Advisers, Not a System

Some time in about October of my first year here--back when Lerner was new and Butler was old and there was no Broadway Residence Hall--a friend from home, then a senior in high school, came and visited me. He spent the night in my Carman double and came to my Lit Hum class, and somewhere along the way he asked me if I liked my adviser. I explained to him that I didn't have one, that at Columbia we had an advising "system," and I truly believed that what I was saying made sense.

Alex went to Harvard.

A few months later a girl was killed in her Ruggles room by her boyfriend--a former Columbia student--and I suddenly found myself crying in my Carman room over the deaths of two people I had never met. I cried because Alex was right, Columbia's system of advice without an adviser didn't work. Because right then I didn't need an advising system, I needed an adviser. I needed a person I knew and who knew me who could be there when I suddenly felt like a little kid, in a big city, a very long way from home.

In four years at Columbia, I have had few times like those, although more than I should have. I have had many more good experiences than bad, and I have met many people my own age who have helped me through what bad times there have been. That is as it should be.

But looking back over my four years at Columbia, I realize that I have never gotten over the feeling I first had that day in February when I had no one to turn to, the feeling that, should my support network fail, there was not another one to catch me. And in dozens of other much more minor crises--What should I major in? Should I drop this class? What do I do if my history paper is already three weeks late?--I found myself with nowhere to turn.

Such complaints about advising at Columbia are not new. They persist because the system remains broken, and because the administrators who try to fix it by incremental steps refuse to realize that the model itself is fundamentally flawed. Students play into the problem when we, too, start talking about the flaws in the advising "system" without realizing that by framing the discussion in those terms we have fallen into the strange, euphemistic language of Columbia life, in which we call not having an adviser a "system" and pretend that it is not failing our students.

Let us be clear, then: students do not want an improved advising system. Students want advisers. We want people with names and faces who we know and who know us. No advising structure that falls short of that will ever solve the problem.

This is not the first advising system to fail. When Austin Quigley became dean in 1995, students had individual faculty advisers, and, if anything, the system was worse than it is now. Faculty members know little about the College beyond their own fields, and many professors have little interest in serving as undergraduate advisers. Quigley realized that the system was failing, and in a bold move he eliminated it, ushering in what eventually became the class center system.

It is easy to forget that, on paper, class centers are not a bad idea. Having deans whose only job is advising is a good idea, one that should not be eliminated. Having groups of class deans rather than assigned advisers was not a bad idea either, on its face; but it just doesn't work.

It doesn't work because it turns out that what students are looking for in an adviser isn't information--which the Class Centers by and large provide well--but human contact. Students want a familiar name and face to listen to their concerns and ask intelligent questions. Students want broad suggestions, new alternatives, perhaps a little input from someone who has seen similar situations before. If they want to know whether Spanish Literature 3200 fulfills their major cultures requirement, they can look in the bulletin.

What is not obvious as a first-year, but that I know now, is that such advice is not hard to give. In four years at Columbia, I have learned enough to give pretty decent advice--that is, to ask the right questions--about pretty much all the majors in the humanities and social sciences, plus the Core. Give me two weeks to talk to science majors and professors, and I could do the sciences too.

Nor need the cost be prohibitive. If each adviser has 100 advisees--25 new students a year, hardly an impossible number to get to know at least superficially--Columbia College would need about 40 advisers. The Class Centers already employ 17. Doubling that number is not impossible if the College and the University make it a priority.

Dean Quigley is fond of saying that what students want is a "one-stop shop" for advice, an impossible goal. But the truth is that students don't expect one person to have all the answers. They don't expect a one-stop shop. We expect someone who knows our name and has time to meet, someone who will listen, support, and give us a nudge in the right direction. If I have one message to pass on after four years, it is this: we don't want a system; we want an adviser.

Ben Casselman is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He was News Editor on Spectator's 125th Managing Board.