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More than 300 Student Affairs staff gathered on a Friday morning late last November to spend time with a very special guest.  Chancellor Gene Block joined us for our annual Fall All-Staff, offering brief prepared remarks and spending the bulk of the hour responding to questions from the audience.  Vice Chancellor Montero opened the meeting with the observation that, “This is not only a chance for us to hear the Chancellor, but also an opportunity for the Chancellor to meet Student Affairs.” 

Chancellor Block noted that we in the Student Affairs area face a special set of challenges in working at the nexus of the varied sets of outlooks on life we see among our constituents.  These include students, who have limited experience and very different perspectives from ours, faculty whose perspectives are shaped by their highly specialized environment, and members of the public who bring a wide array of “real world” concerns to the table.   He observed, “You have to be at the nexus of all these different ‘cultures’, and you do it so well.”  He went on to report that, at a recent Regents meeting in the Bay Area, he had heard repeated comments that, “UCLA does this well, UCLA does that well,” and, in general, multiple indications of the high regard in which UCLA’s Student Affairs work is held throughout the UC system.

The Chancellor identified four major goal areas for UCLA in the coming years – academic excellence, diversity, civic engagement, and financial security.  In at least three of the four, Student Affairs staff will play a major role.  Academic excellence cannot be achieved without top-quality performance in student services and student support – both the reputation and the reality of excellence; diversity and campus climate are areas in which Student Affairs will play a crucial role; and efforts to define and focus our civic engagement will clearly require expansive, creative thinking and planning in the student programming area.

Questions from the audience covered a wide range of important topics.  One involved the Chancellor’s view of the role Student Affairs plays in the educational process.  Chancellor Block noted that the importance of what is learned by students outside the classroom is widely recognized, and that we will see a growing need to incorporate this area of learning as an integral part of the education environment.  Further, he sees both faculty and staff as being involved in defining a “new learning paradigm” at UCLA, an effort in which he envisions UCLA leading a critical new approach to education.

Several other questions involved the diversity of the campus population, the campus climate, and efforts and initiatives related to both.  The Chancellor said that UCLA can benefit from increased recruiting efforts at all levels of the administration, noting that many students in high schools and community colleges don’t appear even to consider UCLA as an option for their next step.  Similarly, he noted that he believes that many students in schools and communities that are traditionally under-represented do not see UCLA as a “welcoming” environment.  “We need to get the message out that we are welcoming to under-represented students,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Complementing these recruiting efforts will be a wide-ranging set of initiatives aimed at improving the current state of our campus climate and the comfort level experienced by students from various underrepresented or non-traditional groups.  This would include looking at ways of creating more welcoming spaces on campus for various student groups, creating opportunities for students to interact across ethnic or social barriers, and, in general, focusing on “quality of life” issues campus-wide.

It should be noted that, since this November meeting, Student Affairs and other major administrative areas have been deeply involved in diversity-related planning.  As related stories in this newsletter issue will show, this planning effort is already bearing fruit in a variety of contexts.

A video of the entire all-staff program, as well as photos from the event, are available at http://www.studentaffairs.ucla.edu/staff/staff1.htm.