM model which, put simply, means lining up your institution’s resources, infrastructure, staffing and data to support its academic goals. Sounds easy but it’s not. True SEM requires cohesion between multiple departments in a large institution — marketing, recruitment, admissions, financial aid, student affairs, teaching and learning, institutional research and registration. It requires constant monitoring with accurate and timely data, and vigilance in constantly tweaking and prodding to get the system to work. Behind each component is a complex array of choices and strategies: how can merit-based financial aid shape enrolment? How can we identify and retain students at risk of failure? The book is peppered with case studies that illustrate precisely how some institutions have used these levers to meet their goals — whether that be internationalizing their campus, or transforming from college to university.

Strategic Enrolment Management is not without its critics. The approach emerged from the US so is automatically treated with suspicion. But like most American higher education innovations, they translate quite well with a few adaptations to the Canadian context. Critics also charge that SEM proponents overly commodify higher education and manipulate the admissions process to create conditions of exclusivity. But SEM can also be employed to diversify, to recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups, to enhance access and retention, and to ensure students’ expectations are met. And this book focuses on the more socially responsible, egalitarian (dare I say “Canadian”) approach to SEM while recognizing that there is a competitive element to higher education in Canada and there are resource implications to every student gained and lost.

Having done one thorough read, I now keep SEM in Canada nearby for reference. It seems to come in handy on a pretty regular basis. A warning: SEM in Canada is not cheap or easy to find. It is published by AACRAO (the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers) and can be ordered online for $77 for non-members.

I haven’t yet read the book but just wanted to note its existence as it appears to be influencing policy. If anyone would like to provide a review to CACUSS Reads, let me know.

Lowering Higher Education: The rise of corporate universities and the fall of liberal education

By James E. Coté and Anton Allahar

Among the books reviewed at this year’s Open Book Session as part of the annual conference of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services were several that painted a rather grim picture of North American higher education. Academically Adrift – making waves in both the U.S. and Canada – has been described as a “damning indictment.”  DIY U argues that the crisis in American higher ed will lead young people to use the ample resources of the web to fill in the gaps left by institutions that simply can’t deliver the experience students expect.

Lowering Higher Education provides the Canadian variation on this ubiquitous theme of declining quality. Authors Coté and Allahar, professors at the University of Western Ontario, gained some notoriety a few years back with their critique of the university system: Ivory Tower Blues. (See CACUSS Reads review.)  Though they had a strong thesis based on both data and teaching experience with their original work, it stank of cynicism.  In Lowering Higher Education, they have not only strengthened their arguments, but they come across as far more concerned than caustic, constructive than cranky.

Here’s the essential argument: historically, people with university degrees earn higher incomes. Other people noticed. They wanted in. And we let them in. The system grew to accommodate increasing numbers of young people, offering the promise of a lucrative career. And instead of delivering education – intellectual enlightenment with the lofty purpose of creating an educated citizenry – universities started delivering something more like training. Because that’s what corporations, parents, governments and even students want.

And then the vicious circle began. More students = declining quality = lack of engagement. Here’s where we get what Coté and Allahar call the “disengagement compact” – that tacit, mutual understanding between professor and student that neither really is really sure why they’re there, neither are adequately prepared for their roles and neither really wants to work as hard as they should to succeed.  Nowhere is this more acute than in the liberal arts, where the return on investment for students is most elusive.

Student affairs pracitioners will be most interested in the fifth chapter – dedicated to the question of whether student disengagement is inevitable.  Here the authors systematically examine every argument ever put forth to refute the fact that vast swaths of the undergraduate population are tuned out.  The excuse “students have busy lives” (commonly used in our field) is thrown back in our faces. Handing out credentials to students from disadvantaged backgrounds without expecting a deep level of engagement in the process does them a disservice, they argue. Good point.

Coté and Allahar perform some very interesting analysis using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to determine whether disengagement is by necessity or by choice. While I think there are some basic flaws in their argument (engagement is solely defined as the amount of time spent studying and preparing for class – a limited view IMHO), they do a great job of debunking some very common myths about what is absorbing students’ time. And they come back to the central thesis: time isn’t the problem. Institutional culture is.

Their final two chapters are dedicated to solutions, the first providing an extremely well-balanced answer to the question of whether technology will save the day (answer: not to the degree that ed-tech evangelists purport) and the final to a laundry list of recommendations that seem overwhelming and, frankly, unfeasible in today’s political climate.

I am probably one of few nerds who read Lower Higher Education cover to cover.  It is not nearly as entertaining as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But all serious student affairs practitioners need to concern themselves with the issues raised here. The tension between access and quality is like a rubber band stretched too far. It will break: either students will get wise and begin to walk away (check out the Uncollege movement in the U.S.) or governments will make a dramatic turnabout in policy.

