This document first identifies multiple assets student veterans often bring to writing classrooms and then acknowledges some of the special considerations that writing instructors and writing program administrators (WPAs) should take into account when working with student veterans. After presenting these generalizations, the document offers…

Charlie Nutt has been an active member of the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) since 1991 and currently is the NACADA Executive Director. NACADA promotes and supports quality academic advising in institutions of higher education to enhance the educational development of students. Nutt's current responsibilities as executive director…

Cara Hoffman's work enacts George Orwell's imperative to "pay attention to the obvious" (an idea that several sympathetic characters repeat in her 2011 novel "So Much Pretty"), probing aspects of twenty-first century life in the United States that have become so accepted as to be unremarkable, such as epidemic levels of…

Today's students can come from a larger area than just high school. With the entire world's conflicts and today's society, more and more of our present day students may have come from the military ranks. Though we have not come to an actual draft system, more and more modern day students have served their time in the military, to keep America…

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF), the focus of the January 2011 special issue of the "American Psychologist," is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for soldiers and veterans. These are worthy goals. Soldiers and veterans deserve the best care possible,…

"The Tom-Walker" combines the best of Sandoz's realism with her worst attempts at moralizing. Unable to divine exactly what political configuration right-wing post-World War II sentiments might take, Sandoz nevertheless feared a fascist uprising in this country. Perhaps because these concerns dominated her thoughts at the time, she allowed her…

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that…

The past decade has seen a resurgence of scholarship on world literature. The best-selling successes of "Great Books" arguments contained in Azar Nafisi's memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and in Dai Sijie's novel "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" seem to mirror, on the popular front, this scholarly return to the question of world…

Soldiers are returning from war to college. The number of veterans enrolled nationally is hard to find. Data from the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics identify nearly 924,000 veterans as "total education program beneficiaries" for 2011. These statistics combine many categories, including dependents and survivors. The…

Last summer Congress passed the new GI Bill, and the president signed it into law. Americans can take great pride in such a program, one that helps veterans attend college after they return home. However, few are aware that many of those veterans will also encounter a variety of non-financial problems that require substantial adjustment as they…

The President of the United States promises to return servicemen and servicewomen back home from the war in the Middle East by 2011. This raises important questions about how the people in higher education will view and serve those who have worn the military uniform. As they watch the veterans who are making the transition from the battlefield to…

This introduction to the strengths, needs, and challenges of veterans as they transition from the military to higher education is presented within the framework of Schlossberg's transition model (Schlossberg, Waters, & Goodman, 1995). Academic advisors must understand the way that veteran transitions to college are both similar to and different…

The experience of the combat soldier and the road back to civilian life are recurrent themes in American literature and cinema. Whether the treatment is tragic (Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage", Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", or Tony Scott's "Blackhawk Down"), satirical (Joseph Heller's "Catch Twenty-Two" and Robert Altman's…

Recently veteran academic advisors were asked to share their experiences. The respondents to an E-mailed survey self-identified as advisors or administrators and represented six American regions and various sizes of public and private 2- and 4-year institutions. Their responses reflect a genuine interest in the welfare of students today and a…

The idea of providing returning veterans with benefits as both a reward for their service and as a means of enabling them to reintegrate into civilian life dates to the early history of the United States. Revolutionary War soldiers received military pensions, land grants, and other forms of care, depending on their service and its location. After…