Reporting Live From the 31st Annual First-Year Experience Conference

John N. Gardner
President

The 31^st Annual First-Year Experience Conference has just concluded, either the largest or second largest in our history—the final tally has yet to be completed. There were nearly 2000 in attendance including 300 representatives from the host state of Texas and from over 600 institutions from nine countries—and this isn’t even marketed as an “international” conference!

The meeting was held in San Antonio, an ideal convention center unless you are a bar owner during the annual meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous which I learned from a taxi driver recently met there. The city’s convention center is the most attractive and comfortable I have ever seen.

In light of the fact that this was my 31^st annual meeting, the only person there for all 31, I found myself asking what is/was different about this one? What is perennial? What are the concerns and issues? What’s new?

From my perspective the most remarkable thing is the given: the FYE movement has become institutionalized. It is now the establishment. It has gone mainstream.

The meeting continues to draw at least half first-timers each year. This is a very healthy indicator. 

The meeting had over 60 for-profit exhibitors, which shows the alliance of shameless commerce with the academy these days. I would not have predicted or wanted this 32 years ago when I conceived the idea for the conference, but it is very apparent that the forces of capitalism have discovered there are many things we either don’t do well enough on our own or that we want to outsource to them. The driver for this, of course, is retention.

When we started what is now a “movement,” we found that the initial champions were our colleagues in Student Affairs. Now, they don’t need to be the champions.  That’s because the academic affairs folks are there, engaged, so much so there is much talk of formerly Student Affairs functions being reorganized into Academic Affairs reporting lines—true testimony to the quality of the job Student Affairs professionals have done in persuading the academy of the importance of their work to the academic success of college students.

For many years in the late 80’s and earlier 90’s, we worked very hard to recruit senior leaders: presidents/chancellors, vice presidents to these meetings. We even used to waive their registration fees if they would just come and bring a team of at least three others. In 2012, only a handful of them were in evidence. I think what this means is that they are already sold; they don’t need to be convinced. They get it.  But I still wish more of them were there.

The conference attendees seemed to me to be evenly divided between three constituencies: academic affairs administrators, student affairs administrators, and faculty. And we had students with us too. I so admire institutions that are willing to invest their precious travel monies to bring students.  I can only conclude that our original goal in 1981 to organize a conference to bring together those constituencies to rally around a common focus—the welfare of beginning college students, is still the dominant cultural characteristic of this meeting.

It was a consensus that this work was more needed than ever given the directions of American society towards ever-increasing levels of social and economic inequality. I was struck though with how few of the attendees seem to understand or realize the origins of the FYE movement being in the social justice movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I did my best to remind the multiple audiences I had of this important heritage and of the fact that the civil rights movement is definitely unfinished.

Many of the attendees still feel undervalued and unappreciated on their campuses because of the low status of new students, and hence those that work with those students. So the most important thing that happens for these attendees is affirmation, which they so deserve.

The FYE movement began as a reaction against the tenets of the academy that were denying dignity and resource commitment to new students. The importance of the first year is now well established and institutionalized at most campuses. Thus, the “revolution” has now become orthodox. As a recovering former historian, I know that the most threatening thing to the vitality of any revolution is for it to become the new orthodoxy. I was pleased to see that there were no evidences that this movement has yet to become staid and complacent.

I left the conference as I have for a number of years now feeling gratified and with the goal to keep coming until my fiftieth when I will be 87.  I hope our country will be more committed to social justice then than it is now. In contrast to my aspiration, just last Friday, February 17, a candidate for President stated very explicitly that he supported economic inequality*. The comment provided great timing to remind me that I have the opposite goal for the future of the FYE conference series. And, I am betting that more of the American people share my vision than this particular candidate’s vision for our collective future.

*:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/santorum-says-his-position-on-auto-bailout-more-consistent-than-romneys/2012/02/16/gIQADeiBIR_blog.html

Happy Birthday FYE

I can’t believe it. On February 17^th, something I started by flying by the seat of my pants back in 1981, with the assistance of one overworked administrative assistant, will become the 31^st offering of the Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience. I understand from my successors at the University of South Carolina that the event will draw over 1800 participants. That is a far cry from the 173 pioneers who joined us for the first one in February 1982.

