How Faculty Advisers Can Be First Responders When Students Need Help

At the end of her junior year as an elementary-education major at Winston-Salem State University, Inayah Turner was visiting the office of her faculty adviser, Dawn N. Hicks Tafari.

Winston-Salem State U.

Turner, who swung by the office regularly, was just checking in — laughing, talking — when she got a phone call. “Her whole demeanor changed and she starts crying,” Tafari recalled. “That’s when she had found out that there was a fire at her home in New Jersey.”

No one was hurt, but Turner wanted to temporarily leave school and go back to be with her family and help them financially.

No, urged Tafari, who was worried that Turner would lose her momentum toward graduation and miss out on her student teaching in North Carolina. If you really want to help them, she said, get your degree so that you can get a job and help support them.

Tafari usually speaks to students from across her desk. In that moment, though, she needed to come out from behind it. “I just held her. I just hugged her. I told her that everything was going to be OK and that she needed to stay.”

Faculty advisers’ core job is to help students plan their schedules, be successful in their course work, and prepare for their careers. But professors like Tafari, who has 52 advisees, know that the role also entails being a first responder to family tragedies, mental illness, substance abuse, learning disabilities, relationship struggles, and other problems. That has been especially true as depression and anxiety rates among college students have risen sharply.

“I was an elementary-school teacher,” Tafari says, “so I understand the importance of caring for the whole child. Students don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

Professors can’t be experts in the myriad things that can go wrong with their students. But they should be experts in the art of referral, says Charlie Nutt, executive director of Nacada, an international association for academic advisers. They should know where on their campus a student should go and whom they should see for health, housing, career, financial-aid, work-study, campus security, and other problems.

Sometimes the adviser also needs to take the extra time to get that student there. One of Tafari’s students was grieving over his grandmother and “he was stuck,” she recalls. “He couldn’t do anything. So I walked with him over to the counseling center and sat with him until the counselor was able to come out and talk to him.”

Faculty sensitivity to these matters hasn’t always been a given. Jeffery Leving, who has a family-law practice in Chicago, recalls his adviser, a professor of communications at Southern Illinois University, counseling Leving during his second year in 1971 to drop out. Leving was a scholarship student from a low-income family. His bartender dad and secretary mom were divorced. Leving worked full-time at dishwashing and other jobs in addition to his studies. The professor asked him about his ancestry. Polish, he said. “How many Polish physicians do you know, or lawyers?” asked the adviser. None, said Leving. “That should tell you something,” the professor said.

Leving was 19, “very young and impressionable.” He had the good sense not to listen to the guy, but, at 67, the thought still haunts him: “I just wonder how many students did he talk to and persuade to quit and not pursue their dreams?”

Be Alert. Communicate.

To respond effectively to students’ problems, professors have to be alert and to communicate well with each other. For most, that comes naturally, said Nutt.

Course scheduling “is probably the thing that faculty advisers dislike the most,” he said. “Other conversations they love.” They just need to learn to incorporate that holistic rapport into their advising role.

At conferences and online, Nacada offers training to help faculty members feel comfortable with advising responsibilities. (See the resource list below.)

“We don’t want faculty to believe they are expected to be personal counselors or substance-abuse counselors,” Nutt said. On the flip side, instructors must be careful not to shut down a student who is opening up about a problem. They shouldn’t say “I can’t talk to you about that” for fear of not knowing enough about a particular problem and saying the wrong thing.

Becoming an expert referrer is the happy medium, Nutt said. Nacada, in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and the Center for Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning, is in the early stages of a five-year training campaign to spread that word and teach those skills.

Faculty interventions can make a difference. At Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wis., a general advising staff serves freshmen, who then work with faculty advisers for the next three years. Most classes, said Carrie Espinosa, director of the college’s Center for Student Success, have 20 or fewer students, so professors have a good chance of picking up on problems including but often beyond the academic.

Faculty and staff members are urged to err on the side of caution by adding a note to the early-alert system in the college’s student-success software. If an English professor is worried by a student’s absences, a slide in her quality of work, or a shift in her behavior, a history professor or an athletics coach might have noticed similar problems and noted something too. The picture is fleshed out, and it becomes clear that the college must intercede.

That was the case with one student, a junior, whom Patricia Rieman, an associate professor of education, was concerned about last year. He started the term out OK, but partway through the course “he changed and he changed dramatically,” she remembered. He was missing classes, and when he showed up, “it was creepy,” she said. “I was really afraid of him. His outlook was so negative. His voice had changed. His entire demeanor had changed.”

Through the early alerts and email follow-ups with other faculty and staff, “we had this completely wrap-around system,” she said. “As it turned out, he finally admitted that he had been abusing substances, been really struggling.”

He is now a senior and on course for spring graduation.

“If all I had done was flunk him — maybe the old traditional type of university where you just weed him out — who knows?” asked Rieman. “He might not be alive today, much less close to finishing a degree.”

In another case, a student with Asperger’s was missing classes and isolating himself in his room. An early warning posted by faculty triggered an intervention that led the student’s family to withdraw him from Carthage to get more intensive help. He is close to graduating, Espinosa said, so she hopes he’ll be back.

Role Models

Many effective advisers will tell you they learned from and in some ways emulate the advisers they had as undergraduates. Katie Lynn Staab, an assistant professor of biology at McDaniel College, in Westminster, Md., was a first-generation student when she went to Mount Saint Mary’s University.

When speaking with her students, “I’m just authentic about my own background,” she said. “My parents didn’t go to college, no one was talking about photosynthesis over the dinner table.” If I can do it, she tells students, you can do it.

In college, Staab got a job in the lab of David Bushman, an entomologist who was working on caterpillar physiology (and who is now president of Bridgewater College, in Virginia). She had the soft skills — reliability, punctuality, a frank and professional demeanor — “and I guess he saw my potential,” she recalled. He would check in hourly on her experiments and brought her to her first conference, in Fort Lauderdale, which was also her first trip on an airplane. She presented on the pupation of an agricultural pest called the corn earworm. “I was on top of the world,” she said. “It really lit that fire.”

Staab tries to offer similar opportunities and encouragement to students like Ornella Ngameni, who graduated from McDaniel, is working in a sample-analysis lab for government contracts, and plans to go to medical school and become a brain surgeon. Ngameni moved to the United States from Cameroon when she was 8. Her school barely had any lab science, she said, and when she had Staab as a professor at McDaniel, “I would go to her office every day and she would sit there with me for as long as I needed.”

Staab said that Ngameni, like most students, dove first into the material she understood best instead of least, so they reversed that and worked on other study strategies as well.

“I know you can do it,” Staab would tell Ngameni, who said that “just hearing that from a professor is so important.”

Inayah Turner, the education student whose New Jersey house burned down, has graduated too and is teaching fourth grade in Philadelphia.

She partly owes that to her adviser, Professor Tafari. “It wasn’t until I spoke to Dr. Tafari that I realized … that although there’s this tragedy going on in our lives right now, I needed to graduate so that I can actually contribute to the success of my family. This hardship was temporary but the goal that I set for myself is long term.”

“It’s no secret,” Turner said, “that I don’t have a relationship with my mother.” Tafari “basically took me in as her daughter,” she said. “There are moments to this day that she’ll text me, call me, check up on me to make sure I’m OK.”

Turner wants to get a Ph.D., take on an educational leadership role, and become a professor herself. “I want to be like her. I want to be a professor who impacts students’ lives as much as she impacted mine.”

Resources for faculty advisers from Nacada:

A Faculty Guide to Academic Advising

What Is Academic Advising?: An Introduction to the Field

Academic Advising Core Competencies Guide

Additional resources

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.