Putting Students First: Creating a Climate of Support and Challenge

Abstract

In our soon to be published book entitled Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Stu-dents Purposefully (Anker Press), we call for a reinvigoration of higher education's commitment to " put students first " by prioritizing a holistic approach to student development. This call is not unfamiliar to higher education. What is new, however, are the ways and contexts in which people—in theory and practice—advocate for keeping the student in student development and for adopting of a view of student development that is comprehensive and holistic. In our book, and by extension in this article, we use the term student development to include a full spectrum of holistic student learning and development goals that includes vocational, professional, intellectual, cogni-tive, social, civic, political, moral, ethical, and spiritual dimensions as well as a focus on values clarification and character development.