The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration

By George S. McClellan and Judy Marquez Kiyama

The foremost scholars in student affairs discuss issues facing the field today, approaches to those issues, and skills necessary to enact the approaches

Professionals in student affairs administration need practical, timely, and applied information on the myriad issues they encounter in supporting the success of the students and the institutions they serve. In the Handbook of Student Affairs Administration, the top scholars in the field share the latest information, methods, and advice on addressing these issues. The book is sponsored by NASPA, the leading professional organization for student affairs in higher education.

This fifth edition has been updated to reflect current and effective techniques in student affairs administration including new chapters on anti-oppressive frameworks and equity in praxis, access for students with disabilities, men and masculinities, support for students’ mental health and well-being, and student employment as learning-integrated work. There is also an emphasis throughout on adult learners, online learners, part-time students, and transfer students. Chapter authors of diverse gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, experiential background, and type of institution offer broader perspectives.

• Learn about the dominant organization and administration models in student affairs
• Stay up to date on core competencies and professional development models
• Discover research-based strategies for addressing both emerging and lasting issues in student affairs
• Instructor resources available

The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration is a comprehensive and thoughtful resource, with expert insight on the issues facing student affairs. This is one handbook students and professionals in the field won’t want to go without.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781119695998

Book preview

PART ONE

CONTEXTS OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

The evolution of student affairs professional practice is situated within a historical context of higher education and informed by the current moment and our planning for the future. In fact, we close this edited volume by reflecting on student affairs in the moment and the future. Our time as student affairs practitioners is informed by sociopolitical, sociocultural, environmental, political, and national contexts. This first section is dedicated to understanding these contexts within institutional histories, current moments, and planning for the future.

Chapter 1 begins with Michael Hevel and Amy Wells Dolan reviewing the practice of the earliest student affairs professionals, including the origins and evolutions of student affairs professional associations. They demonstrate how the field has expanded, informed by policy, changes in the collegiate environment, and growing diversity of student populations. They thread throughout the institutional commitment to students. In Chapter 2, Claire Robbins and Sharrika Adams describe the ways in which colleges and universities are classified, focusing on how institutional missions inform student affairs practice. They conclude with exploring the relationship between institutional mission and professional mobility. In Chapter 3, Jillian Kinzie demonstrates the ways in which the collegiate environment is unique by reviewing environmental theories within higher education. She reviews the environmental conditions that promote student learning and success and the ways in which the environment can be assessed and optimized. Chapter 4 offers a unique and personal account of how two institutional leaders, Lori White and Sarah Steinkamp, trace their professional paths into their current positions—from the perspective of the office of the president. In sharing their journeys, this chapter is a testament to the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and lessons that are important when serving our students and institutions. This section closes with Chapter 5, written by Sherry Mallory, who discusses accountability within a student affairs context and why it matters. This chapter offers specific implications for student affairs practice including the ways in which student affairs professionals can support institutional accreditation and accountability efforts.

CHAPTER ONE

A CONCISE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF STUDENT AFFAIRS

Michael S. Hevel and Amy E. Wells Dolan

Concerns about student life and welfare were at the center of the first crisis in higher education in what would become the United States. In 1639, after Harvard College had been opened less than a year, the institution's leader Nathaniel Eaton found himself before several colonial magistrates in a crowded courtroom. Eaton was forced to respond to complaints from students—all of whom were young White men—about harsh discipline, poor living conditions, and their perception that a Black slave who worked for the institution was treated better than them (Morison 1935). Eaton took responsibility for the punishments, but he directed the criticisms about the rest to his wife. She apologized for serving students fish with their guts still in them, pudding that included goat feces, and better food and drink to the slave than to the students. The magistrates fired Eaton.

This early episode reveals important insights into the history of higher education and student affairs. Political leaders and parents have long been concerned about college students’ experiences—especially regarding students with privileged economic, gender, and racial identities. Despite a long history of being denied access to attend colleges and universities, women and racially minoritized people have performed essential—if not always paid—labor. Moreover, college leaders who have not addressed student concerns have long faced public scrutiny and dismissal. Finally, many of the responsibilities that today fall under the purview of student affairs such as discipline and housing existed long before the establishment of the field.

Student affairs emerged as a distinct feature of higher education in the United States over 250 years after this first episode at Harvard. Student affairs can be viewed as an educational reform designed to meet both the needs of and supervise growing numbers of college students while the traditional roles of presidents and faculty changed. Over the course of the ensuing decades, the profession would evolve to become an essential feature of U.S. higher education that strove to meet the changing needs and expectations of college students while advancing institutional priorities. Federal legislation often contributed to national trends that influenced the field. Over the years, many of these laws and U.S. higher education itself reinforced existing privilege while simultaneously improving the social and economic mobility of students with minoritized identities; student affairs contributed to these conflicting trends.

Today, we can use a critical history—not one that is explicitly guided by critical theory but that nonetheless explores both successes and failures and which incorporates minoritized experiences—of the field to become better professionals (e.g., Kimball and Ryder 2014). This chapter begins by focusing on the first student affairs administrators, their responsibilities, and their efforts to establish a profession out of the legacy of the colonial college and in the aftermath of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. Our narrative covers the work of the earliest practitioners, the advent and evolution of professional associations and the student personnel movement, as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the Student Personnel Point of View (SPPV). We turn next to the expansion of the field after the GI Bill when subsequent generations of professionals created an expansive and complex administrative enterprise that would serve an increasingly large and diverse college student population. We later highlight the shifts in the collegiate environment after the 1960s that required student affairs professionals to develop skills in crisis management, conflict resolution, student advocacy, and, later, retention and learning outcomes assessment, that characterize institutional priorities and set the tone for contemporary practitioners and professional associations.

Earlier generations of administrators’ many accomplishments coincided with failures to live up to the profession's ideals. We include their accomplishments in our history to motivate us to leave similar legacies of improving students’ experiences and learning. We acknowledge their shortcomings to encourage us to address enduring inequities and do better in our own time.

Establishing a Professional Foundation, 1890–1939

Two-thirds of the history of higher education in the United States passed without the presence of formally designated student affairs administrators. Until several decades after the U.S. Civil War, presidents focused on educating students and running the institution, and faculty were generalists rather than specialists (Thelin 2019). Together, they prioritized students’ intellectual and moral development with an overarching goal of producing educated social and political leaders under the aegis of Protestant Christianity. The relatively few students who enrolled were usually young White men from wealthier families, and they learned a classical curriculum that focused on a mastery of Greek and Latin. For over two centuries, college men learned a limited curriculum and experienced a long list of campus rules, regimented schedules, and required chapel attendance (Horowitz 1987).

