Faculty provide opinions on new advising system and what needs to be addressed

As UAA’s new centralized advising system, temporarily known as “Advising 2.0,” gets underway this semester, the Northern Light has reached out to professors to receive their input on advising.

In an email, Ian Hartman, the president of UAA’s Faculty Senate and an associate professor of history, wrote, “While there does not seem to be a faculty consensus around the pros and cons of the advising reorganization, we have expressed a few concerns to the provost.”

“We’ve had incredibly hard working advisors, but they’ve not always been supported at CAS,” said Hartman in an interview. 

Hartman said that with such a demanding job, turnover with advisors could be high. This was challenging due to the level of training and effort required to get an advisor to be able to do effective advising.

When it comes to faculty involvement in the advising restructuring process, Hartman said there have been conversations with provost Denise Runge’s office. And though faculty haven’t been left entirely in the dark, they still have questions about the specifics. 

“To the provost’s credit,” said Hartman, “when we’ve asked for meetings, she has shown up and has tried to explain it to us. We have had questions. Our meetings have resulted in more questions. We’ve had to go back to the provost to get more clarification.”

Hartman said that looking forward, some questions about the new system will focus on how UAA will evaluate and troubleshoot problems. 

Hartman also said that the Faculty Senate advisory board have urged that if there is any any additional funding going to this new advising effort it should “be directed to those who interface with students on a daily basis rather than middle- and higher-level administration.” 

Professor Sarah Kirk, in the department of Writing, has had decades of experience with the UAA advising process. She was a faculty advisor in the 90s to help provide a “holistic” approach to advising before academic advising was implemented. Since then, the process of advising has changed at UAA, but she has still maintained interest and a level of involvement with advising. 

Kirk was on the initial hiring team for First Year advising when the program began. First Year Advising will now no longer exist under the new Advising 2.0 system. First Year advisors have instead become a part of three different cohorts that serve different colleges at UAA. 

From a professor’s perspective, First Year advising was an important tool when it came to supporting new students and finding people they could turn to for help, said Kirk. “It was awesome to me as a faculty member who reaches out a lot, especially at the beginning of the year, to advisors about students.”

Kirk said that one of the strengths of the First Year advising program was the support that First Year advisors were able to provide for students who may need it, and it was easy for her to reach out to the first year advising team and make sure there was someone a student could talk to. 

“There was never anyone who said ‘that isn’t my person,’” said Kirk, instead, first year advising would direct people where they needed to be. Kirk said that there was a value to having those advisors in one “shared physical unit, to really help each other out and learn from each other.”

Kirk has concerns that because of the first year advising system being broken apart, both as a group and to different physical offices, “they don’t have that camaraderie of shared understanding.”

Looking forward, these faculty members have expressed the desire to make sure that students can get quality advising that they need, and will continue to look at this new system as it develops. 

Ian Hartman wrote that “Advising has not been uniformly strong across the colleges, but I would also hope and expect that the administration takes the necessary measures to strengthen and build off of what is working and place the greater focus on fixing what is not.” 

Some answers to these concerns can be found in the next article on academic advising, “Student-first advising: The evolution of UAA’s advising system”.