Introduction

A recent school of thought in the theory and philosophy of advising has emphasized the role of advising in promoting learning and integrating the student’s curriculum. The authors who have advocated “learning-centered” philosophies of advising do not necessarily agree in all details, but they share an emphasis on advising as an academic process, more akin to the work of professors than to that of student affairs professionals. They have tried to take the notion of “advising-as-teaching” more literally than has been done by other theorists. In these ways the learning-centered philosophy has a different (not necessarily contrary) focus from that of the better-known developmental philosophy.

Advisers have had nearly forty years to observe how the developmental paradigm can serve as the basis for an advising system, since the profession’s leadership and most of those directing advising programs have at least professed adherence to this idea of advising. The learning-centered approach has fewer adherents, and less of a track record. Its advocates have argued for its merits in their writings and presentations, but audiences may wonder how different a learning-centered advising system would look from a development-centered system.

The following essay does not describe an actual learning-centered advising system. Instead, it imagines what such a system might be like by describing a fictitious institution, the University of Utopia (UU). It takes the idea of advising as teaching to what might be its fullest logical extension. It is intended to provide, in this way, something of a test of the merits of the learning-centered philosophy: If we find UU’s approach attractive and exciting, we are confirming the validity of the philosophy that lies behind it.

The other objective addressed by this description of UU is to elevate the place of advising within an institution to the highest and most important echelon it can occupy. At UU, advisers not only are teachers, but arguably they do the university’s most important teaching, central to meeting its educational goals. This is a stronger claim than can be made for advising at most institutions.

“Utopian” literature has a long history of exploring the merits of philosophical ideas in this way. Typically readers get the most benefit not from judging the practical feasibility of the practices that Utopian authors describe, but from identifying and evaluating the underlying ideas. This essay invites readers to assess the learning-centered philosophy of advising and its paradigm of advising-as-teaching by seeing one way, at least, in which an institution might base its system on those ideas.

After describing the University of Utopia, the essay concludes with a survey of some of the writings on advising and higher education generally that are the intellectual sources for the ideas on which UU is based, so that readers can get a better sense of the origin of those ideas.

The University of Utopia

The University of Utopia (UU, as its students and faculty call it for short) has a well-deserved reputation for its outstanding academic advising program, which is also unusually well integrated into the fabric of the institution. Many consider the UU advising program a model worthy of emulation by other schools. For other colleges and universities that might be interested in adapting UU’s advising system to their circumstances, it is important to understand both the intellectual foundations of the system and the story of its development.

UU’s leadership began the transition that led to the current system largely because, like so many American institutions in late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they were struggling with the need to assess student-learning outcomes. The faculty and administrative leaders of this project became convinced that it was important to assess not only in a “granular” way whether students were mastering the content of individual courses or even individual majors, but also in a big-picture way. They wanted to find out whether their graduates were achieving the overall goals of a UU education as expressed in the institutional mission statement. They wanted to know whether the students were weaving together the various parts of their curricula to become the kind of broadly-liberal-arts-educated people that UU claimed to produce, even among the graduates of its professional programs. Specifically, UU had previously embraced the objectives of the Liberal Arts and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. So the question was, do UU graduates achieve these objectives?

Of course there were those within the university who did not think this was so important. They believed external stakeholders would evaluate UU primarily on the discipline-specific skills and knowledge of students in respective degree programs. However UU was unusual in that those taking this position constituted a minority, at least at the moment in time when our story begins. Even the idea’s strongest advocates were discouraged, though, when some of the earliest efforts at assessment failed to find much evidence that students were graduating with the integrated, unified understanding of the world that the catalog touted.

This led leaders of the project to propose a university-wide effort to focus teaching and learning on making connections, synthesizing perspectives, gaining overviews. This should be pursued in every major, at every level of study, indeed in every course. In response to this proposal, those who had always been assessment-skeptics made common cause with those who argued that the new idea was much too ambitious, that it would be difficult to accomplish, and/or that it would be burdensome and a waste of time and energy better expended elsewhere. One argument commonly voiced was that while UU students were mastering the skills of synthesis, their counterparts elsewhere would be gaining an advantage over them by learning more physics (or accounting, or history …).

This was where the argument stood when someone (no one any longer is sure who it was) suggested that a solution might lie in making use of the university’s strong but underutilized advising system.

