Mental and Emotional Health
In the Daily Cougar, the University of Houston’s student paper, senior Delaney Catlettstout argues that students should track the state legislature’s Mental Health committee and voice their opinions about the kind of mental health care they would like to see on campus. “It relies on students to speak up and speak out about their mental health experience within higher education so all students can have access to the resources they need to be healthy,” she writes.
A survey by the University of Michigan’s Central Student Government Mental Health Climate and Resources Task Force found that over 90 percent of students have dealt with a mental health concern on campus. The task force hosted a town hall meeting last week to discuss the findings.
The editorial board of the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, calls on the school to prioritize finding space to expand the school’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) center. “Empty official statements attesting commitment to students’ mental health needs will not help solve CAPS’ impending space concerns,” the board wrote. “The administration needs to take the initiative and work with campus departments and CAPS to find additional space for the new clinic.”
The Lakeland Ledger reported that in Florida, 10 of the state’s 12 universities fail to meet the recommended staffing level of 1 counselor per 1,000 students. At some schools, the ratio reaches 1 to 3,400. Higher education leaders are asking the state for a $14.5 million investment dedicated to campus mental health care though the legislature rejected a similar request last year.
Diversity and Inclusion
Columbia students and faculty released preliminary findings from an ongoing research project about the school’s historical ties to slavery. The findings, as reported by the Washington Post, reveal the curious dynamics of slavery at a prestigious northern university. “It was an anti-slavery society in that it wanted to get rid of slavery—but it also wanted to get rid of all the black people and send them back to Africa,” said Eric Foner, the Columbia history professor leading the project.
Students at colleges and universities across the country have demanded that administrators promise to provide sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, but college leaders have been hesitant to declare themselves “sanctuary campuses,” for fear of disobeying the law. Some said that protection of student information, including immigration status, is already protected under long-existing privacy laws.
In a campus-wide email Thursday, University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh rejected student demands to designate the university a sanctuary campus, calling the action “unnecessary, since we already provide all the protections and support allowed under the law.” Boston University President Robert A. Brown said his administration will seek to protect undocumented students from deportation, but also rejected the “sanctuary campus” term, saying “We really can’t, in the definitional meaning or the classical meaning of a religious sanctuary, be a sanctuary.”
Katrina Myers Caldwell, the first diversity chancellor at Ole Miss, began her new post this semester. “I’m really intrigued about the University of Mississippi’s history and its legacy,” she told the Daily Mississippian. “In terms of innovation and progress, places like Mississippi are important, I think, in terms of diversity.” Ole Miss did not accept black students until 1962 when James Meredith, a US veteran, was escorted to the school under the protection of 500 U.S. Marshals.
An internal report on diversity at the University of Chicago found that current practices are “inadequate in securing diversity and inclusion.” It recommends hiring a more diverse faculty and implementing campus-wide workshops on implicit attitudes and unconscious bias.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
A Syracuse University graduate student filed a Title IX complaint, claiming a hostile work environment in her academic department. The investigation was opened while an officer from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was already on the school’s campus for a previous Title IX compliance case. The school did not publically acknowledge the second complaint until the school paper, The Daily Orange, reported it.
The Daily Tar Heel reports on the uncertainty of students at UNC Chapel Hill about the future of women’s health care under Donald Trump. “A lot of issues resolved for women’s health could be possibly diminished by a leader who doesn’t place a lot of value on women’s health care,” one student said.
A county circuit judge ruled in favor of the University of Kentucky in its lawsuit against the school’s student paper, the Kentucky Kernel. The university sued the paper after the state attorney general ruled that the school must release documents related to a sexual misconduct case involving a former professor. The Kernel plans to appeal the decision. Kernel editor-in-chief Marjorie Kirk said. “We will continue to report on a system that has enabled professors and others who are found responsible for sexual misconduct to move within academia unnoticed.” The case has received national attention and could set precedent for future investigations by student papers.
The Chronicle interviews Alexandra Brodsky, who co-founded Know Your IX while she was a student at Yale. The organization is a network of sexual assault survivors and advocates who work to structurally improve how campuses handle assault. “It’s really important for survivors to be in the room because they have expertise from their personal experiences,” she said. “But when you reduce them to their experiences, you leave them out of the policy conversations and the legal conversations. That’s a huge shame.”
Amid speculation about whether or not the Trump Administration’s Office of Civil Rights would continue to publicly share the list of open sexual violence investigations, the OCR released the report on Thursday, which showed that 306 sexual violence investigations are now pending at colleges and universities nationwide. That is two more than the previous week, when the office issued its last update under former President Obama.
A former female student filed a Title IX lawsuit against Baylor University Friday, alleging that the football program fostered a culture in which coaches encouraged female students in the Baylor Bruins hostess program to have sex with recruits and players. The lawsuit is the second Title IX suit filed against Baylor this week, and the sixth the school has faced since an internal investigation revealed a failure to properly respond to allegations of sexual assault committed by students, football players in particular.
Hunger and Homelessness
According to a recent survey of administrators at Massachusetts’ 29 public colleges and universities, the number of students facing hunger and homelessness is rising. Around half of the schools surveyed saw an increase in the number of homeless students over the past year, and 38 percent saw an increase in food insecurity. According to a report on the survey by WBUR/NPR, schools have been responding. In 2016, 24 schools had on-campus food pantries, compared to 19 in 2016.
Veterans on Campus
In a Washington Post op-ed , Catharine Bond Hill, President Emerita of Vassar College, warns returning veterans hoping to earn their bachelor degrees to be wary of Trump’s policies on for-profit colleges. Hill believes that the Trump administration will roll back the recent crackdown on for-profit higher ed, a sector that has both aggressively recruited and poorly served student veterans.
Other Stories
Gregory Wolniak, the director of the Center for Research on Higher Education Outcomes at NYU Steinhardt, spoke with The Atlantic about research regarding the effects of college on students, from earnings and quality of life to affordability and knowledge retention. Wolniak said that a bachelor’s degree has a 15 to 20 percent return on investment, and that women’s gains from a bachelor’s degree are greater than men’s, yielding, in some cases, as much as 1.5 times the impact.
