In the relative lull of summer session, I’d like to take a moment and clarify the organizational structure in my portfolio, establish some nomenclature, and (re) introduce my team. First, the visual:

Now, some explanation:

Name of the Portfolio – Student Affairs: While my title is Associate Vice-President, Students, the term “students” doesn’t lend itself well to the name of an organizational unit within an institution. So we refer to my portfolio as Student Affairs. The term Student Services is being eradicated. Why? A couple reasons: first it does not accurately reflect the expanded portfolio of the AVP Students which includes Recruitment & Admissions and the Office of the Registrar, which are not really student services. But secondly, we all agreed that what we’re doing in Student Affairs is becoming less and less “transactional” in nature – i.e. service delivery — and increasingly educational. We’re about learning. Even seemingly routine transactions — such as the delivery of a student loan, or a decision on a grade appeal — represent learning opportunities — in debt management, rights and responsibilities, accountability, navigating bureaucracy. You’ll hear more from me on this later.

Introducing Student Success Programs: There’s a small group of people in the unit formerly known as Campus Life, Career Services and International Student Services who are now all reporting directly to me. They are an extension of my office (though not physically located with me 🙁 ) and represent growth areas for OCAD U. The name of the unit was unwieldy and did not accommodate new programs, like our First Generation Student Success Programs, which reside there. So we’ve renamed that group: Student Success Programs. They will still use their individual “brands” for promotional purposes: eg. Campus Life or Career Services, but as a team they are about Student Success.

The Student Affairs Team: The org chart only lists my direct reports but, of course, there’s a team of people in each of these little boxes who, together, put all of the pieces in place to support and engage the OCAD U student community. There’s one new name on the chart: Jennifer Robinson is the new manager of the Health & Wellness Centre, leading a team of health care and counselling professionals to support and educate students.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.