 |
FACULTY FOCUS: Zipperstein
hopes to convince more professors to advise freshmen
and sophomores.
Linda Cicero |
In his new role as faculty
director of advising, history professor Steven Zipperstein
is thinking about thinking.
He envisions a one- or two-hour session that would
help launch New Student Orientation: several heavy-hitters
on the faculty would discuss a complex topic like abortion,
then field questions. “They’d take on an
issue that is enormously, massively difficult, and think
aloud,” Zipperstein says. The exercise, he adds,
would show students that “much of the fun at Stanford
is intellectual labor.”
The first to hold the new half-time post, Zipperstein
is guiding nothing less than the overhaul of the advising
system. Faculty participation in freshman and sophomore
advising has dropped from about 45 percent to 15 percent
over the past 10 years. (Most advisers are staff; some
are graduate students or local alumni.) And surveys
by the Undergraduate Advising Center over the past three
years indicate that between 25 and 35 percent of freshmen
are not satisfied with the advising they’re receiving.
Take Darius Ameri. His adviser “has been okay,
but not particularly helpful,” he says. “I
usually go to the HPAC [head peer academic coordinator]
in our dorm, and I tend to be pretty independent and
self-reliant.” But for every Ameri, there’s
a Megan Rowe and a Tim Chang, who are happy with their
match-ups. “My adviser lets me know if I’m
going to take anything bad, and it’s definitely
been a good experience,” says Rowe. When Chang
explained that he was unsure what type of engineering
to select as a major, his adviser suggested attending
colloquia and brown-bag seminars put on by different
departments. “I never would have known to do that,”
Chang says.
There clearly are dedicated and resourceful advisers.
But according to John Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate
education, there also is “a persistent complaint
in some quarters about advising.” Bravman, ’79,
MS ’81, PhD ’85, says he created the new
position in part to respond to “a problem that
is complex,” and because advising is “part
of the core academic mission of the University.”
The time had come, he says, “to appoint a faculty
director of advising, just as we have a faculty director
of the program in writing and rhetoric and of Introduction
to the Humanities.”
Zipperstein spent autumn quarter talking with faculty,
staff and students on the Farm, and visiting a number
of other campuses to see how they approached advising.
He liked the University of Pennsylvania’s system,
where one-third of freshmen have advisers in their residences,
and he was intrigued by the academic/residential role
of Harvard’s assistant deans of freshmen. Over
lunch with Wellesley’s class deans, Zipperstein
learned how freshmen pick academic advisers from among
the professors they study with in their first term.
He is beginning to float the idea of establishing an
all-frosh dorm with a residential dean who would be
responsible for advising 400 to 500 students through
their four years at Stanford.
Zipperstein also would like to boost the number of
faculty who advise incoming students, but he says that
is not “in and of itself a panacea.” Instead,
he says, “I think the key is foregrounding academia
at the very center of advising.”
He also knows recruiting faculty will be challenging.
Tom Wasow, for example, has had it. The linguist spent
more than 20 years advising freshmen, dating back to
his days as an assistant professor. The director of
the symbolic systems program says he loved the interaction,
and recalls that “there were a couple of occasions
in which I was able to play a really important role
in a student’s life, helping him or her with a
decision that would have repercussions for many years.”
Wasow continued to advise freshmen even as their interest
appeared to wane in recent years. Then came last year’s
written evaluations, which “brought home how little
most students valued my efforts.” Wasow took his
name off the UAC list, and now devotes his mentoring
time exclusively to his own sym sys majors.
Zipperstein hopes to change faculty reluctance to advise—perhaps
with financial incentives for research, or by cutting
back on the social obligations that have come to be
associated with advising. He envisions each adviser—faculty
or otherwise—accepting responsibility for eight
to 10 undergraduates. Their job would be to set an intellectual
tone, “not to master information about the distinction
between Chem 201 and 202,” he adds. “Part
of the key to the success of this endeavor is to foreground
intellectual activity without losing the panache that
Stanford has.”
|
