Close to the Mission

A few years ago I watched a capable colleague in IT describe his own work this way: “What we do doesn’t really have anything to do with teaching and learning, research, or public service.” He wasn’t bitter about it. He said it the way you state something obvious, the way you’d mention that the building has four floors. I kept thinking about how matter-of-fact he was about it. Somewhere along the line he had absorbed a story about where he stood in relation to the university’s purpose, and the story had become so settled it no longer felt like an opinion. It felt like a fact.

The story has a phrase attached to it, and if you work in higher education you already know it: close to the mission. Some units are close to the mission. Others are farther away. Academic departments and colleges, the people who teach, who run the labs, who do the public-facing scholarship, are close. Central administration, IT, facilities, finance, student services, and the other enabling functions sit somewhere out past the ring roads. We use the phrase in budget meetings and reorganizations and strategy retreats, and we use it as if it were a neutral tool: a way to talk about resource allocation, decision rights, shared services, and efficiency.

I want to take the phrase seriously, because I don’t think it’s neutral at all. It does real work in our institutions, and much of that work happens where we aren’t looking.

Let me be fair to it first, because the phrase isn’t empty. Universities run on finite resources, and “close to the mission” is one way we reason about priorities when we can’t fund everything equally. It helps leaders protect the core academic work, decide what to centralize, and hold a shared sense of what the institution is fundamentally for. Used that way, as a rough guide to prioritization under scarcity, it earns its keep, and I’m not proposing we throw it out. My concern is with the second job the phrase quietly takes on, the one it was never designed for: ranking people.

I should say where I sit, though not as an apology. I write this from inside those enabling functions. I lead in IT now, and I came up through student affairs. That is not a caveat that weakens the argument; it is the vantage that lets me make it. I’ve stood in two of the functions the phrase keeps at a distance, and heard the same thing said in both. I have watched this dynamic up close for years, and I am describing what I have seen, not pleading a case. Judge it on whether it’s true, not on where I stand when I say it.

What the language actually does

Language that sorts people always ends up allocating something, and “close to the mission” allocates presence. It shapes who is in the room when the institution decides what it is going to become.

When a strategy conversation convenes, proximity to the mission is often the unspoken guest list. The closer units are assumed to have a stake in the direction; the farther ones are assumed to have an interest in the logistics. So the academic leaders are asked what the university should do, and the enabling leaders are asked, later, how to pay for it or stand it up. One group is consulted about ends. The other is consulted about means. That division feels efficient. It is also a quiet ranking, and everyone in the institution can read it.

This is not only a matter of morale. It is a matter of governance. Institutions make worse decisions when the people who understand implementation, risk, capacity, and operational dependencies arrive in the conversation after the direction has already been set. Keeping the enabling voice out of the room where ends are chosen doesn’t just bruise that voice, it lowers the quality of the strategy.

The ranking compounds. Whose constraints get treated as central and whose as inconvenient? Whose problems are the institution’s problems, and whose are that unit’s problems to manage? When budgets tighten, which work is protected because it is close to the mission, and which is trimmed because it is merely support? None of these are stated as judgments about human worth. All of them are absorbed as exactly that.

How people come to believe it

The most consequential thing the phrase does is not organizational. It’s internal. Over enough years, the people on the far side of the ranking begin to narrate themselves the way the institution narrates them.

That is what I heard in my colleague’s voice. He was not describing a slight; he was describing his understanding of reality. The institutional story had taken root inside him, and it had done what such stories do: it lowered his sense of his own relevance until the lowered version felt simply true. I’ve heard the same note well beyond IT: from academic advisers, from student services, from financial aid, from the registrar’s office, from facilities, from the people who keep the network up at two in the morning so a researcher’s grant submission goes through at eight. We support the work. We’re not really part of it. The version that stays with me most comes from student services colleagues, people who spend their days face to face with students, who have still absorbed the message that they stand outside the mission. If the ranking can convince them, it can convince anyone.

And this is not one campus’s problem. In the national communities I’ve belonged to, EDUCAUSE on the technology side and NASPA on the student-affairs side, I’ve heard the same quiet refrain from colleagues across many different institutions. It isn’t a local culture quirk. It’s a pattern in how higher education as a whole talks about its own work.

It isn’t only anecdotal, either. Celia Whitchurch’s work on “third space” professionals describes staff who work across the old line between academic and administrative roles, doing work the traditional org chart was never built to see. Research on belonging tells a parallel story: the large literature on belonging in higher education is overwhelmingly about students, while a smaller body of work on faculty and staff finds their sense of belonging just as consequential, shaping retention, collaboration, and organizational commitment, and finds that professional staff often report sitting a step outside the institution’s core.

