As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen academic advising, a committee led by Dean of the College Paul Armstrong is developing a proposal for improvement that it will present to President Ruth Simmons by the end of the month.
The committee, which also includes Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services David Greene and Associate Provost Brenda Allen, director of institutional diversity, is working largely from a report on academic advising completed in 2001 by Associate Professor of Sociology Gregory Elliott. Elliot used sociology research methods to survey the student body and see "what works and what doesn't," Armstrong said.
One of the committee's focuses will be providing a "safety net" for students who do not connect with their advisers. "We think it's incumbent on us as a university to be more present to provide assistance to students in difficulty and for students for whom the advising doesn't work," Armstrong said.
For this to happen, it is the consensus of the committee that academic advising needs to be better integrated with student life. The committee hopes to propose five residential advising offices closer to dorms. "We're talking about having arms of the college out more where students are living," Armstrong said.
A recent addition to the academic advising system is the "advising partnership" model. Introduced three years ago, it passes materials on to first-year students and faculty about the interactive nature of a successful adviser-advisee relationship - something that many students have never experienced before.
"When I came to college, I had no idea what an adviser was," Armstrong said. "(Advisers) aren't supposed to be the answer-men or answer-women, telling you what do. (They should be) asking you questions, helping students make the transition from high school - you don't have that relationship with your guidance counselor.
"Part of this is recognizing that you have to educate students how to be not passive but active, how to seek out advice - orienting (them) to figure out how (they) should be navigating the Brown curriculum," he said.
Over 180 faculty members participate in first-year academic advising, and about 900 first-year students were enrolled in Curricular Advising Program courses this year. CAP courses enable first-year students to be taught by their advisers in a small seminar setting.
For many students, however, faculty advising falls off in their sophomore year when they are no longer required by the University to have an adviser. One of the committee's goals is to increase the percentage of sophomores with an identified faculty adviser. To this end, sophomore CAP courses are being launched for the 2005-06 school year, and in January, the University organized a sophomore midyear orientation.
A good faculty adviser has to believe that the job he or she is doing is important, which is a perception not all Brown faculty have, Armstrong said.
"We had a couple of discussions about these ideas with faculty governance boards, and (it seemed) that faculty find advising (at Brown) more interesting than at other places, where students have a list of courses they have to take - 'I have to do this, I have to do that,' " he said.
"But they don't always think that the work that they do as advisers is adequately recognized and rewarded. We need to make sure faculty advising salaries are raised and advising gets as much attention as teaching. Good advising should be more visibly rewarded," Armstrong said.
The committee aims to begin implementing its final proposal in the fall, and in the meantime has completed site visits to Dartmouth College and Princeton University and a discussion with Stanford University's newly appointed associate vice provost for undergraduate education. "We're trying to get as many good ideas as we can from as many people and put them all together," Armstrong said.
