Mental and Behavioral
Northwestern faculty are now encouraged to include language in their syllabi to make students feel more comfortable coming forth with mental or physical health issues. The sample language provided states: “If you find yourself struggling with your mental or physical health this quarter, please feel to approach me. I try to be flexible and accommodating.”
Iowa State University added a Student Health and Wellness program to its Student Affairs department. The new division plans to encourage faculty/student collaborations, recruit peer health educators, and broaden prevention programming.
A new scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania will recognize student leaders in mental wellness. The scholarship was created and endowed by the Stephanie Becker Fund, which honors its namesake, a Penn grad, by working to equalize the importance of mental and physical health.
As counseling centers across the country struggle to meet increased student demand, researchers at Michigan State University are examining the role that mobile technology can play in combating mental illness. A new app called iSee uses wearable technology sensors to collect data about students’ daily activities, including physical activity, sleep, social interaction, and going to class. The information is then sent to school counselors, allowing fewer counselors to keep track of more students, offering help to those most in need.
Diversity and Inclusion
Texas is debating a new “bathroom bill” that would require public agencies, including higher education institutions, to restrict transgender people’s use of bathrooms to facilities consistent with biological gender assigned at birth. The bill has been called “remarkably similar” to a version in North Carolina that prompted widespread protests and criticism, and spurred several organizations to pull large events from the state.
Cavalry Rogers, a freshman University of Pennsylvania track team member, writes about facing racism on campus at a northern Ivy League school, even if it is not as overt as a state like Oklahoma, where a student was recently expelled for sending explicitly racist GroupMe messages. “However,” he writes, “ I wasn’t in Oklahoma when a woman working at a front desk on campus asked me ‘What sport do you play?’ when I walked through the door wearing a suit.”
Sexual Assault and Title IX
A new policy at Stanford University now requires a unanimous verdict from a three-member panel charged with investigating an assault to find a student accused of sexual assault responsible. Stanford’s previous policy already set an uncommonly high bar, requiring at least a 4-1 vote, rather than the simple majority required at many schools.
Amid national attention for their candid reporting on sexual assault, which raises questions about public records and confidentiality, the Kentucky Kernel reports that eight faculty members were investigated by the school’s Title IX office over a five year period. Two were asked to resign without disclosing a specific cause for dismissal.
In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Dante Ramos criticized colleges for defining sexual assault so broadly and erasing due-process for students accused of sexual assault on campus. Ramos called on the federal government to press students and schools to involve law enforcement in every campus sexual assault case saying, “It shouldn’t just make harried college bureaucracies take on more investigations — only with ever more draconian rules.”
Guns on Campus
The Georgia State Representative who sponsored the state’s unsuccessful campus carry bill has been appointed the state’s chairman of the House Higher Education Committee, the legislative body which influences policies within the University System of Georgia. The bill was vetoed last year by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal last year.
Sex and Gender
In what has become a challenge for Greek leadership, Northwestern University student Adam Davies, who identifies as transgender female-to-male, went through three days of the sorority recruitment process before school administrators called him into a meeting to say he was not “fit and eligible” because of his gender. Although the school’s campus Panhellenic board members expressed interest in welcoming gender non-binary members into their houses, the national boards have been less comfortable.
This month, student unions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke will start providing free tampons in all of its bathrooms. Sue Wasiolek, the associate Vice President for student affairs and dean of students at Duke, noted that the school has been providing free condoms for years. “[This project] believes that women’s menstrual cycles are an as important physical manifestation issue as safe sex,” she said, “and that it should be as easy to find a free tampon or pad on a college campus as it is to find a condom.”
Smoking
Researchers at Ohio State University are studying the health impact of electronic cigarettes. According to the CDC, use among high school students has increased tenfold within four years.
