ABSTRACT
How student affairs should be organized and where student affairs is best positioned on an institution's organizational chart are topics that have been discussed over many decades without yielding a definitive answer. Several reasons may contribute to this situation. Student affairs, as a professional endeavor, certainly is younger than the academic and business aspects of higher education in the United States, which began with the advent of higher education in the 13 colonies. To the extent that classes had to be taught, ledgers needed to be
balanced, and the physical plant kept up to at least tolerable standards made these areas of endeavor (academic and business affairs) necessary. One could argue that student affairs work actually began the first time a faculty member talked with a homesick student about the transition to college, or maybe that student affairs began because presidents needed help regulating student behavior (Rhatigan, 2000). Regardless of when or why student affairs work began, Fenske (1989) provides an insightful analysis of why student affairs has struggled with its professional identity, and why its future has been in doubt from time to time. He pointed out that the primary clientele of student services, college students, are the "most transient" (p. 29) of all of an institution's constituencies. He observed that it only took five years from the height of student unrestin the late 1960s for students to be characterized as an uninvolved generation that "adhered to political conservatism'' (p. 29). Fenske argued,
In contrast, faculty continued, largely unaffected, to teach and research in their disciplines and the institutional financial specialists likewise continued their budgeting and comptroller functions largely unaffected through the entire metamorphosis of students' attitudinal changes from materialism to involvement to indifference. (pp. 29-30)
And, there is some debate as to what constitutes student affairs. Whereas few would dispute that faculty deliver courses, evaluate student projects, and are engaged in research and other scholarly activities, or that the physical plant staff maintains institutional facilities, what constitutes student affairs work is somewhat more debatable in that functions that are part of the student affairs division on some campuses may be positioned organizationally elsewhere on others.