– Deanne Fisher

on Twitter: @deannefisher

Pickings are slim for new work related to traditional topics like student development or leadership. But the virtual bookshelves in the higher education section are full of juicy condemnations of the state of (mostly US) colleges and universities. Provocative titles like No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-off, or The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It are certainly tempting. Nothing like a good rant. And Academically Adrift by professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa was the talk of the town at the recent NASPA conference in Philadelphia. But for this year’s Open Book session, I’ve decided rather than succumb to the wave, I’ll stick to some themes I’ve been exploring for a few years and some tried and true authors.

So I’ve placed my order and eagerly await the arrival of:

Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish

This one is actually a few years old but I’ve long wanted to read it. Fish has been described as an “erudite crank” whose frank writing challenges us to rethink the role of the university. Save the World on Your Own Time garnered lots of attention when it was published in 2008 as it argued:

“there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose.”

Whether we agree or not, I think it’s important for us to understand and appreciate this point of view.

Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education by James Coté and Anton Allahar

A few years ago I reviewed the first book by these two professors from the University of Western Ontario, Ivory Tower Blues. While hardly flawless, Ivory Tower Blues presented a long overdue critique of Canadian universities and brought to the forefront issues like underpreparedness, parental involvement and lack of engagement. I look forward to their follow-up.

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle

I’ve been reading about the impact of technology, particularly on youth and young adults, for years now but remain unconvinced by both sides of the argument. MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s been studying this phenomenon for 15 years and has discovered “new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.” I am hoping Alone Together will help all of us deepen our understanding of the emotional impact of the digital era on our students.

I do hope some of you will get your hands on one or more these books and contribute to the discussion, either here on the blog or at CACUSS 2011 at Ryerson in Toronto this June.

– Deanne Fisher

I have spent the better part of the last decade trying to understand, from the inside, what makes institutions of higher education change. We all purport to be in the midst of it – change, that is – with strategic visions and plans that call for us to “build on our strengths”  or “define our dreams.”  Let me guess, your institution’s plan says something about…increasing enrolment/graduate enrolment/international enrolment, improving your profile/reputation regionally/nationally/internationally, probably talks about some “pillars” and sets a lofty goal around “improving the overall student experience”, the part that gets us student affairs types all giddy.

And yet, despite all the effort – townhall meetings and consultation sessions, green papers and white papers, beautifully designed strategic plan websites and glossy brochures ­– the returns on investment are often ambiguous, marginal or incremental, and rarely transformative.

As Michael Fullan and Geoff Scott point out in this book:

“Universities, with all their brainpower, are much more resistant to change than many other institutions. Universities are great at studying and recommending change for others, but when it comes to themselves, that is another matter.”

And yet the pressures to change, the authors argue, have never been greater.

So what makes the difference between an institution that can change and one that cannot? Leadership.  Okay, so, duh. But what kind of leadership? And if the answer can be explained in 155 pages, why isn’t it working?

It’s an uphill battle. Fullan, professor emeritus at OISE-UT, and Scott, pro-vice chancellor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, begin by painting a rather dismal picture, international in scope. One that sets up tremendous expectations of universities throughout the world, and yet points to the many flawed and change averse aspects of the traditional culture of higher education. Do any of these conditions sound familiar to you:

• Meetings with no clear outcome?
• Staff who are unclear how their work plays an important role in the success of the university?
• Planning and decision making that tends to focus more on consensus around the table rather than consensus around the data?
• Plans, produced in glossy form, launched at a large function, and then forgotten, with little tracking of their implementation or accountability for failure to deliver on the key targets and changes they contain?

If so, you’ll enjoy, at the very least, Fullan and Scott’s concise explanation of what’s wrong with the academy, if for no other reason than the realization that you are not insane. This stuff really is happening. Everywhere.

These are all symptoms of the change averse culture so prominent in most institutions. The good news, say Fullan and Scott, is that institutions of higher education can accomplish impressive breakthroughs when the put their minds and hearts to work on focused problems. And the bulk of Turnaround Leadership, is dedicated to explaining how to do just that.

While much of this book is focused on the very highest levels of academic leadership, there is much to be learned here for those of us in the professional or managerial ranks. The authors detail the competencies and capabilities that successful leaders in higher education need to develop (not necessarily be born with) in order to lead institutional change efforts. I particularly enjoyed the list of metaphors academic leaders provided to describe their role, including: “getting butterflies to fly in formation”, “having a Ferrari with no money for fuel”, and “trying to drive a nail into a wall of blancmange – little resistance but no result.”

I don’t know that all of you will find this book as compelling as I did. It is certainly a highly accessible read and resonated with me. But it makes no direct references to student services and, although highly focused around the role of teaching and learning in the academy, makes no mention of the development of the whole student as a measure of success in higher education. Nevertheless, several lightbulbs clicked on for me as the authors respectfully, though concretely, explained what needs to change in order for change to happen.

