Kristen Renn
But Student Affairs work now is not what it used to be like. It is not, it is not at the entry level. It is not at mid certainly, and we know it’s not at the top. So I think that there might be a role for graduate programs in offering more places and dialog for current professionals who finished their grad program 510, 1520, years ago, right? Like, who thought I had a chance to have a space to think about, like Brandon when you’re pointing out, like, you know, the organizational dynamics, like the politics, like you can have that in a professional development session, be in your division, but you’re still there with, like, your boss or the people who work for you.

Heather Shea
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW, the online learning community for Student Affairs educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea. Welcome to today’s podcast episode, I am so thrilled to have a special talk given by Dr Kristin Renn at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Student Affairs Administration MA program at Michigan State University. As I sat in the audience that September afternoon, I knew we needed to preserve Kris’ powerful message by turning this into an episode, Kris, I am so grateful for you to be here today and share your talk with us. And also joining the episode is SAA program alum, Brandon Arnold, Brandon, thanks for joining us.

Brandon Arnold
Thanks for having me.

Heather Shea
Brandon is going to give an introduction. He also introduced Kris at the event, and then he and I will be offering some reflections and additional insights afterward. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is sponsored by the Student Affairs Administration, also known as SAA master’s degree program at Michigan State University. SAA, at MSU, provides future student affairs professionals with the knowledge and skills to work with students and cultivate educational environments promoting diversity and multiculturalism. As I mentioned, I am your host for today’s episode, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers, and I am broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the, three fires, confederacy of Ojibwe Odawa and Potawatomi peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, where all three of us actually work. So let’s get to the episode, Brandon. I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce Kris, as you did at the Colloquium.

Brandon Arnold
Thank you so much, Heather. It was my honor and privilege to introduce Dr Renn at the 75th anniversary, and it’s my privilege to do so again today. I first met Dr Renn when she was my advisor in the Student Affairs Administration program. Dr Kristin Renn is professor of higher adult and lifelong education and Mildred B Erickson, Distinguished Chair Emerita at Michigan State University. She has served in leadership roles, including associate dean and senior advisor in undergraduate education, and has a background in student affairs and higher education policy. Dr Renn’s research focuses on student success, identity development, mixed race students, women’s colleges and LGBTQ issues in higher education.

Heather Shea
Thanks so much, Brandon. I should also mention Dr. Renn was my advisor and dissertation chair at MSU during my PhD program, and I originally learned of Kris’s work when I was a master’s student interested in studying multiracial college students. And at that time, there was one dissertation available for citation, and that happened to be Kristin Renn, so my decision to relocate to Michigan many, many years later was deeply influenced by that, Kris, thanks so much for your mentorship, support and dedication to students at MSU, and I’m going to turn it over to you. Why don’t you start it by giving us a little bit of context. You know, what was the purpose of your talk that day?

Kristen Renn
Great. Thanks so much, Heather and Brandon for being here and for inviting me to do the talk again. So the rains colloquium is a twice a year symposium that we operate out of the Student Affairs masters program at Michigan State. We have an endowment based on Max Raines, who’s a former faculty member the late Max rains and we use this as an opportunity to bring scholars and practitioners to campus to make us smarter and make us more engaged, and have conversations with students and faculty on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of our master’s program, we want to sort of look internally and have one of our current faculty give us sort of look back, look around, look ahead, sense of not just our program, But the field itself. So I am the longest serving Student Affairs masters faculty member here at Michigan State. I began in 2001 so this is my 24th year. And so the the invite fell to me, and I was very grateful for this opportunity to do this reflection on where Michigan State is as a field, but like where student affairs is. Where we’re going. Certainly, we are at a very we say it all the time in student affairs, but this is very unprecedented time for higher education in most of our lifetimes. So it was a great time to kind of take stock and think forward about the kinds of things we doing. So I had the opportunity to give this talk, and it was fun, and it’s fun to get to revisit the one of the thoughts that I had then,

Heather Shea
yeah, thanks so much, Kris. I, as I, as I said in the intro, I was sitting in the audience going, oh my gosh, this is, this is powerful, and also something everybody you know who works in this field, who cares about this field, and and, of course, those of us who are at MSU, but really needs to hear we are, as we discussed in our preparation for today’s episode. Going to do this just a little bit differently. We are going to Brandon and I are going to go off camera, and Kris is going to share her screen. Has some fantastic slides. We will put the link to a PDF of those slides into the show notes. And so if you are listening to today’s episode and you would like the full experience those slides, you will be able to view and watch and look at the slides while we’re on YouTube, and then Brandon and I’ll come back and join for discussion and reflection at the end. So Kris, are you ready to get started?

Kristen Renn
Indeed. All right, okay, Anniversaries are a good time to take stock, to look back at the past and look around at where we are today and looking forward to what the future might hold. The 75th anniversary of the Michigan State University Student Affairs Administration master’s program is a milestone, for sure, the one that calls for looking back, looking around and looking ahead at higher education student affairs. Recapping this talk from the 75th anniversary, I want to thank everyone who made the talk possible then, but also today, thanking Dr Heather Shea for suggesting we make a student affairs now. Episode out of this her leadership in the field as a legend, and it’s a privilege to join you here in the in the podcast. Thanks, plus to Brandon Arnold for the generous introduction. As I looked over the list of attendees at that anniversary celebration, I was reminded how special the Michigan State University Student Affairs program is, I saw in that audience generations of hail and Student Affairs faculty to whom I’m grateful for ongoing support, generations of student affairs professionals and leaders have come through the Michigan State master’s program, and generations of campus partners and friends have supported our work. Reuniting with former master’s students who are now faculty in other student affairs graduate programs was just one way to visualize the impact of our program on the field. Seeing so many students and colleagues leading student affairs and serving students at Michigan State was another so in this talk, I’ll look back, I’ll look around, and I’ll look ahead to see if our past and present can inform what we might expect and aspire to for the futures of Student Affairs. And I say futures with an S, because I will compose a set of conditions that, depending on how they evolve, point us to different possible futures for our field. Which one we end up with is in part, a factor of what we do today. So let’s begin with the past and work our way forward. I assume that many people hearing this talk have had an opportunity to study the history of higher education United States and the emergence of the professional field of student affairs. It’s an oversimplification, please bear with me, but a useful shorthand to recall that student affairs grew from the vocational counseling movement and from the separation of faculty work into research and teaching, away from the moral, spiritual and social guidance that professors performed in the early days of higher education, when Mary Talbot, the Dean of Women at the Dean of Women at the University of Chicago, started to organize her colleagues at other universities in 1903 and the National Association of Women Deans officially formed in 1916 student affairs professionals were said to act in local Parentis in the place of parents to an ostensibly young adult college population, vocational and some personal counseling, discipline and conduct, What we now identify as student leadership and involvement, were among the areas of deans of women and deans of men at what they oversaw at the end of the Second World War, higher education the United States transformed radically through a massive expansion to accommodate the influx of returning soldiers and sailors, as well as the federal dollars that came with them through the GI Bill. The subsequent cold war between the US and the Soviet Union spurred additional federal investment in higher education through research and development in science, engineering and technology. The post secondary sector expanded in size and scope and while faculty and research functions further separated from the work of Student Development and care for the instructional research missions, this transformation prepared the sector for the influx of the baby boom generation, which further expanded higher education through its sheer population size. Parallel to these developments in the post secondary sector, movements for civil rights, for African Americans, equity for girls and women, and political organizing by and for Asian American Latinx and Native American peoples created a greater sense that higher education. I was, and should be, for anyone who wanted it. It was advertised as a means of upward and social mobility for poor and working class students. The US had come from what Martin true once called elite higher education in early centuries to mass higher education in the mid 1900s and then to universal, or approaching universal. To be sure, universal higher education has not been achieved, and even now, there’s a debate about whether or not everyone needs secondary credentials. But along the way to this nearly universal higher ed, deans of men became what we now know as NASPA, which effectively absorbed the deans of women. Could give a whole talk about that, but I instead will point you to Bob Schwartz’s classic article How deans of women became men. Scholars agree, however, that although the deans of men by and large became the deans of students, once the two offices were combined, it was the deans of women who professionalized the field of student affairs as we know it, by creating professional networks, establishing career pathways and conducting research, all while doing their quote day jobs in student affairs. So on this occasion of the diamond anniversary of Michigan State’s graduate program. I point especially to the role of deans of women in the establishment of graduate education designed to prepare deans of women, as recently outlined by Dr Katie Smith.