Despite the absence of student affairs administrators in early higher education, the responsibilities and challenges they would later face have a long history. Colleges dealt with how to house students from the start. In the colonial era, Harvard and William and Mary's leaders raised funds from wealthy donors in Great Britain who were interested in the education and religious conversion of Native Americans (Wright 1988). The institutions used the funds to build large campus buildings purportedly for Native Americans but that mostly housed White sons of the colonial elite, in part because the colonists were always more interested in educating young White men and in part because Native Americans resisted Christianity and viewed the education as ineffective. After several promising Native American young men became susceptible to the diseases, alcoholism, and laziness common among some White college men, Native American leaders politely suggested that colonial officials might want to send young Englishmen to the tribes for a truly beneficial education in leadership (Thelin 2019, p. 30).

Early college leaders operated a discipline system under the common law doctrine of in loco parentis. In direct translation, it meant that they served in the place of parents while students were on campus. In practice, it meant that college leaders could impose any rule and any punishment for any reason (Melear 2003). Tutors, often studious and serious recent graduates who remained on campus to prepare for the ministry, served on the front lines of administering this strict discipline system (e.g., Wertenbaker 1946/1996). Tutors provided much of the teaching and lived and ate with the students. While presidents and faculty usually determined punishments, tutors were expected to report any violations of campus rules. This role often made them unpopular with students. The contradiction of expecting the youngest employees to both build camaraderie with students and report their disciplinary infractions would remain a feature of U.S. higher education for centuries to come.

Around 1800, college men increasingly protested and sometimes rioted against this rigid discipline system (Novak 1977). College presidents and faculty suppressed most outbreaks, but students won in the long run with relaxed enforcement if not always fewer rules. With more freedom, White college men began creating student organizations, including literary societies and fraternities, and athletic contests in the first half of the nineteenth century. As White women and Black Americans began attending college in larger numbers later that century, they engaged in similar activities and added new ones, including student government, to establish what today we call student life or the cocurriculum (Wells Dolan and Kaiser 2015). College leaders continued to enjoy wide latitude in terms of campus discipline for another century, though after the Civil War the courts sometimes intervened in admissions and expulsions (Gelber 2014). College women and racially minoritized students faced stricter rules and harsher punishments, not to mention a more limited student life, than White college men.

Changes in the roles of presidents and faculty and growing enrollments led to the creation of student affairs in the late nineteenth century. As institutions grew, presidents faced a larger workload that increasingly focused on external rather than internal concerns (Thelin 2019). Many presidents needed someone to supervise students and enforce campus discipline. Their longstanding partners in this effort, the faculty, also had less time to monitor and mentor students outside of the classroom. After the Civil War, faculty members, who had started to earn graduate degrees at universities in Germany, became focused on specific disciplines, conducting research, and establishing expertise (Thelin 2019). Presidents and faculty members’ reduced supervision of students proved troubling to the public. As coeducation spread and more White women enrolled, many people believed that the presence of men and women students on the same campus called for additional—not relaxed—oversight (Horowitz 1987).

Morrill Acts

Congress accelerated changes in higher education with the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which sold federal lands to endow colleges and universities controlled by the states. These land-grant institutions offered applied fields such as engineering and agriculture alongside the traditional arts and sciences. They also enrolled growing numbers of White middle-class students (Sorber 2018). Most institutions, especially in the Midwest and West, were coeducational, but women students experienced sexism in both academics and student life (Radke-Moss 2008). The second Morrill Act required states that did not admit Black students to their land-grant institution to establish a separate institution. This expanded access to higher education for Blacks, but the law provided federal legitimacy to racial discrimination by funding new institutions rather than requiring existing institutions to desegregate (Thelin 2019). That the first Morrill Act used funds from the sale of lands taken by force and coercion of Native Americans provided another troubling legacy of the law that, for generations, would be remembered mostly for its democratic rather than its discriminating effects (Nash 2019).

Earliest Practitioners

To deal with the increased complexity of higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutional leaders began creating positions responsible for students outside of the classroom. Those individuals who were first hired into three newly formed administrative positions—deans of women, deans of men, and student personnel workers—deserve significant credit for establishing the philosophical and professional foundation for student affairs.

Presidents of coeducational institutions, all of whom were men, hired deans of women because they considered themselves unqualified to and perhaps uninterested in guiding the education of women students. They also wanted to deter inappropriate relationships among the women and men. Marion Talbot was the most influential of the early deans of women. She arrived at the newly established University of Chicago in 1892 as an assistant professor and an assistant to its first dean of women, Alice Freeman Palmer (Nidiffer 2000). Palmer had already risen through the ranks of academic leadership, serving as the president of Wellesley College in the 1880s. Talbot assumed the deanship after Palmer's resignation in 1895.

The dean of women position spread quickly. In 1911, a survey of 55 institutions revealed 44 employed a dean of women (Miller and Pruitt-Logan 2012). Limited budgets at even the most prestigious historically Black college and universities (HBCUs) forestalled the position's existence at HBCUs until the president of Howard University hired Lucy Diggs Slowe in 1922 (Perkins 1996). Deans of women either had a bachelor's degree or graduate training in an academic discipline (Sartorius 2022). In fact, as graduate programs at research universities accepted women before men's colleges and coeducational institutions regularly hired them as faculty members, the dean of women position became an entry point to employment at colleges and universities for women with graduate degrees. Deans of women often held a faculty appointment alongside their administrative role. While many came to treasure their roles, some deans of women believed that their administrative responsibilities stymied promising research agendas (Kerber 1997, Chapter 8). Collectively, the early deans of women proved successful in meeting the expectations of their presidents and the needs of women students (Bashaw 1999; Nidiffer 2000).

To a large extent, the success of the deans of women led to the creation of deans of men. All-male Harvard created a deanship position focused on students (a position held most famously be LeBaron Russell Briggs for several decades) around the same time as the first deans of women on coeducational campuses. Deans of men arrived on campus in full force nearly two decades after the first deans of women (Schwartz 2010). Presidents usually appointed long-serving faculty members with administrative abilities and good relationships with students as deans of men. If Thomas Arkle Clarke was not the first dean of men upon his appointment to the role at the University of Illinois in 1909, he soon became one of the most prominent.

