What University Administrators Want

Earlier, I commented on the term used by college administrators helicopter_parents.  These were viewed by these august staffers as parents who (from their perspective) continue to insinuate themselves into their offspring's university experience instead of fully cutting the ties and showing up at graduation or perhaps to drive them home for Christmas or the summer.

Here's a few more terms that the people in Divisions of Student Life or Services bandy about:

Suitcase college -- An institution where a sizeable part of the student body returns to their home town on weekends, leaving the campus setting largely to the fraternities, sororities, graduate students, and students that come from far away.  (Think LSU, Alabama, Georgia, or North Carolina, where significant numbers of students decamp on weekends.)  And they see this as a bad thing, when instead they could remain on campus and have deep discussions regarding the great ideas of Western or World philosophy:

"I wonder how big is his thing?"

"What would happen if I drank beer through a straw?"

"They must be double D's, at least."

"Do you think Professor Kindly is straight or gay?"

"There's no way that Kentucky will win the NCAA Championship!"

The reality often is, there's nothing to do but drink and watch television on weekends.

Then there's the  commuter college.  These are largely viewed as inferior institutions in which students live at home and drive to campus, sometimes for an hour or two.  Usually, they work part-time as well, as checkers in big box stores, wait staff, baristas, or sometimes heavy duty work.  It would seem to me that these students should be admired for their ambition and gumption to go to such an effort.  But noooooo!  It just doesn't fit in with some outdated, elitist view of what should constitute a higher education.

These student life people have their faculty counterpart in the tenured faculty member who has a distaste for teaching introductory level classes, seeing those as appropriate for the poorly-paid part-time help and teaching assistants.

Whether they like it or not, college and university students have their own needs and agendas in attending their institutions.  Somehow, providing a raison d'être for Student Life staffers is not in their program.  Obviously, there's a lot of self-interest on their part.