Response to NAS Statement and SLI

I read the NAS statement last Monday and - almost a week later - I still haven’t managed to re-group sufficiently. If you’ve seen me wandering around campus, muttering to myself, it’s because I’m debating myself about the NAS statement. At first I thought about creating two responses – one, a “rant”, and the other, a more “collected” statement. After several days, I’ve decided that neither is appropriate. 

Where do we begin? Do we start off by confronting the obvious flaws of their arguments? Or do we perhaps question exactly what they think the imperatives that they so vehemently oppose are? It seemed to me they were perhaps judging a different set of imperatives than the SLI actually has and were instead dreaming up some “hidden agenda” that the “imperativists” are trying to indoctrinate college students with. 

SLI ARGUMENT OR POLITICAL ARGUMENT? 

Reading this article really reminded me of the arguments that people to the far, far right of the political spectrum are making regarding healthcare reform – taking statements that are completely false (for example, that the public option has a hidden agenda to kill old people) and using these lies scare the public. They go as far as comparing Obama to Hitler! Is this something that traditional conservatives agree with? No. It is simply a fringe of the far right that is screaming loudly. Now maybe I am naïve, or perhaps I am just optimistic, but I do not want to believe that the NAS statement is something that the vast majority of faculty and scholars actually ascribe to. I think the people wrote this are on the fringe and are, likely, incredibly conservative and afraid that educating the whole student will lead to an army of ACORN-loving liberals. (Don’t even get me started on that one….)

I also do not believe this statement by the NAS was actually written specifically as a rebuttal to the SLI. I think it was a misplaced response to the incident at the University of Delaware. I cannot claim to know exactly what happened there, but it seems to me that this impassioned statement by the NAS is really directed towards that incident, and fear of a politically liberal indoctrination that places student affairs professionals at the target, and are trying to take the SLI and “whole student” education down with them. 

SCOPE OF NAS SENTIMENTS

Between my college education (undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, semester exchange at American University, post-baccalaureate studies at Johnson & Wales, graduate education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa) and my employment at Brown University, I have never seen a display like the NAS statement against the education of the whole student. Yes, many professors think they are “above” student affairs professionals - which I attribute to a combination of social awkwardness, and academic snobbery- but these attitudes are very different from the attitude displayed in the NAS statement. This is one of the reasons I would like to believe the NAS statement represents a fringe minority of faculty. From my experience, faculty members do care about students and student development they just often see student development as the responsibility of student affairs while they see themselves as responsible for academic learning. 

ARGUMENT FLAWS

I’m sure many of you also noticed the flaws I saw in the NAS statement. One, that “Imperativists are not scholars.” I will not elaborate on this as I think most of you will agree that many student affairs professionals do have worthy credentials! Another argument flaw is that the statement seems to imply that faculty need to take back a role that it seems they actually do not want. In reality, faculty have become so focused on research that their primary goal is usually not even teaching, let alone guiding students in their development! Another flaw (from my perspective) is that this statement seems to focus on the academic learning of students, and not on anything else. Hrm. Perhaps they don’t know that psychosocial and moral development enables cognitive development…..(just saying…) 

This is all leading up to what I see as the primary flaw of the NAS statement: The SLI is hostile to liberal education. On the contrary! Liberal education goes hand in hand with whole student development. -Anyone at a liberal arts college could have told them that! 

THE FUTURE? 

I don’t think we can be dreamy about a faculty and student affairs staff holding hands and singing kumbaya around a holistic, transformative learning tree. I do, however, think that it is possible to bridge the gap between faculty and staff for the common goal of educating students. I think that one way of doing this may be to put the SLI and the NAS statement aside and come together to identify problems and solutions. Are our students getting the education they need to succeed? How can we help? This may also be a good place to insert assessment of students and graduates. Faculty, administrators and staff can argue about imperatives, objectives, and goals all they want, but if students indicate they are not receiving the education or services necessary to succeed in life and in their careers, we must come together to find a way to meet the needs of the students (and breathe life into what may be a failing institutional mission). 

CONCLUSION

As I have mentioned at least a couple of times, I think this statement may not actually have been a direct response to the SLI, rather, a minority, fringe, conservative response to what they perceive to be a liberal, left-wing movement that they fear the student affairs profession brings to the table. 

I have identified some of the flaws in arguments set forth in the NAS statement and have identified what I think is the way to combat the problem of “faculty vs. student affairs staff” which is simply to stop the SLI/NAS war. Let’s do some assessment and get together and talk bout what is going on at our own, individual institutions and identify problems and propose solutions together.