– Deanne Fisher
@deannefisher

A full review – in conversation form – by Tricia Seifert, Dray Perenic and myself appears in the June 2010 edition of the CACUSS publication Communique. At the conference, I elaborated on some of my key criticisms of the book. But before I summarize them here, let me say first that every one of the 16 different chapter authors (including the two editors) deserve our full gratitude for persevering with this labour of love and telling our story. But just as this book represents the development of our field of practice, we must also be prepared for the growing pains that come along with the maturation process.

The core of the book is a set of explanatory chapters, written by active practitioners, providing an overview of a specific area of student services — from registrarial services (actually, quite a fascinating read) to housing and residence life, first year and orientation and more, through to a very well thought-out chapter on management of student services by Brian Sullivan. But services for international students and students with disabilities are  given only mentions in more overarching chapters on health and wellness and/or services for diverse students. I now understand that there is a volume II of Achieving Student Success planned that will address these gaps. This I eagerly await as I think one of the hallmarks of our field in Canada is its focus on vigilant protection of human rights and equity.

My primary criticism of the book is leveled not at its cast of authors, but at the culminating argument made by its authors. Hardy-Cox and Strange make a strong case for the professionalization of student services in Canada: “It is our belief that the kinds of understandings, insights, and strategies associated with the programs and practices reflected in the above chapters require that practitioners in this field be prepared more systematically and at a level that reflects the professional standards of their work.” They argue that there is too much emphasis on “on-the-job” training in our field and that what is needed are professional preparation programs at the post-graduate level in our country.

It’s pretty difficult, not to mention ironic,  to argue against education. But in this drive toward advanced degrees, I think we need to be very careful not to dismiss what I consider to be the strengths of the field in Canada: a service-oriented mentality which gives us humility, lived experience which fuels us to make a difference, and a community-based approach that emphasizes the collective over the individual. I’m not saying that we should abandon the professionalization imperative, but that we do so with a good sense of our own values and assets rather than adopt an approach from another jurisdiction.

All that said, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion were it not for the efforts of Hardy-Cox, Strange and my colleagues from coast to coast who put their collective experience to print in this groundbreaking volume. Achieving Student Success is available to order online via McGill-Queen’s University Press.

– Deanne Fisher

Join David Newman (president of SASA), Bruce Belbin (president-elect of CACUSS), Dave Hannah (a past president of CACUSS), Tim Rahilly (CACUSS board member) and me for our “best of” edition of Open Book. While books are the focus, the value is really in the discussion of ideas that have shaped our field, that inform our everyday practice (whether we know it or not) and will present challenges for us in the future.

See you there!

– Deanne Fisher.

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re a nerd. Or at least have nerd-like tendencies. You work in higher education and you like reading books. Or at least reading other people’s pithy summaries of books so you can sound well-read.

And chances are you’ve experienced moments of doubt – subtle self-deprecating voices that ask you whether what you do really has any value? If you advise, teach or coach students in a university setting, you work in the service of intellectual advancement, which, these days, is pitted against the powerful force of pragmatism, and losing.

Laura Penny’s More Money than Brains is a fabulously engaging vilification of the forces of anti-intellectualism, particularly the right-wing critics of the humanities, bullies like Stephen Harper or Sarah Palin, of shallow media and greedy tycoons, and even the general public, more captivated by the balloon boy than the pitfalls of the American health care system.

Student affairs professionals will be most interested in her chapter on higher education – “Screw U or Hate My Professors” – where her own experience as a professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University comes through. Increasing credentialism, says Penny, means students are “buying a chit instead of a challenge”, rendering the professorial role to one of a potential impediment to the end goal.

We’ve seen these perspectives before, most recently in Ivory Tower Blues by two faculty members at the University of Western Ontario. But where previous critiques have been earnest and tedious, Penny is rife with irony, hyperbole and curse-words – infinitely more entertaining. Take this little tirade on the state of the current undergraduate classroom:

“When I was an irritating idealistic undergraduate, I thought everyone should go to university. My friends and I enthused about those super-civilized, culture-made countries in Europe that charged no tuition, the ones where they would pay people to go to school – like learning was important, or something.[....] Not like in dumbass, get-a-job North America, where college was simply a means to an end, a private benefit to be shilled vigorously like any other high-end product….But a decade of teaching has beaten the shining egalitarian dream of universal access out of me. There are a lot of people in university who have no business being there. Classrooms are peopled with the doomed and the dragooned, with heel-dragging heaps of burning money and wasted time. Many students are unready, unwilling, or unable to do university-level work.”

Penny’s critique crosses the Canada-US border fluidly and appropriately, as the cult of the “useful” is not unique to either nation. You will likely disagree (as I do) with some of her points but the argument is so adeptly maintained and bolstered by evidence, it’s hard to poke any serious holes.

