As Matthew Caires, MSU’s newly hired Dean of Students, begins his service, he certainly has no shortage of issues on his plate. In addition to the immense task of reaching out to the many facets of MSU’s student culture, he must rise to the challenge of articulating the student perspective at the administrative level.
His most important task, however, should be to develop opportunities for student leadership.
Historically, the university has focused on providing services to students through programs implemented by paid career staff, the approach underlying everything from Residence Life to the recently reorganized Office for Student Success. MSU would be well-advised, however, to redirect its efforts toward encouraging opportunities for students to serve each other.
Too often, staff-driven programs, well-intentioned though they may be, fail to engage students in their education and surroundings in a meaningful way. Instead of creating a culture where students take responsibility for their educations in an adult sense, soft paternalism tends to reduce us to something akin to products on an assembly line, subject to an externally directed education better suited to a high school setting.
It seems likely, sadly, that this state of affairs has a significant impact on our drop-out rate. If asked to take on more responsibility, perhaps some of the quarter of freshmen who leave our campus by the end of their first year could be retained.
Groups like the Network of Environmentally Conscious Organizations, whose efforts developed the campus’s recycling program, should serve as role models for institutional involvement. Given the right combination of passionate leadership and institutional support, student-driven efforts can and do make substantial contributions to our campus community.
In the process, they develop their participants from passive learners to proactive community members, providing students with the single most important educational opportunity MSU can offer. In that sense, extracurricular engagement is as important to the university’s mission as is its undergraduate research.
As a liaison between MSU’s students and administration, Caires is in a unique position to help broaden the impact of those experiences. In addition to advocating for the funding and services necessary to support student initiatives, he has the ability to facilitate the dialogue necessary to build student ideas into viable programs and polices. The talents of MSU’s student leaders are among the campus’s most important resources; it would be a missed opportunity not to invest in them.