Before the story continues, it is important to understand what is meant by saying the system was “strong but underutilized.” The system was strong in its inputs. The advising leadership had worked hard to make sure that advising loads were reasonable; that advisers had clear, attractive, and accurate materials to work with; that advisers could be reached not only in their offices but by phone, e-mail, text message, or whatever the latest communication technology was at any given time; and that frequent in-service trainings and generous conference travel allowances provided advisers with opportunities to stay up-to-date on the UU curriculum and trends in advising elsewhere.

However, the university did not require students to see their advisers in order to register, and few students saw any other reasons why one would see one’s adviser. Moreover, extremely user-friendly and accessible electronic degree audits enabled students easily to track their progress toward their degrees without professional assistance. Presumably for these reasons, many students never saw, spoke with, or otherwise made use of their advisers.

At that time UU, like many universities, had a dual advising system. Full-time advisers with professional staff status advised most first- and second-year students, while upperclass students (who were required to have declared majors) usually had faculty in their major departments as advisers. The staff advisers especially, but many of the faculty advisers as well, were enthusiastic proponents of the university’s learning goals and curriculum, but often were disappointed by students’ level of engagement with both. As it happened, at this time a fairly large portion of the staff advisers held advanced degrees in liberal arts disciplines and some had served in faculty roles at UU or elsewhere. These advisers in particular were focused on the LEAP objectives, and they were the most excited about the idea that the advising system could be instrumental in a new effort to achieve the university’s goals. However they wondered, How?

Core Ideas

Several ideas that advisers, faculty, and administrators were discussing at the time came together and led to an answer to that question. Here are brief descriptions of these ideas:

1. Value added. Advisers who wanted to promote greater use of advising—in particular the director of the advising center—had been asking, “What is the value added by advising?” They reasoned, “If we think of advising as a process in support of course selection, there may not be so much. But suppose we think of the advising transaction as a locus of student learning that is coequal with the classroom but may add much more value. What should we aim for students to learn from participating in advising, and how will we know if they learn it?”
2. Constructivism. This view of learning was gaining currency among faculty. It held that students do not receive knowledge from others (professors, textbook authors, etc.) but rather create it actively themselves. Applied to the problem at hand, this notion suggested that students’ task in meeting the LEAP objectives is to construct for themselves an understanding of the world and their place in it that is informed by all the disciplines they have studied but brings them together in a way unique to each individual learner. It is not only a dispassionate intellectual activity but one in which the student’s task can make meaning out of his or her world.

3. Intentionality. Some faculty members were also beginning to emphasize intentionality in their pedagogy. They argued that students would master material more thoroughly and understand its implications more effectively if they learn to see knowledge in the context of the larger picture of which it is intended to be a part, if instructors explicitly discuss all the learning goals of a lesson or a course—including not only facts and theories but broader intellectual skills that students will be developing and the “big picture” into which the material fits—and if students keep these goals in mind as they learn and describe their learning with reference to the goals.

   Advisers were echoing faculty in this regard, encouraging students to make their course selections with a view toward something more than checking off a box on a worksheet. They asked students to focus on what they expected to learn from each course and how that would fit in with other courses, e.g., by building a skill that would facilitate further learning or by providing an instructive contrast with material learned elsewhere.

4. Reflection. If students are going to construct a world picture for themselves, faculty reasoned, they must reflect constantly on new learning as it relates to other ideas already encountered and on the way this learning may contribute to further learning goals that the students have in view. UU already expected the requirements for credit-bearing internships or service learning experiences include reflection exercises; now faculty members were suggesting they should play a larger role in holding all of a student’s learning together.
5. Careers and majors. Most UU faculty and the advising staff were committed to breaking down the common assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between career goals and academic majors. They believed that with a few specific exceptions, a liberal arts-based education that would meet the LEAP goals would also prepare students for a wide variety of careers or professional schools. In this commitment they had the support of the career counseling center, since staff there found such a stance made their work more interesting, albeit more challenging as well.

Faculty who were thinking through the interrelationships among these concepts now brought them together. They concluded that a student’s reflection, his or her intentional construction of linkages among the pieces of his or her education, was an indispensible part of a UU education. They felt it would add value to all of the student’s learning, in every course, in the major and general education. To be fully successful, they reasoned this reflection would need to continue throughout the college years and beyond. Finally, though this activity is the student’s responsibility and cannot be done for him or her by anyone else, it nonetheless will be most effective if it is facilitated.

