Contested Issues in Student Affairs: Diverse Perspectives and Respectful Dialogue

•Designed to stimulate reflection and discussion about critical and often contentious issues that confront today’s student affairs professionals
•Written by leaders in the field
•Related blog site enables readers to teach and learn from each other, and interact with colleagues beyond their immediate campus
What is your level of understanding of the many moral, ideological, and political issues that student affairs educators regularly encounter? What is your personal responsibility to addressing these issues? What are the rationales behind your decisions? What are the theoretical perspectives you might choose and why? How do your responses compare with those of colleagues?
This book augments traditional introductory handbooks that focus on functional areas (e.g., residence life, career services) and organizational issues in student affairs. It fills a void by addressing the social, educational and moral concepts and concerns of student affairs work that transcend content areas and administrative units, such as the tensions between theory and practice, academic affairs and student affairs, risk taking and failure; and such as issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and spirituality. It places learning and social justice at the epicenter of student affairs practice.
The book addresses these issues by asking 24 critical and contentious questions that go to the heart of contemporary educational practice. The contributors – student affairs faculty, administrators, and graduate students – situate these 24 questions historically in the professional literature, present background information and context, define key terms, summarize the diverse ideological and theoretical approaches to the questions, make explicit their own perspectives, discuss their political implications, and set them in the context of the changing nature of student affairs work.
Each chapter is followed by a response that offers additional perspectives and complications, reminding re

Peter M. Magolda was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. He focused his scholarship on ethnographic studies of college students, critical issues in qualitative research, and program evaluation. He is author of The Lives of Campus Custodians and co-author of Contested Issues in Student Affairs, Contested Issues in Troubled Times, and It’s All About Jesus!: Faith as an Oppositional Collegiate Subculture, and has served on the editorial boards of Research in Higher Education and the Journal of Educational Research. He was an ACPA Senior Scholar inductee, and in 2013 received the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Mentoring Award. He also received Miami University’s Richard Delp Outstanding Faculty Member award, as well Alumni Award from The Ohio State University and Indiana University.

We deeply mourn the loss of author, teacher, and friend Peter M. Magolda.

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Miami University of Ohio and a nationally recognized author and speaker on student development and learning. She received the American College Personnel Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Research Achievement Award in 2007, for her outstanding contribution to advancing student learning.

Her scholarship addresses the evolution of learning and development in college and subsequent adult life, and educational practice to promote self-authorship. Her seventh and eighth books respectively are Authoring Your Life and Development and Assessment of Self-Authorship.