The big question it leaves for us as a profession is this: are we part of the solution, or part of the problem? Penny doesn’t address our field specifically, but her positioning of the “student-centred” culture of universities as evidence of the customer-service – chit-versus-challenge – model at play serves as an “ouch” moment. “Good service means A’s,” she writes. “Bad grades are bad service, a finger in your chili or a mouse in your beer, evidence that the help has fucked up again. Good service means classes that are entertaining. Bad service means classes that are boring or hard.” Controversial? Yes. Worth discussion? Definitely.

– Deanne Fisher

Academic Transformation: The forces reshaping higher education in Ontario

Ian D. Clark, Greg Moran, Michael L. Skolnik, David Trick

For the past six years, my beloved institution has been working toward enhancing the undergraduate student experience as its primary objective under the academic planning framework. A couple of weeks ago, I asked a room of about 40 relatively engaged students (residence dons) what they thought the top priority for the University has been. “Increasing graduate enrolment?” Nope. Though that is a newly established objective. “International student recruitment?” A priority, yes. But not the top one. “Research excellence?”  It took about ten tries.

When I asked them if they could name any changes they’d witnessed as a result of this priority in action, there were some snickers. A few good answers too, but lots of smirks.

Positive change on the student experience – both inside and outside the classroom – has been incremental here at the University of Toronto, despite a University-wide commitment and millions in new funding to kick-start new projects. As all higher education institutions focusing on the student experience have learned, there is no roadmap. Or, as George Kuh, former director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is fond of saying, “There is no single blueprint to success.”

There are lots of things we can do – and we have done – to improve undergraduate education. But many of the barriers to improving quality in higher education are persistent and systemic. So say the authors of this new book that takes both a wide-angled lens and a microscope to the issues plaguing higher education in Ontario.

The authors, three professors (two U of T, one Western) and a higher ed consultant, isolate the turning point in the 1960s when two key provincial policy decisions were made – the first limiting the role of the colleges, and the second giving institutional autonomy to universities. As a result, undergraduate education, until very recently anyways, was the exclusive domain of the universities in Ontario (a situation that is not the case in some other provinces.) This might be less than disastrous if not for the fact that virtually every university, in turn, has adopted that same model: the research university. And the research university is without a doubt, say the authors, “the most expensive type of post-secondary institution.”

Meanwhile, we’ve got increasing demand for undergraduate education from an increasingly diverse population. The result: an unsustainable model.

Academic Transformation is a very detailed, very thorough explanation of how post-secondary education in Ontario works – from the provincial funding model, to the production of knowledge, to access and accountability for undergraduate education. They tackle tough issues: are teaching and research truly compatible? Is the baccalaureate the appropriate credential for an applied program at a community college? Or could there be another designation? Does the mounting competition amongst universities for the “best and brightest” lead to more merit-based rather than needs-based aid? And what effect does that have for marginalized groups?

The books paints a bleak picture. The players – colleges, universities, government – are pretty entrenched in the status quo. But the authors do attempt to sketch a way out, prescribing a new system with differentiation among universities – and set of institutions focused on undergraduate education exclusively.

Academic Transformation will certainly open the eyes of most student affairs professionals in Ontario — both in the college and university sector — to the some of the intricacies of the higher education system. For me, it helped explain why progress on enhancing the undergraduate experience for  research universities seems to fall prey to the one-step-forward, two-steps-backward paradigm.

– Deanne Fisher

You can pre-order it now online at McGill-Queen’s University Press (paper or cloth). Hoping many of you will do so and read in time for CACUSS 2010 in Edmonton.

– D.F.

1. Collect things that command my attention. Writing a blog post is one of many things — including getting new glasses, developing a student survey and preparing the 2010-11 budget for my department –commanding my attention right now. I collect them all in a little application called NoteBook. But you could use any “bucket” to collect all your stuff — as long as it’s all in one place.

My NoteBook table of contents

2. Process all that “stuff” in the bucket. This is where I, and I’m sure many of you, get bogged down. So in this case the item is “Write review of David Allen’s book.” I ask myself: “Is this item actionable?” – If the answer is “yes” (which it is), then I determine what the next action item is. The next action might be: Read Chapter 4. If the action takes less than two minutes, I just do it. Right now. But in my case, reading Chapter 4 will take more than two minutes. So I have two choices: 1. Delegate it. Um, not really an option (although admittedly I do occasionally pretend to have read books that really my partner has read and summarized for me. This, by the way, is a totally legitimate form of non-reading according to Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.) But in this case, I really am going to read the book myself. But not in two minutes. So I defer it. I can defer it to my Calendar (to do at a specific time) or make it my Next Action (to do as soon as I can.)