At this point, the UU faculty and staff were ready to put the pieces together and devise an approach to the problem they had posed. The keys to the solution were these: First, the faculty decided to make the facilitation of higher-level reflection and meaning construction the province of a student’s academic adviser. Second, because the faculty now understood advising to have an absolutely critical role in facilitating learning and in meeting UU’s instructional goals, they decided to assign academic credit to this activity and to make earning that credit a graduation requirement. (The idea that “advising is teaching” had been a mantra for decades at UU and other institutions, but few who espoused it could give a very persuasive account of its meaning. The University of Utopia would pioneer in giving that concept a concrete definition.)

Elements of the UU Solution

Once the university leadership had reached these conclusions, it took a remarkably short time to decide how to implement them. Below are the key elements in the system they created.

Each student at UU maintains a portfolio throughout his or her time at the university. The portfolio can be kept on paper although most faculty members believe it will be most effective if it is electronic because hyperlinks can enhance its functionality. The portfolio includes an evolving learning plan in which students focus on how they intend to meet both the broad goals of a UU education and their specific personal educational goals. The plan is “evolving” not only because a student’s goals change over time, but also because his or her understanding of the university’s educational goals will also develop with time.

The second element in the portfolio is a collection of work samples that the student chooses in order to demonstrate his or her learning. Finally, the portfolio includes ongoing reflection on how the student’s academic experiences are fitting together and how they are addressing the learning goals (or changing them). Students reflect not only on what they are learning but also on how their goals are changing.

Early-career students tend to have rather simple learning goals and experience difficulty in making connections and reflecting. Advisers expect this and have learned to help them patiently use the portfolio as a developmental exercise.

Every semester, each student is enrolled in a credit-bearing course titled “Reflective Learning.”  The instructor for each reflective learning course is the student’s adviser.  Most commonly, Reflective Learning (RL) is conducted in a one-on-one format using various modes of interaction from e-mail exchanges to meeting in person. Some advisers find it productive to have some group meetings as well. Because the students are earning credit, advisers are comfortable with expecting them to do out-of-class work that includes not only reflective writing for the portfolio but occasional reading about education or learning as well. And just as students earn academic credit for the course, advisers receive credit toward their contractual teaching load.

The university wants students in RL to accomplish more than just analyze their learning progress. Faculty expect that the experience will in fact enhance students’ learning in their other courses by helping them to make connections and see course content in a wider context while they are experiencing it.

In Reflective Learning, students work on the elements of their portfolios but with hooks to some of the same decisions that characterize the advising setting at any university. For example, an adviser might engage a student in discussing why the current semester’s course selections were appropriate at just this point in her studies. What does she hope to learn this semester, and how will the various courses complement each other in advancing her goals? “Psychology 201 is a prerequisite for Psychology 212” is not a good enough answer to such a question. The student needs to answer in terms of what she expects to learn in the courses.

RL students also discuss learning retrospectively. “Now that you have taken a methodology course in both biology and psychology, let’s talk about the similarities and differences between natural and social sciences.” “Can you see any application of what you learned in that course to your desire to go into electronic journalism?” They may also discuss why they chose to include a particular piece of work in the portfolio: “I thought this history paper in particular shows that I have analytical skills that would appeal to a business looking for an entry-level manager.” Or: “I wanted to show how my ability to do an ethical analysis of a problem has progressed since last year.” Or, finally: “This exam essay showed that I can sort through a mass of material, some of which is relevant and some not, to identify the information that is really relevant to solving a problem. If I’m competing for a job with people who’ve only answered multiple-choice questions or artificially constructed essay questions, I’ll have an advantage.” Such discussions constitute one of the most prominent manifestations of intentionality at UU.

At the beginning and end of their undergraduate careers, students have stage-specific RL experiences. In their first year, all students take an RL course focused on the concept of “Work.” Though it has some elements of career exploration, as the students expect it to, “Work” also serves a more abstract purpose. It includes a conceptual exploration of the concepts of work, career, vocation, and the like, and also offers students an opportunity to research the kinds of skills and knowledge that people need in the workplace, which are not always the same ones that the students would have identified previously. It includes a multi-disciplinary exploration of the question of what makes work satisfying. This exercise is valuable for students not only because of the intrinsic interest of the topic but also because it gives them an early opportunity to experience the merits of investigating a question from such diverse perspectives as those of philosophy, psychology, film, and literature.

