More change ahead for longtime adviser Simkins to continue at UW after retirement

When the late Charles Odegaard retired from the UW, he was given a T-shirt that said, “University, c’est moi.” Director of Academic Counseling Richard Simkins might be a candidate for the same shirt. After all, he’s been in advising at the University for 38 years, and that’s just the paid employment. The Seattle native was a student here before that. And when he retires this June, he won’t really be disappearing. After a summer off, Simkins will return to work at 40 percent.

Director of Academic Counseling Richard Simkins has been with the UW for almost 40 years. He began his advising career while a graduate student.

He will, however, be giving up his work in the Undergraduate Advising Center that he has in many ways molded. Simkins was a graduate student in political science when he started working there in 1962, one of many grad students who staffed the office along with a few faculty under the guidance of Political Science Professor Walter Riley.

“Walter’s idea was that advanced graduate students could staff the office while they were working on dissertations,” Simkins explained. “In those days there weren’t nearly as many students coming in, so if you weren’t busy, you worked on your studies.”

Simkins didn’t take much time out, however. He enjoyed his experience in the advising office so much that he went on to become the resident director in Haggett Hall for three years. Eventually he abandoned his graduate program - “I went ABD” - and became Riley’s full-time assistant. By 1970 he had become the office director.

He’s never looked back. “I’m sure there have been days that I’ve come to work and just felt ‘Oh well, another day.’ But I bet there haven’t been a dozen of those,” Simkins said. “I just love all the aspects of my job. I like working with students, but I enjoy the administrative work and the contact with people all over campus too.”

Simkins may have spent nearly 40 years in the same place, but the place has changed and his job changed along with it. In the beginning, he says, advising was mainly a matter of program planning. Advisers helped students figure out what to take in any given quarter and made sure they met graduation requirements. Majors were open to anyone and most of the rules weren’t written down.

“Walter really resisted writing things down, because he thought that was too restrictive,” Simkins recalled. “He wanted to treat each of the 15,000 students we had in those days as an individual and judge what to do on a case-by-case basis.”

A noble idea, but it created problems. Like forcing Riley to personally see every student who wanted to drop a class, a process that then involved collecting several signatures. Furtively, Simkins began to write things down, then to share what he had written. Eventually, the document grew to what is now called the Adviser Information File - one of the Bibles an adviser turns to when trying to decide what should be done for any given student.

Soon, seeking stability, Simkins began pushing for full-time advisers. Sometime in the 1970s graduate student employees were phased out and the office began to hire people with master’s degrees. And over time, the people he hired began to think of themselves as part of a profession called academic advising. It’s a good thing they did, because the institution was becoming ever more complex while the number of students was increasing. Today, the office Simkins oversees - which includes the equivalent of 11 full-time advisers - is responsible for about half of the 25,000 undergraduates - the ones who haven’t yet declared a major.

“When people ask me how students today differ from those in the past, I tell them they’re totally different and exactly the same,” Simkins said. “They live in a very different world but their developmental issues haven’t changed.”

For example, Simkins says that when he first started advising, he might have asked a female student if she planned to finish her degree or get married. She, in turn, might talk about choosing nursing or teaching as “something to fall back on.” For the past few decades, however, all advisers have known that women students are as serious about their education as the men.

Both men and women, however, are more worried about whether they’ll be able to make it economically and “find a place in the cold cruel world where they can feel they’re making some kind of contribution,” Simkins said. “When I started, the mere fact that you were in college meant that you were going to make it.”

This fearfulness has led some students to shy away from the liberal arts, according to Simkins. He and his staff work hard to convince students that not only is a liberal arts degree a viable one, it is even in demand because of the transferability of the skills acquired.

Students these days are also busier. Simkins describes them as “unbelievably involved, sometimes in too many things.” And while that involvement can be beneficial, he sees a down side: “They don’t see college as a time to really immerse themselves and try to develop their basic abilities or get excited about a field of interest.”

Simkins, on the other hand, has certainly immersed himself in academia. In addition to running the advising office, he’s gotten involved in curricular issues. He sits on the Curriculum Committee for the College of Arts and Sciences and also the Faculty Senate’s Faculty Council on Academic Standards - in both cases as an ex officio but very active member. One of the things he offers to both committees is his “long memory” about curriculum issues from the past.

It’s natural that the head of advising should be kept informed about curriculum changes, but Simkins has gone beyond a receptive role on the committees. For example, after the University adopted minors in 1994, he went to the dean of undergraduate education, Fred Campbell, and asked about some related issue. “Fred said ‘You handle it,’” Simkins recalled. So over time, Simkins became the “czar of minors” at the University, essentially trying to figure out the details of how minors - of which there are now about 80 - should work.

It is this curricular work that Simkins will continue when he returns at 40 percent in the fall. The summer, he says, will be devoted to relaxation and travel. He’s an active participant in Elderhostel programs and loves to entertain friends in the condominium he’s occupied for 21 years.

“I’ll miss the students, but I enjoy the curriculum work, too,” Simkins said. “I do try to inject a note of humor and humanity into these things. Though I work with a lot of bureaucratic systems I try to be as unbureaucratic as possible. Anyway, it’s my style to be optimistic. I don’t expect things to be perfect, just good enough to serve people.” ¶

Nancy Wick