Student Affairs

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When I think about what we do, it boils down to four words: We support student success.

That’s an easy statement to make, but what does it actually mean? We do support students in a thousand different ways, but what are we actually doing?

When I am mentally chewing over questions like this, I sometimes find it helpful...illuminating, inspiring, sometimes hilarious...to find out where our words come from because that makes me think about them differently. Plus it gives me something to do besides laundry when I can’t sleep.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “support” wandered into English from Old French. The French borrowed it from Latin, combining the preposition sub (meaning “up from under”) and the verb portare, “to carry.”

Want the short form?

To support something is to get under it and hold it up.

As a noun, a support is a thing that bears the weight of something and keeps it upright...yes, like support stockings.

I had a great time this week checking out the questions about support frequently posted to Google. My favorite was “What is a fancy word for support?” That’s the question you type into a search field when you’ve been assigned a 1,000 word essay and you’re running out of ways to say the same thing, but I loved Google’s response. To support is to “back, give help to, assist, aid, be on the side of, side with...encourage, vote for, ally oneself with, stand behind, fall in with, stand up for, defend, take someone’s part, take up the cudgels for.”

I think I let my favorite cudgel go at the last garage sale, but I felt positively inspired by synonyms like “back,” “be on the side of,” and “stand behind”--oh yeah! That is what we do.

I also got positively choked up when I read Google’s input in response to this question: “What is a stronger word for support?”

“Advocate, champion, uphold.”

That’s what we do in Student Affairs. We place ourselves in a position to advocate for students. We fall in beside them to make sure that their first steps into their university career are steady. We sometimes have to go so far as to get under them to lift them up. We advocate. We champion. We uphold. And we do it because we know that, sometimes, people just need a little extra support to succeed.

Roars Truly,

Lyn Redington, Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management

Kelly S. Moor, D.A. Director of Strategic Communications, Student Affairs Student Affairs Suite, Pond Student Union Hypostyle Phone: (208) 282-6122