Kristen Renn
Dr Katie Smith used archival records to understand the development of the first student, first graduate program a professional diploma for deans of women at Teachers College Columbia University. They inaugurated the Diploma in 1914 and ran it with appropriate name and curricular changes through the 1944 1945 school year though, the diplomas changed names over time. By 1945 teachers college combined the diploma programs into one dean of students, diploma ms shoes Student Affairs Program began only five years later. Early Student Personnel courses focused on a hygienic, economic, social, moral and religious aspects of community life, and one at Teachers College addressed quote, the sociological foundation for the education of women, principles of method, underlying social control, the advisors relation to the guidance of young women in matters of health, of religion and of Thrift, in all social relations in high school and college, vocational direction and their training for leisure. The operation of in local apprentice is quite clear in this curriculum. But the century continued on. Higher Education grew in scale and diversity, and it was, as always, intertwined with its sociocultural context. The Perfect Storm of social movements for racial and gender justice, defined at the time as women’s rights, campus movements for gay and lesbian rights and anti war protests heralded a shift in the Student Affairs profession away from the quote, health, religion and thrift and more, towards student development and learning. A Michigan State University Student Affairs faculty member played a critical role in one of the major debates in student affairs in the 1980s and 1990s as the profession was turning to a student development philosophy professor Louis dematakis took a stand that student development was not a philosophy. Development was not a philosophy, but the focus on student learning was the robust philosophy on which to base the field’s work. He soundly critiqued Student Development literature in use in student affairs. Saying, our literature, our advocacies, are overreaching for near immediate professional legitimacy and respect as CO equal with our colleagues of the faculty has thrust us into a posturing and practice as the sole educators, excuse me, developers, original to his text of the students, affective, attitudinal and values development justifiably we can be accused of hubris. has also had a lot to say about why the field should focus on. Student learning rather than student development. In 1996 He and two non Michigan State colleagues advised, quote, redirecting the role of Student Affairs to focus on student learning. There was a brouhaha, maybe a kerfuffle, in the field at this approach and the primacy of learning versus development, until 10 years later, when self authorship theory led Marcia Baxter mcgold his proposal of the learning partnerships model, which seemingly brought student development theory and learning back together. Need I point out that it once again, took a woman to advance the field. So when I look back at our history as a field and the intellectual underpinnings of the field, I see that it was not inevitable that we should end up in 2024 where we are. We emerged from a set of historical and cultural forces that could have taken higher education in a number of different directions that might not have included Student Affairs, and student affairs itself might not have converged on the understandings and approaches we have today to learning and development as twin organizing concepts in the profession. So that’s my approach right now for looking back, looking around, as I turn to look around at what’s going on in today’s student affairs. I’ll address two areas. First, I’ll make two observations about the student affairs profession. Then I’ll talk about our context within higher education and what’s happening around this. My first observation about student affairs today is that we remain, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a low consensus field across functional areas and levels of institutional work, different student affairs professionals or Student Affairs educators or Student Affairs staff, you can see low consensus already draw concepts from student development theory, business and financial models, interpretations of law and policy, learning theory, counseling, political theory and Management and Leadership Studies, among others, throughout my career, and in spite of being in my current position as a faculty member in a highly regarded graduate program, I’ve said that I don’t think someone necessarily needs to study student development and student affairs to be a good student affairs profession. I do believe that a program like our Student Affairs masters offers an ideal curriculum that blends academic and professional experiences that have allowed generations of students to engage deeply in learning in and from these key areas in a concentrated, intentional way. But thoughtful professionals with other academic and professional backgrounds can also be successful, and they can bring important perspectives to the field as well. That’s one side of the benefits of being a low consensus field. We welcome different ideas and expertise, making us stronger as a field and more able to connect across institutional contexts. Another benefit of being a low consensus field is that we’re adaptive to change. One constant throughout that change, however, has been institutional expectations that student affairs divisions take up more and more of the critical work of higher education. With very deep respect for my colleagues, operating in institution wide dei positions Student Affairs Division champion diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Long before the profession of senior diversity or chief diversity officer was even a thing, Student Affairs has grown to incorporate programs and services for student veterans, students with disabilities, first gen students, sexual assault survivors, undocumented students and other populations that were always with us, but whom we did not see and did not always serve. Well, to be sure, the offices that serve these populations are not always included organizationally in the Division of Student Affairs, but sometimes they are, and typically they align with the values and philosophies of our profession, our low consensus field welcomes colleagues serving these more recently recognized groups of students. But there are challenges that come with being low consensus as well, especially at an institution as large as Michigan State, we risk falling into factions with our respective specialized theories, approaches and vocabularies. An example from this institution would be that you could overhear the phrase, did you hear that the AVPs of SLE met with dosa and Poe to talk about NSO? It’s not just about communication. It’s about territorialism, competition for resources and positive attention. It’s also about hurt feelings from past experiences like reorganizations that favored some units over others, and legitimate differences of professional opinion about priorities and the best way to address problems of practice. Low consensus in our approaches can also lead to tensions in how we interact. To be clear, a strength of low consensus is our ability to bring specialized expertise to the task, but we need to think carefully about how to include expertise that lies outside our own area, and to look both out across and also up and down organizational hierarchies to identify sources of expertise that we have historically kept outside the rooms where decisions happen and action plans emerge. Another liability of being a low consensus field is that it can make us slow to respond to queries, challenges and threats. We have a culture of inclusion, even if we don’t always act in optimal ways, and the culture entails consultation and taking time to hear multiple voices. Low consensus means that we may also, from our areas of expertise, have legitimately different answers to the same question. So a senior institutional leader or journalist asks us one question and gets a dozen replies if and when someone often a division head in student affairs appears. To act or speak without taking my own view seriously, then I may feel disenfranchised in the division, unheard, possibly demoralized, all of which continue to burn out. Within my corner of Student Affairs, there may be very high consensus about how we do things, how to enact a shared set of values, but when I’m in a division or field that is low consensus overall, those differences can feel like divisiveness. So that’s my first observation about student affairs today, not just at MSU, but across the field. We thrive on low consensus but are also limited by it when it’s time to act in unison, and we sometimes create conflict when it’s time for decisions or action, and I don’t see myself reflected in whatever direction my division or field is taking. My second observation is that student affairs as a low consensus field sits in the context of siloed organizations which are themselves frequently low consensus and well, for generations. And certainly we see this in Professor stomataka says quote about, quote, overreaching for professional legitimacy and respect as CO equal with our colleagues and faculty for generations. It was common to describe the higher education landscaped as, quote, Student Affairs versus faculty. This division was based largely on the primacy of research and lecture based teaching models, both I observed to be masculinized functions over the developmental and care taking functions of Student Affairs, thermonized functions. It played out in times of extreme budget cuts, when staff took bigger hits than faculty, and it plays out today when faculty complain of, quote, administrative bloat and the proliferation of Student Affairs roles to extend to, for example, students with disabilities, identity based student programs and sexual assault prevention intervention. And to be clear, I am not saying that these essential roles are administrative bloat. I’m saying that faculty notice the addition of non instructional and non research personnel, and they often don’t understand why higher education institutions choose to add them, so the competition for resources for positions plays out in faculty versus administrative terms.

