Office of Student Affairs Records

TThe history of the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) can be traced back to the founding of the Carnegie Technical Schools. For the institution’s first fourteen years, the responsibilities overseen by the OSA today were managed by the Student Assembly, the Department of Health, and, later, the Secretary of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT).

In 1919, men's deanship was created to centralize the administration of student welfare and activities. One year later, a deanship of women was established to maintain similar responsibilities in the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College.

An administrative restructuring occurred again in September 1940 when the Executive Committee of CIT’s Board of Trustees authorized the formation of the Division of Student Personnel and Welfare (DSPW). The goal of this reorganization was to improve the service to students by more effectively coordinating the Institute’s non-academic administrative functions. The DSPW was initially comprised of seven administrative units: the Offices of the Chairman of Committee on Undergraduate Admissions, the Registrar, the Dean of Students, the Department of Student Health, the Counselor on Financial Aid to Students, and the Bureaus of Placements, and of Measurement and Guidance. Some of these offices and bureaus were newly formed, while others were, by this point, decades old.

The department changed its name to the Division of Student Affairs in July 1960. In 2014 the department was renamed to Student Leadership, Involvement, and Civic Engagement or SLICE. Despite undergoing various intraoffice changes since then, the broad, institutional role of what we today know as the Office of Student Affairs–non-academic administrative functions–has remained essentially the same.