We should treat statements like that as evidence, not as modesty. When a whole class of employees can casually locate their daily labor outside the purpose they serve, something in the institution’s design is teaching them to. And what it teaches is expensive. It erodes belonging, which erodes discretionary effort. It degrades decision quality, because the people closest to how things actually work are not in the conversations where things are decided. It weakens collaboration across units that have quietly been sorted into first and second class. People who believe their work is peripheral eventually behave as though it is.

An interdependence view

If the ranking is that costly, the fair question is what ought to replace it as our picture of how the work gets done. Here is a second lens, one I’d hold alongside the operational use, not in place of it. Keep the phrase as one limited input into prioritization, not as a proxy for value, voice, or strategic relevance. Then add this to see what proximity leaves out. A university does not deliver its mission through a set of core units while everyone else stands at a supportive distance. It produces its mission through the interaction of nearly everything it does.

A class gets taught because a room was scheduled, a system authenticated the student, financial aid cleared, the network held, the payroll ran so the instructor was paid, and the building was warm and safe. Research gets published because data was stored and secured, compliance was navigated, grants were administered, and instruments were maintained. Public service reaches the public because someone built the platform, protected the privacy, and kept the doors open. Remove any one of those conditions and the mission does not happen. The teaching does not occur in spite of the enabling work; it occurs through it.

Seen this way, “distance from the mission” is largely an artifact of how we draw org charts and account for costs. The chart puts academic units at the top and enabling units below, and we mistake a diagram for a hierarchy of value. The budget calls some work “direct” and some “indirect,” and we let an accounting convention describe people’s contribution to the purpose. But the mission is not produced along the lines of the chart. It’s produced across them, in a web of dependencies where the label “support” describes a relationship, not a lesser rank.

This is not a plea to flatten real differences. Teaching a seminar and running an identity-management system are different kinds of work, and pretending otherwise helps no one. The point is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with: every role in the institution helps create the conditions under which the mission succeeds or fails. Proximity is too crude an axis on its own. Contribution, dependency, risk, and strategic fit give a better account of how work advances the mission, and by that account it is distributed far more widely than our language admits.

There’s a further point I keep coming back to, and it goes past interdependence into something more direct. Learning happens everywhere on campus, not only in the classroom. In IT we employ students, often a lot of them, and for many the job is where a career takes shape: they learn to troubleshoot, to carry responsibility, to see themselves as professionals. We run internships, advise student organizations, and become the person a student thanks years later. It’s even more obvious in student services, where developing students, their belonging, their growth, their readiness for life after graduation, is the entire point of the work, not a byproduct of it. We file all of this under “co-curricular” or “student support,” as though it happened alongside the education rather than as part of it. It does not happen alongside the education. It is the education, taught in a different room. When enabling units develop students this way, the distinction between core and support doesn’t just soften; it disappears, because the “support” unit is now doing the educational mission itself.

Much of this depends on what we mean by student success. If success is only graduation, a degree conferred, a completion number on a dashboard, then it’s easy to keep the work of degree production close and everything else at a distance. But the definition most of us actually believe in is larger. Student success includes belonging, personal development, and career readiness alongside the credential. A student who graduates without ever feeling they belonged, without growing as a person, without being ready for the work ahead of them, is not a full success, and we know it. Once you hold that fuller definition, the enabling units come into focus as producers of student success rather than bystanders to it. The IT job that builds career readiness, the advisor who helps a student find where they fit, the mentor who becomes part of someone’s growth: these are not adjacent to student success. In the fuller sense we claim to mean, they are it.

And there’s an irony here. An institution fluent in the language of belonging for its students can be strangely careless about belonging for the staff who help produce it. If belonging matters, and we say constantly that it does, it can’t be something we extend only to students. It belongs to every member of the community: faculty, staff, custodians, analysts, advisors, everyone whose work the institution runs on. A sense of belonging is not a student amenity. It’s a condition of a healthy institution, and it’s owed to all of us.

Most IT work, of course, never touches a student directly. It supports the faculty and staff who do. But that doesn’t place it further from student success; it places it one link back in the same chain. When we keep a learning-management system reliable, when we give an advisor the data to reach a student who’s slipping, when we clear enough administrative friction that a faculty member has more of themselves left for teaching, we are enabling the very people who promote student success. Enabling that work is student success work, even when the student never sees who did it.

Step back once more, and there’s a still more basic layer, one that has nothing to do with whether a unit ever meets a student. Watch what happens when a pipe bursts and floods a building and no one from facilities is there to stop it. Or when the network goes down in the middle of final exams. Or when the power fails. The mission does not degrade gracefully in those moments; it stops. I still vividly remember the early stretch of the pandemic, when most of the campus went home and the university moved online almost overnight. It was our custodians, our facilities crews, and others in roles we rarely name who kept coming in, into a building most of us were being told to stay out of, so the campus could keep functioning at all. Take those people out of the picture and there is no institution left to have a mission. That is not distance from the mission. That is the floor the whole thing stands on.

