IU advising task force requests career ladder

As a professor in the Department of History, Padraic Kenney might meet with 50 students majoring in history during any given semester and have great conversations with only a dozen of them.

“If a student were to ask me what’s the difference between a B.A. and a B.S., I have no idea. That’s what advisers are for,” he said. “Faculty and students tend to think of advisers as ‘people who choose my classes.’ We can’t move ahead at this University without a really great and really prominent, in the sense of being really widely advertised to the students, advising program.”

Currently, IU advisers have no career ladder, Kenney said, and an adviser who has worked for the University for 20 years barely makes more than an adviser who just started.

“A career ladder says that somebody who’s been working here 10 years deserves to be rewarded,” he said. “We want to keep that knowledge on campus.”

In a recent report released by the IU Bloomington Academic Advising Task Force, Kenney said it became obvious that IU’s advising program is the next important aspect of campus that needs to be tweaked to better the University.

Kenney, who chairs the education policies committee of the Bloomington Faculty Council, co-chaired the task force.

The creation of the task force followed the April 2009 report “Enhancing Undergraduate Education at IU Bloomington,” which made it clear to Provost Karen Hanson and other members of the University how important advising is to the campus.

“The charge of the task force was to look at advising without any limits, and the first and most important thing that we show and argue in the report is that academic advising is absolutely central to the University,” Kenney said. “Universities these days are really looking at their bottom line and quickly realize that a key source of funding is students. I’m talking about the fact that it is a real waste of money if you bring in students and then they drop out.”

Sonya Stephens, vice provost for undergraduate education, appointed the 25 members of the task force last fall.

They began to meet as a group in October, said Mark Hurley, president of the Bloomington Advisors’ Council.

For nearly seven months, Hurley said, the members met as a large group once a month and as smaller working groups on a weekly basis.

The task force determined three focus points on how to improve advising, Kenney said.

First, Kenney said, there needs to be a central advising office or administration.

“They wouldn’t be reporting to this person, but somebody who oversees the advising and is aware what’s going on across campus, be a voice for advisers,” he said.

The second focus relates to advisers’ compensation, Kenney said.

“When we consider all the things about advisers, it’s amazing how little they make,” he said. “We should be both attracting the top people and holding on to them, because we also have a fair amount of turnover, which also costs the University a lot.”

As the final focus, Kenney said the task force wants to provide advisers with the proper tools to help communicate with and assess students.

“The hope we have is that the provost and vice provost, in creating this task force and giving us this job, were serious about really doing something about advising,” he said. “We’ll be setting up this administration and implementing some of the tools in the 2010-11 school year. I believe that we’ll see a lot of movement on this in the fall.”

Gail Fairfield, associate director of the undergraduate program in the Kelley School of Business, said she immediately said yes when asked to join the task force.

“I believe passionately in academic advising and want to see it more organized, professionalized and effective,” she said. “We need some campus-wide momentum to make that happen.”

While Fairfield said she feels hopeful that the provost is responding positively, the bottom line depends on the University — and whether the next step is taken depends on money.

“Each of these things will make a huge difference,” she said. “The career ladder itself, if able to set it up, that will make an amazing difference in moral as well as effectiveness. Right now, advisers improve themselves because they want to. We don’t necessarily get to reward them. If money were not object, we would be madly implementing tomorrow.”

Greater coordination and an advising council that has a strong voice in making recommendations to the campus will help advisers and members of the administration communicate better, Hurley said.

“I think a lot of people are excited, but they’re also not getting their hopes up too much,” he said. “We’re all kind of waiting to hear what the next step is going to be.”