All UU students are required to complete some type of experiential learning course to graduate. In most cases these courses are internships, though there are also service-learning opportunities.  UU faculty are particularly interested in providing occasions for students to make connections between their sometimes-abstract classroom learning and real-world situations, and then to reflect on how those connections affect both those situations and the meaning of the prior learning. Instructors for these experiential learning courses are usually faculty from a student’s major, but advisers in the RL courses make a special effort to encourage students to explore all the possible connections to the rest of the curriculum.

As they approach graduation, students complete a capstone reflective learning course that involves more integration and synthesis than earlier courses and is designed to provide an opportunity for reflection on their entire educational experience. This includes discussion of what they have learned about how all the intellectual disciplines they have studied come together for them to constitute a world view. It also provides an opportunity to talk about the skills they have developed, and in particular how some of these may relate to career or graduate school plans.

Professors and Advisers

The university’s decision to make advisers responsible for a credit-bearing course and give them teaching credit for it created some confusion among the faculty and staff at first, since only faculty had a contractual teaching load and staff advisers did not. The resolution of this perplexity led to the next important breakthrough at UU. The university collapsed the distinction between faculty and staff advisers. Though it took a transition of several years to complete, UU sought to create a system in which all the personnel who advise and teach students have the same status.

Leaders noted that not all professional advisers were ready to undertake the kind of work that was going to be part of the job. But for that matter, neither were all of the faculty. So the university made an intentional decision to recruit people who were motivated and qualified for this very special area of teaching to serve as faculty/advisers. Students now referred to these individuals generically as “preceptors” (that term won out in a close faculty vote over “mentors”). Faculty and staff advisers already at the university but not prepared for their amplified roles were offered support to adjust. A very few (from both groups) were not interested in moving their careers in this direction and sought to move elsewhere. However, most were excited about the possibilities and chose to take advantage of the opportunity.

Official policy at UU provides for a seamless continuum between faculty hired primarily to be teacher-scholars, who teach courses in academic disciplines and general education and engage in traditional scholarly pursuits while doing some advising, and those hired primarily to advise while teaching a few class courses. The institution’s expectations of any given preceptor are tied to the proportions of the different types of teaching that he or she does, but there is no sharp boundary between “professors” and “advisers.” Those who primarily advise come to the university with strength in an academic discipline and generally continue to do scholarly work—often related to advising—while they are at UU. Those who primarily teach classes are hired as scholars and are evaluated on their scholarship as well as on their advising and other teaching.

Just as there is no sharp division between these two categories of faculty at UU, there also is considerable overlap between what happens in the advising setting and what happens in the classroom. Although advisers are primarily responsible for coaching students to make connections among parts of the curriculum and to develop an overview of their entire education, faculty are committed to contributing to this effort in their courses as well. In their teaching they focus frequently on helping students see relationships between the material they are discussing and other topics in the present course or other courses. They also encourage students—indeed they frequently require students—to think through such connections for themselves as one of the ways to demonstrate mastery of a subject.

Convincing the Stakeholders

Early in UU’s transition to the new system, some at the university worried about how well it would be received by external stakeholders. Addressing this concern required thought and not just a little bit of work.

The biggest concern perhaps pertained to the university’s accreditors, both regional and discipline-specific. Without regional accreditation, an institution is critically hampered, and most discipline-based accreditations are necessary for students in the respective programs to be employable (though some are not). UU timed the transition to the new system in such a way that it would be in place for a few years before the next visit by the regional accreditor. This provided time to demonstrate the usefulness of the new practices for outcomes assessment, which was a major concern of all the regional accrediting bodies at that time.

The disciplinary associations that accredited UU’s programs in some pre-professional areas were a mixed group. Some were suspicious of any institutional style that diverged from orthodoxy, and it took considerable effort to convince them that unusual inputs should be ignored or at least pardoned if the student outcomes are good. Admittedly, certain of these bodies represent the one area in which UU must continue to mend fences since they remain skeptical about the relevance of RL and other such practices to create professionals in their fields. Although UU graduates do perform well on licensure exams, these tests are not generally designed to assess the range of skills that will ultimately enable them to be highly successful in their professions.

