Examining the Campus Environment

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Examining the Campus Environment

• Presented by Lori Burns

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The Institutional Mission

• The mission statement should do the following
• Provide guidance to the day-by-day practices
  within the institution
• Provide a statement of the broad long-term
  purpose of the institution (should articulate why
  the institution was created and defines the
  constituencies the institution will serve)
• Guide the academic leadership of the institution
  in determining what educational programs are
  appropriate within the context of the institution

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The Institutional Mission

• The mission statement should do the following
• Provide specific guidance to student affairs
  professionals in developing policies and
  implementing program initiatives
• Provide guidance to students by providing
  information regarding the expectations of the
  institution for students

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Factors Influencing the Mission

• Affiliation
• Characteristics
• History
• Focus
• Governance
• Higher Education System
• Geographic Location

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Affiliation

• Religious affiliation can play a large part of an
  institutions mission
• Earlham, Haverford, and Guilford are distinctive
  for being founded by the Quakers
• Notre Dame, Georgetown, DePaul, Loyola of
  Chicago, and Loyola of New Orleans are shaped by
  their affiliation with the Catholic Church
• These affiliations can influence the life of the
  campus related to governance structures, control,
  behavioral expectations for students, and
  recognition of student organizations

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Characteristics

• Another way to understand an institution is to
  look at the characteristic of the institutions,
  such as
• Residential or commuter
• Degrees offered
• Part-time or Full-time
• Cost of tuition
• Size

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History

• Historical factors that can influence the
  institutional mission
• The intention of the founders
• Creation of state legislature or private group of
  individuals
• The heritage of an institution can be one of the
  building blocks of it mission
• (Lyons, 1993)

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Focus

• Some mission statements are focused with regard
  to whom they serve
• Community Colleges
• serve a bounded demographic community and develop
  programs and activities to meet the needs of the
  communities where theyre located
• Historically Black Colleges
• founded to serve those that were unserved or
  underserved
• Many were and are religiously affiliated and are
  public and private
• Unique mission was challenged by the integration
  of public and private institutions after the
  Civil Rights Act
• Tribal Colleges
• Schools founded primarily for Native Americans
• Currently there are almost 30 tribal colleges

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Governance

• Very nature of an institution is influenced by
  the statutory, constitutional, or charter
  provisions governing the formation of the
  institution
• The corporate governance structure dictates much
  of the day-to-day work of the institution

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Higher Education System

• Institutions of higher education may be connected
  through the development of a university system
• Individual campuses then have less autonomy
• Policies and procedures are administered on a
  system wide basis
• It would be a mistake to assume that all campuses
  in a system are the same and function the same way

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Geographical Location

• Physical location also influences the mission
• The creator of the institutions created it in a
  particular place to meet a particular need
• Population sometimes dictates geographic location
• Location also influences the role and scope of
  student affairs work on campus

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Geographic Location

• Example of influence
• Historically Black institutions are found more in
  the south than the north
• Schools located in rural areas tend to focus more
  studies on agriculture
• Growth of normal schools responded to the need
  for educated persons to serve as teachers in
  communities across the country

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Institutional Governance
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Institutional Distinctions

• Public Institutions
• Independent or Private Institutions
• Size Distinctions

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Public Institutions

• Student affairs staff need to be aware of the
  concerns of the legislature that controls their
  status
• Public institutions in statewide systems usually
  employ someone in the state capitol to keep them
  up to date about legislative and funding
  developments
• Governing boards in public sectors are usually
  quite small
• Legislature determines tuition and fees and
  compensation for faculty and staff

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Independent or Private Institutions

• Governing boards are much larger
• Trustees are usually benefactors
• Governing board has greater control over fiscal
  matters
• Set fees for students
• Control compensation levels for faculty and staff
• Decide parameters for budget decisions

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Size Distinctions

• Larger institutions need representative groups
  for faculty, staff, and students to be effective
  in governance
• Members feel more distanced from the decision
  making process
• At times may not feel comfortable with or agree
  with the decision making process
• Smaller institutions dont always need
  representative groups because the group is often
  small enough to represent itself
• The small the institution the more confident the
  members feel in the decision making process

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Governing Boards

• Purpose
• Selection and Preparation
• Activities and Operations
• Student Life Committee
• Other Board Committees

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Purpose

• Typically the board of trustees
• serve as the final authority on
• Institutional decisions
• Fiscal matters
• Major policy changes or developments
• Insure students rights are protected

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Selection and Preparation

• Selected in different ways depending on
  institutional size or type
• At public institutions
• Appointed by state government process
• Elected
• At private institutions
• Boards are self-selecting and self-perpetuating
• At religious based institutions
• Nominated through process managed by church or
  religious organization

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Selection and Preparation

• Board members
• Come from professional backgrounds
• Business, law, medicine, philanthropy
• Can have little to no knowledge about higher
  education
• Chief student affairs officer create special
  programs to orient board members to the
  institution

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Activities and Operations

• Select and supervise the president of the
  institution
• President is a non-voting member of the board
• Often the president is the only member of
  administration on the board
• The board acts as a collective entity not as a
  collection of individuals
• Working with individual trustees can be
  interpreted as attempting to exert unwarranted
  influence

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Student Life Committee

• Work by boards is often done through committees
• Chief student affairs administrator is usually
  assigned the responsibility of staffing the
  student life committee
• Includes suggesting agenda topics, meeting with
  the president and committee chair about said
  topics, gathering info and materials to make the
  meeting as effective as possible
• Committee is usually commissioned with the
  responsibility of representing student interests
  in the policymaking activities of the board

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Faculty GovernanceRoles and Functions

