Confab 14: Your Passion and Your Job: Will It Be Gone Soon? Student Affairs is So Last Century

Let’s go there. Here’s a draft of the question?

Is _______________ Student Affairs too narrowly focused on ___________ and cut off from ________________ colleges and universities?

Discuss!

Morning java. Wireless.  Comfy spots to sit. Something to nosh. A drink later on. War stories. Laughter. Plenty to talk about. Lots to catch-up on. A smirky future just hoping we can catch it. Inspiration waiting for the ask.

We always say we’ve got to do it but we rarely get around to making it real. So let’s get together. Not at or as a conference. Instead, it’s time for our confab.

An old-school group convo. We’re talking cafe-style seating. (No auditorium, rows, or half-tables.) Power strips and wireless.  We’ll even throw in a little sweet swing as background (music).

We’ll get together on February 21, 2014.

Calling folk who deal with young hopes and dreams. We want a conversation with people who encourage, support, nurture, and teach on the street and on the fly, and, in places that are not traditionally called classrooms. We want to hear from those of you who work with students and staff in your community to plunge young people into an environment full of color, music, and conversation – building places for people to come together, find passion, write poetry, and find love.  We’re looking for you to take the lead on one of these conversation starters:

• What should we be worried about?
• What is your favorite, deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
• What student development concept or idea is ready for a smooth departure?
• What trend excites you?
• What student development idea or concept would improve everyone’s bag of neat tricks?
• How is ______________ changing the way we think?
• What are you optimistic about?
• What do you know is true, even though you can’t prove it?
• What questions have we stopped asking ourselves?
• What now?

Interested? Hope you can join us.  We’re inviting you to put together a pithy 5-minute presentation that will jumpstart our thinking; wake us up; and, get us amped.  Immediately following your conversation-starting presentation, Dean Elmore will engage you in a five-minute conversation before he brings the rest of the folks present into the conversation for a ten-minute discussion of your ideas. Overall, you’re on the hook for about twenty minutes.

Can you do it? Let us know if you want to present by sending your intention to dos@bu.edu.

Whether you’re leading the discussion or just taking it in, we’ll see you on February 21.  More info on the way.

Peace.