Other constituencies that needed to be “sold” were the organizations that typically employ UU graduates. Here the university’s leadership took a wise step. Many programs and schools within the university had advisory boards, which included many of those employers among their membership. These groups were brought into the planning process early on, which enabled them to understand the rationale for what was contemplated and also gave them the opportunity to contribute to the specifics. In focus group settings, faculty and administrators elicited employers’ thoughtful analyses of skills they needed in the workplace, with the promise that this information would be important in the end. Since (not coincidentally) the employers’ ideas matched up well with the LEAP objectives, it was not difficult to deliver on this promise. Once employers were convinced to at least consider UU students for positions, the students had the opportunity to prove their value to a receptive audience. Samples of reflection from their portfolios were often highly persuasive, as were student performances in internships. Ultimately the most decisive factor was that when UU grads were hired, they performed superbly and paved the way for the next year’s cohort.

A deciding factor with the employers was intentionality. In many cases their prior experience with students who had majored in such subjects as English or anthropology revealed that the students’ ability to discuss what they had learned seemed to be limited to the specifics of their disciplines. However impressive that knowledge may have seemed, its relevance to the business needs of the prospective employer seemed remote. Now, however, UU students were demonstrating the ability to speak with enthusiasm and sophistication about the intellectual skills they had developed and how they could contribute to that business. The difference actually lay not so much in the fact that the students now possessed those skills, but they demonstrated a superior understanding of the skills’ usefulness in a range of contexts compared to their earlier counterparts.

As a public institution, UU needed to be concerned also about its state government and especially the legislature, since lawmakers are not always patient with academicians’ thought processes, and perhaps least of all with those who depart from well-known models. The most important element in eliciting the state’s empathy for UU’s endeavor turned out to be the university’s ability to demonstrate the impact on learning outcomes and employability.

The parents of prospective students comprised still another constituency; and without this group’s acceptance of UU’s project, success would have been difficult. The challenge for the admissions staff was to present the newly “different” character of the university as a positive distinction rather than a detriment. The very coherence of UU’s vision of the above features and the way they fit together was helpful in this regard. Marketers spoke of the university’s “brand,” and although some faculty were uncomfortable with this terminology, they agreed it represented a useful point. UU was doing something no other institution was. When families visited the school, they met faculty who spoke with passion about the new model. Highly motivated students guided the families on tours of the campus and talked about learning in a sophisticated way that the parents had not heard from tour guides elsewhere. The students demonstrated this enthusiasm even while showing off the fitness center.

Assessment of Learning

The most important common element in satisfying each of these stakeholder groups was the value of UU’s ability to document student learning outcomes. The university was able to do this well partly because students’ learning had in fact been strengthened by intentionality and reflection: Learners who understand what they are doing and why they are doing it tend to do it better. Moreover, aspects such as the portfolio and the RL course had focused faculty and administrative attention on learning outcomes, so whenever a question about assessment arose, an answer was readily available, or at least people knew how to produce it. So UU had moved to the forefront of institutions known for their outcomes assessment and for their students’ achievements. At the same time, faculty and others were frequently talking about UU’s ideas at academic conferences related to their disciplines or to topics in pedagogy, advising, or assessment.

A final point relating to outcomes assessment is that by engaging the students so specifically in the analysis of learning, the institution had also made them partners in the assessment effort. More than their counterparts elsewhere, UU students understood the purposes of the assessment activities in which they were invited to participate, and they wanted to do so. They actually enjoyed completing national surveys of student engagement. When they took national tests of general education skills, they tended to shine, because they recognized faster than other students what the tests were seeking to measure, and they better understood those skills and how to demonstrate them.

Institutional Fit

Another area of skepticism elicited by UU’s new direction, in addition to its questionable ability to satisfy stakeholders, regarded whether the model could work at a comprehensive university. Some faculty who acknowledged that these practices would be appropriate for a liberal arts college were afraid they would not be conducive to strong graduate and professional schools or to research by faculty. UU had a number of rigorous and highly regarded doctoral, master’s, and other professional programs that were important to its mission, and faculty understood there tends to be a correlation between such programs and their own scholarly productivity. University leaders had no desire to deemphasize any of these features of the institution or to see them deteriorate. Advocates of UU’s transition pledged to continue to support graduate study and research, and as we have seen, the changes proceeded.

Now, some years after the transition process began, UU tends to recruit and attract faculty intellectuals who are interested in the relationships between their own and other disciplines, partly because this is important to undergraduate teaching and advising there. A consequence, though, is that such faculty have had an impact on the emphasis of some of the graduate programs as well. For example, much more so than their counterparts at other universities, graduate departments at UU encourage their students to take courses in other departments, provided they can explain how these relate to their learning goals and individual curricula. UU has also been more receptive than other universities to proposals for interdepartmental and interdisciplinary graduate degrees, provided that faculty proposing such programs can give a persuasive account of what students would gain from enrolling in them. (UU’s reputation for intentionality in its curriculum and for assessing outcomes has earned credibility with state authorities and accrediting bodies whose approval is needed for such programs.)

