Abstract
As the student affairs field emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these administrators were increasingly depicted in novels about college students and campus life. This chapter examines their portrait in 23 novels from 1860s to 1930s. These college novels conveyed to the larger public and future college students that student affairs administrators focused on policing behavior rather than encouraging education. In these books, fictional students were hostile toward these administrators, resisting adherence to Victorian-era propriety. In some novels, progressive faculty members represented an alternative path—a path attractive to many students—to the anti-intellectualism of the first fictional student affairs administrators. These depictions laid a foundation for the negative portrayals of student affairs administrators in contemporary American popular culture.
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Hevel, M.S. (2017). Developing a Bad Reputation: The Emergence of Student Affairs in College Novels. In: Tobolowsky, B., Reynolds, P. (eds) Anti-Intellectual Representations of American Colleges and Universities. Higher Education and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57004-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57004-8_7
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