Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Students Purposefully (review)

We live in an age of undeniably complex issues demanding equally complex solutions. The evening news confronts us with stories of famine, poverty, war, religious intolerance, and racial and ethnic strife. Newspapers warn of health crises worldwide, from unaffordable healthcare in this country to the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Investigations regularly uncover ethics failures both in corporate and government institutions.

These problems and a myriad of others, equally difficult, will undoubtedly not be resolved completely by the current generation of leaders. College students of today (and tomorrow) who succeed to those leadership positions will need to be guided by values loftier than political ideology, profit maximization, or simple turf protection. We need leaders who will create organizational cultures that demonstrate and reward civic and personal responsibility and who will evaluate the consequences of their decisions and act responsibly for the sake of all stakeholders.

Those of us working in higher education have the responsibility to nurture leaders able to balance power with conscientiousness and accountability. The question we must grapple with is how to educate college students so that, in addition to enhancing intellectual and social development, we are able to foster ethical, moral, existential, and spiritual development.

In Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Students Purposefully, Larry A. Braskamp, Lois Calian Trautvetter, and Kelly Ward, in essence, argue that an effective undergraduate college education centers on holistic student development. For them, this mission unequivocally includes intentionally fostering in students the search for meaning and purpose in life; social, physical, and political responsibility; personal values, self-awareness, self-authorship, and identity; intellectual critical thinking and reasoning; academic, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary knowledge; and spirituality and the practice of faith.

Putting Students First is an interesting attempt at capturing how American institutions of higher education can and do strategically design and implement learning environments that enable this type of holistic student development. The book stems from a larger study designed to explore faculty expectations in fostering student development at more than 500 Christian church-related colleges. The findings of site visits and the resultant in-depth case studies of 10 campuses form the basis for Putting Students First.

The authors chose to examine church-related institutions because "these institutions have as their mission to incorporate faith, spirituality, and religion and prepare students for lives of moral and intellectual complexity. . . . Since these institutions are dedicated to the development of the whole student, they provide the types of settings from which we can learn how to educate students to be prepared for their careers and to develop students holistically as good citizens and persons of character" (p. 16).

This book seeks to provide a setting in which faculty, administrators, and staff can think hard about how to challenge their campuses to incorporate a holistic approach when making decisions about the overall student experience. As the authors make very clear, the central piece of the student development puzzle is the faculty.

Braskamp, Trautvetter, and Ward provide a refreshing approach when examining a tough and important topic. Although it is both troubling and disappointing that only Christian church-related institutions were examined for this book, the message of the text is not diminished. The use of specific examples throughout the text allows the reader to look beyond the religious context in which the institutions are set, examining more closely the underlying principles that should drive our student interactions. In addition, the authors provide a scholarly work that is easy to comprehend, to the point, and quick to read.

The book is divided into seven chapters that progressively build upon each other. The first two provide an introduction and rationale for the book and detail the conceptual framework and design of their project. The authors define holistic student development in a college setting and explain why they chose to focus their research on church-related institutions. They briefly explain the historical and theoretical bases for holistic...