Kristen Renn
Vasti Torres and I, based on her 2017 Marines colloquium talk at Michigan State, developed a model for thinking about institutional science in our work at our own institutions and nationally, we saw that student affairs can play a key role in post secondary sectors, priority on student success. After a substantial focus on increasing access to higher ed, from the 1970s to 2000s people started paying attention to the question of access to what was universal access leading to universal degree completion? Not by a long shot, about half of students who entered higher education were leaving before earning the degree they intended, and the half were not completing were substantially different in race, gender and socioeconomic status than the half that were completed. Higher education became not an engine of social mobility, but an engine of social reproduction. Focusing on student success in the most basic definition, having students complete the degrees they started is part of the answer. That’s not the whole story, of course, in raising up student success as a moral imperative of higher ed as a whole and institutions themselves, there are also dedicated student affairs professionals and faculty who recognize both the academic and non academic needs and academic needs of students. Vasti and I identified four major silos within college and universities, each with their own expertise, values and guiding theoretical perspectives that can contribute to student success, faculty and instructors, academic affairs, student affairs and the newly emerging silo of Student Success Services, every campus will look a little different in how these silos overlap, and in some cases, how the silos have been fully merged. Vasti and I argued that this blending is essential for drawing out the deep expertise from existing professional silos and for managing the demands of the Student Success imperative. She and I are both rooted professionally in student affairs, practice and theories, but our work has led us to wonder if student affairs as a stand run silo may have outlived its purpose in higher education, as I look back to where we came from and around it, where we are now a low consensus field with the potential to transform organizational silos in service of students. I also look around us outside the post secondary sector. My faculty colleagues at Michigan State and Austin and Brendan Cantwell have proposed that US higher education is currently undergoing a foundational transformation. I believe, as they do, that we are in a crucible moment that will reshape the Schecter as surely as the moral land grant acts, GI Bill and Brown versus Board of Education did, and like At those times, the transformation is driven by social and political forces outside the higher education sector. Unlike those times, the outside forces are not necessarily well aligned with Student Affairs values about expanding equity access and working to increase that. Now, if you have been around Student Affairs in Higher Education for a minute, some of you have, I’m sure you might be tempted to say, Gosh, Kris, haven’t we been through all this? Henny Penny, the sky is falling. Higher Ed is going away before. Yes, we have certainly had some panicky times in the past, but we survived massive budget cuts that people predicted would eliminate Student Affairs entirely. We all lived through MOOC mania when everyone said that bricks and mortars institutions were going to disappear to the massive online open courses, because everybody said bricks and mortars institutions would go away when people sat home in their pajamas instead of paying to live and learn on campus. But even. When the pandemic lockdown was supposed to have revealed that students wouldn’t want to come back to in person learning. Turns out that what we do in student affairs is part of why they have come back in very large numbers. So why would I believe, in spite of all these conditions, that now there are forces currently aligned to radically and fundamentally transform post secondary sector and student affairs with it? Because while we were congratulating ourselves on our progress and expanding access and working toward diverse, equitable and inclusive campuses that actualize the so called American value of social mobility, a powerful coalition of anti democracy, anti government, anti institutional and anti science movements converged on, among other shared ideas, the idea that higher education represents what’s wrong with America. We cannot ignore the alignment and mobilization of these various strands of thinking. For the first time since people started keeping track, public support for the idea of higher education is declining. I am tempted to believe the comforting myth that this trend is temporary, a phase in the evolution of conservative ideology that has surfaced publicly in the project 25 quote, mandate for leadership, for conservative promise. I do not know how things will turn out in the election. I am certain that the ideas in this book are not going away, and I’m certain that we in student affairs must take seriously how these ideas and the ideologies that led to their articulation interact with and affect the futures of higher education student affairs. I’m framing my discussion of what is going on around us through three themes. First, college for all. Many of us in student affairs fully bought into the college for all movement. We believe in the potential of higher education to promote social mobility, enhance human lives and enrich democracy. The College for all movement was built on the transition from elite to mass higher education, broadening access to a wider and more diverse population was the key to this movement. Student Affairs as a field has contributed substantially to the structures, policies and programs that have facilitated the success of an increasingly diverse student population that the college for all movement attracted. Student Affairs leaders have responded to the growth in numbers and visibility of first generation students and low income students, as they did to increase the numbers of women in the 1960s and 1970s and students of color. From the 1970s forward, we added programs and services, offices, staff and budgets for these new populations. We train student affairs professionals to serve these groups and others as we become aware of them in our campuses. We expand our work, conduct new research, and reconsider our theoretical foundations so we can move more equitably to provide college for all, not just for those who are basically clones of who are we already have here. While it is true that college ought to be an opportunity available to all who are interested, there are good reasons why it doesn’t need to be a mandate. Even President Obama recently shifted gears on the question. In 2010 he challenged every American to commit to at least one year of higher education or post secondary training, and he enacted policies to promote that goal. He said in 2014 however, that not everyone needs a college degree as long as they have the right training. And in March 2023 he openly advocated for policies that would remove barriers to getting jobs without a college degree. The movement, to quote, tear the paper ceiling, meaning the barrier that impedes workers without a bachelor’s degree, has taken off in corporate and government sectors a student affairs equity minor response to this movement may be strongly in support of including more people in possible futures, but from inside an institution that focuses on making sure people attend and pay for and eventually earn bachelor’s degrees. It can also look like something of a threat. It’s not a both and or it is a both and not an either or. But where is student affairs and helping craft opportunities for holistic post secondary education and training? Do we know enough? Are we creative enough? Are we willing to challenge ourselves enough to jump into that discussion and offer expertise on student development and adult learning? Or will we let education technology vendors, corporations and consulting firms do this work without including our values? So shifts in the college for all approach is one of the forces I see when I look around us. The second theme I see when I look around is related to the college for all campaigns, and it’s about ROI return on investment. In the 1980s there’s a policy shift away from federal grants to students to student loans. This Reagan era, shift shifted from federal grants to federally guaranteed student loans, and it provided policy alignment with the emphasis on earning college degrees. Public messaging campaigns in the early 2000s promised that college graduates would earn $1 million more in their lifetime than high school graduates, and it further emphasized the private benefits of higher education, you will get a substantial income boost. We will also give you loans to make sure that you can pay for college. The ROI was going to be worth it, we said, and it is still true, that jobs that require college degrees are more likely to add up to higher lifetime income, and that people with college degrees are less likely to be unemployed. But many students, families and communities feel betrayed by post secondary enterprise that promised this ROI and yet sort of looked the other way as college costs increased and students took out more loans in aspiring toward the ROI promises of income. Increased post graduation incomes are dampened by the reality inspector of a student loan debt a collective $1.75 trillion across the US, with Michigan College graduates averaging over $35,000 that student loan debt is not equitably distributed, actually, with black women most likely to leave college with debt, and white men least likely. It’s not only the people with the debt who might feel betrayed by higher ed, but the 60% of the US, percent of the US who never earned a college degree. They wonder why they are now being asked to pay for loan forgiveness for something they never chose for themselves, and do not believe they’ve benefited from. Perhaps, while we in student affairs and higher education, we’re studying the impact of college on students and telling ourselves about the benefits of college and how the sector is good for the whole country, we didn’t do as good a job communicating those benefits to others. So if the college for all campaigns benefited from the availability of student loans, the issue of student debt has boomeranged back on us as an argument, not only for individuals to pass up higher education, but for the government to disinvest from loan programs.

