Talking Stick - September/October 2014 - 35

I

f you have traveled to London, you have perhaps ridden the Tube and heard the
admonition to "mind the gap." This gap between train and platform is not a
wide chasm or deep abyss, but it needs to be noticed. Similarly, the gap between
student affairs and academic professionals is not wide; tasks of both entities are
not dichotomous or mutually exclusive, but the gap has to be recognized and
understood in order to arrive at a mutually beneficial partnership in creating
environments conducive to student learning. Before housing practitioners can
engage in a long-lasting partnership with faculty, they have to appraise their
own organizational and professional culture, as well as understand how faculty
culture differs.

Cultural Differences
The gap between student affairs and academic
affairs can be understood as a cultural one.
Both have their own language, artifacts, stories,
standards, and accomplishments that inform
many of their individual and collective actions
and decisions. As part of their own culture,
each housing administrator or faculty member
transmits practices and behaviors from group
to group or generation to generation. Because
of these cultural differences, collaboration
between student affairs and academic affairs
can be challenging. Some institutions have
created favorable environments in which
this partnership has flourished, but at many
others efforts to forge partnerships have
stalled for several reasons. Some student
affairs professionals lament that faculty do not
understand what they do, and some faculty
lament that student affairs professionals are
asking for too much of their time. The faculty
member may not understand what the housing
profession does to support student success, and
the housing professional may not understand
the faculty member's obligation to conduct
research and generate publications. Seeing
both groups as products of their own cultures
can help to bridge this gap.
The three main keys to understanding faculty
is their need for autonomy, their training, and
their perception of rewards. Autonomy is what
many faculty love most about their work. Most

faculty have considerable flexibility in what they
teach, when, and how, as well as some freedom
in what they research and how they want to serve
their institution. They don't have the kind of
supervisor that watches closely over them from
day to day, and they have some latitude in how
they spend their time beyond classroom and
office hours. Housing professionals, on the other
hand, are directly accountable to a supervisor and
keep more regular hours - long ones when they
are on call.
Most faculty received their training as
doctoral students at research institutions,
work that often involved long hours in a lab or
behind a computer, often alone or with a small
group of colleagues. As doctoral students, many
faculty received little training in areas that
are central to housing professionals, such as
diversity awareness, social justice education, or
counseling. Many faculty spend much of their
working time alone, writing research grants,
conducting research, preparing for classes, and
reading and grading student tests and papers. In
contrast, student affairs professionals are often
trained in cohorts and are often encouraged or
expected to work in pairs or teams.
Promotion and tenure comprise the
main rewards for faculty, usually based on
the first five to seven years of productivity
and effectiveness in teaching, research, and
service. Depending on institutional mission
and priorities, faculty spend most of their time
on teaching or research before serving their

September + OctOber 2014

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Talking Stick - September/October 2014

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