Mental and Behavioral Health
In the Cornell Daily Sun, Kent W. Bullis, M.D., the executive director of Cornell Health, wrote a column introducing their new approach to the delivery of mental health services. In order to provide increased access to mental health care for students, Cornell Health now offers free 25-minute goal-focused counseling sessions that often can be scheduled the same day. These appointments focus on meeting the student’s immediate needs, and making a plan for next steps, when needed. The new model of care is an adaption of a system currently in place at Brown University that has been successful in supporting seamless and rapid access to mental health services.
The Syracuse University Student Association has established mental health awareness as a top priority for the 2019-20 academic year. SA President Mackenzie Mertikas and Vice President Sameeha Saied announced plans to promote and expand support networks for student health and well-being, specifically mental health awareness and sexual health.
In Forbes, Marvin Krislov, the president of Pace University, writes that colleges and universities help build resilience in their students by providing not just counseling resources but also a sense of connection and community through clubs and activities, support from peer counselors and resident assistants and classes like the one Krisolv teaches at Pace that helps incoming students learn how to be better, more effective students.
A new study found that suicidal thinking, severe depression and rates of self-injury among U.S. college students more than doubled over less than a decade. Looking at data from two large annual surveys of college undergraduates from 2007 to 2018, researchers found a worsening of mental health indicators including depression overall, anxiety, low flourishing and suicidal planning and attempts, particularly in the second half of the study period. Study co-author Jean Twenge, said, “It suggests that something is seriously wrong in the lives of young people and that whatever went wrong seemed to happen around 2012, or 2013.” She noted that this was around the time smartphones became common and social media moved from being optional to mandatory among youngsters. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University in California and author of the book “iGen,” said, “It’s difficult to think of any other event that began around that time, and then got stronger on until 2018.”
In an op-ed in the Cornell Sun, student Michaela Bettez writes that the school’s planned review of student mental health should focus on “the ways in which the campus environment and culture contribute to mental health challenges at Cornell.” So far, Bettez writes, the plan focuses too much on expanding and improving Cornell Health’s services while neglecting to address the harsh academic culture. And according to Bettez, the administration should demonstrate through its policies that academic requirements don’t eclipse the needs of student health.
Virginia Tech University is working to improve mental health services. This fall, the school is launching a multipronged mental health initiative from Provost Cyril Clarke, who put together a task force to examine the issue. Chris Flynn, the director of the counseling center, has taken on a new position as executive director of Mental Health Initiatives, a role that was created to break down barriers and improve the likelihood of a student successfully completing their degree. With the task force finding that wait times are the chief concern of students who visit the counseling center, Tech has added counselors, doctors and other services in an effort to reduce the delay. The school is also exploring creative ways to improve the overall well-being of students, one strategy being to embed counselors in academic units. “We want to train faculty and staff to work with their students,” Flynn said. “Obviously, faculty are experts in their field and some of them may have expertise in mental health and some may not. How do we work with them to recognize students in distress?” Flynn also plans awareness campaigns and efforts to study what about the classroom raises anxiety and depression and how the university can fight it. He said he wants students to improve themselves, seek help when they need it and make sure everyone on campus works together toward improving mental wellness.
The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has received a three-year grant of $261,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to support campus Counseling Services in efforts to build suicide prevention resources and strategies. “We want to find out what is working and what more can be done-hopefully three or four steps upstream-to promote wellness and prevent situations that, although always complex and unique, may ultimately lead to suicide,” says Emily Low, UH Hilo Counseling Services counselor and principal investigator of the grant. “The goal is to meet the needs of all students, including veterans and LGBTQI students, who are at higher risk for suicide, and Native Hawaiians, men and other groups who may be less likely to seek help when in distress.”
Lafayette College’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee is launching a mental health campaign this fall while they continue to provide a platform for student athletes on campus. Committee chair and senior field hockey midfielder Cameron Costello said, “We’re hoping to increase student athletes’ awareness of all the resources they have on campus for mental health and also promote the mindset that ‘you don’t have to be sick to get better’ when it comes to mental health because everyone can work on it in some way.” She added that the committee is asking each team to dedicate a game to mental health, which they will promote via social media, interviewing members of the team about what it means to them.
Diversity and Inclusion
Emerson College president Lee Pelton wrote a blistering letter to the campus community condemning the Straight Pride Parade that took place in Boston this past weekend. “Do not be lulled into believing this parade is motivated by any noble obligation to protect freedom of speech or assembly,” Pelton wrote. [The parade] was really “meant to objectify the ‘other’ as unworthy, as deformed, as disfigured and, most horribly, as something other than human.” He called it “a perversion” and “a desecration of beauty, truth and generosity.”
A new care team at Indiana University Bloomington’s Health Center will provide additional support for transgender and nonbinary students on campus. The Gender Affirming Care Team, which is a joint effort between Medical Services and Counseling and Psychological Services, as well as health and sexuality educators at the center, launched this semester.