Kristen Renn
The third thing I want to talk about as I look around outside, higher education is likely near top of mind for many people already, the more on Dei. Now I’m old enough to remember before a time when dei was before dei was a thing. It was an abbreviation for the words diversity, equity and inclusion, and it captured deeply held values thought professionals added justice to the list, sometimes making a Jedi, and here at Michigan State, our forward thinking colleagues in student life have added belonging, whatever we call it. The term has been co opted by people hostile to higher education institutions and the higher education sector to so does trust and ridicule of higher education in some conservative circles, journalists, college students and local civic leaders are being trained to conflate quote dei with affirmative action, and recently even to attach dei to anti semitism through a logic that runs like this, affirmative action brought more students of color to lead higher education institutions denying Jewish students who are underrepresented among students of color their places at Harvard. I’m not even kidding about this. I was on a panel for the Harvard Kennedy School. Someone made this comment linking dei to anti semitism through affirmative action, I was caught very much off guard, because it just didn’t occur to me to attempt that kind of logic. I thought for years that the work I was seeing in student affairs around religious inclusion was dei work, but the backlash of the progress we’ve made towards equity in higher education has kept the attention of people willing to build that kind of an argument and use it to whack us on the head publicly and hold us up for ridicule. To some extent, we in student affairs didn’t foresee the strength and scope of the anti dei coalition, and we weren’t well prepared for the scale and scope of the attack. Perhaps we were being naive or maybe just Wishful Thinkers. I would also point out that we were busy serving over 1 million college students the United States through a global pandemic. We were using digital versions of shoe strings and bubble gum to MacGyver the college experience for students in lockdown, and while we were tending to the social, developmental and psychological well being of all these students to whom we have opened access, other people were spending their time in the last five years developing blueprints to dismantle what they see as a sinister plot, brainwash youth, shut down dissent and otherwise extend a left wing agenda. The Chronicle of Higher Education started tracking anti dei legislation in january 2023 to be clear, this is a coordinated effort. There is an actual playbook for introducing legislation with recommended draft bills, and there are also playbooks for local school boards, town councils and college student activists, the infrastructure of professional associations, department staff and higher education industry media is inadequate to help us muster defense against this organized assault, and not all institutional leaders are willing to do so in any case, so the anti dei movement has gained momentum through a series of state level laws and policies and got a massive injection of credibility from the Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action. Ending affirmative action in college admissions now, even in states where explicit dei work is legal institutions cower and equivocate, hoping that by changing the names of offices or downplaying identity based programs, they will escape the attention of the anti dei forces. Spoiler alert, that does not work, as black lesbian warrior poet Audrey Lord told us, your silence will not protect you. Higher Education and Student Affairs, our silence has not protected us. I tried to resist the cliche of the war on framing for this part of my talk, but the forces aligned against the core commitments of the Student Affairs field, those forces that are aligned against our vision of dei are engaged in a strategic, hostile operation approximating political, social and digital warfare. Their goal is the complete annihilation of what they claim as dei orthodoxy and the institutions they see as its protector. So as I look around at the antecedents of the college for all movement and the call to tear the paper ceiling, at the ROI questions that relate not only to individuals decisions to go to college and deal with student debt, but also the public investment higher education and at the strategic dismantling of the DEI academic complex, I can see forces mounting that will transform higher education as radically as doctors Austin and Campbell have pointed out, as previous Criswell moments have, higher education has become both an object to be transformed. Formed, and a justification that the folks behind project 2025 use for the dissolution of the, quote, administrative state, which they see as ripe with financial waste and dangerous ideas, sadly, individuals in the nation with debt, all in the service of a quote, unquote, woke ideology, in light of all that has gone before and all that’s going on around us now what’s next? What do our past and the present context suggest for our future? Actually, I titled this talk the futures of student affairs with an S, not just to hedge my predictions, but if we take seriously our historical commitments to students, higher education and society, and we take seriously the context in which we find ourselves, we can imagine some futures for ourselves, our students and our institutions. Today, I’ll offer three potential futures, one related to each of my themes, from looking around at present and invite you into this dream world to contradict all ones taking up the college for all, or maybe not college for all. Movement a future to consider is one where the post secondary sector differentiates even more than it is now, the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions will be able to resist a great deal of what’s going on around them and power through more or less unchanged Student Affairs. Of these institutions will hum along more or less the status quo, largely sheltered from what’s going on outside. But for most of us, there’s a much more interesting, exciting and challenging future in this one if we take seriously the idea that college for all and a college degree for all white collar jobs are harmful and unsustainable myths, then we have the opportunity to get creative with how student affairs can be in the vanguard with alternative credentials, micro credentials and non degree programs. Are we putting ourselves at the table when our institutions start planning these offerings? Can we get past our own ideas that student affairs programs and services are only for the people who only for the people who commit to beginning a degree program at our colleges and universities? Are we able to step into this conversation and say, look, we’ve got expertise to offer in the design and implementation of adult education credentials and skills training. We know about how to create transition programs for learners. We can help instructors and trainers think about the needs of adult learners. Do we really believe that we that what we do and know can only be offered to degree seeking students, and think about what we know about hospitality, leadership, marketing, project management and customer service, why not participate in institutional efforts to help people gain workforce skills in these areas? I bet everybody listening to this talk knows how to write a learning outcome and design a workshop or a program to help people achieve it. As noted by, we’ve tried calling ourselves Student Affairs educators for several decades. How about if we move some of that education expertise to where it’s needed and where our institutions might need us? Imagine a division of student affairs that had a continuing and Adult Education Certification Program not to train more student affairs professionals, but to use our expertise to help people tear the paper ceiling through workforce training,

