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Fables, Labels, and Folding Tables: Reflections on the Student Affairs Profession
by Randy L. Mitchell

With humor, pathos, and humanity, Fables, Labels, and Folding Tables is a valuable reflective tool for helping student affairs professionals to define or re-define our place and our work in a time of dramatic change. It is a book about the human dimension of student affairs.

Author Randy Mitchell shares personal/professional essays as he explores his own work and that of his profession. Randy sees the fables — the stories and experiences that professionals share with each other — as processes of interpretation and self-definition. This sharing is critical to individual and collective success. Labels refers to the unique language of the profession and captures the names and ways used to describe people, movements, causes, and paradigms. And, folding tables denotes the tools of the trade and the ability to invent, utilize, and create using those tools.

Each of the 31 essays is a personal story, and yet in the tradition of all great story-telling, the story is really about each of us. As such it offers us the opportunity to think and reflect on our own practice and its place in the profession as a whole.