3. Organize all those actions. In this case, my action item – Read Chapter 4 of David Allen’s Book — is not something I can actually schedule. So it goes on my “Next Actions List”. There are other lists — an Incubator (for stuff that’s just not going to get done in the near future, but you don’t want to lose), a “Waiting For” list, etc But in this case, we have a longer-than-two-minute, non-delegatable action that needs to be tracked. So it goes on the Next Action List.

4. Review your list. There’s a lot of stuff on your list. How do you decide what to do right now? (see #5, below) Allen gives us a few models but I like this one: consider your context (what can be done…in the bathtub?), with the time available (…in about half an hour before somebody kicks me out of the bathroom), and energy available (…while I have enough caffeine in my system to focus) and is a high priority (…i.e. will give me the highest payoff?) Answer: Read Chapter 4 of David Allen’s book.

5. Do. So I read Chapter 4. Check.

And then the process starts over again. Next Action: “Write witty review of David Allen’s book, without actually finishing it!”. Done.

So, two questions linger: (1) if I can apply the method after having ready only four chapters, what are the other nine about? and (2) what does this have to do with student affairs?

Answer to the first: I’ve given you an overly simplistic explanation of the method. The rest of the book gives you much more depth on issues like project planning (how to get that idea off the ground), managing e-mail, or how to deal with your “someday/maybe” list. I do intend to read the rest. But my goal was to write a new blog post. That was the source of my stress – and it’s been dealt with (in a pretty ingenious way.)

On the second question: productivity is critical in student affairs. We have to be accountable to both students and the public and we simply cannot afford to operate in a reactive manner, waiting for the next issue, conflict or crisis to come across our desk. Yet, there’s a skill set involved in moving projects forward that is not typically delivered as part of student affairs training and education. We’re just taught to understand student development,  to coach and mentor, to take direction, and to respond to situations. If a book called “Productivity in Student Affairs” existed, I’d have read that instead. But as far as I know, it doesn’t.

Getting Things Done seems to work perfectly well for me. I’ve just knocked off a major stress factor (keeping this blog up-to-date!) using Allen’s method. Now on to that budget.

– Deanne Fisher.

If you are interested in improving student learning and engagement on your campus, then you have probably deduced that collaboration is, at least to some degree, the key to success. It inspires innovation, leads to better service, motivates staff, and can even decrease costs. So if collaboration is such a compelling solution to our woes, why, then, is it so difficult to achieve? Adrianna Kezar and Jaime Lester provide some of the answers by studying, in great depth, the organizational culture of institutions that demonstrate a high level of collaboration.

Unlike other sectors, including the corporate world, that have adapted to the collaboration imperative, higher education is uniquely defined by its “siloed, bureaucratic, and hierarchical” organizational structure. Reward structures for faculty recognize individual accomplishments almost exclusively; autonomy is cherished; the culture values specialists and professionals rather than generalists. Working against these long-held traditions, trends and values is not easy but Kezar and Lester provide a very practical guide to establishing a culture of collaboration on campus.

The book is aimed at leaders – and most of the strategies outlined would require the leadership of someone of significant formal authority within the institution. Collaborative campuses have formalized social networks, they capitalize on committee work, open up meetings, build in reward structures and have designed physical spaces to facilitate interaction. But there’s lots of advice in here for informal leaders as well – ways for change agents to promote the collaboration agenda even when it appears to be unsupported at the very top.

Herein lies the paradox. Collaboration is the antithesis of top-down, command and control organizational structure. And yet without the support of the top of the hierarchy, efforts to collaborate are often frustrating and futile. For those of you who have been working diligently and thoughtfully toward a new way of doing things, you will find validation in this book. Here’s an idea: maybe use it as a thank you gift when an influential administrator speaks at your next event?

– Deanne Fisher

For those of you new to the blog, please contribute. Any visitor can comment on one of the reviews. Just hit the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of any article.

If you’d like to contribute a full review, you have two options: 1. send it to me and I’ll post it for you or 2. send me an email requesting a “contributor” account and I’ll set you up so you can post. (If you are new to WordPress, you will find it quite easy to use – fun really.)

I’ll keep posting reviews throughout the year – and look forward to seeing you all in Edmonton for Open Book VII!

- Deanne.

The annual CACUSS conference is only a week away and my fellow panelists and I are frantically reading away in preparation for sixth annual installment of the Open Book session. Our complete list of recommended (or not!) recent student affairs titles will be available at the session (Wednesday, June 17, 11 am) but in case you need a bit more enticing to come see us — or you want to read ahead and contribute your own thoughts — here are a few of the books we’re reading:

Margot Bell (UBC) is delving into the 2005 NASPA publication The Seventh Learning College Principle: a framework for transformational change, described as a unique resource for institutions wanting to become a more learner-centred organization. Margot will also follow-up on one of the keynote topics this year by reviewing ) Learning Communities and Student Affairs: Partnering for powerful learning published by the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education.

