Mental and Behavioral Health
Wazo Connect, a University of California Los Angeles student organization aims to bridge the gap between the high demand for mental health services and the low supply of programs at UCLA. Wazo Connect pairs students seeking mental health help with peer mentors. Yewon Kim, president of Wazo Connect and one of Wazo Connect’s founders, talked of the organizations background saying it used to be a “think tank” through which students would explore solutions to pressing issues in the community, such as mental health. After brainstorming for a little over a year, the group came up with Wazo Connect to fight depression that might result from feeling disconnected from the campus community.
A University of Wisconsin study found that student athletes report better mental health than their non-athlete peers. Throughout the study, the general undergraduate scores were lower in mental health, and trended lower as their self-reported physical activity decreased. These undergraduate results are also lower than the population norms for mental health.
In an op-ed in the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA, the Editorial Board argues that the school has abandoned the mental health of their students. The Daily Bruin reported that a private counseling service is opening near campus, partnering with on-campus mental health services to mitigate high student demand for treatment. While the Board acknowledges that the service will help students, it asserts that “wealthy university [is] neglecting its community’s mental health needs and banking on good Samaritans from the general population to do the heavy lifting.” According to the Editorial Board, despite an influx of student fees, CAPS has steadily scaled back the number of appointments students can book per year, citing a lack of staff and space.
The University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto is urging students to get the mental health resources they need after two student deaths this month. In a campus-wide email sent last week, Capilouto wrote, “Such losses of people so absurdly young and so remarkably full of promise makes dimmer our community spirit and makes heavy our individual hearts. As you cope with loss and pain, we insist that you consider seeking assistance across the multitude of resources available to you in our shared space,” referring to a website that lists numerous mental health resources on campus.
A semester after the launch of Penn Franklins, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student peer support group, the organization struggles with low turnout, despite the need to improve resources for graduate student mental health. The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly launched the Penn Franklins group after GAPSA’s mental health survey showed that almost half of the graduate students who responded to their survey felt “so depressed it was difficult to function.” While more than 60 graduate students originally joined the organization and attended the peer supporters training hosted in the fall, Penn Franklins Internal Director Matthew Lee, who is a fourth-year Nursing graduate student, said there are currently about 30 active members. Penn Franklins hosts walk-in sessions several hours each day three times a week.
With rising demand for mental health services and a shortage of healthcare providers, universities and colleges are turning to telehealth platforms and mobile health tools to connect with students who need mental health care but can’t or don’t want to go to in-person counseling sessions. “It can introduce a lot of people to a form of therapy they haven’t had before,” says Brian Tobin, a post-graduate counseling Fellow at Vermont’s Middlebury College who’s been using a program called “connected health” for close to a year to work with students. “What surprises me is how much they really do like it. It’s like another app to them.” Among the first was Colorado State University, which first turned to telemedicine and mobile health in 2008 to tackle a mental health crisis that had led to eight suicides over two semesters.
On Tuesday, Stanford University alumnus Paul Watkins ’17 brought four “therapy llamas” to campus to decrease stress and promote wellness on campus, and to publicize his mobile app, Vibe, which helps student users find on-campus peer support. “I know how Stanford is, and when I left, I wanted to create this startup that focuses on mental health support in a more accessible way that is also less stigmatized and expensive,” Watkins said.
A multimillion-dollar grant to help victims of crime will also add resources to mental health services at The Ohio State University. In December, the Ohio Attorney General’s office awarded a $2.1 million grant to OSU’s Wexner Medical Center’s Stress, Trauma and Resilience (STAR) Program. The STAR Trauma Recovery Center is using the grant to hire additional clinical staff who provide case management, therapy and medication management for patients in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. Some of those staff members will aid students at the Office of Student Life’s Counseling and Consultation Service.
Diversity and Inclusion
One day after an emotional rally last where University of Oklahoma students denounced a video in which a student in blackface used a racial slur, news broke that university police were searching for an unknown person who was seen walking on and near the campus, his face painted black and his identity partly obscured by a red hat and a scarf. A student had videotaped the person, and the clip went viral. At the rally, students and other protesters had confronted the university’s president, James L. Gallogly, and demanded tougher action against racism. The president called the incident a “shameful moment” in the university’s history and vowed to continue working on a series of steps he had outlined to make the campus more welcoming to diverse students. Emotions at the rally ran high, with much of the anger directed at the president himself, a former oil executive who took office in July, was recruited to help make the university more financially sustainable. At the rally, the president pleaded with the audience to work with him to make the campus more inclusive. Gallogly told The Chronicle on Friday that he is still growing into the job and that “all I ask is people give me a chance.” “I’ve been a CEO in the past and haven’t been in the academy,” he said. “And so I have much to learn. I’ll be the first to say that.” Walter M. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, argues in the Chronicle that college presidents can’t solve campus racism on their own. According to Kimbrough, “If the solution is to blame the president for every racist incident on or off campus, we are basically admitting that everyone else on the campus has sat back and allowed racism to be a feature of its climate. In that case the campus should openly market its tolerance for racism so prospective students can find a better fit.”
