I was on a campus on the East Coast this week, working with a student affairs team for a full day. They are crawling toward graduation while navigating lots of staff and leadership transitions. Some folks were new in the past couple of weeks, interviewing for senior positions are taking place, and the senior team that is in place has all arrived in their roles over the past 3 years. What I noticed, as I often do in these rooms, was how capable and committed these people were – and how exhausted.
That exhaustion is not a mystery. Student affairs is operating right now in conditions that would wear anyone down. Budget cuts and staffing reductions. Travel freezes and eliminated professional development. Students with growing needs and shrinking resources to meet them. Parents and legislators are demanding more accountability with less trust. Leadership transitions that raise uncertainty just as teams were finding their footing. And a persistent, low-grade frustration that campus colleagues still don’t fully understand what student affairs does or why it matters.
What I keep coming back to, though, is that these pressures don’t operate independently. They compound each other. And what I’ve seen make the biggest difference in how departments navigate them is not simply more resources or a better strategy document. It’s collective clarity and structured and aligned action. When a team shares a genuine co-created understanding of their purpose and their work is organized to actually reflect that understanding, something shifts. The pressure doesn’t disappear. But it becomes navigable.
Without that foundation, every new demand gets absorbed into an already-overloaded system with no framework for deciding what it means or how to respond. Every leadership transition raises the question of whether what we’ve built still matters. Every program that’s been on the schedule for fifteen years stays there not because it’s working, but because no one has a principled reason to let it go. Student affairs contributes meaningfully to learning and growth. But that contribution doesn’t happen through magical thinking, and it cannot be communicated if we can’t first name it clearly ourselves. Movie nights and pizza parties are not the problem, but they are not the answer either.
Collective clarity and structured and aligned action change nearly everything. Staff have a shared sense of purpose that crosses functional silos, which matters enormously for morale when everything outside feels uncertain. Leaders have a reference point when the next announcement comes from above: not “how do we absorb this?” but “what does this mean for what we’ve said we’re about, and what do we adjust?” Legacy initiatives that no longer serve can be released, not through cutting corners, but through honest, principled conversation. And the work itself becomes easier to explain to campus colleagues, senior leadership, prospective students, donors, and the public, because you’re speaking from clarity rather than defending activity.
This is the work of the Curricular Approach. We’re not adding more busywork to an already overwhelmed team, but building the kind of collective clarity and structured and aligned action. This is not only more sustainable, but it also helps us do less, so we can be more for students. I’ve watched departments find this magical real estate.
If this is where your division is, I’d welcome the conversation. I’ve worked with more than 100 campuses on this, and would love to be helpful.
