Ethical Issues in Academic Advising: Behind the Book - Adventures in Advising

Dr. Lisa Rubin, professor in the College of Education at Kansas State University and Dr. Ashley Thomas, assistant director of resources and managing editor at NACADA discuss Rubin’s upcoming book, Ethical Issues in Academic Advising, a new guidebook shaped by her journey from athletic advisor to professor at Kansas State University. This conversation dives into the ethical challenges advisors face every day with clarity, compassion, and real-world insight. From foundational ethical concepts to decision-making frameworks, Rubin and Thomas discuss how this book offers practical tools for academic and faculty advisors, as well as administrators. 

Pre-order Ethical Issues in Academic Advising! 

Follow the podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

The Instagram, and Facebook handle for the podcast is @AdvisingPodcast

Also, subscribe to our Adventures in Advising YouTube Channel!

Connect with Matt and Ryan on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hey, this is Matt Markin, and welcome back to the adventures and advising podcast, along with me on this ride. CO hosting is Ryan shekel. Ryan, are you excited for today's guests? Yeah,

Ryan Scheckel  
absolutely, when we have a chance to talk about human intelligence, maybe today, and maybe less artificial. No, I am always excited when there's a new publication in the body of literature, and thrilled to get to talk about that today with Lisa and Ashley.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, so we are kind of changing up slightly that the episode topic as we are getting to learn more about an upcoming book release, and that's with two amazing guests, and they are Dr. Lisa Rubin, Professor in the College of Education at Kansas State University, and Dr. Ashley Thomas, Assistant Director of resources and managing editor over at NACADA. Lisa and Ashley, welcome friends. 

Lisa Rubin  
Thank you. Welcome to Ashley. To be next to me. I'm so glad to have Dr Thomas nearby. 

Ashley Thomas  
Oh, it's good to see you both. Absolutely. Thank you for having us.

Matt Markin  
And so Lisa, I know you know we're gonna be talking about this upcoming book called ethical issues and academic advising, but before we get to that, it's the adventures in advising podcast. So we got to know from you and also from Ashley, we got to know about your journeys in higher ed. What's your origin stories?

Lisa Rubin  
I don't think I have a typical path, but maybe most of us don't. I fell into higher ed because I followed my brother's footsteps to be an admission student worker and tour guide at the University of Texas, and my brother still works in enrollment management today, many decades later, so it's his fault, but I started my career after I got my masters as an athletic advisor at the University of Nebraska, and it was a really great place to be. It still has the most academic all Americans, and I just had a lot of great resources there in terms of mentoring and, of course, facilities and investment in what students resources were in the athletic department. And so from there, I took a similar position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I worked as an athletic academic advisor and what we used to call life skills coordinator. Now student athlete development is that term, and worked in that area while starting my PhD one class at a time in higher education leadership. And maybe some people remember back in the 2010, timeframe, a lot of budget cuts happening across different states in the US for higher education. And so my PhD program got eliminated while I was finishing it, and that led me to leave athletics to go back to school full time, which was a big change to go from staff to student, and in that time, I picked up some graduate assistantships in different areas, academic integrity and Student Conduct and student organizations and involvement, and I adjuncted teaching First-Year Experience courses at all three colleges in the southern Nevada area, making ends meet with lots of different jobs, until I was able to get a full time position as a career advisor in the hospitality management College, which is number one in the world, I believe still is. So I got to be around students from all over the country and all sorts of countries that wanted to work in the field of hospitality, and that was a very rewarding time. So after serving as a career advisor for three years, finishing my PhD and adjuncting all the time, I ended up in my dream job at Kansas State University, where I've been for 11 years, teaching both in academic advising and student affairs and higher ed programs. And so now I consider myself a faculty advisor and a student organization advisor. So I've done what I think is four different advising roles, and I've been very rewarded in all of them.

Matt Markin  
Thank you, Ashley, how about you? 

