Mental and Behavioral Health
Minnesota and seven other states will receive federal funding for a pilot Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics program for community colleges. Advocates believe community health programs like these could fill the mental health service gap that currently exists between community college students and their peers at four-year residential schools. Dr. Derri Shtasel, Executive Director of the Kraft Center for Community Health, wrote about these issues in the Mary Christie Quarterly.
Penn State is considering a new student mental health fee that would be used to fund additional counseling and psychiatric services staff that could address the school’s existing wait lists for service. The proposed $15 per semester fee would generate over $2 million for the counseling center.
In his State of the University address, Ohio State Undergraduate Student Government President Gerard Basalla emphasized the passage of a resolution to place mental health disclaimers on all syllabi. The disclaimer will include contact information for the school’s counseling center.
Diversity and Inclusion
On the night before President Trump’s inauguration, religious leaders at Amherst College formally dedicated the campus chapel as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants who fear the new president will make good on his promise to deport them. In November, Amherst President Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, wrote a letter to students promising that the school would do everything “within the limits of the law” to support undocumented students. She wrote, “At Amherst, we have an obligation to ensure that all our students are able to take advantage of the educational opportunity we offer without fear for their well-being.”
According to a new study by The Equality of Opportunity Project, at 38 colleges and universities across the US, more students hail from from the top 1% of the income scale than from the bottom 60%. Five Ivy League schools were included in this list: Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Brown.
New York Magazine’s Science of Us blog reports on a new article by Scott Lilienfeld, a social psychologist at Emory University who calls for further evidence in the use of microaggression policies at college and universities. In Perspectives on Psychological Science, Lilienfeld cites numerous problems with current microaggression research, including how these offenses are defined at a basic level. Lilienfeld argues that until microaggressions have been researched properly, college and universities should not incorporate microaggression policies into their on-campus diversity and tolerance trainings.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
In 2014, the Obama administration publicly released a list of 55 schools that faced Title IX investigations by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights related to their handling of sexual violence reports. Since then, the number of schools with similar infractions has quadrupled, with 304 investigations currently underway at 223 colleges. It is unclear if the Trump administration will continue to publicly release this list.
During her confirmation hearing, Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, refused to say whether she would uphold the Title IX campus sexual assault guidance reflected in the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter. Of Title IX, Devos said she is committed “to ensuring that the intent of the law is actually carried out in a way that recognizes both the victim, the rights of the victims, as well as those who are accused.”
The health disparities team of the University of Texas at Austin’s Medical School partnered with Huston-Tillotson University to screen the pilot episode of “Our Journey Alive,” a docu-series following the lives of sexual abuse and domestic violence survivors. “My main inspiration for creating this docu-reality series was, as a survivor myself, we rarely see survivors portrayed in any type of television unless it’s kind of sensationalized, unless it was a major case or a celebrity that you hear about,” said Sophia Strother, the series creator, writer and director. “But as a survivor I want to see others like myself that have thrived after the incident
In his final days as president, Obama appointed Mia Karvonides, Harvard’s first Title IX coordinator, to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In her time at Harvard, Karvonides lowered the standard for finding responsibility in sexual assault cases and supported a strict adherence to the letter of the law.
Syracuse University adopted a preferred name policy for course registration and university emails, making it easier for trans* students on campus to be called by their preferred name. Syracuse joins other schools such as Georgetown and Northwestern in establishing such a policy.
The editorial board of Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student paper, sat down with all 10 active fraternity presidents on campus to discuss Fraternities Committed to Safety, the University’s first fraternity-specific sexual violence policy. While acknowledging the policy as a positive step forward, the editorial board noted some important gaps including the fact that the FCS website does not allow students to report sexual assault and requires an email address. “It strikes us as inherently paradoxical that a document that sets up standards for sexual assault prevention does not offer a portal to report incidents of sexual assault,” the editorial board writes. “Not only can sexual assault survivors not report their experiences to the FCS, but also, even if they could, their identities would not remain anonymous.” A full transcript of the conversation between the editorial board and the fraternity presidents is available online.
Florida State University’s Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity hosted a roundtable on sexual assault that brought together professors from the Sociology Department, officers from the FSU Police Department, and University Health Services. According to the FSU Sexual Violence Prevention Coordinator, 20 percent of FSU students have experienced some sort of relationship violence in the past year.
The University of Georgia’s student paper, Red & Black, reports on the backlog of unprocessed rape kits at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As of Dec. 1, over 4,200 rape kits were unprocessed, meaning that survivors of sexual assault could have to wait as long as seven years to hear anything about the status of their case.
Substance Abuse
Penn State President Eric Barron established a task force to explore making the campus tobacco-free. One of the considerations is providing services or referrals to help students who already smoke, should tobacco be banned.
In Iceland, government funding that encouraged teenagers to pursue sports, music, and art led to a dramatic decline in drinking, marijuana use, and cigarette smoking. (From 1998 to 2016, 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month fell from 42 percent to 5 percent; cannabis use fell from 17 percent to 7 percent; and daily cigarettes use fell from 23 percent to 3 percent.) The researchers on the project found that replacing the high from drugs or alcohol with the natural highs that come from sport or music was much more effective than educating teenagers on the risks of drugs and alcohol. Despite the program’s success, many countries, including the U.S., have not adopted similar policies due to concerns about government infringement.