The responsibilities of deans of women and deans of men expanded over time. The early deans focused much of their work on housing and discipline. The deans inspected the numerous boarding houses surrounding campus—sometimes visiting more than 1,000 homes a year—and they advocated for the construction of residence halls on campus (Bashaw 1999; Schwartz 2010). Many deans struggled to balance their disciplinary responsibilities with a strong desire to mentor students. Deans of women worried that aggressive surveillance and discipline sent the wrong message about the character of college women (Kerber 1997; Miller and Pruitt-Logan 2012). Deans of men often used their personalities to correct misbehavior. For example, Briggs's obituary noted that when he was forced to admonish a student he did it in such an engaging way that the sinner felt positively cheered (Dr. Briggs 1934, p. 21). Many students came to believe that deans of women and deans of men had extensive networks of informants. This situation may have worked to the deans’ advantage by improving student behavior, but it also contributed to negative perceptions of deans by some students and negative portrayals in popular culture (Nidiffer 2000; Hevel 2017a). Depictions of student affairs professionals as overzealous disciplinarians in films, novels, and television shows would persist over the years.

Expansion of Roles

By the 1900s and 1910s, in addition to housing and discipline responsibilities, a typical dean of women might supervise several staff members responsible for advising student government, monitoring grades, keeping health records, awarding scholarships, and providing campus jobs (Hevel 2016; Sartorius 2022). Deans of women also tried to minimize sexism against college women, working to ensure their equal treatment in the classroom and encourage their pursuit of professional careers. With more male students on campus, deans of men often had a larger staff and similar responsibilities (Schwartz 2010).

Enrollment in the 1920s doubled to exceed 1 million annually and led to new programs that would eventually be organized within student affairs (Loss 2014). This growth coincided with a retention issue where almost one-third of freshmen dropped out of college (Loss 2014). Students complained that these enlarged campuses were impersonal and faculty were more interested in research than teaching. In response, institutions started new student orientation programs and started providing funding and oversight to student organizations. Media coverage of student deaths by suicide in the late 1920s led to the establishment of mental health services on campus, though these services and the newspaper coverage were concentrated on the most prestigious predominately White campuses (Loss 2014). By the time he retired in 1931 from the University of Illinois, Thomas Arkle Clarke had built an administrative empire that employed 40 student workers, tracked student attendance, mentored international students, and supervised over 90 fraternity chapters (Schwartz 2010, p. 118). Deans of women's and deans of men's overarching goal was to make the cocurriculum advance rather than hinder institutional initiatives (Horowitz 1987).

Initial Efforts to Professionalize

Deans of women led the efforts of turning a hodgepodge portfolio of campus responsibilities into a profession. Marion Talbot organized the first conference and organization for deans of women in the early 1900s. In determining membership eligibility, the format and focus of the meetings, and the purposes for gathering, deans of women considered issues that would persist among student affairs organizations (Gerda 2006). In 1922, this smaller group was absorbed into the larger and newer National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), which was founded in 1916 and would eventually become the National Association for Women in Higher Education (NAWE). In the 1910s, deans of women began attending summer school at Teachers College, Columbia University, where the first graduate courses designed for the field were offered (Hevel 2016). A dean of women wrote the first book in the field in 1915, and the NADW created the first research journal in 1938.

Deans of men moved slower to professionalize. The first deans of men conference occurred in 1919 (Schwartz 2010). A year later, this group established the National Association of Deans of Men (NADM), the precursor to today's NASPA. Deans of men offered advice through newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, and books, but they often based it on intuition rather than research. Deans of men initially resisted graduate training, emphasizing personality and preferring apprenticeship to prepare subsequent generations of administrators.

As the deans of women and deans of men met and pursued affiliation around their roles and responsibilities, other professional associations took shape, including those that centered around campus responsibilities and institutional types. For example, the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) began in 1914 and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) took shape in 1920. Inside these nascent associations, shared concerns united participants and new interest groups splintered off or merged. This would be the case for the Association for Christians in Student Development (ACSD), which began in 1955 from the efforts of two Christian deans of women who helped found the Christian Association Deans of Women (CADW) and later joined with the Association of Christian Deans and Advisors of Men (ACDAM). All told, these associations and their members gave impetus to an emergent movement and the larger history of student affairs.

Student Personnel Movement

Upon his appointment as president of Northwestern University in 1920, Walter Dill Scott implemented an educational practice that would become known as the student personnel movement (Biddix and Schwartz 2012). After graduating from Northwestern in 1895, Scott traveled to Germany and earned a doctorate in psychology and educational administration five years later. Scott spent most of the next 20 years on the Northwestern faculty, except for several leaves to apply his expertise in psychology to business and government. Scott developed management methods that aimed to maximize employee efficiency and satisfaction through extensive psychological testing.

At its core, student personnel applied these methods to college students by using psychological tests and detailed recordkeeping to plan students’ experiences in preparation for their ideal career. Student personnel workers interviewed and administered tests to incoming students. These interviews, test results, and subsequent meetings were tracked on an appointment card kept for each student. If the approach appeared more detached and remote from that of deans of women and deans of men, its goal was the opposite. Personnel officers wanted to help a large university operate like a smaller one in its individualized treatment of students (Schwartz and Stewart 2017, p. 26).

The emphasis of student personnel work on future careers led to the establishment of the National Association of Appointment Secretaries (NAAS) in 1924, which eventually evolved into today's ACPA. Yet Scott's dismissal of the dean of women and dean of men to establish the personnel program revealed that student affairs roles could be vulnerable to fads in American higher education and changing prerogatives of presidents.

Student Personnel Point of View and the Whole Student. Scott hired Esther Lloyd-Jones to implement the personnel program for women students at Northwestern. After several years of success, she decamped for a lengthy career on the faculty at Teachers College where she provided leadership in writing the field's most influential philosophical statement. In 1936, the newly created American Council on Education (ACE) formed a committee to consider college students and the student personnel movement. Out of a committee of influential educators, Esther Lloyd-Jones partnered with W.H. Cowley, a professor who led student personnel work at Ohio State University, to compile the committee's conclusions in The Student Personnel Point of View (ACE 1937; Rhatigan 2009). To a large extent, the SPPV reflected themes in Lloyd-Jones's earlier writing about the student personnel movement, namely maximizing the potential of college students (Certis 2014). The SPPV emphasized that colleges and universities must promote personal as well as intellectual development:

This philosophy imposes upon educational institutions the obligation to consider the student as a whole—his intellectual capacity and achievement, his emotional make up, his physical condition, his social relationships, his vocational aptitudes and skills, his moral and religious values, his economic resources, his aesthetic appreciations. (ACE 1937, p. 1)

Concern for the whole student emerged from the SPPV to become the most common and succinct philosophy of student affairs professionals in the decades to come.