Ashley Thomas  
Yeah, so much like Lisa, I definitely kind of stumbled into higher ed. I was working at a mental health center, community mental health center as a child adolescent case manager, and got notified about a advisor position at the local community college. And I was like, Well, I really enjoyed College. Let me go see what this is all about. And so I was fortunate enough to get my first job at Allen Community College in small town, southeast Kansas. Was there for four years and completed my master's degree in community counseling, because the thought was I would take over for my boss when he retired, because he was a he was a count, like he was a counselor and the counselor for the college. And then I had a friend who had recently transitioned to K State as an instructor, and I had kind of guided her through learning how to. Do advising while she was with me at Allen, and she had moved to K State, and she said, we have a job open. You need to come. You need to come do do that here. And so I, again, was fortunate. K State is my alma mater, and so it was really exciting for me to go back home to be a Wildcat again, and so I transitioned to K State, worked my way up in our office in the College of Business at K State, was senior advisor, and then felt like I wanted a new challenge. And the position at NACADA came open, and I have been here since 2019 and oversee all NACADA publications, in addition to doing some consulting work, some task forces that we're working on, like the definition of advising, all of those really exciting things. So I did, as Lisa mentioned I just finished my PhD in January. Just graduated, gosh, a couple was it been two weekends yet ago. So that was exciting. I worked on my PhD for 11 years. Had the joy of having Lisa on my committee, among other kind of Nakata people and celebrities, and so I'm very fortunate that I had an amazing experience with my PhD, and kind of sad that it's over. To be honest, not many people can say that, but, but yeah, so I'm really excited to talk about this new book that Lisa has put out, because it's going to be a really important resource for our profession.

Ryan Scheckel  
Speaking of the book, can you tell us a little bit Lisa about the inspiration behind the book itself, the title ethical issues and academic advising, sort of where this came from?

Lisa Rubin  
Absolutely. So ,when we were putting together the PhD in leadership and academic advising curriculum, which now feels like a lifetime ago. We did a lot of focus groups with former students who had completed our masters in academic advising at various NACADA regional and annual conferences and on Zoom. And this topic came up as something that people wanted but wasn't in the current curriculum at the graduate level, and we were having conversations with our faculty, which included Charlie Nutt and Wendy Troxel and Sean Bridgen and Karen Sullivan-Vance, and a lot of executive office members at the time for NACADA. And there were three, technically four courses, three advising specific content courses and an advising research course that we were putting together. And everyone took one of them to work on, and I took the ethical issues and practice of academic advising course and put together a potential curriculum reading lots and lots of books from unethics, from different areas of higher education and philosophy and other areas, but nothing was quite in the realm of academic advising. But we have a ton of great articles, and in both empirical and commentary articles on ethical issues, from a lot of outstanding advising scholar, practitioners and scholars, through NACADA and the mentor and some other areas. So I put together a course syllabus and potential reading list, and then five years goes by and it's time to teach the first section. So that meant, of course, going re updating all of that stuff, looking for new work, which there had been since I had started this process, and then teaching the first course in 2022 and that was with our first cohort of the PhD program, by any of them, the cohort, the students, even in my teaching evaluation, said, this course needs to be a book. We would use it to train our staff. This would be really helpful for the profession. So I took their inspiration and put together a book proposal in 2022, and then I had the chance to submit it to the publications advisory board. And the rest, I guess, is history.

Ryan Scheckel  
The rest is ethics. Is what I think it is, well, so it started with his graduate student sort of experience, or whatever, and they saw the value in it. But who do you see as the intended audience for the book, and what do you hope people take away from reading it?

Lisa Rubin  
That's a great question. So I have a good number of potential audience members here. I do think probably first and foremost primary role academic advisors. They're faced with ethical challenges pretty much every day, and they have to make difficult decisions. So that's one group that I think would really benefit from the book. Another, faculty advisors. Since I am one, I know that a lot of faculty advisors do not receive lots of training. For their position as it relates to advising anyway. But there's often different types of conflicts that faculty advisors face, sometimes between the curriculum and policies and how they believe students should pursue their paths, you know, which would benefit the students the best, but goes against, you know, maybe the culture of the department or program that the students are in. I also think advising administrators and department heads who supervise advising or oversee their training would be really important to have their engagement with this book, future leaders in higher education, such as graduate students in higher ed student affairs and advising programs who should have some ethical foundations for their practice as they advance. I also think it would help academic advising scholars, which probably the majority of the people that I think would who would read this because it's additional base of literature as they build on it for their research. And then lastly, ethics and higher ed researchers, just to contribute another layer of knowledge and the complexity of higher education ethics and how those issues are situated.

