This open letter to Chancellor Biddy Martin is excerpted from an acceptance speech given in response to an academic staff award.

Chancellor Martin, I’ve read with great interest your Undergraduate Initiative. Enhanced student services are mentioned several times. I think that is code for better academic advising. As someone who spends a lot of time — and I mean a lot — talking to students, I am thrilled to hear that.

A cautionary note: Misperceptions abound around the topic of advising. Good advising is happening all over campus, but advisers need your help. Here’s what you really need to be checking on.

1. Where is the next generation of classified staff, those critical student-service team members, going to come from? We expect smart, committed, student-focused people at the front desk, but they get almost no perks and zero advancement opportunities. It’s a huge challenge. Without them, we are sunk.

2. Where are the career advancement opportunities for committed, talented and productive advisors already at Madison? Where are mid-career advisrs like Becky Ryan, Beth Dawson, Eman Zaki and Bonnie Schmidt going to get the concrete rewards that will induce them to continue to apply their talents to academic advising? Where are new advisors like Suzy Sandrik, with a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering but a huge interest in a career in academic advising, going to get the encouragement to stay in advising? In the next three years, we will need answers to these questions.

3. Where is the leadership in student services going to come from when anyone can see a professional at UW-Madison is better rewarded for just about anything than for working with students? People who handle money at Madison make way more money than people who work with students. Check it out. Is this Badger Bank and Trust? Plus, there is something fishy when advisers at two-year campuses make more money on average than advisers at four-year doctoral universities, but that’s the current situation. That is not true for chancellors, deans or professors, and it shouldn’t be true for advisers, either.

So, we have a lot of confusion about advising at Madison and how to improve it. It doesn’t help when it is the non-advisers who claim to have all the answers. I’m here to say it is not an IT (technology) problem. Anyone who thinks it is, needs to talk to more students. It is not a training problem, although more training is always welcomed. It is fundamentally about how work with students is going to be encouraged and rewarded. That’s where the answers are.

Don Woolston

Assistant Dean

College of Engineering Academic Affairs

[email protected]