If you are a student affairs practitioner and read Inside Higher Ed, I’m guessing you know from where the inspiration for this post came. My response was too long to post as a comment, so I’m going to write an entire blog post about it instead.
I have to admit, I struggled with Eric’s post about student affairs and radical practitioners. Not because I didn’t agree with it – theoretically, I do. But reality is so very different than theory. As my friends and I say, “Good in theory, bad in practice.”
See, here’s the thing: I was the radical practitioner. I spoke out in meetings for all the things I thought we should be doing instead of what we were doing. I argued with higher-ups when nobody else would. I became known for the fact that I was blunt and unafraid and something of a bitch (because that’s what we call assertive women in the workplace, right? Come on, let’s be honest here – us bitches always know that’s what we’re really be called instead of smart, hardworking and assertive). And then a couple of things happened one right after another.
I got a job in another department within our division – a promotion of sorts. And with that job came some hard questions about how I behaved “politically.” It’s one thing when you ask the questions so your director doesn’t have to. It’s another thing when you are the director.
And then after a particularly tense meeting one day, I was speaking with another director, and they shared this tidbit with me: “You know that none of the rest of us ask the hard questions because we know you’re going to, right?”
So here I was, putting my job on the line time after time, and these other people were not willing to do the same. Nor did I give them the chance to do that.
And the reality of all of it was, instead of actually getting change to happen in our division, I mostly just became known as a contentious, well, bitch. It was easy to dismiss what I said because it seemed like I was always argumentative. This isn’t to say I didn’t have good reasoning behind my arguments, but really, what do you do when that one person always asks the hard question or challenges you? You get tired of them, right?
The past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project concerning retention and student GPAs that is something of a shift for the way our department, division and university operate with students. In other words, I’m doing something radical. But instead of yelling that from the rooftops, I’ve been quietly plugging away, pulling in concerned constituents, and crunching data. Yesterday I met with a higher up one-on-one to discuss this project, and I received high praise for what I’d been doing. Did I argue, challenge, ask tough questions, or generally act like a radical? No – at least not in public. I did all of those things in quiet, and I’m managing to make a big change that I believe will have a very positive impact on our students.
So maybe I still am a radical practitioner – but you won’t be hearing about me in any papers or media outlets. I just hope some day maybe you’ll see some of these students graduate instead.