Matt Markin  
So wide range of different individuals that might find benefit in this book. And I guess kind of building upon that when we're talking about ethics, like, how would you define ethics in the context of academic advising? And I guess a second part to that could be what you're mentioning about ethical advising, what could be some of those ways that ethical advising practices could influence, maybe the broader student success or even institutional integrity?

Lisa Rubin  
Great questions. Matt, so first, ethics are just basically guidelines for what is considered right and wrong for an individual or a group. And like I said, advisors and people generally make 1000s of decisions every day, and our decisions impact people besides us and so for how ethics matter to advisors, when we're faced with ethical dilemmas, we might have multiple opportunities or multiple options to decide between multiple right answers, so there may not be a wrong one, but how do we distinguish between different options for the best outcome. And so having ethical decision making will help advisors choose between those different options. And some of those options might be something familiar, like a best practice that they've learned through NACADA or through their training and development. And so what ways you said the second question, what ways can these practices influence student success? So like I said, decisions can impact more than just the advisor and the student that are making them. So one example might be if an advisor is making an exception to a policy for one student, that might lead to other students then asking for exceptions and that could lead to potential values conflict for an advisor who's loyal to both the institution and the student, and so how do they handle that? An example that I think comes up a lot for us as a student who wants to transfer because they want to pursue an academic program that our institution does not have, and is the advisor harming their institution by supporting the student to transfer. Probably many of us would say no, but if retention is really been beaten down everyone's throats, you must retain students, then telling a student to transfer is not a great look for that person. So that's something that they have to wrestle with. So some things to think about are that advisors or role models are moral mentors for students, and they're exhibiting behavior that students observe. So one example that I think would be interesting to consider is cultural backgrounds of students. So sometimes advisors may strongly believe that a student needs to develop their identity as an adult because they're in college, so they should learn how to make their own academic decisions and figure things out on their own with the information that's given to them or provided to them, with the advising help. But a student may want to bring their parents or family members to an appointment, because that's part of their culture. They're in a collectivistic culture, and everything they do is influenced by their family member. So how does an advisor who believes that having family members in their meeting or their advising appointment would go against the students growth and development while respecting their culture? So these are the kinds of things that are in the book to help students and advisors in those unusual situations that do happen all of the time.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, I'm kind of curious. I'm going to throw a question to Ashley.There are other publications, other books from  NACADA and. Include ethics components, oftentimes at the beginnings. And I'm kind of curious how you see this book fitting in with the larger body of knowledge and the scope of the literature, just from your perspective, with the Association and then the role that you play there?

Ashley Thomas  
Yeah, that's a good question. So at NACADA, we're always trying to build on what is out there, because we all know that the profession is relatively new, right? Like we've been around. Advisors have been around for a while, but the profession is constantly changing and evolving, and so we are with our resources and our publications, we're always trying to keep up with that and make sure that what we're putting out is helpful and timely and useful to the profession, while all you know and what's happening right now. But also, what can we kind of if we had a crystal ball, what could we predict right to happen in the future? Wouldn't that be nice? But so with as far as this book is concerned, I think it definitely expands, kind of like Lisa mentioned, it expands upon some of the the literature that was out there that just started to scratch the surface. And so there's some great articles out there by some authors in the NACADA journal and things like that. But this really does a deep dive. And when we look at some of the other events that we provide, the resources that we provide, the ethics, I think there's a real appetite for ethics out there. Because, you know, when we look at our events, like our conferences and things like that. The ethics presentations are always highly, highly attended. And so people are really interested in this, in this area, because we, like, like Lisa said, we always are looking for ways to to understand how to navigate certain situations that we're all put into. And so I think that, and even Lisa had some some reservations about writing this book, right? This is a massive topic to take on, but my encouragement and my empowerment to her was, we have to start somewhere. We have to start somewhere and putting it down. And maybe, you know, things evolve and change, and we expect that. But this book is the, I think, the first of a very needed resource for our profession. And how cool would it be if it leads eventually to a code of ethics or something like that, right? And so those are some of the things that we're always forward thinking on and trying to think about. You know, how do we kind of scaffold some of these things and build, build things into the future.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, no, I think this is a great segue into this next question. And, you know, Lisa was talking about, you know, there being the literature out there conferences, there's a course. And that kind of led into like, Well, shouldn't you write a book about this in terms of, you know, when you're structuring something like this and this book taking shape with everything that has to go along with ethics. How do you decide what you include, what you don't include in this talk? Talk to us about this pathway of this becoming a reality.