Kristen Renn
considering the ROI question and how it affects the future of Student Affairs here, I think we have some things to consider. For decades, we have had to explain the ROI of a student affairs division to our colleagues the university, why is it worth investing financially in the personal personnel and operating cost of Student Affairs function areas and here, we have an edge on most academics. When a campus or system starts cutting math and Gender Studies or sociology, faculty are often of lost to explain the value added of their department. They, or we, if I may, own my own faculty role here, have rarely had to defend why it’s important to keep an academic discipline or area in the overall institutional curriculum. Sure departments sometimes have to argue for faculty lines and justify why smaller programs would be worth keeping, but it’s been so uncommon that a major discipline like math or sociology has had to justify its value proposition that faculty in those areas are not well prepared to explain what value they represent. Student Affairs, departments and divisions, on the other hand, have routinely had to do so. Some divisions are entirely self sustaining through revenue generation in residence halls and dining facilities, the institutional investment may be minimal and the ROI questions may be more internal to the vision. Can the student leadership programs office explain the ROI for its costs? Michigan State’s executive vice president Benny Gore may know better than I but whether or not a division is financially independent, justifying the ROI of Student Affairs operations becomes an essential skill of department and division leaders getting past bland and generic cases for educating the whole student, a philosophy with which I agree. Of course, student affairs professionals getting past this bland explanation will continue to have to sharpen our argumentation, use data and demonstrate the value we add to a college education. We have a role to play, of course, in helping our institutions make the higher education ROI case to the public as well, as I noted earlier, higher ed survived MOOC mania and the pandemic campus closures, it turns out that contemporary society does indeed love online learning for targeted skills and knowledge. I’ve done some MOOCs myself, and who doesn’t love a well curated YouTube library for learning skills, but by the millions traditional age and older learners still value post secondary institutions for what we can offer. Perhaps the paper ceiling movement will make some dent in this belief in value, but it seems to me that we may be talking about parallel movements here, improving college access and Student Success pathways in degree institutions while also building out. A robust credentialing pathway to middle class careers that don’t require bachelor’s degree. I just talked about a student affairs future in which we can help build that non degree pathway, but we must also be able to articulate the ROI for higher education institutions and the value of a college degree that is bundled to include student development as well as academic learning, personal development, intercultural and ethical maturity necessary to navigate complex social and civic landscapes. We need to help our institutional leaders explain the this ROI to an increasingly skeptical and local public, politicians and policymakers. We need to help our graduates understand and explain to others what they’re getting in addition to earnings potential from those student loans and the debt they carry with them. We need to truly make good on our promise of access, equity, social mobility and public good. For too long, Student Affairs has kept this discussion in graduate programs and maybe some in house conversations. There is a future of Student Affairs in which we become much more engaged in activating and explaining our value and the value of the experiences students have through our work. Student Affairs philosophies have sometimes led us to believe that students are not quote customers, and justifying our ROI sounds too capitalist, so we’ve avoided the conversation. I suggest that we can’t do that anymore. There’s too much at stake. And I think as a profession, we are smart enough to become fluent in the language of return on investment and value added without giving up our souls or selling out our values equity and inclusion, as I noted to a few student affairs masters students recently, now that students at my university register by placing their courses in their online shopping cart, as they do here, I’ve got to get over my distaste for the language of customer service and get serious about using what I know and believe to argue for the return on investment of the out of class learning environments we create, and the value of student Success Services to ensure that every student we admit is we admit has an equitable opportunity to learn, thrive, graduate and succeed in life. So that’s what I suggest as a second future one that takes ROI into account, not just as an argument to make, but also as a way to think about our work, understanding and explaining the value of Student Affairs adds to the investment students, families and the public make in higher education. And the third future I want to consider, one that deals with the war on Dei, even if project 2025, isn’t enacted wholesale, the hostility toward higher education and the willingness of state, federal and local politicians need to step into the daily operations and budgets of our institutions, as they are now doing in relation to Dei. When they do this, higher education loses much of its autonomy. The enforcement mechanism to comply with this political intervention into higher education will be the threat or actual funding, withholding of federal student funds. Imagine if the price for keeping your gender and sexuality center open was that no student at the institution could receive a Pell Grant, or if operating a Black Male Student Success initiative meant that no researchers could get grants from the National grants from the National Science Foundation. I swear I’m not doing this guy as falling stick here, but these are real possibilities, and we see the antecedents in anti in state level, anti dei laws already in this future, Student Affairs loses a lot. We lose our explicit focus on identity based student programs and services. We lose many of our opportunities to engage students in intergroup dialog and programs to build their cultural maturity. We lose a lot of our staff who came into the field, in part because of its social justice fund. Okay, social justice focus, but we could also hold on to some of our core purposes back from our origins, maybe not the part about women’s hygiene, but we could still hold on to those and do a lot of what we do in meaningful ways, we would have to get more creative, and not just sneaky and getting around anti dei laws, but more creative professionally and how we ensure that the values of our field come through all of the work of the institution. We would have to figure out how to enact and communicate our values. Instead of pointing across campus at our frankly impressive and at Michigan State gorgeous and huge and new Multicultural Center, we point across and we use that as a symbol to say, See you belong. We support you. Please. Know, I’m not dismissing the value of standalone multicultural centers, but the risk of having such a visible center for inclusion means that other people can more easily not pay attention to inclusion their corner of campus. If project 2025, were implemented this winter, would we have confidence that our campuses would carry forward the DEI be values we that we are able to see in our organizational structures today, without our Assistant Vice President for dei be Dr Janine Royal and her team in student life, without our CDO, Dr Jabbar Bennett, could our campus sustain momentum in support of all of our students? What can we do today, this month, next year, to continue to transform our institutions so that we don’t have to rely on dei mandates, so that it is impossible to, quote, get rid of dei by forcing the closing of some offices or buildings and doing away with diversity statements for jobs. To be sure, this anti dei future implemented by these means of financial threat is not a future I want to happen. But it’s not just the future. It is reality for many colleagues from our country, the dismantling of the DEI academic complex is underway, even if it never reaches a national level extreme. It is not turning back. So that’s a future we have to consider, even as we celebrate our ability to embrace equity minded approaches to student learning, development and success here at Michigan State so. I’m grounding these three possible futures and the three thematic forces I see around us today, they are not mutually exclusive futures, and in fact, they’re likely to run parallel and intertwining into all of our futures and student affairs. The two futures I do not see for student affairs are at the polls. I don’t see a future in which we carry on the status quo of today, and I don’t see a future in which student affairs disappears, voluntarily or involuntarily. As for the status quo, we know it cannot hold. Higher education is not going to hold the status quo. It cannot, perhaps it really should not as uncomfortable a decision to contemplate some of the arguments made, some of the arguments made in Project 2025, documents, and more generally, in the public critique of higher education, some of these arguments can inform a self examination of our sector, our institutions in the Student Affairs field, no matter what happens in the presidential election, those arguments are not going away. We can use the antipathy toward higher education as a motivation to transform for the better in equity minded ways aligned with our values. But no, we’re not keeping the status quo, and no, we’re not disappearing or being disappeared as a field. Institutions may dissolve divisions of student affairs or transform them into divisions of student success. There may be new forms of student affairs that come in through mergers with other departments, particularly in the Student Success space. There could be new modes created through outsourcing and public private partnerships and Student Affairs areas. But in the 100 plus years of existence and the 75 years of Michigan State training student affairs professionals, we have enacted philosophies and values that now infuse the post secondary ecosystem as a whole. To be sure, we can look around every day and see examples of inequitable policies, unfair practices and abuse of power in our divisions and our institutions, but the overall access and students executives of our sector require people trained as we are, trained the expectations students and families and society have of higher education, require people who do what we do, maybe with different titles someday, maybe in some different organizational format, but people who know how to think about students, student development, adult learning, student success and organizational culture, institutional leadership and change management, whether student affairs professionals learn these skills and Knowledge and graduate programs or through other experiences. Our field needs these values and we inculcate these competencies, our institutions suffer without.

