Media and how they see Student Affairs

I was invited to a roundtable discussion hosted by the New York Times/International Herald Tribune yesterday which included about 20 higher education administrative staff who work in Qatar.  The invitation noted that the meeting would include, "Don Guttenplan, the London-based International Education reporter for the IHT and The New York Times, who, with the participation of ThomsonReuters correspondents in Doha, will lead discussions on the current opportunities and challenges in higher education in the region."  As participants waited for the meeting to begin, I spoke informally with two of the NYT/IHT staff who noted that they had just completed the same type of meeting in Dubai the previous day.  Out of curiosity, I asked what kind of issues emerged in the Dubai discussion and was told that the most prominent message was that Dubai higher education claimed to be offering the full "student experience."  I asked what "student experience" meant and the response was, "The social life of the city, bars, clubs, etc."  WOW!

You could have scraped me off the ceiling.  After I regained my composure, I indicated that bars and clubs were certainly not what Hamad bin Khalifa University and our university partners were about and then I went on to extol the benefits of wholistic student engagement advocated in the American model.  The staffers, one Greek and the other British, seemed to only vaguely understand what I was saying as I desperately attempted to explain the research and theory building around issues of student involvement and development and its deeper impact on the "student experience."

Encounters like yesterday continue to amaze me.  I wonder if those involved in the Dubai meeting actually said what was reported.  Or, was it the lens of the NYT/IHT staff who come out of European educational tradition and have never experienced serious student engagement?  We have a lot of work to do in articulating what we do, the importance of it to the educational enterprise, and differentiating the role of student affairs as a serious endeavor in the emerging international higher education community!