• Faculty are expected to
• Lead scholarly development in their field
• Provide service to their institutions and
  community
• Be expert in imparting knowledge
• Participate in the governance of the institution
• Direct the process of selection of their peers
• Help direct decision making process for promotion
  and tenure status for each member of faculty
• Typical student affairs staff members have little
  to no role in such matters unless they are also a
  faculty member

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Faculty GovernanceRoles and Functions

• Larger Institutions
• Have faculty senates or councils to represent the
  faculty and their interests
• Typically there is no place for a student affairs
  officials on these boards
• Smaller Institutions
• Often engage the faculty as a whole in governance
  and decision making
• Student affairs staff are sometimes part of the
  process

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Student and Staff Roles

• Student Roles
• Student government used in student programming
  and student representation in decision making
• Students have a voice but due to constant
  turnover they are unable to keep up with
  specifics of many issues
• Many institutions allow a student to attend
  trustee meetings as a representative with no
  voting rights
• Staff Roles
• Many institutions have staff committees or
  councils
• Some use staff reps as observers and commentators
  at trustees meetings

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Understanding Campus Envirtonments
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Importance of Institutional Context on Student
Learning and Development

1. Students benefit more from their college
   experience when their total level of campus
   engagement is mutually supporting and relevant to
   a particular educational outcome.
2. Involvement in the academic and social life of
   the institution enhances student learning
3. Integrated and complementary academic and social
   programs, policies, and practices enhance student
   learning
4. Students who feel they belong and are valued as
   individuals are more likely to take advantage of
   the resources the institutions provides for their
   learning

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Framework for Assessing Influence of Contextual
Conditions

• Substantive Frames
• Take into account physical and psychological
  properties that influence learning
• Size and shape of structures
• Campus use of green space
• Students perceptions of what the institution
  emphasizes and quality of relations among groups
• Interpretive Frames
• Serve as a filter or lens through which to
  analyze and understand how students interactions
  with institutions contextual conditions
  influence behaviors

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Substantive Frames

• There are three sets of institutional properties
  that can influence student learning
• Institutional Mission and Philosophy
• Opportunities, Support, and Rewards
• Faculty and Student Subcultures

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Institutional Mission and Philosophy

• No institutional factor is more influential in
  directing student and faculty behavior that the
  institutions mission and philosophy

Mission May or may not be congruent with how the college describes itself May change intentionally or in response to external environment In smaller schools the mission is usually salient meaning even those not directly tied to the institution know exactly what the institution stands for Philosophy Often not stated in writing Mainly discerned from its acts which represent the institutions values and beliefs as they are enacted by institutional agents or policies, practices, and standard operating procedures
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Opportunities, Support, and Rewards
Opportunities Examples Include Social programming bodies Governance structures Performing arts venues Intercollegiate and intramural athletics Should encourage spontaneous interaction among students and between students and institutional agent consistent with institutions educational purpose Support may take the form of an ethic of care, a belief system that permeates the institution that encourage faculty, staff, and students to reach out to those in need Safety nets made up of faculty and staff are often available to intervene with students encountering difficulty Students learn best when they receive frequent feedback Rewards Many colleges recognize student achievement through convocations and honor society memberships, banquets, deans lists, announcements of scholarship and fellowship recipients, etc.
When these three subsystems are operating at a
satisfactory level they can create powerful
conditions for learning.
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Faculty and Student Subcultures

• It is important to determine if faculty and
  student cultures foster or discourage student
  involvement

Faculty Spend less time with undergraduates outside of the classroom Can be influenced by the size of the institution Face the conflict between research and daily demands of teaching Unspoken agreement between faculty and students seems to be, You leave me alone and Ill leave you alone. Mainly concerned with teaching and research than interacting with students outside of the classroom Students Ones peers exert a nontrivial influence on student learning because they determine the kinds of people with whom one spends time Different student affinity groups develop and perpetuate their own distinctive interaction patterns and norms that influence how their members behave and are to relate to others Most of these groups have set expectations, attitudes, and values that are often incongruent with those of the faculty Concerned with making good grades, friends, taking care of themselves, and managing their time
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Interpretive Frames

• Three perspectives can be used to understand how
  a colleges contextual conditions influence
  student learning
• Ecology
• Climate
• Culture

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Ecology

• Includes institutions size, location,
  facilities, open spaces, and other permanent
  attributes
• The amount, locations, and arrangement of
  physical spaces shape behavior, in that they
  facilitate or inhibit social interaction and the
  development of group cohesiveness
• The proximity of academic buildings to permeable
  socially catalytic spaces can promote or
  discourage interaction between students from
  different majors

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Climates

• Refers to how students, faculty, student affairs
  staff, and other institutional agents perceive
  and experience their institution
• Students perceptions of their institution have a
  nontrivial influence and directly and indirectly
  affect learning and personal development

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Cultures

• The collective, mutually shaping pattern of
  institutional history, mission, physical setting,
  norms, traditions, values, practices, beliefs,
  and assumptions that guide the behavior of
  individuals and groups in college or university
• Collegiate cultures can be made up of holistic,
  complex webs of physical and verbal artifacts,
  enduring behavioral patterns, embedded values and
  beliefs, and ideologies and assumptions that
  represent learned products of group experience
• Typically perpetuated through traditions, major
  campus events, heroic individuals, and language

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Cultures

• Can change over time through a dynamic interplay
  between the institutions structural and cultural
  elements
• Shifting in demographics
• Destruction of facilities or accidents that take
  the lives of administrators or athletic teams
• Presence of people
• Can also change due to the mutual shaping of the
  cultural properties
• Physical attributes of campus
• Established practices
• Symbols and symbolic actions

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References

• Barr, M. J. (2000). The Handbook of Student
  Affairs Administration. San Francisco
  Jossey-Bass.