extracurricular governing apparatus—identifiable on university org charts as Student Affairs, Student Life, Dean of Students—is central to the daily life of college at institutions like UVA. I like to think of it as the Other University.
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The Other University does not have a faculty; it has a staff with professional degrees and doctorates in higher-ed administration. The Other University does not have a curriculum; it has programming: health and wellness, multicultural awareness, community outreach, personal enrichment and career counseling. Within the managerial ethos of the Other University, these aren’t topics for discussion and discovery, they are messages to be internalized and abided.
But what distinguishes the programs of the Other University from the College’s education curriculum is not simply the existence of rules and governing structures—any big public university will require a healthy bureaucracy—but rather the rigidity of the Other University’s rules and the fixedness of its goals. If the faculty aspire to guide students in open, searching inquiry, the Other University fits students to the ready-made norms and values of a complex institutional structure and a professional world students will soon inherit. If faculty teach students, the Other University trains them. Consequently, instead of helping students gain clarity about their own values, the Other University reinforces the credentialing game undergraduates are already primed to play, turning questions about how to live into marketable skills and qualifications, the challenges of shaping a day into a calculus of work-life balance, aspirations for future ways of living into competition for internships and future jobs, and psychological challenges into a therapeutic concern best treated individually and cordoned off from collective and curricular life.
The result is a contradiction that is reflected in the distrust and skepticism with which many undergraduates come to view their universities. The real education we attempt to give them in the classroom requires trust and trustworthiness, a feeling that is not just a mechanical dependability but an openness and vulnerability to the judgment of another. Meanwhile, even as it claims to “advocate for students and support their development as citizen leaders”—as our Division of Student Affairs website puts it—the Other University often undermines their development into citizens with duties to each other and the capacity to argue about how to live together on campus. The Other University therefore further narrows the path that pushed students into college and reinforces the conditions in which feelings of anxiety and powerlessness float over them like morning mist.
