Student Affairs Leadership: Defining the Role Through an Ecological Framework

Kuk and Banning offer readers a new lens for viewing leadership, one that goes beyond a focus on the behavior and values of leaders as individuals to examine how positional leaders interact with their environments to engage in leadership “in context”.

This book is addressed to aspiring and senior student affairs officers and offers a new “ecological” framework that recognizes that today’s leaders are affected by factors they may not control, and work within an environment they cannot expect to mold solely through their execution of skills and strategies.

Based on research supported through a grant from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Foundation, this book explores leadership as an interactive process within varied environmental contexts, and through an analysis of the transactional process between the leader, the organizational members and the various components of the organizations environment.

It describes how leaders deploy differing competencies, skills and strategies in varied contexts, and how they choose to use past experiences, their training and personal characteristics to set priorities and navigate the cultural, social, physical, legal and political, resource, and ethical environments of their organizations.

Several chapters conclude with an account of how the experiences of the SSAO participants in the research informed their practice of leadership and understanding of how leadership actually works.

Linda Kuk currently serves as the Program Chair for the Higher Education Leadership Program in the School of Education at Colorado State University and is an Associate Professor of Education. Within her work she continues to prepare leaders for roles in Higher Education Institutions. Prior to her return to the faculty in 2006, she served as the Vice President of Student Affairs at Colorado State University, her alma mater.

During her administrative career in Student Affairs she served as a Vice President for Student Affairs for nearly 23 years at Colorado State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY, Cortland. She also served as Dean of Students at Marquette University in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and held various positions within student affairs divisions at Iowa State University and the University of Connecticut. She has served as an organizational consultant for a number of Colleges and Universities within the United States and in China.

She has published three books, Positioning Student Affairs for Sustainable Change, (2010), New Realities: Emerging Specialist Roles and Structures in Student Affairs Organizations, (2012) and The Handbook for Student Affairs in Community Colleges, (2014). She has published over 30 articles in referred journals, as well as numerous book chapters and presentations. Her research interests include: issues related to organizational behavior, change and leadership in student affairs and higher education, student engagement and retention, and student affairs professional development. In her limited spare time she is a painter, dabbling in a variety of media and also likes to bike and golf.

James H. Banning , Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, is an environmental psychologist and studies institutional learning environments from the perspective of campus ecology. Jim holds a Ph.D. degree in clinical psychology from the University of Colorado – Boulder, Colorado. He has served in a number of Senior Student Affairs Officers positions.

He began his SSAO career as acting Dean of Students at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Later his SSAO experience included the positions of Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at the University of Missouri, Columbia and Vice President for Student Affairs at Colorado State. In the student affairs field, he is seen as a pioneer in the campus ecology movement. He has co-authored several books: Educating by Design: Creating Campus Environments that Work, Positioning Student Affairs for Sustainable Change(Jossey Bass 2001),Designing for Learning: Creating Campus Environments for Student Success(Jossey Bass 2015)), and recently authored Campus Ecology and University Affairs: History, Applications, and Future - A Scholarly Personal Narrative(TerraCotta Publishing, 2016).

Jim has also been active in the classroom. He taught environmental psychology for the Department of Psychology and campus ecology for the Student Affairs Program in Higher Education, and qualitative research and data analysis for School of Education’s Higher Education Leadership Program. Jim retired in 2013, but continues to teach and write, focusing on the concept of campus ecology.

Visit James's personal website, The Campus Ecologist.

Cynthia Cherrey president and chief executive officer of the International Leadership Association (ILA), formerly vice president for Campus Life at Princeton University