Activists at the University of Mississippi are growing impatient with what they view as the administration dragging its feet to move a confederate statue. Instead of tearing down the statue, as protesters did last year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, student leaders at the University of Mississippi worked across racial and party lines to build support for relocating the icon from the campus’s entrance to a cemetery on university grounds. The student government unanimously supported the plan in March. Governing bodies representing faculty, staff, and graduate students also got on board. So did the university’s interim chancellor, pending the approval of state agencies. But the student newspaper reported last week that the university hadn’t submitted plans for the relocation, even though five months had passed since the administration’s endorsement. A Twitter account named Move Silent Sam warned that the community might tear down the monument. Signs began to appear at its base listing how many days had passed with seemingly no progress since the student vote. On Wednesday, Mississippi’s interim chancellor, Larry D. Sparks, announced that the university had completed its plan for relocating the statue, after contracting with a firm to help develop that plan in June.
The New York Times Magazine provided an in-depth feature on the high profile lawsuit against Harvard College by Students for Fair Admissions that alleges discrimination and bias towards Asian-American applicants. The magazine explores the historical context of the lawsuit and the complicated views that Asian American applicants and students have about affirmative action.
The College Board is walking back its plan to give a single, overarching “adversity score” meant to capture a student’s economic hardship. The change comes after blowback from university officials and parents of those taking the college admissions exam who saw the score as overly simplistic and vulnerable to manipulation. The proposed score was part of an Environmental Context Dashboard, a program the organization had tested at 50 colleges over the last year in an effort to help admissions officers gain broader context about each applicant’s socioeconomic background when evaluating SAT scores. The adversity score did not factor in race, but grouped together population-level data about crime rates, median income, parents’ education levels, the academic rigor of a high school or receiving free or reduced-price lunches. In the new program, renamed Landscape, there’s no overall adversity score, but all the other contextualizing data points remain the same. The College Board is also offering new guidelines about how to use the program and details about its methodology.
The Hechinger Report looks at the implications of luxury housing for college and university students, something that has become a standard feature of campus life, with shiny new apartment buildings encircling U.S. college and university campuses. Critics say that this has created a two-tiered housing system that is worsening the socioeconomic divide in higher education by segregating rich students from their poorer classmates and pushing up other off-campus rents. Andrew Ryder, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington said, “We’re re-creating socially stratified communities on campus instead of giving students opportunities to live among people from different walks of life.” Such disparities in housing are reinforcing “a total divide” in the student body, said Leah Pearlman, a senior studying media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who lived during her junior year in a private luxury student apartment complex and noticed how many of her fellow tenants were, like her, from affluent suburbs north of Chicago.
As the New York Times reports, unexpected denials and long delays have become increasingly common for international students seeking visas under the Trump administration’s policies, raising concerns among college officials who see a threat to the diversity and enrichment of their campuses — not to mention causing anxiety for students who may have spent years preparing to study in the United States. The latest example to stun educators and students came on Friday, when a Palestinian student attending Harvard, Ismail Ajjawi, was denied entry to the United States at the airport in Boston after, he said, a Customs and Border Protection agent demanded to see his phone and objected to the social media activity of his friends. After a public outcry, Ismail Ajjawi was admitted Into U.S. and arrived on campus this week.
Andrew M. Smith, a 19-year-old student at the University of Illinois has been charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and a felony hate crime after a noose was found hanging in an elevator at a residence hall on campus.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
The University of Cincinnati Department of Athletics has partnered with Undergraduate Student Government to launch an awareness campaign and a pledge to end sexual assault on campus. In April, the groups released a video for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a public service announcement where athletes and other students encourage students to join them in their pledge to stop sexual assault on campus.
The University of New Mexico launched the awareness campaign #ReclaimTheRed as part of a national sexual assault prevention effort across college campuses in 2017. The Red Zone, as it is now commonly called, is the time during the first months of classes between August and November when, according to some studies, more than half of college sexual assaults occur. By reclaiming the color red, UNM students are encouraged to take a stand against The Red Zone and create a cultural shift against sexual misconduct on campus and in the community.
Men who have said they were sexually abused by former Ohio State University doctor Richard Strauss were angered Friday to learn that the State Medical Board failed to remove his license or inform police despite an investigator finding credible evidence of misconduct in 1996. Steve Snyder-Hill, who complained to the university about Strauss in the mid-90 said, “I feel betrayed by them just as much as I did by OSU.” Lawyers representing some of the victims in actions against the university say that as many as 300 men may have been sexually assaulted. A university investigation found that Strauss molested students from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s while serving in Ohio State’s athletic department and at the student health center, and that employees knew about the misconduct but repeatedly failed to act to stop it.
Student Safety
Paul Steber, a 19-year-old from Massachusetts was planning a mass shooting at his college, High Point University in North Carolina, for nearly a year before he was thwarted by other students reporting his guns to school staff. Steber told authorities he chose a university in North Carolina to begin his freshman year because it was easier to get guns there. Steber studied past mass shootings and had stocked his dorm room with weapons. Authorities found ammunition, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun. Steber was initially charged with two felony counts of carrying weapons on campus, which is legal in some states but not in North Carolina. Later, after an interview with authorities, Steber was also charged with communicating a threat of mass violence on educational property.
Free Speech
Marquette University recently adopted a policy placing restrictions on campus demonstrations. Since the policy was announced this month, graduate students and the faculty have taken issue with the restrictions it imposes on free speech. More than 100 faculty members signed an open letter, delivered to Marquette administrators on Tuesday that called the policy “arbitrary and capricious.”
