Historicizing Academic Advising

The concept of academic advising goes as far back as the Sophists. The word Sophist in the Greek tradition means a person of wisdom (Sophia). The Sophists1 were a group of teachers who used to advise young Athenians on the know how of the art of rhetoric.

Also, the art of academic advising goes as far back as Socrates who used to academically advise his students through the Socratic Teaching Methodology in which the advisor tries to enlighten his advisees through goal-oriented questions. So, tracing the origin of advising to the Greeks with its roots in Sophism depicts the academic advisor as a knowledgeable person of insight, understanding, intelligence, sensibility, and responsiveness.

Current Advising Models

In the modern era, the concept of advising can be traced to Colonial America where instructors served as moral and intellectual advisors. Advising, in this sense, was considered as an instructive task to teach the prevailing ethics and the advisors were considered as mentors who had to structure the behavior of their advisees.

Yet the 1960s witnessed an intellectual and cultural paradigm shift in the way higher education in the USA looked at academic advising. Since then, it became apparent that the need existed for personal, vocational, and academic advising for both men and women. By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, academic advising focused on academically assisting students and retaining them in higher education.