Our newest member of the panel, Bruce Belbin (NAIT), will take us into the field of management in student affairs with a review of Hiring Right: Conducting successful searches in higher education and then opens a discussion on broader issues in higher education with the provocatively titled Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the academic bully culture and what to do about it.

Tim Rahilly (SFU) – undoubtedly the panelist with the most ambitious reading list – is still narrowing his focus. He’ll likely tackle some student affairs practice literature like Student Conduct Practice: The Complete guide for student affairs professionals or the new Amy Reynolds book Helping College Students: Developing essential support skills for student affairs practice. Tim is also considering adding to Bruce’s management discussion with a review of The No Asshole Rule: Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t.

In addition to revisiting a few of the titles I’ve discussed here on the CACUSS Reads blog, I’m planning to review a new how-to on assessment by John Schuh called…wait for it… Assessment Methods for Student Affairs. I’m also just finishing up and interesting book on Organizing for Collaboration in Higher Education: a guide for campus leaders.

Our list includes many more titles — but you have to come to the session to get it!

See you there,

– Deanne Fisher.

Now comes the antidote: Grown Up Digital: How the net generation is changing your world by Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Where Bauerlein sees unhealthy addiction to gaming, Tapscott sees new forms of global collaboration. While Bauerlein laments the loss of literature as a popular pastime, Tapscott revels in the development of new reading skills – non-linear reading that requires sorting and synthesis. In other words, where one sees the end of civilization as we know it, the other sees salvation.

Chances are, if you work in student affairs, you’re predisposed to liking young people. You probably don’t need Tapscott to tell you that young people hold the potential to rid our planet of many of its most pernicious problems. But you have probably also wondered whether the Internet, and particularly social media, are hindering or helping in realizing the potential of youth.

Blaming the Internet for problems like disengagement in traditional democracy, disaffected learners, overconfident employees or teenage bullying is, according to Tapscott, like blaming the library for ignorance. The Internet is becoming an easy target, a scapegoat when we don’t know what else to do.

Drawing on a massive (proprietary) research project involving interviews with almost 10,000 people, most of them members of the “net generation” – those born from 1977-1997 – Tapscott finds almost no reason to fear youth or the Internet. Quite the opposite: “Not only are the kids alright, but as a generation they are poised to transform every institution of society – for the better,” he concludes.

He reserves some of his only words of caution for issues of privacy. “Net geners are giving up their privacy,” he writes, “without realizing it.”

But the rest of the book is dedicated to his relentless optimism. Written post-Obama, Grown Up Digital has the advantage of hindsight in its analysis of the campaign’s use of social media to engage young Americans. The book also includes very current and useful chapters on how education, the workplace and civic society are all being transformed by the new norms of the net generation: freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, play, collaboration, speed and innovation.

Grown Up Digital is so unremittingly positive in its outlook, it grows tedious. Whatever the issue at hand, Tapscott has an anecdote – often involving one of his own (now young adult) children – to turn conventional wisdom on its head. Why are kids moving back home with their parents in the mid-20’s? They’re not slackers, they just have better relationships with their folks than we did in our day. Sure, they steal music, but 70 per cent of them also volunteer! And so on.

A balanced view, the book is not. It is a full-on counterattack on naysayers like Bauerlein and others. In the final write-off of anyone over 30 who is still skeptical, Tapscott coins a new term: “NGenophobia: the irrational and morbid fear of youth, especially with regards to their use of the Internet.” Ouch.

– Deanne Fisher.

The book is about how great leaders think – the ways in which they approach decisions and what sets them apart from the rest of us conventional types. The focus is on business leadership. I know what you’re thinking: the business leadership model (based largely on competition) does not work in higher education (based on warm fuzzies.) But to dismiss what Martin has to share on that basis would be to prove his point. Successful leaders open their minds to opposing views; how we see the world around us – our stance – is a construction of our own experiences. There are other ways of looking at problems, other models, and successful leaders don’t fear them, they leverage them.

The first half of The Opposable Mind is dedicated to case studies of successful leaders – CEOs and business “rock stars” mostly, with a couple of really interesting (from my perspective) figures – Piers Handling of the Toronto International Film Festival, and Victoria Hale, who pioneered not-for-profit drug development to address global health issues. The creativity and innovation of some of these leaders is truly inspiring but that’s not what Martin wants us to leave with. His point – and what he spends the second half of the book explaining – is that this stuff is not necessarily innate. It can be learned. We can train our minds to hold opposing concepts in tandem, to keep our options open, to resist simplification.

For me, the most salient lessons revolve around the tensions between simplicity and complexity. I work in a very complex institutional environment (the same one as Martin) and am constantly challenged by colleagues to find simple solutions to what are really very complicated problems. But Martin confirms for me that simplification, though comforting, impairs integrative thinking and can lead to poor decisions.

