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Small Colleges and Universities Division |
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The Small Colleges and Universities Division provides leadership in higher education to promote understanding of small college and university missions, challenges, and opportunities. The Division ensures that NASPA's programmatic and policy directions appropriately respond to small institutions – defined as those enrolling less than 5,000 students – and their unique needs.
Welcome to NASPA’s Small Colleges and Universities Division! The SCU Division is dedicated to advocacy, professional development, support and information-sharing for colleagues in institutions who strengths lie in being small in size, but large in impact. The Advisory Board is eager to be responsive to your needs and input and provide resources that are relevant, timely and resonant with the unique characteristics, as well as challenges, of our types of institutions. We stand ready to listen, discuss, engage in dialog and offer value to you as a professional in the many and diverse ways that we are called upon to serve our students. We have a special responsibility as educators and we can enrich each other by candid communication, asking questions of each other and sharing best practices---hopefully SCU can be that resource for you!
Social Learning Environments: Gen Z students want to be in on the action and collaborate with others to build their professional skills. Gen Z wants to see the finish line, working with others that can help them build the skills necessary to reach their goal is important to them. With community partners this may look different in the past because they will want to do things with their peers.
No matter your political affiliation, there was much to celebrate in Tuesday’s midterms, which resulted in increasing diversity of our nation’s elected officials, seven state gubernatorial races (so far) flipping from Republican to Democrat, an increased Republican majority in the Senate, and a Democratic takeover in the House. If your interest in policy work is more issue-based, you may be searching for the answers to what this all means now that results are in. How does a night of history-making play out on the ground, and how will these state and federal results impact local higher education communities? This post by NASPA assistant director of policy research and advocacy Diana Ali will dig into some of the outcomes, including early indications of record voter turnout on college campuses, to provide insight into these questions.
Institutions seeking ways to address the increasing divisiveness plaguing our nation’s political discourse are challenged with balancing strong respect for equity and inclusion with protecting free speech. Contrary to inclusion and diversity and freedom of expression being at odds, however, campus leaders can take proactive steps to establish both meaningful protections for those who have experienced past trauma and create spaces for open and honest discourse on fraught topics. For some institutions, re-examining institutional speech and expression policies to identify how they can be made less reliant on free speech zones while still allowing for appropriate planning for campus safety, may bring together campus leaders, students, and the community around a concrete task. Establishing a practice of deliberative dialogue across topics of passionately held different opinions allows for greater exploration and creates capacity for empathy and discussion. Providing resources for higher education professionals for use of safe spaces in pedagogically appropriate ways can help students with histories of trauma, from veterans to survivors of abuse, engage more fully with their educations. This post by NASPA director of policy research and advocacy Teri Lyn Hinds provides starting points and considerations for these approaches.
In an era of ubiquitous data and data collection, the notion of completing an official count of every person in the United States every ten years may seem outdated. The Census, however, is a vital component in the foundation of our national government. Understanding the importance of the Census and the role it plays in ensuring the health of our representative democracy is essential as we head into the final year of preparation for the 2020 Census. This post by NASPA director of policy research and advocacy, Teri Lyn Hinds, provides a brief history of the Census and how it relates to the United States House of Representatives and the distribution of federal funds before addressing how student affairs professionals can help ensure all members of the campus communities are counted in 2020.