Kristen Renn
So what is the work we do now to move forward to whatever futures? I’d say four things. We need to engage our values and history, interrogate them, discard what is no longer useful. We need to create new and different theories, but also remember the wisdom of the deans of women to articulate the needs for this profession. We need to live into our low consensus strengths. We are a creative, resilient, inclusive, expansive field. We don’t have to agree all the time. We can adapt and adopt what we know, what we claim to be teaching our students. We can learn to be in disagreement and know that we are better when we listen to others before discarding ideas. We can become more multilingual and vocal inside and outside our institutions. We can show our faculty colleagues how to articulate ROI we can prep our presidents and boards to explain the value added of a holistic undergraduate experience, not just the degree itself, but all that we know goes into a degree. In addition to 120 credits earned, we may have to dip into some uncomfortable framings around customers and investments in ROI, but let’s not stop our principles. Let’s not let our principles stop us from making the case we need to make for right now to counter the anti institution lists. And to be clear, I don’t mean we should apologize for our values, for believing that equity is a worthy, if aspirational goal. We should not give up these values, but we are smart enough to hold them, act toward them, and also talk in a different register for people who, frankly, don’t care if that’s what we have to offer. Finally, and aligned with the part about not apologizing for our values, we always make the case and make it clearly that Student Affairs in Higher Education are about creating conditions for human thriving full stop. Part of being multilingual is learning to make arguments about somewhat abstract ideas, like thriving in ways that are compelling. We in student affairs have been pretty good at that, and we can build from our foundations to get even better. The times require this. Of us drawing things to a close, I find the current context and the challenges of college for all ROI and the anti dei movements, daunting and exhausting, but I look back at where we came from as a field and know that we are up to these challenges, and those are the anti democracy and anti higher education movement, if we choose to embrace them robustly, I don’t know which of these futures may land in the next decade when I think about gathering for Michigan State’s Student Affairs 100th anniversary in 25 years, I’m inspired. I’m inspired in part because for 75 years, this program and its predecessors have been bringing together some of the leading minds in the field as students and as faculty. I am biased, of course, but I believe that this program and all who are affiliated with it as students, alums, faculty, supporters, mentors, supervisors and friends are among the people we need to take up these challenges to create these and other better futures for our field, for our students, for institutions and for society, these futures are in your mind and hands. Thank you.

Heather Shea
It was just as great the second time. Thanks so much. Kris Renn. It was, it was fascinating. Re listening to it, because I picked up on some different things. And so I’m really excited now to open it up to a bit of conversation, reflection, hearing a little bit about what, what Brandon thought, also. So Brandon, maybe we’ll start with you. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Arnold
So, Kris, you talked about being inspired, right? And I think now that it’s been over a little bit over a month since the first time that Heather and I experienced this, we continue to be inspired at looking at these futures. But there’s so much that’s happened even in that short amount of time, both here at MSU and sort of globally, right? We think about ms use, shifting organizational structure and announcements, including, you know, reorganization of Student Affairs work globally. We hear about AI and its role, student activism, all of those things. I’m curious, in this amount of time, what sort of light bulb moments or pieces of this talk have hit different in that about month month time,

Kristen Renn
such a great question. Brandon and it has been in. It’s been running to remind you, you give a talk, and then you think, ah, what if. But what if? And the world, there’s so much going on. It’s coming at us pretty fast, right now, right? One of the things I might add is thinking about the critical skill for our future of student affairs professionals to be responsive without necessarily being reactive. How do we develop the uh, judgment and wisdom to keep our eyes on both the everyday things coming at us, but also the really big stuff and what’s underlying some of that big stuff. Our institutions are now making proclamations about things like, quote, institutional neutrality. We have major newspapers refusing to endorse presidential candidates for reasons that seem clearly linked to capitalist interests rather than journalism. So we see this movement, and I wonder about the role, particularly Student Affairs leaders, who have access to the President and the cabinet to take up serious conversations about this institutional neutrality idea. So that’s one kind of thing, the ability to think quickly, but also discern where to put energy, historically, at least in my lifetime as an activist, part of the strategy of is to is to just rile up the activists and the left and get people paying attention to all the little stuff, so they missed the big picture. So while we’ve been doing a lot of de and all kinds of important things, and I do believe we did spend a lot of really good and important time investing in student life and student affairs during the pandemic, but truly, there were other people over there planning giant takeovers of the federal government while we were kind of chasing after the whack a mole that was being set up. So I think that wisdom part and then using that wisdom in places like the cabinet might be two things that have occurred to me in the last six or eight weeks

Heather Shea
Yeah, yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve been thinking a lot in it. We should also provide our the little time stamp, right? That the NPR politics podcast always does is that things may have changed since, since we recorded this. We are recording this episode on Monday, October 28 we are about a week and a day away from the US presidential election. And so I that I was thinking about your talk and how in particular project 2025 and you know what might happen, and people are listening to this in the the after times, who knows? You know what has has evolved NASA president, or former NASA president, Kevin Krueger, did an episode on the podcast where he talked about Blue State student affairs and Red State student affairs, and how, not only does that mean, you know, students get make, maybe make choices about what institutions they attend based on state politics, but also you mentioned in your talk, what about staff in Student Affairs who may choose not to go work in states where either their identities, their their work, their preparation, isn’t taken into consideration. So I don’t know. I don’t know what my question is in all of that, but I think the context is, is valuable. And if you had to think a little bit about, you know, two weeks down the road, a month down the road, three years down the road, where would, where do you think we should be in terms of creating spaces and places for folks who who may. May not be finding themselves comfortable within their current environments,

Kristen Renn
underlying, sort of the whole, depending on how things go, I’ll move to Canada, or, depending on how things go, I’ll move to a different state, underlying all that is, like a whole lot of privilege, right? Like, there are, sure, yep, 10s of 1000s of student affairs professionals who do not have a choice to pick up and move from wherever they are right for whatever reasons. And there are others who deeply love their home communities, who came to, for example, a master’s program up north. But their heart and soul and commitments to the world and to their family are in perhaps one of the states that bans dei work, but they’re planning to go back make their difference where they can make it right. So I think that one of the risks that that we face in our field is a, or say it a to use Kevin Kruger’s language, if you know, if Blue State student affairs, people start, frankly, looking down their noses at Red State student affairs, people like, why would you work there? And why don’t you just leave? And we hear these things in the field sometimes, right? Like, you know, anybody who really cared about that would get out of that place. Clearly, you don’t care enough. We do run the risk within the field of that kind of again, I have seen this similar kinds of things in my lifetime as Student Affairs. So that would be one, one thing I would worry about in our field, that we continue to meet each other with compassion and thinking more fully. Maybe the parallel has been our colleagues who do student affairs work at Kristian colleges, there was a separate society for Kristian student development, right? Like I think that for a long time, people in secular institutions have not taken seriously those professionals and the work they do, for example, I think we could go down a similar pathway, and that would be a bad pathway to go to, not not good for the field and not good for humans in it, and not all align with our actual values. Student Affairs doesn’t always live on its values, right? Our stated values. So that is, is one of the things I think about.