We chose February originally because I thought holding a trial balloon conference would have a better chance of being viable if we held it dead in the middle of a beautiful South Carolina winter—that would guarantee a good showing of “Yankees” who would come down to see if we wore shoes in the winter.

We held the meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, until 2000 when we felt compelled to honor the NAACP national boycott against South Carolina for flying the Confederate battle flag, literally, at the foot of the steps to enter the South Carolina state Legislature. So since 2000 we have been moving the meeting around major US cities.

I have come to increasingly believe that the real “FYE” is in the highest enrollment, high failure rate courses—and that more than all other areas of possible focus, is where we most need to be directing our attention.

But I will soon see what higher education thinks we should be paying attention to this year.

This event is always like Christmas to me of sorts. So many gifts, from so many fine people—albeit educational gifts but still prized greatly.

A Day with Student Affairs Leader

John N. Gardner
President

Recently I spent a day with about 40 senior student affairs officers of the great City University of New York system. It was a great day for me, surely more so for me than for them. I was reminded of all I don’t know about students and how much professors like me need to spend time with our student affairs colleagues.

The day also recalled for me the beginnings of my own journey of transformation as a faculty member. That began in 1972 when my President at the University of South Carolina invited me and 16 other faculty members to spend 45 hours over three weeks in workshop sessions with 8 student affairs officers. We had come together to design the University 101 course and to transform the beginning university experience: to do that we had to transform ourselves.

Prior to this workshop (when I was 28 years old and had been teaching in the academy for almost 6 years) I had never worked with student affairs professionals. I didn’t know who they were, what they did, how they became a member of their profession. I had gone to a small liberal arts college in the 60’s and that genre didn’t have student affairs professionals then. Thank goodness it does now (and I am in touch with those folks now at my alma mater).

So 40 years later, déjà vu, I got to spend a day with a group of contemporary student affairs officers. Unlike my original period of introduction to them, they aren’t under the radar any longer. They have been discovered and found to be incredibly important to our overall goals of increasing student success. But in that respect, they have also become victims of their own success. Now that they have been discovered many academics like me no longer understand or support the rationale of having student affairs professionals bureaucratically separated from academic affairs folks. Hence all over the country I am seeing these distinctions blur, become ambiguous and realigned, and I welcome this overdo direction because it bodes well for greater concentration on support for the preeminent institutional mission: academic success.

As I listened to these professionals who live and work in one of the most dynamic, high pressure, diverse, adversarial, confrontational cultures in the world, I marveled at how deeply and respectfully they understand their students and advocate for them. I listened to them talking about student conditions involving: courage, shame, struggles, homelessness, hunger, violence, ambition, hopes, dreams, fears, accomplishments and frustrations. I don’t know when I had mentally run such a gamut in such a short period of time. I couldn’t help but think that far more faculty needed to be in that room and in rooms like it. It is not that we don’t know our students. We do. And many of us do engage their lives outside the classrooms. But the academic world has changed. Now the distinction between learning inside and outside the classroom has been reduced to very little difference. We can only arbitrarily separate the two, and to promote student success we must not.

I offered these professional champions for student needs a number of strategies to enhance student affairs/academic affairs collaborations. I believe they are needed more than ever. This is because the overall goal of the student success movement, social justice, is more challenged than ever by the stratification system in America which produces greater and greater inequality rather than equality. What this means is that student success has become harder and harder to achieve. We have to achieve this together.

I hope more of my faculty colleagues will be able to spend time, even a limited amount, in rooms like I found myself in, just listening for insights and inspiration, as our student affairs colleagues talk with us about the students’ worlds as they see this in 2012.

What Would You Like Me to Blog About?

John Gardner
President

I am losing track of time on this but a few years ago, a former staff colleague of mine in our Institute, suggested for the first time that I do a blog. I tried ignoring her at first as in just laughing and saying “Me? You have to be kidding.” But she didn’t give up and finally I consented. OK, so now I have a blog. The challenge of course is to be disciplined about this and to keep at it. Usually, this is no challenge for me as I always have things I am thinking about and feel I can easily share. I have a task master in our Institute who posts my blogs and makes them look better than I would alone, and she keeps nudging me when I don’t have at least one waiting to be posted. Her goal for me is two a week. I don’t always make that.

At this moment I knew I should write something and as I thought about what I should write, the phrase “Well, let’s ask the customer.” came to mind. So I am asking: “What would my readers like me to write about?” I would look forward to hearing from you with suggestions of topics.

This challenge of what to write about reminds me of a technique I learned from a former colleague of mine at the University of South Carolina, Jerry Jewler. Jerry was a distinguished professor of advertising in our school of Journalism. And he directed with me the University 101 course, for six years from 1983-99. One of his strongest passions for what he believed students needed to do in our course was to develop thinking skills. And for Jerry, the best way to do that was to develop writing skills. He saw the teaching of writing as a way of teaching thinking skills. So he made a point of emphasis with our teaching faculty for the course to provide training for people who don’t teach writing to teach writing. And now a quarter of a century later I still believe that this is one of the most important purposes of any first-year course, but especially two: the first-year writing/composition course(s) and first-year seminar.

Jerry’s favorite process for teaching instructors and then ultimately students, was to use the pedagogy of a well known scholar and teacher of writing, Peter Elbow, and in particular, his strategy known as free writing. In our University 101 Teaching Experience Workshops Jerry would use the Elbow pedagogies. First we would just have the instructors practice pure “freewriting” in which they would be asked to write anything they were thinking. This would be a form of “private” writing, not to be shared with anyone in the group.

Then he would move them to “focused” freewriting by giving them a focus or topic to direct freewriting towards. And to get them started on the focused freewriting, he would give them “triggers” or phrases and ask them to write down anything that occurred to them in response to the trigger they had just heard. We believed that we could teach academics from a broad variety of disciplines who weren’t teachers of writing to become teachers of writing to become teachers of thinking.

As I started writing this blog, I already had a topic. The topic was to ask my readers what they would like me to write about. But that reminded me of another topic, of something I believe in, of a special memory and appreciation for a former very close working colleague. And this connects to my current work. I still think that first-year seminars need to be courses to teach students how to think in college, and that writing is a powerful pedagogy to achieve that end. And, yes, Jerry Jewler’s and Peter Elbow’s beliefs and pedagogies can still help at that.

Perhaps my thinking about this was stimulated by recent discussion of so many American school children no longer receiving instruction in cursive writing and all moving towards learning to write on IPads. And I am sure I am influenced by my daily distress in observing what’s happening to writing as practiced now on smart phones, and e-mail too. For any writer, myself included, there are so many powerful connections between our ideas, concerns, what we write, and for whom.

Do let me know if there are topics you want to hear from me about.

Thank you for reading and influencing my thinking, and then writing, I hope…

A Quaker Perspective About Says It All

John Gardner
President

 For the past several weeks living here in western North Carolina, near the South Carolina border, the airwaves have been inundated with the South Carolina Republican Presidential primary attack ads that have perniciously polluted our consciousness. I am so glad I don’t live there any more during such a period. I have been following closely the excellent New York Times coverage of the incredible things these candidates have been saying especially in their predictable race baiting comments about President Obama. I think I have heard and read it all—and not only about playing the tried and true race card, but all the commentary on the 99% vs the 1%.

 But, just when I reached this point of saturation, I was reading my now home town newspaper, a little twice-a-week publication in Brevard, North Carolina, population 6000, The Transylvania Times. This paper is one of the reasons I love living here. It is a vital organ of local democracy. In the January 19, 2012 issue they printed a “guest column” which reported on a motion taken at the monthly Brevard Friends meeting of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I am constantly looking for and devouring writing that is better than my own and the following motion certainly fits in that category. I share it with you for hopefully your appreciation and concurrence with the views expressed:

 “We have listened to the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement with a growing sense of appreciation for its seeking to “speak truth into power,” a long-time Quaker tradition. We agree that our current economic system is unsustainable, undemocratic, and unjust, and that the world’s resources must go towards caring for all the people of the planet we all share, not just the privileged few. We are grateful for the movement’s efforts to bring these issues to national and world attention. We are impressed that there is a desire for consensus building among the many participants, and that most of them are striving to do so in a non-violent manner, in the traditions of Jesus, Gandhi, King, and our own Quaker testimonies.

