Academic Assistants, Unite!

Academic cultures place much value on committees and meetings. There are meetings for departments, meetings for department chairs, meetings for the senior cabinet, meetings for faculty committees, meetings for various working groups. But there is one group that does not meet as a collective on most campuses that we know of: academic assistants.

You will find assistants on every college campus nationwide. While the day-to-day work may differ slightly from campus to campus, some of our typical responsibilities include: monitoring department budgets, managing and planning events, supervising student workers, coordinating assembly of faculty personnel review files, and assisting department chairs in their administrative duties.

The lack of meetings for the group of employees serving as academic assistants is notable given how essential we are to an organization’s success and the similarity of the tasks that we all perform—even if, on the surface, they might appear to be different. For instance, the academic assistants for the departments of neuroscience, biology and theater order sheep brains, live organisms and fabric for costumes for their respective departments. But this task is really just about ordering materials; we have to go through the same ordering and approval process, no matter whether we are buying neon tetras or neon taffeta.

Our daily tasks involve navigating the same bureaucracy, battling the same software glitches and often dealing with the same or similar offices on campus. Yet it’s not uncommon for us to be isolated in our own building, or floor, unable to benefit from the collective wisdom of those who perform the same tasks as we do.

Enter the Faculty Administrative Support Team (FASTeam) at Connecticut College. We are a group of 18 academic assistants who interact daily with faculty, students, staff and almost every department on campus. We serve 31 academic departments, nine programs, 44 majors, five centers, one certificate program, nearly 2,000 students and 286 faculty (including all full-time, part-time and adjunct faculty, and visiting faculty and postdocs). There are very few divisions on campus and very few groups, who do not benefit from our expertise.

The establishment of the FASTeam, as a committee of sorts, came about slowly over time. After a lunch for academic assistants hosted by the dean of the faculty’s office sometime around 2010, we realized that our collective knowledge and shared experiences were valuable to explore, and we continued meeting informally over lunch about once a semester for a couple more years.

This was an aha moment for all of us. Of course, there should be meetings where academic assistants can connect regularly and exchange information. Of course, there is immense value to be gained from this network of experienced employees. We then began meeting monthly, with the associate dean of faculty or another faculty representative setting up and leading the meetings. Since then, we have evolved into a committee—we now run our own meetings and develop our own agenda while keeping the dean of the faculty apprised of our work.

This is how we do it: We meet every other week to discuss items we all regularly work on such as budgets, events and faculty tenure and promotion files. We review and discuss policies that are in place and those that need to be created to standardize certain procedures. We also host guest speakers once a month from other departments (accounting, catering and events, information services, the college archivist, the registrar, and many more). Last academic year, some of our guests included the college president, the director of campus safety, the dean of the faculty, the associate vice president for finance and the vice president of human resources, to name a few.

These meetings keep us updated on changes to campus policies and procedures. They also give us the opportunity to sit in a room with people in similar roles, to get to know each other and have discussions that aim to make systems the best they can be. These dialogues help bridge the gap between the administrative tasks we individually perform and broader institutional goals. Through our various discussions of procedures on campus, we have found ways of standardizing many processes to make them more user-friendly and accessible: Just one example was our development of a single consistent standard now used across departments to determine student eligibility for the honors program.

To be sure, with the high turnover among faculty and staff in higher education, especially since COVID, there are valid concerns about the burdens that staff and faculty face. A group that takes on the work of training each other might be perceived as letting institutions off the hook for their responsibilities. Institutions should certainly be held accountable for investing in their employees; yet the reality of working in any bureaucracy will almost always be that employees will feel isolated, overworked and mired in red tape. Higher education is no different. And judging from our past experiences at large universities, the bigger the institution, the worse the problems of isolation, inefficiency and lack of training can be.

The FASTeam allows us to do our work more collaboratively and efficiently and make sure people in our positions are well supported and informed, including new employees who don’t know the ropes yet. We all have our areas of expertise and institutional knowledge—Excel, Word, Google Docs, review files, budget processes and more. As we run the spectrum of time employed here (from more than 30 years to as little as one year) there is nothing that needs to be done that one or more of us has not already experienced and mastered.

Our active group chat allows us to support each other by providing a casual platform to pose any questions that arise. Chairs, faculty and various administrative offices rely on us for institutional knowledge and quick responses to their questions, especially since department chairs and administrators rotate out more frequently than we do.

While our institution benefits greatly from the FASTeam, there is one last aspect of this group that is worth mentioning: We have a deep understanding of the challenges we all face in our day-to-day work. The willingness to uplift one another is truly wonderful. We now have an annual holiday party that we invite our FASTeam alumni to, and for a couple of laughter-filled hours we play silly games, share stories, eat good food, have a gift swap and enjoy each other’s company to the fullest. The sense of comradery and family in this group is unique, and we are honored to call each other not just colleagues but friends.

This brings us to some questions: When was the last time you checked in with your academic assistants? Are they struggling with the demands of their work? Do they have a network? Are they feeling isolated?

Maybe you could use a FASTeam on your campus. We know that we couldn’t do without it.