A second development resulting from the transition is that faculty in UU’s graduate programs have decided to focus on the fact that most Ph.D.’s, no matter how bright, will not wind up teaching at the most prestigious research universities. Many of them will wind up at liberal arts colleges or master’s-granting institutions. At such places, they will likely be expected to do a lot of undergraduate teaching and probably advising as well. UU faculty believe they can best serve those institutions by making sure their doctoral students are prepared for the types of roles they will have there. Therefore all of UU’s Ph.D. programs include course work on undergraduate teaching and advising and are animated by UU’s own approach to undergraduate education. Just as UU’s “brand” is helpful in recruiting undergraduate students, it is also helpful in placing the institution’s Ph.D.’s.

Moreover, the faculty also realize not all of their doctoral students will eventually find the academic employment that is the initial goal of their graduate study. Given the current job market, there are chronically more new Ph.D.’s than there are teaching jobs. Faculty members, therefore, scrupulously avoid sending explicit or implicit messages to their students that suggest non-academic employment is unworthy of their skills. On the contrary, they encourage reflection on where else those skills may be useful and exploration of options, just as they do for undergraduates.

Finally, when UU undertook these new developments in its approach to learning, it did not lower expectations that faculty will be productive scholars. It did not increase faculty teaching loads, though some of the load was redirected to advising. It did, however, make a commitment to support research that might bridge or fall between traditional disciplines, provided that the results of this work would meet the same standards of excellence that more traditional work demands.  That attracted scholars to the faculty who were interested in doing this kind of work and who were interested in collaborating with like-minded colleagues who might be in different departments. Such faculty were also likely to be strong contributors to undergraduate teaching and advising of the sort that UU was promoting.

Teaching Future Advisers

One idea that rose among leaders of the graduate school as they focused on the impact that new practices would have on graduate education was that UU might be uniquely situated to offer a graduate degree in academic advising itself. Faculty reasoned that such a program might be a good use of the university’s expertise and a way to capitalize on its reputation in the field as well. Prospective students may be people already employed as advisers at institutions encouraging them to enhance their techniques, new college graduates who might find the profession attractive, and people working in academe who would like to change careers. Once the program was established, it became evident that it also served as an in-service introduction to the advising field for new UU faculty with significant strengths but no advising experience.

Other universities were also offering programs in advising, however, UU’s distinctive program provided, relatively speaking, more emphasis on:

1. In-depth examination and critical analysis of the theory and philosophy of advising
2. Exploration of current theoretical issues in higher education
3. Higher education curricula—how they are organized, how various approaches are similar and different
4. Approaches to general education—relative merits and drawbacks, theoretical underpinnings
5. Cognitive development
6. Assessment of student learning

At the same time there is—again, relatively speaking—less focus on student personal development and on techniques of advising specific populations. These topics are not considered unworthy of attention, nor are they altogether neglected; the program faculty at UU have simply decided to emphasize their own strengths.

Moreover, advising technique certainly is included in the curriculum. Students learn about styles of advising and various approaches to the undergraduate student. They develop facility at Socratic questioning, which UU faculty consider as important for advising as it is for all teaching. They also learn about such approaches as appreciative advising, narrative/story-telling techniques, and ways of employing technology to enhance students’ active learning in the advising process.

UU faculty members are aware that much of what is taught in the advising graduate program is valuable for classroom teaching as well. This is not surprising since the university is committed to the idea that these two teaching domains are continuous. Students in the university’s doctoral programs, therefore, often take these courses to help prepare themselves for teaching careers, as do some early-career UU faculty.

Just as students in any graduate program benefit from working with a range of faculty who bring different philosophies and expertise to their courses, this is the case at the UU advising program, too. Faculty who teach in that program vary in their intellectual backgrounds, theoretical approaches to advising, and techniques and problems in the field that particularly interest them. Most but not all hold joint appointments with other UU departments. The department treats advising as an intellectual discipline still young in its development and characterized by the kind of ferment common in disciplines whose paradigms are in flux. It has developed a reputation around the institution as a place where key issues in higher education are addressed, and it frequently hosts outside speakers who will be of interest not only to teachers and students of advising but to the wider UU community.