 Further, we want to acknowledge that most of the participants are of the younger generation, and that it is in the youth of our nation that the fires of idealism and reform often burn the brightest, while we who are older often are willing to settle for the status quo. We thank them for their insights, their passions, and for their belief that together we can build a more just and equitable world.

 We see the aims of Occupy Wall Street as being similar to the mission of our Friends Committee on National Legislation (fcnl.org).

We seek a world free of war and the threat of war.
We seek a society with equity and justice for all.
We seek a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled.
We seek an earth restored.”

Thinking of Martin Luther King 2012

John N. Gardner
President 

I don’t really need an MLK Day to make me think of Dr. King. I think of him frequently for the impact he had on my own consciousness and life. I think of him in the 2012 national presidential election cycle especially in terms of the unfinished civil rights movement, and the fact that there surely would be no President Barack Obama were it not for the ultimate sacrifice of Martin Luther King.

In the summer of 1963, when King delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech on the Washington Mall, I had just finished my sophomore year in college. I didn’t know that a few months later my Presidential hero, John Kennedy, was going to be murdered. That August though, I had a summer job in Hillside, New Jersey, as a steelworker, laboring in a factory making millions of beer cans, and not a drop to drink — real torture for a red-blooded American college kid like me. On the day he made that speech, I was driving on the Garden State Parkway. I had my car radio on, and I listened to the news coverage of the demonstration and speech. As he started to speak, I knew that I was never going to hear another live speech like this again. I just couldn’t believe my ears. His words and spirit touched me like no speaker I had ever heard. I rapidly became enthralled and so for my own safety I pulled over to the shoulder, shut my engine off, and took in the speech in wonderment. I hadn’t yet begun to conceptualize that I would ever earn my own living as a public speaker, and even if I had, I would not have imagined ever being able to speak like that. And, of course, I can’t. However, he inspires me to this day.

Just five relatively short years later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts adopted, and the Civil Rights movement in full swing, along with the war in Vietnam, I had been drafted and then volunteered to go on active duty. I was stationed at a US Air Force base in South Carolina (as a psychiatric social worker) in April of 196\8 when Dr. King was murdered. I was scheduled to teach a class in Sociology 101 the next night in my capacity as an adjunct instructor at USC Lancaster, and I just couldn’t imagine sticking with my original game plan for that class. So, I went to the base library and checked out several of Dr. King’s works, and used the following class for an extended eulogy and exploration of his life and its significance. My eulogy consisted largely of readings I did for the students who sat there looking –some of them—shocked, others embarrassed and avoiding eye contact with me. The next week when I returned to teach that class the campus Dean met me before class to inform me that a “delegation” of students had come to see him to complain about my previous class describing me as a “N…… Lover.” I couldn’t and didn’t deny it.

Fast forward, here I am, 44 years later. As I look at my own continuing work to help colleges and universities improve first-year and transfer student success, more than anything else, I see my work as part of the continuing, unfinished, civil rights movement. This has been powerfully confirmed for me in the past few months as more and more attention has been called, rightfully so, to the institutionalization of inequality in the US. Now, once again, the whole country is talking about inequality, the 99% vs. the 1%, the myth of American upward social mobility, compounded by our myth that we are a classless society with equal opportunity for all.

I know my work was needed when I was just one, lone, classroom adjunct college instructor in a small, rural, southern, textile mill town. I am far from that now in terms of my own stature but my work is needed just as much given what we know to be the powerful inequities that remain in our society that can only be corrected by education as the primary means of upward social mobility.

There are so many examples of one person making a difference. Dr. King is about as good an example as I can think of. He inspired me then. He inspires me now 

As an exercise for any of my readers who work with college students, ask them who inspires them, and think long and hard about what they tell you. This year, on the anniversary of Dr. King’s murder, would be a great time for such a discussion.

