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From Disciplinarian to Change Agent: How the Civil Rights Era Changed the Roles of Student Affairs Professionals
Gaston-Gayles, Joy L. Wolf-Wendel, Lisa E. Tuttle, Kathryn Nemeth Twombly, Susan B. Ward, Kelly
Gaston-Gayles, Joy L.
Wolf-Wendel, Lisa E.
Tuttle, Kathryn Nemeth
Twombly, Susan B.
Ward, Kelly
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Abstract
Little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators
during the civil rights era. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the
civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to
the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other
administrators, and the community. A secondary analysis was conducted based on
interviews with 18 student affairs professionals who served on a variety of college
campuses during the civil rights era, primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s. Our
findings suggest that these administrators took on roles such as educator, advocate,
mediator, initiator, and change agent in order to effectively and efficiently resolve
issues that arose on their campuses as a result of the civil rights era and the student
protest movement.
Colleges and universities have been the battleground for many important civil rights
concerns, and many authors have chronicled student social movements of this era
(Adelman, 1972; Altbach, 1973; Strauss & Howe, 1997). In both northern and southern
colleges and universities, integration of African Americans into higher education was a
slow and difficult process (Clark, 1993; Cohodas, 1997; Exum, 1985). Once on
campus, African American students had to deal with segregation in all types of
out-of-class domains including housing, cafeterias, social activities, organized student
groups (including athletics, fraternities, and sororities), availability of scholarships,
on-campus and off-campus jobs, and access to barber shops and beauty parlors.
Student affairs administrators were in the middle of this battlefield and played a key
role in representing student demands to the administration and sometimes advocating
for change to occur (Clark, 1993; Laliberte, 2003; Tuttle, 1996). Simultaneously, the
presidents of many college and university campuses expected the student affairs staff
to represent the institutions’ views to the students and to mete out discipline to
students who failed to follow the campus rules. These conflicting demands—the desire
to support students and the desire to be seen as effective administrators—put many
student affairs administrators in precarious positions (Nichols, 1990). Nevertheless,
student affairs professionals in the civil rights era served as communication links
between the administration and students and experienced enhanced status and
advancement to higher administrative positions. In the process, their experiences
exerted considerable influence on the student affairs profession itself. By examining the
stories of student affairs administrators, we learn firsthand how the civil rights era
affected the profession. This article provides a glimpse into civil rights struggles on
campus as seen through their eyes.
Unfortunately, little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs
administrators during the civil rights era. One study by Crookston and Atkyns (1974)
found that during the period of unrest in the 1960s, many senior student affairs officers
left their positions. They also concluded that during this period student affairs
administrators became known as crisis managers, and most colleges and universities
elevated the chief student affairs officer from dean to vice president. In recent research
that examined student affairs during the turbulent years of 1968-1972, Laliberte (2003)
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confirmed the crisis manager and student advocate roles of student affairs
administrators. For the purpose of this article, a secondary analysis of the data
collected for the book Reflecting Back, Looking Forward: Civil Rights and Student
Affairs (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2004) was conducted to examine how the civil rights era
influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played
by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the
community. The book told the stories of individuals in first person narrative form;
however, this article focuses specifically on how participation during the civil rights era
affected the profession itself.
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Date
2005
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Berkley Electronic Press
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Citation
Gaston-Gayles, J., Wolf-Wendel, L., Twombly, S., Ward, K & Tuttle, K. (2005). From disciplinarian to change agent: How the civil rights era changed the roles of student affairs professionals. NASPA Journal, 42(3), 263-282.