Lisa Rubin  
And that's a good question. I think it's definitely hard to tackle everything. And I know, just to be clear with everyone, this book was peer reviewed, you know, after I wrote it, I got feedback from reviewers, and, you know, someone said this is kind of basic, and I thought we have, as Ashley said, we do have to start somewhere. And I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't take these types of classes until I was in my PhD program, and I certainly don't expect everyone to have done a PhD program or taken ethics in their lifetime. So I really thought it was important to go back to some very basic concepts, even though I still think it's a deep dive, because it's not like dinner conversation, usually to talk about ethical theory. Maybe it is for Peter Hagen, I don't know, but I would normally expect people to not know everything, even off the top of their head, if they took a class 20 years ago. So I started, I'm I will be very transparent. I started with a syllabus that I used in that course, and looked at the topics that I had, took feedback from the students, who, again, are all advising leaders, administrators or coordinators of some sort, and started with that, and then went to the basics. First, defining ethics, defining morals, defining values, what are the differences? And then what are some basic overarching paradigms and theories for lots of different ways of thinking and knowing. And then, you know, towards the end of the book, we get into specific topics that affect advisors, and that's so it's very broad leading into that, and that's building every chapter. To how do people think? To what are some different ways to make decisions and what are different examples of ethical dilemmas, to very specific things that advisors can keep in mind or that they may face towards the end of the book. So that's kind of how my approach went.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well. I know we want everyone to get a copy and look through it. But I'm curious if you could just give us a little like an example, a little spoiler, maybe of a decision making framework, or one of those paradigms from the book and how it can help advisors navigate complex situations. 

Lisa Rubin  
Sure, Ryan, I can do that. So the book that I used when I didn't have a book that I wrote for the past two times I've taught the course was Rudolph Kidder, and it's how good people make tough choices, I believe is the title. And he offered three ways of thinking about a decision. So those three ways are ends based thinking, which reflects utilitarianism, what outcome produces the greatest number does the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And then there's ruled based thinking, which is in deontology, advisors have to forget about the outcomes of their decisions and focus on obeying a universal standard for all students and care best care based thinking is that an advisor be empathetic, imagining how it would feel to be the recipient of their actions, rather than the decision maker. So those are the three. I'll give an example using those three ways of thinking, but I also note that there's what Kidder called a trilemma, and that's kind of a compromise between all the different options. So one of my examples that I am going to share is about advising a pre Health Sciences student, so any type of pre medical or or other pre health field, and a student that you advise struggling in a lab science course. So they're coming to you for help. They really want to pursue a career in the health sciences, but just cannot pass that first biology course. They've taken it twice. They went to tutoring, and they didn't make any progress. So I'm going to apply those three ways of thinking. So for ends based thinking, the advisor figures that's doesn't have to be you, the advisor figures that the student may not do well a third time in the class, and suggest they consider a different career path, and that could be considered the greatest good for the greatest number of people, because the student may not struggle as much anymore. It could save them a lot of money and time, and it's more likely that they'll stay enrolled. If they cannot pass that first biology course, then they'll delay all their other lab courses and extend their time in college. And the advisor doesn't want them to burn out or drop out of college. So that's the ends based thinking. If we apply rules based thinking, the advisor might suggest the student take a course again with a different Professor reminding them that they cannot repeat it more than twice to replace the original grade. They would tell all students this because that is what's in the college colleges policy handbook, and they can allow the student to continue pursuing their health sciences program as long as they meet the minimum overall grades to stay in and if the student drops below those minimum grades, then they can suggest an alternative program to pursue. And then lastly, with care based thinking, the advisor might recommend the student consider taking biology at a nearby community college, which would be less expensive and may have a smaller class size, may not replace the Fs on their transcript or help their grade average at their institution, but it may make their journey to continue in pre Health Sciences more likely. That also does take away money from the institution, but in the long run, the Advisors decision to help the student this way and may retain the student. 