“Feeling Overwhelmed” as Subtext for “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind”

John Gardner
President

I was recently in communication with a colleague who is a candidate for a senior leadership position. One of the many issues that colleagues on this particular campus are dealing with is their pervasive sense of “feeling overwhelmed.” My colleague asked me how I would respond to this. Of course I know this is very real. In a period of economic recession when millions of workers feel their only reward in an employment setting is simply keeping their jobs, with no raises, with high pressure demands for increased productivity, with an ever increasing array of technological devices impinging on every second of our formerly free consciousness, it is no wonder that people feel overwhelmed. I am reminded of what my favorite American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the late 1840’s: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

So what did I tell my friend when it was asked of me how would I respond to the question of addressing subordinates legitimate concerns of feeling overwhelmed? This was my reply:

I would want you to know that I hear this at virtually every place I visit or interact with. It is a sign of the larger culture. But I think it also masks—is a smokescreen—a metaphor for a larger set of feelings that go like this:

•  We are given too much busy work to do
• We are constantly being asked to do things for which there are no discernible results and/or we are not listened to and/or the project we were working on gets ignored by the decision makers and/or there are no rewards for me personally
• The economy is so bad, there are no raises, there are no rewards for merit so why should I knock myself out

I find that there is less of this sentiment where:

• Leaders convince people their work matters
• Leaders persuade people they are being listened to
• Leaders act on the input they get from work groups and projects
• Leaders find ways to recognize and affirm people
• Leaders find ways to reward merit
• Leaders find other ways to improve morale

When people feel more satisfied and fulfilled in their work they are more willing to take on additional duties for the good of the cause. That’s your challenge: to create an overall culture of improved morale.

People always find time to do what matters most to them. They want to work very hard at things they care most about. The key is for leaders to find ways to make those alignments.

Bottom line: I don’t think it is demands for more work and more and harder work. Those are not the real issues. People would willingly do those things if other things were going right for them in the work environment. So it’s those “other things” you have got to address.

A Guiding Framework

John Gardner
President 

Long ago I learned in my own liberal arts education that the questions are often more important than the answers. My day to day work at this point in my career is guiding colleges and universities through a set of questions that my non-profit organization calls “performance indicators”. These are  specifically targeted questions to deduce the institution’s current level of performance vis a vis a set of aspirational standards for excellence in the beginning college experience. The overall guiding questions are: what is excellence in the beginning college experience? And what would your institution have to do to be performing at a level of excellence (as opposed say to a somewhat dumbed down question like what you you have to do to simply retain students).

Why would institutions pursue such questions? To create an action plan to improve the beginning college experience—and then to implement that plan. Most institutions don’t have such a plan. That’s because they simply develop “programs” and don’t take the time to ask the right questions.

I trust you get this point after this introduction: I like “guiding questions”. And in that vein, this weekend there was an article in the Sunday New York Times (January 1, 2012) business section entitled “Even a Giant Can Learn to Run.”The article was about the “relentless progress” of IBM over the past decade and focused especially on the leadership of the outgoing IBM President, Samuel J. Palmisano.

The article described four questions which comprise the President’s “guiding framework”:

• Why would someone spend their money with you?
• Why would somebody work for you?
• Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography—their country?
• And why would somebody invest their money with you?

Let’s quickly revise these questions to any campus situation at the unit or institutional level.

• Why would (should) a student, his/her family/government spend their money with you?
• Assuming a properly credentialed and experience higher educator had the option of asking: why would he/she want to work for you? What is so special about working for you? How are you going to develop this employee and invest in him/her?
• Why would the marketplace, your state system or whatever system your institution may be a member of, allow you to operate in the first place? What value added do you bring? How is society somehow better off because you exist as a unit or institution?
• And why would a donor, alum, foundation invest in you? What potential do you have to move to the next level? What might be the return on investment? How could you reward the intrinsic satisfaction of the investor?

I have long believed that great leaders, at all levels, have a “guiding framework”, and the same with great colleges and universities.

I think the beginning of a new year is a great time to start out deciding or reaffirming what are your guiding questions. These are far more likely to pay off than nebulous “resolutions”.

So what are your guiding questions?

Next week is my 45^th anniversary of being a member of the higher education profession and surely I will write a blog about that. This reminds me of how I got started asking guiding questions and how far they have taken me.