A new report from two researchers Caroline M. Hoxby, professor of economics at Stanford University, and Sarah Turner, professor of economics at the University of Virginia, who are known for their work on low-income students, suggests that colleges are thinking about serving that group in the wrong way. The findings of the project, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled “Measuring Opportunity in U.S. Higher Education,” challenge the idea that colleges should be judged as successful based primarily on the percentage of their students whose families are in the bottom quintile of national earners or who are eligible for Pell Grants, the main federal student-aid program based on need. Hoxby and Turner also critique the often-cited intergenerational-mobility measurement, which measures how well institutions’ low-income students climb income quintiles later in life. Instead, the researchers suggest a more-nuanced method of quantifying economic mobility. They propose breaking a state’s potential applicants into five-percentile segments and measures that against the income profiles of a college’s in-state students. The more closely the two pictures resemble each other, the better the college represents the state’s population. According to Hoxby and Turner, using that method, colleges would get a better idea of the student populations they’re not enrolling.
Duke University has apologized for an incident in which Megan Neely, an administrator and assistant professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics, advised graduate students by email to speak English while on the campus. Neely emailed students in the program to report that two faculty members had asked her for pictures of the graduate students, in order to identify several students who were speaking Chinese in a student lounge area. She wrote, “They were disappointed that these students were not taking the opportunity to improve their English and were being so impolite as to have a conversation that not everyone on the floor could understand.” Neely advised international students to speak English “100% of the time” in any “professional setting” on the campus. She will step down immediately as director of graduate studies in biostatistics.
In a feature on what it means to be a women’s college today, the Chronicle explores admissions criteria, among other factors. Today, of the roughly 40 women’s colleges still in existence in the United States, more than half say their doors are open to more than just cisgender women. In 2014, Mount Holyoke became the second women’s college in the country, preceded by Mills College, in California, to adopt a formal policy inviting applications from transgender and nonbinary students. The immediate impact was to open the doors to trans women, whose ability to attend had previously been left unclear. Over the following year, the remaining Seven Sisters that hadn’t gone coed or defunct also announced policies inclusive of trans women, often under considerable pressure from students. No institution, however, has gone as far as Mount Holyoke, where the policy established the college as a place not only for anyone who identifies as a woman, but also for a diverse spectrum of people outside the gender binary – including gender-nonbinary applicants assigned either male or female at birth – as well as trans men who have already transitioned at the time of application. Today, the only group Mount Holyoke doesn’t consider is cisgender men.
Free Speech
Jay Rosenstein, a professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is asking for the right to ban from his classroom a student with a history of persistent online trolling against him. Last semester, an online troll who had posted “really disparaging comments” about him on social media, calling him a sexual predator, saying he should be in jail, and who showed up at faculty senate meetings to criticize him in person, enrolled in one of his classes. After the first day of class, Rosenstein said, he approached his dean and the university police but was told there was nothing that could be done, that the person had enrolled in the course as a nondegree student. In November, Rosenstein drafted a resolution, to be considered by the faculty senate, that would prevent students who have displayed a history of “persistent trolling, harassment, obsession with, or stalking” of a faculty member, either online or in person, from taking a class taught by that faculty member.
Food Insecurity
A piece of legislation introduced by California State Senator Bill Dodds aims to help tens of thousands of low-income college students in the state gain reliable access to food and nourishment through the CalFresh program. “Students shouldn’t be forced to make the heartbreaking choice between getting an education and eating,” Dodd said. “Hunger is a serious problem on college campuses across the state and my bill takes an important step toward putting food on the table.” According to the release by Dodd’s office, Senate Bill 173 removes “barriers to students to get subsidies under CalFresh, in part by streamlining the application process,” allowing more than 50,000 college students in California to be able to enroll in food assistance.
A new food pantry on the Indiana State University campus just opened, which aims to educate students about their food choices and nutrition while also providing a service to students.