Matt Markin  
Awesome. As you were going through each of those examples, I was like, Yeah, I think I've experienced that, or have known advisors that experienced that with some other students throughout the years now, going along with this book. I mean, you have various concepts in here chapters, a lot of I think it's probably gonna be a lot of great tips for advisors, especially the ones that you've just mentioned, have you found anything any of these chapters or concepts particularly enjoyable that you've explored in this book, or challenging and I guess also, like from Ashley, is your standpoint from imagining editor? Do you have any favorite parts throughout this whole process going from idea to publication?

Lisa Rubin  
Well, of course, I really enjoyed getting into the works of a lot of NACADA leaders before me who wrote on ethics. So I engaged with work from Mark Lowenstein, Tom Grits, Joanne Damminger, Peter Hagen and Drew Puroway, among many others. I also had fun with kidders concept of. Ethical fitness, and I did weave in some fitness references to yoga and pilates in the book. I also have found things challenging, so I wrote a chapter on moral development theories. And yeah, that's definitely not something I would say is in my wheelhouse. So I did have to dive into those and make sense of them for me, and then try to write those in a language that I think would be digestible to people who aren't as familiar with moral development like I was when I started that. And I also think it was just a learning experience. So I live by the motto "Learning never goes out of style." And so I just thought the whole process of writing a book was a learning experience. I have co authored a book before, and it was a very different experience than writing by myself. Though we do have a lot of excellent case study contributions from NACADA members in the book, but the book process is lonely sometimes, so I just challenge myself to take it all as something I'm learning, either through the writing process or the topic?

Ashley Thomas  
Yeah, I think that in this particular book, Lisa does a brilliant job of with her writing. Lisa is an excellent writer to begin with, but then adding in the voices from some of the the case studies that kind of help us practically think through some of those things are really, were really a cool addition to this book. But as far as the process goes, there's so many parallels between this and advising my job and actually advising itself. Because, you know, when we think about students that walk into our office and they are think about that freshman or that freshman, or that non traditional student that walks in our office and they're scared to death, right? And they don't really know they have they they're super excited, but they don't really know what their path is. And as an advisor, you're there to guide them along that way, and then you watch them walk across the stage as that empowered, confident, almost grown up, you know, person that that they is totally opposite of what they walked into your office with this process is very much like that. Even Dr. Rubin had her like hesitations about this process or other things that that we have worked on together, and, you know, being able to come alongside people, whether they have written a ton, or whether they've never written before in their lives, and just kind of be there to empower them along The way, is an incredibly humbling and rewarding experience. And you know, I'm I'm always there as a point person to talk with them through that process and and make myself extremely accessible forever what you know, no matter what they need, but, but also at the end, when they actually get to see their book or their publication in print. You know, when they send that first proof? I remember when Lisa got the first proof of this book, and she texted me and was like, Oh my gosh, no. I said, it's really cool to see it actually. You know, come to life, isn't it? And then when they actually get to hold that publication for the first time. It's, it's pretty cool. So it's a lot of fun to be a part of that process with them and just kind of be in the background and get to see everything that they did they experienced through the process.

Ryan Scheckel  
So I'm curious, as you're, you know, trying to establish these basic concepts and build up to these specific situations. Did you discover anything along the way that you wish there had been more room for or that you wish there was more in scholarship that you could have drawn from to fill in some of the questions that felt maybe unanswered? 

Lisa Rubin  
That's a great question. I do think there is definitely more that can be added to this area, in advising scholarship and generally in higher education scholarship. I was very lucky that things were coming out, you know, Drew Puroway's article Tensions: A Grounded Theory of Ethical Practice came out in 2022 in NACADA journal. So that was excellent timing. I did also find a phenomenal dissertation that I quote in the book, and, you know, harass the author a little bit to submit to a NACADA publication themselves. And so hopefully, you know, in the future, they'll get their work promoted outside of just a small citation in this book. But there's some really, potentially outstanding ideas that people can build off of, and when you do see the factors that affect ethical advising practices, chapter 10, it's barely covering, you know? Covered like five topics a little bit, and then I list like 20 that could have been discussed. And I probably have had a chapter on each of these topics. But just, you know, to make it readable and not get too obsolete in the near future, I had to keep that to a minimum. But I did cover some topics I think that are really important. And in referencing, of course, one of Ryan's article, the Panopticon article on technology and surveillance, and some of those topics that are still very relevant, like predictive analytics, some of those things that are really impacting advisors right now, and I think will continue to be important as AI still is in our conversation. 