Which is really my argument, in the end. There are several dimensions to being “close to the mission”: teaching it, producing the research, developing the students who live it, enabling the people who serve them, and keeping the whole enterprise standing. Different roles, all of them load-bearing. I am not claiming academic work isn’t central; it is. I am asking for a reading of the phrase that is more inclusive than exclusive, one wide enough to hold everyone whose work the mission actually depends on.

None of this dissolves accountability, and it shouldn’t. Someone still has to own the outcomes: specific units are accountable for retention, for graduation rates, for keeping the systems up, and that clarity matters. But accountability and responsibility are not the same thing. In student success we’ve learned to say it plainly: a few offices are accountable for the metrics, while student success is everyone’s responsibility, from the faculty member to the advisor, the coach, the analyst, the person at the help desk, all of us. The same holds for the mission as a whole. A retention office may own the number, but it cannot produce retention alone. Designated units carry the accountability; the whole community carries the responsibility. Holding both at once isn’t a contradiction. It’s just an honest description of how the work actually gets done.

And let me be plain about what this is not. Saying that a unit contributes to the mission is not saying it can never be cut, restructured, or held to a hard standard. Recognition is not immunity. A truer picture of who contributes should make prioritization sharper, not softer. It gives leaders more accurate information about what they are actually trading off. I’m arguing for a fuller accounting of contribution, not a shield against scrutiny.

There’s a fair objection here that deserves a straight answer. Some functions really are more substitutable than others, or further from the academic judgment at the heart of a university, and a leader still has to make those calls. If the takeaway becomes “everyone is essential, so nothing can move,” the phrase just gets replaced by a vaguer one and prioritization gets harder, not easier. So let me narrow the claim. The line that actually matters isn’t proximity to the mission; it’s whether the work is essential operational architecture or a substitutable transaction. A commodity service the institution could buy from a vendor tomorrow sits in a different place from the systems the whole enterprise runs on, and that is a judgment about the work itself, not about how close a unit sits to the academic core. I am not saying every contribution is equal. I am saying contribution is real, widely distributed, and often invisible, and that proximity is a poor instrument for measuring it. Keep making the hard calls. Just stop using a crude proxy to make them.

What better practice looks like

Leaders can begin with language immediately, and at no cost. But changing the story takes more than different words. It takes different guest lists, different decision practices, and different ways of measuring contribution.

Stop using proximity to the mission as a synonym for importance. When you catch yourself sorting units into close and far, ask instead how each one shows up in a specific mission outcome, and then say that out loud, in the meetings where it matters. Name the linkage. When enrollment goes smoothly, say why the systems and the people behind them made it smooth. When a research team lands a major grant, trace the enabling work that made the submission possible and credit it by name. In a budget conversation, when a cut is about to land on an “enabling” line, ask out loud which mission outcomes run through that line before the number is final. Recognition is not decoration; it’s how people learn where they stand.

Change the guest list. If a decision will depend on how the work actually gets done, the people who do it belong in the room where the direction is set, not only in the room where the logistics are handled. Concretely: at your next strategy retreat, decide who is in the room before you decide the agenda. If a question touches how the work gets built, run, or paid for, the operational leader is a participant from the first session, not a presenter brought in for the implementation slot. This isn’t a case for bigger committees or consensus by crowd; it’s architectural consultation, not a veto for everyone. Bring the person who understands how the thing actually works into the design conversation, not thirty people into every decision. Ends and means are not as separable as our meeting structures pretend.

And listen for the internalized story. When a capable person tells you their work has nothing to do with the mission, treat it as a signal that the institution has taught them something untrue, and treat correcting it as part of your job. Not with a pep talk, but with a concrete account of how their work connects to what the university is for.

What’s at stake

I keep returning to my colleague’s voice, because the flatness in it is the real cost. The phrase “close to the mission” did not intend to tell him he was peripheral. It just kept implying it, meeting after meeting, budget after budget, until he said it back to us as fact.

The words we use to organize our institutions do more than organize them. They tell people whether their work is integral or incidental, whether they belong in the conversation or beside it, whether their effort is part of the purpose or merely in service of it from a distance. We don’t have to abandon “close to the mission” to fix this. Let it keep doing its narrow, legitimate job: one input into how we weigh priorities when resources are finite, not the whole of it. What we can stop doing is letting it double as a map of who matters. Alongside it, we can hold a truer account of how universities actually produce what they exist to produce, together, across every role, with no one standing outside the mission looking in.

I know which version I’d want said about my own work. It’s the same version that happens to be true.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent my employer. This is a reflection on higher education as a sector, drawn from years working across it, not a commentary on, or a message aimed at, any single institution.