Search Continues for Advising Director

Administrators are continuing the search for a new director of the Academic Advising Center to replace Elizabeth Nathans, its current director, who will be retiring this spring.
"The search for a new director of academic advising is proceeding apace," said Donald Hafner, vice provost for undergraduate affairs, in an e-mail. The University has hired a private hiring firm to assist in finding a new director. The University has not released the name of the firm.

Hafner said he does not expect the job requirements of the new director to change.
However, he said, the new director should be able to work well with individual departments. An important direction for the Academic Advising Center in the future will be to serve as a resource for academic departments as they address the needs of their undergraduate majors," he said. "This will require a director who enjoys the confidence of faculty, and we are identifying candidates who fit that bill."

Nathans, who came to the University in 2005 having administrative roles at Duke and Harvard, said she hopes to see the Center promote deeper conversation between students and advisers.

"Advisers carry very heavy loads," she said. "They are often working with 30 or 40 students in total, and this, by definition, means you can't have in-depth conversation. There aren't enough hours in the day."

One issue to overcome, Nathans said, is cutting the nominal ties between faculty and their students, encouraging more advising relationships based on conversation. "If a student comes to me with a question … I may not be able to give the student a clear-cut answer," she said. "Sometimes the student will be dissatisfied. One thing that is very hard to accept is ambiguity. To take intellectual risks and to take personal risks is very hard."

The processes to reach these goals, however, will come as a result of effort. "They involve advisers making time to work with students around those issues," she said.
"They involve advisers having the courage to ask the tough questions. They involve students knowing that advisers will not know the answers to every question."

Nathans served as dean of freshmen at Harvard for 13 years prior to arriving at BC. Her time at Harvard gave her a different perspective on student formation – a perspective from which, she said, BC could benefit. "Harvard paid very close attention to making sure advisers had information about the whole student," she said.

"If I found one frustration [at BC], it's that the structures haven't caught up with the goals to address the needs of the students. I have rarely worked in an institution that has seen such an extraordinarily sharp division between student and academic affairs."

But, she said, any institution faces troubles with its advising structure. "There is no University in the country that I know of that can claim that it's completely happy with its advising system," she said. "There are no undergraduates that are completely happy with the advisers they get."

Al Dea, president of the Undergraduate Government of Boston College (UGBC) and CSOM '10, has made academic advising a central issue of his time as president.
"From UGBC's end, we hope the new director of the Academic Advising Center will work with UGBC and our initiative to improve academic advising," Dea said in an e-mail. "Our hope is that students will play a role in the search process for the new director for the center, and, once the new director is in place, that they will continue to work with UGBC as well as other administrators to improve the advising experience here at Boston College."

The University advising system underwent a systematic change during Nathan's time as director, changing from a system based on course selection to one based on student development. "The Advising Center is very new to BC," Nathans said.

"Emphasis had always been on course selection. Even first and second year students had a different adviser for every selection period."

While students are now assigned faculty advisers, changed only at a student's request, there are still ways the University can improve its student-faculty relations, Nathans said.
"One of the things that I've noticed is that there are fewer public opportunities at BC for both students and faculty to debate issues of mutual concern, whether that is the curriculum or the residential community," she said. "Again, that grows out of BC's not so recent past of faculty governance."