Kristen Renn
I think getting clear about what our core values are might be helpful if things take a turn. I hope they do not take but also, you know, we say two weeks, two months, three years, when you know the project 2025, people are not,

Heather Shea
are not going to right? Yeah,

Kristen Renn
they’re like, Absolutely not. They are working hard at state and local levels, and they will keep working at a national level if they don’t get the election they want this time, or when listeners hear this, if they haven’t gotten the election they wanted. It doesn’t matter. They’re not going away. And we need to really take that seriously. And, like I said, like, as abhorrent as a lot of it is, a lot of their languaging is we have to take seriously that. That’s we have to take seriously those the arguments they’re making. Yeah, and and not change ourselves to avoid or adapt to meet their expectations, but get, I think, think through what the core of that is, and how do we answer that with our values?

Brandon Arnold
Yeah, so, Kris, when we think about professional preparation programs, which I know is only part of this, right, how do you see the curriculum structure, etc, sort of changing to or evolving to help students, like navigate through continued attacks? You know, on our field, on our work, or working in places that may not align with their values. How do you think that’s going to change the educational experience?

Kristen Renn
Many Student Affairs graduate programs already have students working in experiences, practicum, assistantships, internships. I think that continuing to have people in real world settings, I think, is a way to, sometimes you learn the best stuff, like when you’re just out there, like, wow, that did not work through I thought, and, and, and then I think we need to continue to partner very carefully with the folks who are supervising our grad students, to give them some of the tools to have those conversations with students. Last week was Michigan State’s fall break, and I had a chance to go back to Rhode Island, where I worked for 10 years at Brown University. Dinner with my mentor and former boss, and we talked about the hardest night of my professional career, and she reminded me it was only four months into her being the vice president Student Affairs Dean of Students, when we had students take over the administration building and person for student financial aid. And president who was not on campus that day, by phone, told the dean of students to clear the building by midnight, and so we arrested many 100 students, and we escorted them out of the building, a student affairs professional and a police officer, one by one down the stairs, and I’ve talked in other places, this was the most transformative moment of my early Student Affairs career, and thinking about how we find ourselves sometimes compelled or asked to do things that don’t align with some of Our deeper values, I wasn’t going to leave my colleagues and my mentor alone to do that work without me there, because I had a value of that. I had a value around the humane treatment of students. And it wasn’t it as humane as students could be. It was a pretty humane one of that, but it definitely was one of those times everybody has, some of them in their student affairs career, where your values the institution’s values don’t line up. So today, it may be somebody who’s just had their office shuttered and has been who has accepted, you know, they’re no longer leading an identity center. They’re now in academic advising, because the institution committed to not firing people, but they didn’t have another job. You know, that person may be sitting there right now trying to figure out where to go with their life, and knowing that pretty much everybody in Student Affairs has some of these moments, maybe we have more conversations about those. Think again, training supervisors to help people think through and talk through those more effectively, creating forums where people not just can share the really hard stories that are happening now, but can think through. How do we process those and come to terms? Not another word, um, move forward for most times. So I think that might be part of it. I’d love to hear Brandon you as an earlier career professional. Heather, you’ve got your finger point on the pulse of the whole field.

Heather Shea
Brandon, go ahead.

Brandon Arnold
Yeah. I my brain is going in so many different directions. Um,

Brandon Arnold
I think before I started in the Student Affairs Program, all right, and granted, this was pre pandemic, right? So much our focus, I think, was on individual students, right? Maybe both as somebody who was coming out of undergrad into the field, and I think the field as a whole, right? We were thinking about the students who were sitting in front of us, their journeys, whatnot, with the pandemic, I think with some of the what’s happened at Michigan State, with our own tragedies and the violence that occurred on our campus and the election, I think, over the past few years, or granted, I only graduated in 2021 but I do see that there’s sort of this increasing transition To looking bigger, right? Looking at some of the the forces at play and the political nuances and so many of the things that we talk about in class, right? And we don’t always think, you know, when I go and am a hall director and I sit down with the student, right? This isn’t the thing I’m going to be thinking about, but I do think that it is showing up more and more and more, and is requiring us to, you know, have those conversations with mentors and people who are experienced, right? And is, I think, thrusting us into a little bit more of political navigation than might be necessarily expecting with some early career roles, right or sort of expressing the need to keep these resources or sustain these programs. I think that some of those navigational aspects are at least from. My perspective and supervising, you know, newer professionals as well, previously, like they’re occurring in the life cycle a little bit earlier, which is making folks sort of clarify their values in this world and in this field, again, I think a little bit earlier in the life cycle, too.

Heather Shea
I think you really kind of named for me, kind of the shift, and you’re kind of describing it as focus on individual students, and that kind of construct of understanding what they are addressing and solving maybe individual problems, towards looking at might be larger field issues, and I think about that as our as a field, understanding why we do what we do, and whether it’s the we’re here for, the larger and why, why does higher education do What it does right? And why? Why does higher education need to exist within a democracy? And you know, what does, what do universities owe democracy? There’s a there’s a fabulous book about this that I was just given by my by by my vice provost. But I think about the shift for folks across the field. And you know, for me, a piece of having I was just traveling in another part of the state or another part of the country, where the premise is that we believe in and value diversity, equity, inclusion. I was in California, and so they’re able to build upon that premise with whole other layers of supports and engagement with faculty, staff, students. Was a fascinating question to ask them, Okay, what if that premise isn’t even there? And then how? Then, how do you do this work? Kris, you also mentioned something that I think is really significant about the role of professional preparation in giving students practical experience, and the way that supervisors can have engaging conversations with their staff that that do move at that like, you know, more institutional, higher level, so that when folks get to those places that they’ve they’ve had some, they’ve had some time thinking about, well, this is, this is a little bit more complicated than just, you know, we’re gonna make sure that students Clear the Admin Building, right? I mean, what, what are the, what are the limits to free speech? What are the limits to and and I think that the complexity and us as student affairs folks on our campuses, being able to have those conversations with not only students, but with each other, is going to be, I think, really, really critical going forward.

Kristen Renn
Uh, Brandon Smith, dr, Brandon Smith, who graduates his PhD lecture, his dissertation, he interviewed mid career student affairs professionals and about buoyancy and thriving and sort of how you do those things. And one of the things that became really clear since you’re interviewing people who were later in mid career, some of them, you know, there was some conversation like, you know, it’s always been easy to see like, oh, Student Affairs isn’t the same as it used to be. And for some time, maybe that was just sort of what we felt like as we got older, potentially those in the field. But Student Affairs work now is not what it used to be like. It is not, it is not at the entry level. It is not at mid certainly, and we know it’s not at the top. So I think that there might be a role for graduate programs in offering more places and dialog for current professionals who finished their grad program 510, 1520, years ago, right? Like, who thought I had a chance to have a space to think about, like Brandon when you’re pointing out, like, you know, the organizational dynamics, like the politics, like you can have that in a professional development session, be in your division, but you’re still there with, like, your boss or the people who work for you. Work for You, right? Like, have that conversation in a place where maybe doesn’t have to be a faculty member, but somebody who’s a little outside the division can bring in maybe a little bit of illuminating insight from like, hey, just so you know. Like, remember those four frames of organizational theory? Like, remember that thing? Like, where are we seeing that happening now? So there, it’s possible that there are some rules there to connect over. I think for me, in our grad program, we think about our connection going through the master students back up out to institution, a lot of the time. I. I mean, obviously I am friends with and know and communicate with the folks themselves, but I don’t often think of my role as creating context for those colleagues to do more learning. Often it is for the students.