Early Shortcomings

As the male pronouns used to describe all students in the SPPV suggest, what earlier generations of student affairs professionals considered the whole student could fall far short of the values of future generations. As deans of women worked hard to mitigate some aspects of sexism, they reinforced others by enforcing campus rules that held women students to stricter standards, discrimination that lasted into the 1960s and 1970s (Cain and Dier 2020; Sartorius 2014). White deans of women and deans of men did little to improve the climate for racially marginalized students on campus, Black students were discouraged from attending predominately White institutions, and those who did were prevented from living on campus (Klink 2014; Schwartz 2010).

They did not treat their Black student affairs colleagues better. White deans of women and deans of men held conferences in segregated hotels that made attendance for Black administrators impossible or humiliating into the 1940s, and they did not appoint Black administrators to leadership positions (Eisenmann 2006). In response, Black deans of women and deans of men established their own professional organizations, the National Association of Deans of Women Advisors of Girls in Colored Schools (DOWA) in 1929 and the National Association of Personnel Deans of Men in Negro Educational Institutions (DOMA) in 1935 (Dungy and Gordon 2011).

For a majority of the twentieth century, deans of women and deans of men expelled students who they knew or suspected were LBGTQ (Dilley 2002; Sartorius 2014). The reason for the expulsion was stamped on transcripts, and deans at other institutions rarely admitted such students. This practice prevented students from graduating, had a detrimental effect on their future careers, and led some to die by suicide (e.g., Wright 2005). As colleges and universities became increasingly diverse in later decades, this gave future generations in student affairs new opportunities to live up to their profession's philosophy to support the whole identity of every student.

Professional Growing Pains, 1940–1969

Even as student affairs leaders formalized the field's functions and philosophy in the SPPV, the 1930s would become better known for economic struggles and student activism. College presidents cut the budgets of deans of women, deans of men, and student personnel workers during the Great Depression (Fenske 1980). College student activism also swelled and resulted in a national anti-war movement. Upwards of half of all college students pledged to not support future wars, creating friction on campus between liberal activists and conservative fraternity and Reserved Officer Training Corps members (Cohen 1993). The popularity of the peace pledge proved short lived given the resounding support for World War II among recent college graduates and, indeed, most Americans in the 1940s. War mobilization greatly affected college and universities, as many men and some women students joined the armed services and campuses provided space for military training.

G.I. Bill and Enrollment Growth

Congress tried to avoid the previous decade's economic catastrophe by planning for a post-war era. Their efforts culminated with the passage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, which included funds for veterans to pursue higher education. The G.I. Bill, as the law became known, contributed to swelling enrollments on campus as 2.5 million veterans used its higher education benefit, contributing to a public perception that higher education was accessible to the average citizen in ways reminiscent of the Morrill Act. But also like that earlier law, the truth was more complicated. Later analysis showed 80% of its beneficiaries would have gone to college anyway, suggesting that the law provided a government subsidy for many who could already afford higher education (Serow 2004). It did help Black veterans earn college degrees, but institutions could accept the benefits for White veterans while simultaneously denying admission to Blacks. Many more women worked in the war economy than served in the armed forces, but only women veterans received G.I. Bill benefits. LGBTQ veterans discharged for their sexual orientation were denied benefits. At the same time, the presence of students with disabilities increased as injured veterans enrolled in college. Their advocacy helped establish disability services as a functional area within student affairs (Brown 2008).

The enrollment surge following World War II helped prepare campuses for the later influx of students from the baby boom generation in the 1960s and 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of the veterans’ arrival, administrators struggled to enforce discipline codes designed for recent high school graduates rather than adults who had experienced war. Climbing enrollments coupled with strong state appropriations contributed to higher education leaders’ lack of concern about retention and graduation (Nuss 2003).

Colleges were unprepared for this boom, and they were forced to emphasize efficiency. Students, especially at growing state universities, might enroll in classes at tables set up in a campus gymnasium after waiting in line for hours (Thelin 2018). Institutions borrowed funds from the federal government to build large residence halls and dining facilities. These efficient buildings caused few complaints among early occupants who were not far removed from the Great Depression or military barracks, but they rarely added aesthetic value to the campus and had few amenities and less privacy that subsequent generations of students expected. Institutions hired student affairs professionals to help students navigate off-campus housing and maintain positive town-gown relationships, but only a few staff members helped an increasingly large numbers of students (Rousmaniere 2021). Functional areas such as career services and counseling continued to serve students, but their staffs did not grow in proportion to enrollments (Thelin 2018).

The field and its workers often earned the moniker student services—a label that suggested greater distance from the academic enterprise than earlier generations of student affairs professionals—and individual students could receive little attention during their college years (Sartorius 2022; Thelin 2018). Deans of women and deans of men often worked closely with most popular students, including fraternity and sorority members, to plan events and encourage adherence to campus rules (Horowitz 1987). Student affairs deans at HBCUs enjoyed fewer resources to advance their work, but nonetheless strove to operate efficient and effective programs by the 1950s (Herdlein et al. 2008).

Expansion of Professionalization Efforts

To account for the growing complexity of higher education by the mid-twentieth century, student affairs administrators had established many professional groups that served individual functional areas, including academic advising, admissions, counseling, health services, housing, orientation, registrar, student activities, student conduct, and student unions (Dungy and Gordon 2011). In 1954, the two leading professional organizations for Black student affairs administrators formed a new group. This organization evolved into the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals (NASAP) that continues to primarily serve student affairs professionals at HBCUs today. New regional and state organizations tackled local concerns and provided professional development without the expense of cross-country travel. This proliferation of professional organizations enabled the dissemination of specialized knowledge and training to administrators whose practice became increasingly focused. However, the fact the field supported multiple generalist and functional organizations meant that there was no unified voice of the student affairs profession (Sandeen and Barr 2006).

The growth of research and graduate programs also helped create higher education and student affairs as a distinct field of study. ACPA and NASPA established research journals in 1959 and 1963 (Hevel 2016). They would eventually become known as the Journal of College Student Development and the Journal of Student Affairs Administration and Research and serve as prominent outlets for research about college students and student affairs. The number of graduate programs increased as larger campuses needed more employees and as academics from anthropology, economy, and history turned their disciplinary lenses on higher education and college students (Thelin 2018), with faculty from psychology and sociology enjoying the largest and longest influence. Psychologist Nevitt Sanford, who studied the causes of prejudice and critiqued I.Q. tests for favoring the White middle class, also made major contributions to understanding college students in the 1960s (Goleman 1995). He emphasized the importance of the college environment in providing both challenge and support to encourage student development (Evans et al. 1998). The notion of challenge and support would enter the fields’ lexicon alongside concern for the whole student. Sociologists Kenneth Feldman and Theodore Newcomb (1969) summarized 1,500 studies of college students published over four decades in The Impact of College on Students. The book largely found positive outcomes associated with higher education and highlighted the importance of the environment on campus in shaping them. While the findings supported the work of faculty and student affairs administrators, that the authors concluded that small, homogenous, residential colleges provided the best outcomes for students served as an indictment for large, bureaucratized campuses.

Challenges for Women in the Field

These professional organizations, graduate programs, and research initiatives advanced efforts started by deans of women decades earlier. Yet, just as the G.I. Bill provided benefits to few women, the post-war decades proved difficult for women administrators. Deans of women had long experienced sexism from male college presidents. They expected deans of women to remain unmarried and live on campus while deans of men married and lived off campus, and they cut their budgets more than those of the deans of men during the Great Depression (Miller and Pruitt-Logan 2012; Sartorius 2014). As campuses became focused on efficiency after World War II, college presidents began to consolidate the operations of deans of women and deans of men into an Office of the Dean of Students (Sartorius 2022). College presidents almost always promoted a man to dean of students and demoted deans of women to report to deans of students (Hevel 2016). Men in student affairs largely overlooked or justified this discrimination against women. Contemplating the admission of women members to the precursor of NASPA during their conference in 1951, the president of the organization said that if some gal is smart enough to get elected Dean of Students in some institution and merit that title, I may let the old gal in. I don't know (quoted in Schwartz 2010, p. 181). His comment brought laughter from the audience.

Such demotions occurred even as deans of women and their staff continued to perform important work. As male veterans flooded campuses in the late 1940s, the proportion of women students fell even as their absolute numbers increased. The surviving deans of women, primarily through the NADW, advanced a research agenda that revealed discrimination facing women and worked to improve their career opportunities in the 1950s (Eisenmann 2006). These efforts helped to lay the foundation of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

Unfortunately, as more deans of women's operations were subsumed by deans of students, male leaders often eliminated programming designed for women students and largely ignored their needs (Sartorius 2022). As some historically all-male institutions admitted women as undergraduates for the first time in the 1960s, they often hired a woman administrator, such as Elga Wasserman at Yale in 1969, who performed tasks similar to those performed earlier by deans of women (Perkins 2019). After several years of forceful advocacy that improved the experiences of women students, Yale's president terminated Wasserman's position and did not hire her for other openings on campus. A similar situation a quarter century earlier left Kate Hevner Mueller, who was demoted from dean of women to assistant dean of students at Indiana University, to lament, Sometimes I wish that there would be just one person, anyone, anywhere who would say to the President that it is too bad to lose my services! (quoted in Buckley 2004, p. 37). Decades would pass before most campuses would again have women administrators involved in senior-level decision-making on campus (Rhatigan 2009).

Student Activism in the 1960s

Though college women did not protest the mistreatment of women in student affairs, they increasingly attacked sexism on campus and in society (e.g., Cain and Dier 2020). These protests constituted an important part of a gathering storm of student activism in the 1960s. Left-leaning college students, who seemed to grow in number over the decade, also advocated for free speech, racial equality, and ending the Vietnam War. Just as women's activism led to the creation of the first women studies degrees, Asian American, Black, Latinx, and Native American students’ agitation led to racial and ethnic study programs (Hevel 2017a). By the decade's end, LGBTQ college students became visible on campus and started to establish student organizations, informed by the culture of college student activism and the Stonewall Riots of 1969 (Beemyn 2003). Students with disabilities pressured the governmental agencies and institutional leaders to make higher education more accessible (Danforth 2018).

In retrospect, Black college students at North Carolina A&T who organized a sit-in of a segregated lunch counter in February 1960 seem to have been the spark that lit the fire of student activism. Similar sit-ins, often led by Black college students, spread across the South that month. Although many peaceful protesters endured harassment and assaults, their efforts succeeded in desegregating many lunch counters. Some institutions used existing disciplinary codes to expel student activists without providing them notice of the reason or giving them a chance to mount a defense. Some college students challenged these practices in court as a violation of their constitutional rights. A landmark decision in Dixon v. Alabama in 1961, which originated in the expulsion of several Black students at Alabama State College for participating in a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, found in favor of the students (Lee 2014). By ensuring a minimum level of due process, Dixon ended in loco parentis at public institutions. Although the level of due process Dixon called for was not extensive, many campuses would gradually adopt discipline proceedings that mimicked the legal system and sometimes permitted students to involve attorneys. The Black student activists who won the Dixon lawsuit nonetheless never reenrolled at Alabama State College, paying a high price to ensure the rights of future generations of college students (Lee 2014).

Conservative students, often fraternity and ROTC members, protested the liberal protesters. Most Southern institutions desegregated peacefully, but some of the most disruptive and troubling student activism of the decade occurred when White students violently resisted the enrollment of Blacks in such institutions as the Universities of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia (Wallenstein 2008). These riots captured national attention, as did the law enforcement killings of unarmed student protesters at Kent State University and Jackson State Colleges in May 1970. The resulting public outcry helped end the aggressive response to protesters and the protests themselves (Thelin 2018).

Student Activism and Student Affairs

The surge in student activism had major ramifications for student affairs (Gaston-Gayles et al. 2005). Prior to the 1960s, the reporting structure of senior student affairs administrators varied between campuses. These tumultuous years ensured that the senior leader had regular access to the president and usually a seat on the presidential cabinet, and a vice president for student affairs position became common. Crisis management and student advocacy emerged as important professional skills, as students protesting legitimate societal concerns tested a discipline system designed to deal with drinkers and cheaters. Students’ victories in court led institutional leaders to recognize the independence of students, but this could also lead them to ignore student life to an extent that placed students in harm (Gaston-Gayles et al. 2005; Rousmaniere 2021). In terms of activism, student affairs professionals were caught between students who expected them to accept and implement their demands and presidents who expected them to advance institutional goals. Often one such goal was to silence student activists regardless of the legitimacy of their concerns (Gaston-Gayles et al. 2005). Black student affairs administrators at HBCUs often quietly supported their students’ activism in the Civil Rights Movement (Herdlein et al. 2008).

Student affairs leaders mediated conflicts between different groups of students, between students and institutional leaders, and between the campus and the community (Gaston-Gayles et al. 2005). Many student affairs leaders listened to students’ concerns and worked to develop trust with activists. This proved especially effective given that the lack of forewarning of a protest proved the most difficult situation for student affairs administrators to navigate. In fact, student affairs leaders often tried to teach students to protest effectively—helping them communicate their issues, suggest solutions, and realize that every demand could not be met—while minimizing campus disruptions. Realizing the importance of racial diversity, some student affairs leaders started to recruit Black, Latinx, and Native American youth to enroll in college. Adults from these communities pressured those in student affairs to improve the campus climate for their students (Gaston-Gayles et al. 2005). Yet when pressed by student activists to enforce nondiscrimination housing policies among landlords, some institutions closed their off-campus student services office (Rousmaniere 2021). Student affairs administrators also paid increasing attention to students’ sexuality, providing education, sometimes contraception, and occasionally helping students obtain abortions (Perkins 2019; Sartorius 2014).

In sum, this was a hard time to work in the field. Many student affairs leaders left their jobs from some combination of a president losing confidence in their ability to manage students or a campus crisis, their loss of faith in the institution's response to legitimate student concerns, and sheer exhaustion. For those who stayed in the field, higher education leaders’ and the federal government's response to student unrest would provide job security.

Developing and Learning as a Profession, 1970–1999

The decades that closed out the twentieth century could not have been more different than the 1960s on campus. While pockets of activism remained, especially among racially minoritized and LGBTQ students, White students largely eschewed protests after the draft ended and the Vietnam War wound down. They used their college years to mitigate the economic challenges of the 1970s and embrace the conservatism of the 1980s (Horowitz 1987). Many students gravitated toward majoring in business. As attending graduate school for law, medicine, and business became more popular and admissions more competitive, undergraduates were more likely to protest a low grade than social injustice. Students came to see extracurricular involvement as a resumé builder for a future employer or a graduate school application. Membership in fraternities and sororities increased, as students who could afford their dues wanted to tap into national networks of alumni. Tuition increased as state support fell, leaving colleges and universities to compete for affluent students who could pay higher prices. This competition generally led to offering more amenities on campus, which could require higher tuition and fees. Many in higher education lamented the consumer mentality that permeated students and their families.

Era of Federal Legislation

A flurry of federal legislation beginning in the mid-1960s in some ways reduced the need of student activists, as many of these laws addressed their concerns (Nuss 2003). The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 all affected student affairs, as would the Clery Act and Americans with Disabilities Act, which both passed in 1990. Some laws contributed to the growth of adult and part-time students, especially at community colleges and urban institutions. Many strengthened college students’ rights and protections against discrimination (Nuss 2003).

However, these laws, like earlier federal interventions, had a habit of benefitting those with existing privilege. Congress created the current system of federal financial aid with Pell Grants for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds in 1972, but legislators began shifting the bulk of support to loans for more affluent students, which proved popular among middle-class voters (Thelin 2019). Affirmative action was originally intended to combat racism, though White women ended up being its biggest beneficiaries and, ironically, critics (Crenshaw 2007; Massie 2016). Nonetheless, some of these laws encouraged larger numbers of students with minoritized identities to attend colleges and universities, and student affairs professionals became increasingly specialized to serve specific student populations and comply with federal regulations (Nuss 2003).

Investment in Student Experience and Student Affairs

Perhaps the most significant response to the activism of the 1960s in American higher education was an increased investment in student affairs (Thelin 2018). Many college presidents had been caught off guard by the unrest of the previous decade, which cost some their jobs. College presidents now realized that attending to students was a prerequisite to their other initiatives. They largely did this by investing in student services and hiring more student affairs administrators.

Sometimes this meant more career services staff or creating services for students with disabilities; sometimes this meant upgrading campus housing to meet students’ evolving technology expectations, such as running lines to each room for telephones, televisions, and eventually computers. Coeducational residence halls became the norm, and women students no longer faced stricter campus rules than men, at least on paper (Sartorius 2014; Thelin 2019). Many campuses started having student government representatives on policymaking committees. Established in 1979, the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) began to articulate effective practices for specific functional areas (Schwartz and Stewart 2017). Reflecting the field's growth, the original 16 functional areas covered by the CAS standards would grow to nearly 50 over the next four decades. Graduate programs in the field also proliferated, reaching upwards of 100 by the 1990s, though the field was susceptible to critiques about how its scholarship had limited influence over institutional leaders (Keller 1985). The increased size and scope of many student affairs divisions enabled college students to receive more attention and helped personalize large institutions (Thelin 2018).

Student Development Movement

This focus among student affairs professionals on individual students harkened back to the student personnel movement and the SPPV a half century earlier, as student development emerged as the profession's publicly articulated goal in the 1970s (Coomes and Gerda 2016; Strange 1994). Student affairs administrators often used the phrase interchangeably to describe their practice in general but also their use of developmental theories from psychology. Student affairs professionals learned, often in graduate school, about an ever-expanding set of theories about human development to understand students and consider changes to the college environment that would promote learning and personal growth (Strange 1994). Creating professionals with knowledge about college students, their development, and how changing the college environment could promote development became prevailing learning outcomes of student affairs graduate programs. These developmental theories are discussed in depth in Chapter 6.

Yet the first developmental theories were not always based on empirical evidence from college students, and those that were usually relied on data from wealthier White college men (Evans et al. 1998). Over time, more complex theories would emerge, and many would be based on the experiences of college students with minoritized identities. However, this proliferation would make it difficult for any single student affairs administrator to understand the entirety of the available theories. Proponents of student development believed that its concern with intellectual growth would encourage collaboration between academic and student affairs, while critics claimed this never happened and that student development largely distracted student affairs professionals from being concerned with classroom learning (Bloland et al. 1996).

Student Learning Movement

The profession moved to correct this perception. ACPA published the Student Learning Imperative in 1994, which called for student affairs professionals to work collaboratively with academic leaders and faculty, themes that would be echoed early in the next century with its collaboration with NASPA on Learning Reconsidered and Learning Reconsidered 2. Collectively, these publications espoused that the primary role of student affairs professionals was that of educator, a helpful reminder for both those within and outside the field (Dungy and Gordon 2011). Two influential books appeared in 1991 that also centered student learning within the profession. In Involving Colleges, George Kuh, John Schuh, Elizabeth Whitt, and their colleagues profiled 14 institutions noted for promoting learning outside of the classroom. That same year, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini picked up where Feldman and Newcomb had left off, summarizing over 2,600 studies published over 20 years in How College Affects Students. They reached similar conclusions to their predecessors and would do so again in a second volume in 2005: experiences on campus with faculty and student affairs professionals improved the learning of students and lives of alumni. That the authors of both Involving Colleges and How College Affects Students served on the faculty of higher education and student affairs graduate programs instead of traditional disciplines provided evidence that the field was reaching intellectual maturity.

Increasingly, student affairs professionals valued partnering with academic affairs in order to promote and assess student learning and development (Whitt et al. 2008). This push for better integration of academic and student affairs led some campuses to rename the senior student affairs position to a vice provost and have them report to the provost, the chief academic officer on campus. Such moves intended to improve collaboration but also made the president more removed from student issues and could convey a loss of prestige for student affairs. Few student affairs leaders had the faculty background to be promoted to provost, though occasionally senior student affairs officers assumed an institutional presidency.

Diversity and Inclusion

The profession's imperfect march toward diversity, equity, and inclusion continued as the century closed. Centers on campus staffed with student affairs professionals that served racially minoritized students, students with disabilities, and women became common (Schwartz and Stewart 2017). Yet there remained a general concern that many institutions did a better job of recruiting minoritized students than helping create a sense of belonging for them once enrolled (Thelin 2019). Perhaps the most positive strides taken toward inclusion during this time related to LGBTQ students. After spending the first half of the century expelling them—followed by a brief interlude of requiring therapy and refusing to recognize their student organizations—ending homophobia became an espoused goal of the student affairs profession (Dilley 2002, 2019). By the 1990s, student affairs graduate students would learn theories to promote rather than punish the identity development of LGBTQ students (Evans et al. 1998).

Successes and setbacks regarding diversity within professional organizations also persisted. Race proved to be a barrier for leadership positions for decades in organizations established by White administrators. ACPA elected its first Black president in 1976. NASPA waited until 1985, and NAWE until 1988. White women fared better in access to leadership slots, especially after they began to be appointed as vice presidents for student affairs in the 1980s (Rhatigan 2009). Anne Pruitt, ACPA's first Black president, was its eleventh woman leader. NASPA, with its dean of men's legacy, did not elect its first woman president, Alice Manicur, until 1976. Doris Ching became NASPA's first Asian American and sixth woman president in 1999. Yet as women student affairs professionals became welcome in NASPA, the field's oldest professional organization, NAWE, struggled with membership and identity after the elimination of deans of women, closing in 2000 (Gangone 2008). Eight years later, NASPA began publishing a journal today known as the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, carrying on an underappreciated intellectual tradition from deans of women nearly a century old.

A Profession's Complicated Present

Student affairs professionals, like many others on campus, breathed a sigh of relief as the year 2000 began without disruption as campus computing systems adjusted to years greater than 1999, which was called the Y2K problem. Steeled by a thorough readiness plan, the members of the technology response team at City University of New York sat together in the mainframe center as the clock struck midnight. When they felt the threat had cleared, they popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and toasted the New Year (Olsen 2000).

Although the new year began without the anticipated technology disruption, the new millennium unfolded to include multiple disruptions. Some disturbances seemingly reached into higher education from forces beyond, such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; costly natural disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Harvey (2017); and the Great Recession (2007–2009). Other upheavals shook higher education from within and sent shockwaves out. These included tragic mass shootings at the University of Arizona (2002), Virginia Tech (2007), Northern Illinois University (2008), Oikos University (2012), and Umpqua Community College (2015); and an admissions scandal involving parents, coaches, elite universities, fraudulent test scores, and bribery of colleges officials (Chappell and Kennedy 2019).

The remarkable feature about these disruptions and higher education is not that they occurred, as these types of incidents were not singular to the twenty-first century—war, terrorism, financial crisis, bribery, scandal, and even deadly pandemics had happened in the century before. Rather, the fault lines of these disruptions heightened awareness (and subsequent backlash) that boundaries had become muddled and institutions had failed. Social and political polarization deepened. The ostensible racial progress made in the two-term presidency of Barack Obama seemingly recoiled with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Within this milieu, more students entered college even as higher education's reputation suffered. Nearly 70% of high school graduates continued their higher education—pushing enrollments to 20 million by 2016—and more students persisted to graduation (Geiger 2019). However, the wealthiest students clustered in the wealthiest institutions, and there was evidence that college students spent less time on courses and demonstrated lower levels of learning than earlier generations, especially outside of STEM disciplines. Despite this, students developed social and interpersonal skills that employers valued and that served them well (Geiger 2019). They earned higher salaries, led longer and healthier lives, and demonstrated more knowledge than those who did not attend or graduate from college. These outcomes appeared to justify the fact that institutions hired professional staff at a rate that outpaced enrollment growth; the fact that institutions hired faculty at a rate that did not keep up with enrollment growth, coupled with students’ lower levels of academic effort, made the larger ranks of student affairs professionals vulnerable to criticism (Geiger 2019).

A singular professional organization that represented the needs and concerns of the field may have helped student affairs professionals navigate this complex environment. In fact, student affairs scholars and leaders advocated for merging ACPA and NASPA for decades (Coomes et al. 2003). Such efforts culminated in a consolidation proposal in 2010. Proponents of consolidation believed a single organization would reduce redundancy, improve sustainability, be more fiscally responsible, and provide the profession a single, more powerful voice for the field. Overall, they argued, a unified organization would better serve college students and those working in student affairs. Opponents worried consolidation would create governance issues, erase the groups’ distinct cultures, reduce leadership opportunities, create unmanageably large conferences, and require significant resources to build a new identity. Only a minority of eligible members voted (42% in both groups), but most voters favored consolidation—81% in ACPA and 62% in NASPA. However, the NASPA majority did not constitute the necessary two-thirds for approval (Grasgreen 2011; Lipka 2011).

Amid the consolidation debate in 2010, ACPA and NASPA leaders produced their most important collaboration of the new century, the Professional Competency Areas for Student Affairs Educations. The 10 competency areas consisted of:

Advising and supporting

Assessment, evaluation, and research

Law, policy, and governance

Leadership

Organizational and human resources

Personal and ethical foundations

Social justice and inclusion

Student learning and development

Technology

Values, philosophy, and history

Six years later, the groups published rubrics for each competency that aimed to help professionals develop knowledge, skills, and behaviors related to these competencies from a foundational to an advanced level of expertise (ACPA and NASPA 2016). Demonstrating advanced expertise in even a couple of the competencies reflected significant professional learning, and the rubrics helped individuals identify learning opportunities that might maximize their effectiveness on campus.

In fact, possessing and building these competencies helped student affairs professionals confront both enduring and new responsibilities on campus in the 2010s. Student affairs professionals emerged as key users of technology to manage individual and institutional trauma and moderate economic and political fallout for colleges and universities. To better identify students with behavioral concerns, student affairs professionals collaborated with faculty to implement threat assessment and management teams (TAMTs). TAMTs helped corral reports from disparate units and deploy behavioral interventions (Chinn 2013). To improve retention and degree completion, academic advisors employed data analytics to identify students at risk of failure for lack of attendance and other troubling indicators (Doucette 2018).

There was evidence that student affairs programs and practices contributed to the era's increased graduation rates, and, oddly enough, some of the best evidence was provided by their absence (Geiger 2019). Enrollments in for-profit institutions swelled in the 2010s, aided mostly by successful lobbying efforts to channel more federal financial aid their way. Attracting a high proportion of students with minoritized identities and offering virtually no student services, the institutions retained and graduated few students. A crackdown during the Obama Administration resulted in several bankruptcies and lower for-profit enrollments. Those that survived invested in student affairs programs to remain eligible for federal financial aid.

In part because of tuition increases associated with cuts to state funding, 75% of tuition revenues came from federal loans and students generally struggled to pay for college (Geiger 2019; Thelin 2019). To relieve homelessness and hunger among students, student affairs professionals worked to raise funds for students in economic distress, open food pantries, and develop smartphone apps alerting students to retrieve leftovers from university events (Laterman 2019; Dubick et al. 2016). To assist with university public relations, student affairs professionals monitored social media for emerging complaints, health and safety concerns, and to assist law enforcement. Though, admittedly, NASPA president Kevin Kruger said that this was an imperfect science (as cited in Bauer-Wolf 2017, para. 29). Student affairs professionals scrambled to appease the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, rewriting campus policies for handling sexual misconduct to meet shifting standards between the Obama and Trump Administrations (Anderson 2020a, August 14).

Increasing diversity and student activism amplified pressure on student affairs professionals. Enrollments surged after the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, especially among adult and part-time students experiencing unemployment (National Center for Education Statistics 2019a). The absolute numbers of racial and ethnic minoritized students continued to grow, though White students were still more likely to earn degrees than all groups except Asian Americans (Espinosa et al. 2019). Students with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and mental illnesses attended college in higher numbers (National Center for Education Statistics 2019b; Oswalt et al. 2018). Transgender and gender nonconforming students became more visible on campus after 2000, educating the campus community about gender beyond a woman-man binary (Nicolazzo 2017). Many student affairs professionals strove to understand their experiences and make campuses safer spaces, though some changes, such as gender-inclusive restrooms, drew the ire of alumni and politicians (Seltzer 2017). Efforts to serve trans students while minimizing institutional harm mirrored the imperfect balance student affairs administrators tried to strike with early LBGTQ student organizations in the 1970s and 1980s.

One mark of progress and leadership was that the student affairs profession was more diverse than other administrative units on campus by the late 2010s, promoting the success of White women in ways not seen since the deans of women (Pritchard and McChesney 2018). Anecdotally, students in graduate programs and attendees at major conferences appeared to reflect the growing diversity among college students, though the field's ability to retain these individuals in the profession and promote them into senior-level leadership remained uncertain.

College student activists advocating for racial justice became more vocal and visible in the aftermath of a White police officer's killing of Michael Brown, Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. This swell of activism persisted across the remainder of the decade—as did police killings of unarmed Black people. Protests initially rocked the University of Missouri, the public research university closest to Ferguson. The football team lent support to a student waging a hunger strike, resulting in the resignations of university leaders and several years of enrollment declines (Seltzer 2018). Student protesters, many of whom were minoritized students, echoed claims from earlier eras that institutions worked harder to recruit them than to include them once on campus. They found parts of the campus, such as traditionally White fraternities and sororities and memorials in the form of building names or statutes of racist people, particularly unwelcoming and antithetical to espoused institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (Jost 2016; Levenson 2020).

Many in student affairs were sympathetic to these activists’ goals, though they also found themselves in the crosshairs of conservative activists who claimed a liberal bias in higher education (Friedersdorf 2020). In 2019, Jamie Riley, a Black man and the University of Alabama's dean of students, resigned under pressure after a conservative website published an article about social media posts from 2016 and 2017 in which Riley connected the American flag and police to anti-Black racism (Johnson 2019). Riley, who received death threats because of the article, later penned an open letter that indicted those in student affairs for failing to defend him and noting that the field was unsafe for Black people (Riley 2020).

This was the world facing student affairs professionals at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Then a global pandemic appeared, seemingly out of nowhere to everyone except infectious disease experts. The deadly Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome, disrupted higher education, and student affairs professionals scrambled to serve students online, at a distance, and in masks (Anderson 2020, August 20). Entry-level student affairs professionals appeared most likely to contract the disease from students, and institutional leaders expressed frustration that many students failed to follow safety protocols. Enrollments of students who attended high-poverty high schools, students who were caregivers, and men of color dropped sharply, which disproportionately affected institutions that primarily served historically marginalized students, including community colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions, HBCUs, and tribal colleges and universities (Office for