I spent a couple of days out in Calgary this week at the annual meeting of Canadian Association of University & College Student Services (CACUSS).  I had not been to one of these in quite awhile – long enough ago that the meetings could be held on a campus and not in a convention centre – and I was intrigued at some of the changes that seem to have taken place in these occupations, which I suspect reflect some significant changes in Canadian universities at a whole.

A few, semi-connected observations:

• Reconciliation is a really big deal.  I expected the massive emphasis on student mental health, but I was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which the topic of reconciliation dominated the presentations.  I am told the TRC recommendations were really the catalyst for a huge explosion of interest (which is interesting because TRC said a whole lot more about curriculum in post-secondary than it did about services and yet services seem to be where a lot of the action is).  But it’s not just that. I would say I heard a whole lot more talk in sessions about social justice than I have ever heard at one of these meetings.  Partly that’s a reflection of who goes into the profession (attendees are younger and more ethnically diverse than they used to be), but partly also I think because being aware of these issues is more part of the job description. This is quite a change from even ten years ago.

• Student Affairs is increasingly about issues management.  But of course, ask yourself why mastery of social justice issues matters.  And the answer is that to a significant degree, the mid-to-senior level jobs in the field are no longer about pastoral care of students, or managing housing or health services, or getting orientation done properly.  Rather; their role is increasingly a janitorial one.  In a world of social media, where small events can be picked up and amplified in ways that could cause reputational damage quite quickly, institutions are paying a lot more attention to “cleaning up” controversial events.  Incidents which involve racism, or homophobia, or sexual violence – student to student or even professor-to-student – need to be dealt with promptly and effectively, and unlike twenty or even ten years ago, they are no longer the role of academics or academic management (for instance, the provost’s office) to deal with.  Now, it gets shunted off very quickly to student affairs professionals.  I suspect this accounts in part for the proliferation of student affairs professionals working at the faculty level – if it involves students, academic and academic management want to get it off their plate and hand it over to student affairs to clean up.  They are, simply, indispensable because they protect institutional reputation.

• Despite the increased relevance, student affairs are still not well integrated into the university as a whole.  For student affairs to be truly effective, there needs to be a good connection with the academic side of the institution.  But my impression is that on the whole, while student services have been loaded with more responsibility, they have not actually been brought closer to the heart of most institutions.  One of the ways you can see this is the way they talk about issues like measurement and program evaluation: there is a lot of enthusiasm for it (good), but, to my eyes anyway, not a lot of sophistication in technique.  This tells me – among other things – that student affairs offices are doing this stuff on their own without a lot of input from the IR offices which (usually) think about data and assessment more deeply.  And I suspect that the reason for this is simply that student affairs is seen as a much lower priority by the folks in (usually) the provost’s office who decide how the IR department should be spending its time.

In sum, it was nice to see how the profession is changing and impressive to see how the younger generation of professionals are taking a leadership role in institutions.  And I would say there is still a lot more they could contribute: if student affairs were drawn more closely into the real management of Canadian colleges and universities.