My Current Profession

For an earlier entry this week, I utilized a link to "Student Affairs" from Wikipedia.org. In it, there was a criticism section that contained the following:

The "professional" trend in Student Affairs has been criticized for its emphasis on formal training. The degree to which available postgraduate programs actually represent a distinct discipline is a matter of debate. The field's resemblance to psychology, counseling, and other general concentrations has called into question whether Student Affairs degrees are an example of "degree inflation" and whether students' vocational choices are limited by this specialization. The late education critic Allan Bloom wrote that the "...idea of a separate 'Student Affairs' profession in academia is pure rubbish. It is fiction. The range of work involved requires a high school diploma on the low end and a PhD in psychology on the high end. The constituent disciplines (with their quality controls) already exist and can be readily applied to students. Breeching a new 'discipline' for this purpose is nothing more than professional egotism. I see it as a spasm of self-justification for a profession that largely lacks any scholarly work, past or present. This is the worst episode of academic cheapening I have witnessed. In a continuum ranging from Nuclear Physics to Romance Languages, 'student personnel' is almost certainly the most pathetic graduate field yet conceived. It is an embarrassment...

Ouch! Now, I have often joked with my colleagues about my College Student Personnel Degree not being a real Master's Degree, but this takes that thought to a whole new level.