Heather Shea
Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s a really interesting that’s an interesting point. As you were talking Kris, I was thinking a little bit about my own Master’s experience, and, you know, my engagement with the Student Affairs Administration program here at MSU, not as a student in the program, but as somebody who supervised practicum students who had an opportunity to teach for a little bit of time. In fact, Brandon was one of the students who I got the opportunity to work with more closely. So Brandon, I’d love to switch to you for just a moment and hear a little bit about, you know, how has your career? Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about where you’re currently at, and then how has your career been shaped by this experience at MSU and engaging in these kinds of conversations and opportunities?

Brandon Arnold
Yeah, absolutely. So I currently serve as the Assistant Director for retention in the Office of Student Support and Accountability at Michigan State. So our office oversees Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution as well as our care and intervention team. So my specific areas are around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging assessment and our medical leave and return process for students, and specifically as we’re sort of thinking about the impact that mental health has had on all of us that shows up daily in my work with you know, The intersection intersecting identity pieces and all of those things. So it causes me a lot of times to reflect on exactly what you asked Heather, my own sort of personal journey. So I graduated in 2021 actually finished part of the graduate program, remote because of COVID, started working in orientation, and then decided I wanted to come back to Michigan State. Worked in housing for a little while before coming into this role, which is a little bit more strategic in terms of its approach, still has great student interactions, but it sort of looks looks different. And I think about what the SAA program has given me the skills to do, and I think that is to build genuine relationships with people, and to have some of those tough conversations that Kris is talking about, right? I think to go and talk to folks in the field and share my perspective and get theirs has been, you know, in many of the ups and downs during my short career so far, a great opportunity to build joy, to feel validation, to critically problem solve and work together and not feel alone in these types of things. So as Kris talks about, like the cycle in which, you know, we are educating new folks and bringing people back together to tackle this as a team and knowing that this is different. I think that going through the SA program has allowed me to, you know, understand how to focus on the student and to keep an eye for all of these national and global influences that are consistently changing and shifting how we do work and demand that we evolve with the work and for our students.

Heather Shea
Kris, do you want to, I don’t know, add any thoughts about what Brandon just shared, or how, in indeed, this experience and teaching in this program that now just celebrated 75 years has shaped your experience as well.

Kristen Renn
Yeah, I mean, listening to Brandon and sort of point out some of that connection between like, there’s the folks on the individual, but also the strategic and thinking about one of the things I’ve always loved about this program, and are what drew me here as a faculty member, is that it’s a student affairs program located within a higher ed unit, because we know that student affairs professionals will be sitting side by side with folks in higher ed who are not student affairs professionals. So really getting a sense of that and so having you know courses that deal with the Context for Teaching and Learning, helping making sure people understand the organizational strategies. But also a lot about, like adult learning, which helps us, not only with our individual students that we’re working with, but also how we think about adult learning with each other as colleagues and and sort of ongoing development there. So it was really helpful for you to hear you kind of reflect on that, yeah, I think that’s that’s probably kind of one of those high points in terms of the program is like, it’s just, we get to kind of touch on all the areas and build kind of content, but also skills across that for students and kind of in a purposeful way. It’s not sort of accidental. So that’s, I think a brand is a superb professional. So I’ll take whatever credit.

Heather Shea
Oh, I love it. Well, both of you, I am so grateful for your time today. We always end our episodes this. This podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking, pondering, questioning, as any kind of final thoughts that you have, and then if you’d like to share how folks can get in touch with you LinkedIn or otherwise, that would be great as well. So Brandon, do you want to start us off with final thoughts?

Brandon Arnold
Yeah, I’d love to. So I think I shared this during the 75th ceremony, but Kris has been such a pillar of our fields and of our program that sometimes it’s it’s hard to remember that she hasn’t actually been here all 75 years, and it continues to be such a privilege to get to connect with her and to hear about all the things that are going on. And the piece that stuck with me after the first time I heard the rains talk and today is the idea of futures with right, I feel like it continues to give me hope that there will be multiple routes and multiple ways for us to continue to explore our values, to meet the needs that our students have now and that the needs that we don’t even know that they’ll have in the future, and continue to sort of anticipate the good that Higher Education and Student Affairs can do both inside and outside of student affairs units, so I am just continuing to think about ways in which we work together, break down those barriers, find ways to support each other, restore joy In the work that we do as we approach all of these futures. And I’m so thankful, Kris for your insights and Heather for bringing me on today to get to talk about these important, really important topics in our field.

Heather Shea
Thanks so much, Brandon. Before I get to you, Kris, I just have a quick aside that augments what Brandon just said. I came to MSU to work at Michigan State and also to do my master’s, or, sorry, to do my PhD in the Hale program, and I remember sitting in which is a higher ed context program, sitting in the class that’s called students, students in higher education, I think, is what the title of the class is. And Kris is teaching that class, and one of my colleagues turns to me and is like, when the professor assigns their own book. And I was like, this is Kris Renn. Like, what do you mean? There are no other books on students in the in the United States, that Renn and Reason is the book you want to read. And it was just funny how people had, you know, just kind of thought about that in terms of the of the of the class, but then I think they pretty quickly discovered that this was a unique experience. So Kris, we’re super grateful for for you and your time here at MSU. What are your final thoughts and anything else you’d like to share?

Kristen Renn
I just shared a lot, right? So I wanted to build on something brand new saying and actually connect back Heather to your ACPA presidential address, which was focused on a theme, one of the themes of critical hope. And I feel like we are heading for some rough sledding, troubled waters, not an easy next decade or more in higher ed and in student affairs specifically, and thinking about finding joy, critical hope, kind of rooted in our values that gives us something to hold on, to look forward to, I think that’s going to be essential.

Heather Shea
Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Carrie Grains book if you haven’t read it, or Jeffrey Duncan Andrades article. Maybe we’ll link both of those in the show notes today too. I. Um, is is really been the inspiration, you know, for me, because it is hard, it is hard work, and we have to, we have to do it anyway. I think our our students need it, need us, and then the field really needs that. Thank you both again, this has just been terrific. I’m so grateful for this unique opportunity. Brandon, thanks for being here, also to share space and connect. Thanks also, again to our sponsor. Today’s episode, the Student Affairs Administration SAA master’s program at Michigan State University is a cohort based on campus, two year program with world class faculty, one of whom we just heard from graduate students gain a broad perspective of higher education systems, from social, historical and global perspectives, looking outward to MSU the field of student affairs and the higher education ecosystem. The SAA community aspires to create and undertake educational experiences that equip SAA graduate students to take up the challenges and justices and opportunities of higher education. You can find more information about the s, a, m a program at Michigan State University by visiting the link tree at saa_MSU, and we’ll make sure to link that also in the short show notes. If you today get a chance to listen to me spelling that all out again. Huge shout out to our producer, Natalie ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And we really appreciate and love the support for these important conversations from our community. So help us reach even more folks by subscribing to our podcast, by subscribing to the YouTube as well as to our weekly newsletter, which announces each new episode on Wednesdays and more. If you’re so inclined, you can also leave us a five star review. I’m Heather Shea. Thanks again, Kris and Brandon and to everybody who’s watching and listening, take care of yourselves. Be kind and spread joy.

Slides: “The Futures of Student Affairs: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Ahead” by Dr. Kristen A. Renn

Critical Hope by Kari Grain

Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete by Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade