In higher education, student affairs and services (SAS) professionals are tasked with fostering inclusive and equitable campus environments and advancing student and institutional success (Ludeman & Schreiber, 2020). Yet, as we look around our campuses, we are confronted by a landscape that is rapidly shifting. From the sweeping ethical and pedagogical disruptions of artificial intelligence (AI), to system-level changes in geo-political spaces, social and cultural shifts, institutional autonomy and governance, institutional and campus climates, student wellness and graduate employability, and the severe local impacts of climate change. The challenges we face are no longer confined to the neat boundaries of our offices, departments, or even our institutions. The challenges in the contexts in which we operate are systemic, horizontal problems. Yet much of the architecture of college and university leadership, including SAS, remains rigidly vertical and hierarchical, often compared to silos.
Leadership is facing challenges: we cannot meet system-level problems with institution-level, siloed approaches. Many of our leadership and SAS preparatory and professional programs prepare our leadership and staff to run institutions and departments, rather than preparing them to lead and collaborate within complex systems. Our professional development programs often prioritize technical skills and “how-to” competency frameworks over critical “why” reflections, leaving a gap where transformative praxis should thrive and reducing our roles to those of compliance managers and institutional functionaries rather than social justice leaders and change agents (Schreiber, 2025).
If we are to support students in navigating (and thriving and leading in) an increasingly volatile and complex world, the SAS community needs to expand its leadership competencies: we must shift from institutional compliance to collaborative systems leadership.
The Competency Focus of Professionalization
Professionalization in SAS is vital to standardizing competencies, establishing ethical norms, and fostering accountability and credibility, and indeed making our work locally relevant and impactful. Whether driven by professional associations like IASAS, USAf, NASPA, and ACPA, formal graduate programs, programs driven by associations, or government-led models, these frameworks ensure practitioners are guided by a shared body of expertise, are locally relevant, and globally aware.
However, when professional development programs focus mainly on skill acquisition and competency development, such as advising, residences, assessment, and organizational management, they risk becoming overly aligned with the marketization of professions. In this market-driven model, professional development is treated as a commodity that prioritizes institutional efficiency, performance, outcomes, and individual career advancement. We learn how to manage programs, manage residences, offer counselling, comply with institutional policies, and write assessment reports, but we rarely engage in critical analysis of the wider social, economic, and political contexts in which higher education is embedded.
This emphasis on individual capabilities and institutional effectiveness can inadvertently perpetuate a decontextualized approach to SAS practice. It mirrors what Paulo Freire critiques as the “banking model” of education: information is simply deposited into professionals without fostering dialogue, collaboration, critical reflection, or transformative praxis. We learn to manage diversity, but we may not be fully equipped to challenge the systemic inequalities or power dynamics that reproduce privilege on our campuses. As Noam Chomsky warns, without critical engagement, colleges and universities run the risk of becoming “instruments for ensuring the perpetuation of social privilege.” When we prioritize managerial compliance over critique, we reinforce existing power structures rather than questioning them.
Un-learning, Re-learning, and Critical Pedagogy
To break free from this model, SAS professionalization must integrate critical pedagogy. Grounded in the transformative theories of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy challenges the dominant paradigms of education by emphasizing the importance of critical consciousness, praxis, and resistance to hegemonic structures that perpetuate inequality.
Integrating Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony allows us to see that the professional standards and practices we inherit are not neutral or apolitical. They frequently prioritize dominant frameworks while marginalizing more progressive perspectives.
To counter this, we must engage in what educator Elizabeth Lange calls a process of “un-learning and re-learning.” This requires activist-educators within SAS to interrogate the assumptions underlying our daily practice and recognize how power operates and how privilege is reproduced within our fields.
This means our SAS leaders and practitioners need to pivot our focus from mere service provision toward becoming active agents of social change. When we integrate critical theory, we stop viewing our work as purely managerial and recognize professional development as a site of social transformation. We begin to ask counter-hegemonic questions: Who is served by this policy? Whose voices are excluded from this standard? How can our support structures empower students as active democratic citizens rather than passive consumers?
From Vertical Command to Horizontal Networks
However, developing critical consciousness is only half the battle. If our institutional structures remain rigidly hierarchical, even the most critically conscious SAS professional will find their transformative agency choked by institutional resistance and discourses of deference.
Traditionally, higher education leadership has been structured as a hierarchy where authority flows downward from formal positions. While these structures provide accountability and organizational clarity, they are increasingly poorly suited to complex systems and ever more complex problems.
Consider the impact of AI. No individual institution or department can adequately resolve the ethical, digital, relational, and pedagogical questions AI presents. It demands horizontal collaboration across departments, faculties, universities, and regulatory boundaries. The same is true for student health and well-being, student housing, food security, student funding, climate change, and sustainable development. Our challenges operate through networks, while our leadership continues to operate largely through rank.
The SAS leader of the future cannot principally be a chief executive protecting the interests and competitiveness of a single institution, division, or department. We must become coalition builders, public intellectuals, convenors, and facilitators. This requires a flatter, more collaborative, and more inclusive approach to leadership. Leadership must become distributed, recognizing that academics, professional staff, administrators, and students hold different forms of expertise. In a healthy system, authority moves towards expertise rather than expertise continually having to move upwards towards authority. We must replace relational codes of deference with relational codes of participation and collaboration. This means creating conditions in which colleagues and students can think, question, disagree, and collaborate without disagreement being regarded as disloyalty. True leadership is demonstrated not by how much authority we accumulate around ourselves, but by how much capacity we release in others.
Redesigning Student Affairs: Four Pillars of Transformative Praxis
How do we translate these theoretical shifts into daily practice within our SAS organizations? We can build our work around four key pillars of transformative praxis:
1. Curricular Transformation in Professional Development
We must redesign our professionalization curricula to look beyond operational and compliance checklists. This means introducing our staff to critical theories, comparative higher education studies, and the impact of unfavorable financial policies on higher education access and equity. Professional development must encourage staff to analyze the ethical and social implications of their daily decisions.
2. Dialogical and Flat Work Cultures
Instead of top-down command-and-control directives, we should foster dialogical environments where we collaboratively negotiate meaning and co-create solutions. This involves building teams where junior colleagues and students feel heard and valued.
3. Aligning with Global Social Justice Frameworks
We can ground our work in collective, globally recognized frameworks that connect student success with wider social justice. Frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Okanagan Charter for health-promoting educational institutions provide powerful, horizontal-systemic standards that allow us to align our local practices with global efforts for social justice, equity, inclusion, and well-being.
4. Collaborative Advocacy and Knowledge Sovereignty
Just as IASAS, USAf, NASPA, and ACPA have mobilized to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts against political clampdowns, our local and regional networks must act collectively. Together, we must safeguard academic freedom and practice knowledge diplomacy, ensuring that our student development theories and support services are contextually relevant and intellectually sovereign rather than merely imported.
A Call to Dare
As we navigate an era of complexity and systemic turmoil, the status quo is no longer a safe harbor. The traditional path of SAS is insufficient for the scale of the challenges our students face. We need to stop asking if our leaders are powerful enough to command institutions and start asking if they are collaborative enough to share power intelligently. We must look beyond the “how-to” aspects of our profession, critically engage with the “why,” and focus on what we dare to challenge. It is time to unlearn, relearn, and release the transformative capacity within us all.
References
- Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Counterpoints, 177, 13–27.
- Faidley, E. W. (2025). Preparing for student affairs work: Graduate students’ perceptions of essential professional competencies. Journal of College and Character, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/2194587X.2024.2442727
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
- hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
- Lange, E. (2001). [Review of the book Gramsci, Freire and adult education: Possibilities for transformative action, by P. Mayo]. International Review of Education, 47, 395–403. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017970330226
- Ludeman, R., & Schreiber, B. (Eds.). (2020). Student affairs and services in higher education: Global foundations, issues and best practices (3rd ed.). DSW Publishers. https://www.iasas.global/publications
- McGill, C. M., Rocco, T. S., Delgado, A., & Lowery, J. W. (2021). Professionalizing student affairs: Five tensions. College Student Affairs Journal, 39(2), 123–135. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/csj.2021.0012
- Parkhouse, H., Senechal, J., & Severson-Irby, E. (2023). Laying a foundation for critical professional development through a research-practice partnership. Professional Development in Education, 49(4), 725–738. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2023.2193198
- Schreiber, B. (2025). The critical void in leadership development. Journal of College and Character, 2025(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/2194587X.2025.2536435
About the Author
Birgit Schreiber, Ph.D. is Senior Consultant at GSA Consulting Group. Based in Germany, Birgit is GSA's specialist in Africa, Europe, and the Global South. She serves as President of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services (IASAS), is Strategic Lead for Leadership in Africa at SARUA, and is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape. The founding editor of the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, she has more than 100 publications on student success, higher education leadership, and social justice, and her international work has been recognized with the Noam Chomsky Award for international research.