By page 91 of this short book, we’re in Martin’s classroom of MBA students at the Rotman School of Management, where he is the Dean, witnessing how he teaches them to think like a Moses Znaimer or Isadore Sharp. The concepts are laid out clearly enough, though without the benefit of the experiences an MBA student participates in, they remain somewhat elusive and abstract.

The Opposable Mind is a gift to those of us who tend to heterodogmatize. Though it has no direct relevance to student affairs or higher education, the book cautions us to be wary of conventionality and cookie-cutter approaches – a healthy reminder in any context.

I eagerly await his address to the CACUSS delegates in June.

– Deanne Fisher

I had a “How can this be?” moment but quickly wrote it off to a range of possible reasonable explanations: a learning disability, nerves, familiarity with the concept but just not the word in written form. He executed his duties smoothly and I applauded his commitment to the issues.

But perhaps I was witnessing part of what author Mark Bauerlein describes as a generational cocoon. “The insulated mindset of individuals who know precious little history and civics and never read a book or visit a museum is fast-becoming a common, shame-free condition,” writes the Emory University English professor in his provocatively titled “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Considering South African apartheid ended when this was student was a toddler, is it possible he had never exposed himself to that piece world history?

Quite possible, according to Bauerlein, whose central claim is that the promise of the information age has failed us. The “peurile banter” of the digital natives — those born and raised with technology at their disposal — has given us an intellectually-stunted generation that eschews books, has a limited vocabulary, and an even more limited attention span.

All well-intentioned student affairs professionals have learned to treat generational literature with caution for three reasons: (1) It is almost always American, (2) it rarely takes into account any racial or cultural diversity or the effects of migration and (3) it doesn’t really help us do our jobs any better. In a profession that tries to value every student for who they are and where they’re at, generalizations too often lead to assumptions.

That said, we also tend to seek out explanations for our daily experiences. And if you’ve ever met a student who doesn’t read books, doesn’t vote, or can’t engage in a conversation with you about anything other than pop culture, you might find your explanation in Bauerlein’s thesis. He digs up scores and scores of studies and evidence to back up his claim that today’s youth, despite more wealth, education and access to information than any generation before, are also the most self-absorbed and disengaged.

As I closed the cover on the last pages of The Dumbest Generation, I thought I’d get a second opinion. I entered the room where my 16-year-old son sat parked, as he is most often, in front of the computer. “Is the internet making you dumber or smarter?” I asked. He stared at me, slack-jawed. “I dunno,” he said. I think I got my answer.

Next up on my reading list, in stark contrast to Bauerlein, Don Tapscott’s brand new book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, which I suspect will offer a much more positive outlook on the promise of the next generation.

– Deanne Fisher

Perhaps I have succumbed to the dark side. At a recent trip to the local bookstore, I found myself lured toward the business section, that mysterious zone beyond the computer manuals. I ventured there thinking I might find something practical about using new media – aka Web 2.0, aka Social Media, aka the LiveWeb – to engage students in the life of the University. (Yes, I am aware of the irony of going to a bookstore to learn about the internet.) What I found was Denise Shiffman’s The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, a book that I have found immensely useful in rethinking how we communicate with students.

For most of my career, I have shunned the M-word. I don’t do marketing. I do communications. I considered marketing the domain of the pushy and crass. I am not “selling” anything. But in the face of widespread disengagement in co-curricular activity among students, I turned in desperation to the world of business to find out how to “sell” the kinds of experiences we know provide meaningful learning opportunities and build lifelong civic participation skills.
What I discovered is that the dark side isn’t so dark at all. The Age of Engage chronicles the transformation of marketing from the “static, flat, corporate-created web” to the “interactive, social and user-created web” and explains why marketing’s new value set includes concepts of transparency, authenticity and voice. Gone are the days when the successful marketer simply pushed a message out, hid the truth and “listened” to customers through surveys and focus groups. Today, successful marketers engage in conversations with customers, involve them in product development, invite and publish feedback – even negative feedback. Sound familiar?

Replace the word “customer” with “student”, the word“company” with “university” and the word “product” with “learning” and The Age of Engage becomes highly transferable. Shiffman gives us a quick overview of all the Live Web tools – web logs, wikis, podcasts, tagging, social networks, etc — and then uses the remainder of the book to talk strategy — from how to rethink your value, to how to create a voice for your organization through vision and story. Lots of examples – from Apple to Wal-Mart – of both successes and failures help give this book credibility.

Since picking up The Age of Engage, I have learned, through a colleague, of another book on this topic: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I probably won’t get to that one for a while so if anyone else out there has read it, please comment.