Recently, for example, the advising program hosted a symposium exploring whether advising is best seen as an autonomous discipline or can better be understood through its relationships to other activities such as teaching. Leading authors in the field were invited to serve on the panel, and advisers from around the region and beyond joined UU faculty and students in the audience. The event was successful enough that faculty made the UU Advising Symposium an annual event. Because the symposium tends to address issues of broad interest in higher education, it is more likely than other advising conferences to attract audiences and speakers from outside the advising profession.

To be sure, the University of Utopia’s venture in creating a new role for advising has faced its share of challenges. To begin with, it is expensive, although so are many other initiatives that comprehensive universities choose to implement. It is expensive partly because advisers at UU are earning salaries closer to those of faculty than is the case at other institutions. There is also the expense of faculty receiving teaching credit for RL instead of other classes they might teach, but this is offset by the fact that RL students are paying tuition. Moreover, since the credits for RL are included in the total required for graduation, there is no net increase in the amount of instruction the university is funding.

Also, while it is attractive for many faculty members, this too is an area of challenge since it is easier to recruit UU-compatible faculty in some disciplines than in others. In evaluating the costs and challenges, university leaders take into account the distinctiveness of reputation that the advising system and related ventures have helped UU earn and the ability to attract and retain students who thrive in the kind of culture they have built. Most of all, university leaders value the contribution that advising makes to the education of those students.

As responsible managers in a competitive marketplace, they value the edge that they have; as educators with a good idea, they want nothing more than to see it emulated at other institutions.

Background Reading

The following book’s title and overall approach in some ways represent the model for this essay—not specifically pertaining to the ideas discussed above but reflecting the strategy of using a fictitious university to make a philosophical case about higher education.

Hutchins, Robert Maynard. (1953). The University of Utopia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

The following articles promote learning-centered philosophies of advising. The ideas that evolved through this literature are the ones that inspired the advising system at the University of Utopia.

Hagen, P. L. (1994). Academic Advising as Dialectic, NACADA Journal 14 (2), 85–88.

Hemwall, M. K., & Trachte, K. C. (1999). Learning at the core: Toward a new understanding of academic advising. NACADA Journal, 19(1), 5–11.

Hemwall, M. K., Trachte, K. C. (2005). (2005). Academic advising as learning: 10 organizing principles. NACADA Journal, 25(2), 75–83.

Kuh, G. D. (1997). The student learning agenda: Implications for academic advisors. NACADA Journal 17(2), 7–12.

Lowenstein, M. (2000). Academic advising and the “logic” of the curriculum. The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal, 2(2). Retrieved from http://www.psu.edu/dus/mentor.

Lowenstein, M. (2005). If advising is teaching, what do advisors teach? NACADA Journal, 25(2), 65–73.

Laff, N. S.. (2006) Teachable moments: Advising as liberal learning. Liberal Education, 92(2), 36–41.

Reynolds, M. (2004). Faculty advising in a learner-center environment: A small college perspective. Academic Advising Today 27(2), 1–2.

Schulenberg, J., & Lindhorst, M. (2008). Advising is advising: Toward defining the practice and scholarship of academic advising. NACADA Journal, 28(1), 43–53.

Schulenberg, J. K., & Lindhorst, M. J. (2010). The historical foundations and scholarly future of academic advising. In P. L. Hagen, T. L. Kuhn, & G. M. Padak (Eds.), Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising (pp. 17–29). Manhattan, KS: National Academic Advising Association.

The following are not specifically about advising but are sources for UU’s approach to education generally. Chen and Light is recommended for best practices in the use of e-portfolios for reflection and assessment. The Association of American Colleges and Universities website offers a wealth of both theoretical ideas and best practices in higher education. The Hart Research Associates document supports the claims made above about the career relevance of the UU approach to education.

Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change 27(6), 13–25.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2011). Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP). Retrieved from http://www.aacu.org/leap

Chen, H. L., & Light, T. P. (2010). Electronic Portfolios and Student Success: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Cronon, W. (Winter, 1998-99). Only connect: The goals of a liberal education. The Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter, 64(2), 2–4.

Hart Research Associates (2010). Raising the bar: Employers’ views on college learning in the wake of the economic downturn [PDF document]. Retrieved from http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/2009_EmployerSurvey.pdf