Matt Markin  
Who knows where AI will be in a few years, still here, where how advanced it'll be? We'll see. Now I am curious. You know, having gone through this process, a lot of writing, that writing that you've done before, and then, Ashley, same for you. Let's say you have someone that's interested in wanting to write, whether it's an article, a book chapter, whatever it might be. And they're like, I don't know where to start. Do you have any advice for them?

Ashley Thomas  
Yeah. So, you know, to quote Dr. Wendy Troxel, the your your writing starts with wondering something. What do you wonder about. And she she tells me that all the time. And you know, we all have, whether it be advising, related or not, we have things that we wonder about out in the world, right? And so many advisors have the imposter syndrome, right? I don't have anything important to say. I don't have anything like I'm just doing my job. And I hear that from so many people, and my message to them is that you do have something to say. I if it's something that maybe it's something that you have found in your practice, in your day to day practice that works really well with students, or even one of my passions is actually the advisors themselves. How are we retaining academic advisors? How are we keeping advisors from getting burnt out when they're constantly being asked to do more and more? And so regardless of whether your focus is students or advisors or administrators, you have important things to say, and the kata has a broad range of publication venues that that, that they can target, and so whether it's from practice based to integrating theory to doing research to doing a full book like Elisa, did you Know I encourage people to reach out to me, and I'm always happy to jump on a zoom or jump on a teams and talk through the process and and just brainstorm. Sometimes you just need somebody to bounce ideas off of, you know, and that's what I'm here for. I love kind of that brainstorming process and helping people realize that they do have potential as an author, that they are, that they can feel empowered and confident. And then, you know, when you do finally get the courage to write something down and submit it, that's a scary process as well, but I will say that our publications are and then the editors and the review teams that I have engaged in these publications are very developmental in their processes. We're not going to send your paper back with a red pen, you know, bleeding all over the place. We're going to be very, even if we have to reject it for whatever reason. We're going to be very, very helpful in the feedback that we give you, and it's not going to be demeaning in any way. We're very careful with the language that we use, so that you do feel confident in either revising and submitting somewhere else or revising and submitting back to us, or completely, you know, re revamping whatever it is. And what I always tell people is, if you get a revise and resubmit, a lot of people take that as a rejection. It's actually not, because when you get a revise and resubmit, that means they were interested in what you wrote, and they actually want you to and and revise and resubmit is incredibly common. And I would say I can count. I've been with NACADA for six years now. I can count on one hand how many I think I've had one journal article that was a published right off the bat and it was an invited piece. So, you know, a revise and resubmit is always a good thing. And so I just encourage and empower people to realize that if you are a practitioner, if you are engaged in this profession, in any way, you have something to say. So join up with a team. You know, be bold and do it yourself, but reach out to us. And I. Love to brainstorm with you, or reach out to our authors and have them talk through the process. 

Matt Markin  
Awesome. And as we wind down with this, you know, we've been talking about this new book. So where does one purchase this book? What's the details? How much is the cost? When's it available? Well,

Lisa Rubin  
I think soon you will get an email, if you're a NACADA member, that will invite you to pre order the book in the month of June, and you can choose to ship it sometime in July, or you can pick it up at the annual conference at the end of October. And there will be book signings one or more in Las Vegas, so you can have it signed by me and case study contributors, and if you have it shipped, just remember to bring it with you to Vegas so we can sign it. But we are very excited to have this resource earlier than expected. So I thought it would be in October myself, and so the publisher has been great to work with, and everything just moved very smoothly during this process. So I definitely tribute a lot of that to working with Ashley, but I am excited to share this with our members and future members and other colleagues in adjacent fields, and hope it does make it a big difference for future scholarship on advising.

Matt Markin  
And now hearing you know, doing this interview and listen to you both. I think we're Ryan, I are both excited to hopefully get our hands on a copy of this and be able to read the entire thing and see you both in October in Vegas as well. So Lisa and Ashley, congrats on this upcoming book, and thank you so much for being on the podcast with us. 

Lisa Rubin  
Thank you.