BY HARVEY J. GRAFF
We live in a new age of division. Universities are so often centers of differences, contradictions, and clashes between knowledge and ignorance. One revealing site is the false opposition of the faculty and the—to faculty and academic administration—second-class “professionals” in departments of student affairs and student life. Critically, this dichotomy parallels those between “learning and earning,” humanities’ core curriculum and “great books” vs. STEM and business education, curriculum vs. extracurriculum, and on-campus vs. off-campus life.
I challenge recent commentators who exaggerate, misrepresent, and defend their asserted “sides” for reasons that stem from lack of historical knowledge, false oppositions and equivalencies, and overstatement of the superiority and autonomy of faculty. A major recent example is Martha McCaughey and Scott Welsh’s article in Academe, “The Shadow Curriculum of Student Affairs.”
As I considered writing this response, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new report on humanities graduates underscored the issues. Whereas media attention concentrates on the “surprising” finding that the majority of humanities graduates do not regret their choice of majors, the more challenging result is that “close to one-half felt that their undergraduate institution did not prepare them for life and regret their choice of major.” While articles proclaim “Transform teaching and access to tackle crises, universities told,” that cannot be the responsibility of students’ majors and professors, student affairs, or students themselves, each working separately. Today, it is too often left to students alone.
Unlike McCaughey and Welsh, I emphasize integration and interdisciplinarity rather than division, competition, and superiority. I seek intellectual underpinnings for a grounded, civic, and ethical education for a student body that confronts an unpredictable future. I search for new forms of cross-campus collaboration based on identifying and combining the strengths of faculty, student affairs, other non-faculty groups, and the community in order to work cooperatively.
The subordination of student affairs to the disciplinary curriculum and supposedly rightful and historical control of the faculty is inaccurate. McCaughey and Welsh appropriate out of context the notion of a “shadow curriculum.” That notion was developed to study K–12 and especially high schools, and is itself appropriated from notions of “shadow governments” and “shadow court dockets.” They only metaphorically connect it to the variable and uneven efforts of student life programs to expand the social, cultural, and political awareness and preparation of undergraduates. Thus, they ideologically caricature student affairs, which they in turn condemn in contrast to the disciplinary professoriate.
In effect, the resulting argument harms the efforts of all parties, especially students. McCaughey and Welsh express far less interest in students than their privileged view of some but not all faculty. This bears scant resemblance to life on American campuses.
We must leap over these obstructionists to confront the present and contemplate possible futures. Preparation for self-aware, responsible, and participatory life at home, work, the community, and the nation demands historically informed and contextualized civic education, across all disciplines and interdisciplines, from the humanities to the sciences, STEM, and business, at appropriate levels.
Take one compelling topic, the commitment to a nonpartisan education in civics must span and integrate the curriculum and the extracurriculum together, from residential life to responsible (not slogan-based or narrowly vocational) theme houses, general education and disciplinary and interdisciplinary concentrations, in-class and out-of-class, on- and off-campus learning.
One major step lies in faculty and academic administration’s reconsideration of student affairs’ initiatives to which McCaughey and Welsh object. McCaughey and Welsh do not seek to build cooperatively. They only disparage: “A broader problem emerges when the style of intellection [sic] preferred by student affairs begins to compete with the spirit of questioning and inquiry that guides the educational mission of colleges and universities as carried out by the faculty.”
An excellent case in point to which they allude obliquely is the ideologically exaggerated issue of “student free speech,” “discomfort,” and “insecurity.” The lack of reliable evidence; absence of definitions; and disregard for the First Amendment, relevant case law, history of free speech struggles on-campuses, and even outdated campus codes stimulates conflicts and an overflow of contradictions. Here we have a compelling, absolutely necessary opportunity to interconnect formally and informally student affairs programming and advising with faculty in classrooms, office hours, and forums, law schools and other professional schools on campus, and a variety of off-campus, “real world” institutions and environments.
The needs and opportunities are endless, and profound. Students want a genuinely broad and inclusive, integrating education. They want more cross-generational contacts with knowledgeable, responsible professors, advisors, and neighbors. We ignore these imperatives to rethink our “missions” at great present-day and future peril.
Harvey J. Graff is Professor Emeritus of English and History at The Ohio State University and inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies. Author of many books on social history, the history of literacy and education, and interdisciplinarity, he writes about the history and contemporary condition of higher education for Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Academe Blog, Washington Monthly, Publishers Weekly, Against the Current; Columbus Free Press, and newspapers. Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies is published by Palgrave Macmillan this summer.