– Deanne Fisher

Reviewed by Deanne Fisher, University of Toronto

This pithy little publication follows up where the influential Learning Reconsidered and Learning Reconsidered II left off — that is, now that we understand learning, how do we assess how and where it happens? The authors are careful to establish that Assessment Reconsidered is not a how-to manual. So, for those of you who are sold on the importance of assessment and looking for the step-by-step guide to implementing your plan, this book will not meet your needs. However, if you are looking for a thorough, yet succinct, explanation of the fundamentals of assessment in higher education that you can share with colleagues, faculty, and upper levels of your administration, Assessment Reconsidered is ideal.

The book is full of really powerful concepts that sound deceptively simple but, in practice, are really difficult to implement. First and foremost: institutional assessment is about evaluating our effectiveness as educators, rather than the effectiveness of our students in demonstrating what they’ve learned. In other words, it’s about giving us a letter grade, rather than assigning one to the student. For many faculty members, this is a new and different concept. Assessment Reconsidered does a reasonably good job of explaining this and getting us to speak the same language.

The chapter on Rigor in Assessment is particularly helpful. The authors provide a useful and reasonable explanation of how to ensure results are credible and informative and avoid falling into methodology paralysis that can result when we confuse our work with research.

At only 100+ pages, and a cost of $24.95 US ($19.95 for NASPA members), Assessment Reconsidered is probably worth having a few copies around in the office to share with project assessment teams, senior administrators, and as a useful reminder of principles and fundamentals when assessment plans run amok.

Aligning Student and Institutional Views of the College Experience

By Miller, T., Bender, B., Schuh, J., et al.

Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA 2005

– reviewed by David Newman, University of Alberta

In higher education, a growing focus on the quality of the student experience is clearly evident in our institutions. It has been built more strongly into our institutional vision statements in recent years and is often used for purposes of recruitment, alumni support, and community support. However, what happens when the promises contained in such vision statements cannot be realized? How can we determine what types of promises are meaningful to our students? How do institutions balance the potentially contradictory needs that exist between students, external communities, and the institutions themselves?

The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) commissioned the development of Promoting Reasonable Expectations in response to these questions. The book is authored by several contributors, each coming with different institutional perspectives and varied research interests. Although its contents are completely based on research and experiences from the United States, certainly the messages are transferable to a Canadian context. A common thread woven throughout the chapters relates to the empirical data collected through the College Student Expectations Questionnaire (CSXQ) and the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ), which were jointly administered to 43 institutions in the United States. These data were then used to compare student expectations with their experiences. Resulting from the data and other research, discussion topics include, why we should care about expectations, the impact when student experiences vary from expectations, various type of expectations students have (e.g., campus services, cost of higher education, degree attainment, and life after college), how these expectations influence their experiences, the expectations of various stakeholders in the institutions, and the varied expectations depending on institution type.

Promoting Reasonable Expectations will be of particular interest to senior administrators, recruiters, student affairs/services professionals, and any others responsible for attracting, retaining, and investing in the future of our students. One section of the book addresses the need for institutions to be honest about what they promise to students during the recruitment phase to minimize the disconnect between student expectations and experiences. The message in this section, among others, outlines the need for institutions to collaborate to ensure that their vision statements, communication strategies, and capabilities align with each other.

My Freshman Year

What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

By Nathan, R.

Cornell University Press, Ithica, NY 2005

My Freshman Year summarizes the ethnographic study findings of the freshman student experience at one institution. The author, also the investigator, is a professor of anthropology and elected to engage in covert research to gain a better understanding of the experiences of the students she teaches. Pseudonyms for the author, subjects, and the institution are used; however, since publication, the identities of the author and institution have been revealed. Although Nathan engaged in covert research and her identity was hidden, her findings support many experiences that student affairs/services professionals know to be true.

While this book may or may not reveal anything ground breaking in its content to those who work with students regularly, it is a worthwhile resource. The language is very accessible and is written in a narrative format, which also clearly outlines the types of issues that first-year students face. As a result, it provides empirical evidence that support the need for potential programming development in our institutions. Such outcomes, however, may become better supported through advocating that senior administrators understand and potentially read this book. Several topics are outlined, including living in residences, orientation programming, admission processes, classroom experiences, professor expectations, and communication issues. Nathan provides both her experiences as a student and thoughtful reflections or analyses of these experiences.

Nathan also makes a very strong effort to outline the limitations of her study, including the ethical questions related to covert research and the use of pseudonym. Of course, since publication, her anonymity has been revealed, raising these issues provides some credibility to her research as thought was given to these issues. Although there are many worthwhile findings in My Freshman Year, questions about the plausibility of Nathan’s experiences being that of a “typical” freshman student may arise. Did her subjects (peer students) view her as a peer, given their age differences? Was she able to participate in “typical” freshman activities? Was she aware of them? What was her role in student life? Aside from these questions, My Freshman Year should appeal to the same audience as recommended in Promoting Reasonable Expectations above.

– reviews by David Newman, University of Alberta