Adrianna Kezar in The Washington Post: College faculty called on to aid floundering students

Pullias co-director Adrianna Kezar was quoted in The Washington Post about how more college professors are being called on to “help head off problems that can derail students”:

The faculty’s inexperience in addressing students’ nonacademic problems stems from the evolution of American higher education, said Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who studies the issue.

While faculty members at smaller colleges once functioned almost as substitute parents, said Kezar — the director of USC’s Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success — larger universities “took their ethic very much from the German tradition, which said, ‘These are adults. They sink or swim. It’s not our place to guide students.’ ”

Over time, Kezar said, many faculty members began to view their job as weeding out students who couldn’t meet the challenge — not helping them. Now, she said, “it’s kind of like we’re returning to the old idea” of having faculty members serve in a more supportive role.

Read the full article at The Washington Post. Kezar is the author of How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change and many other books on higher education.