Mental and Behavioral Health
USA Today’s two-part series on college athlete mental health addresses why so few student athletes seek help. The series highlights the University of Michigan’s Athletes Connected program, which is making mental health care more accessible for UM athletes, featured in the March 2017 Mary Christie Quarterly.
According to an American College Health Association survey from 2016, almost 65 percent of Duke undergraduates ranked their stress level as “more than average” or “tremendous,” about 10 points higher than the national average. The school’s academic rigor is part of reason, but students also say that they and their peers put pressure on themselves to perform at a high level.
Like many schools across the country, the University of Texas-El Paso has seen the number of students seeking services at the counseling center double over the past six years. The school’s ratio of one counselor per nearly 3,000 students is higher than the recommended ratio of one counselor per 2,4000 students for a school of UTEP’s size.
Penn State’s retiring CAPS Director Dennis Heitzmann reflects on his 33 years in the office pointing to increases in counseling staff and student access. “We brought the CAPS message to the students as opposed to waiting for them to come to us,” Heitzmann told The Collegian, Penn State’s student paper. “As a result there’s been really tremendous growth in the number of students who have come for counseling compared to previous generations of students.”
In an op-ed for the Daily Cal, Berkeley student Danielle Hilborn writes about how Carrie Fisher helped her become more comfortable discussing her mental illness.
Diversity and Inclusion
Leaders of historically black colleges and universities attended a day-long summit hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights advocacy group, to talk about “inclusive practices and policies and share best practices for expanding equality” at HBCU campuses.
Ruthie Robertson, a former adjunct professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho, believes she lost her job because of a Facebook post in which she wrote, “This is my official announcement and declaration that I believe heterosexuality and homosexuality are both natural and neither is sinful.” She told the Washington Post that someone had forwarded the post to the university.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security were discussing a proposal that would require foreign students to re-apply for permission to stay in the United States every year. The proposal, intended to strengthen national security by monitoring foreign students more closely, alarmed leaders of organizations such as the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. Leaders of these organizations expressed serious concerns that the proposal could discourage the most talented international students from applying to schools in the United States. In the Mary Christie Quarterly, University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan wrote about the unwelcome message sent to international students by the federal government’s travel ban.
Already a leader in LGBTQ health services, University of California Berkeley’s Tang Center is adding two new services that will be covered by student health insurance for its transgender students: fertility preservation and hair electrolysis.
The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student paper, covers local concerns about an upcoming KKK rally in Charlottesville, where the school is located.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Men are increasingly using Title IX to defend themselves against what they view as bias during sexual assault investigations. Grant Neal, a former Colorado State University Pueblo football player, settled a Title IX lawsuit against the university that stemmed from a multi-year suspension involving allegations of sexual assault. Neal’s lawsuit alleged that the school violated his due-process rights during the adjudication of the matter. The news of Neal’s settlement came a week after a separate high-profile case at Columbia university came to a similar end. In yet another case, a former Catholic University student has sued the school, claiming that the administration was biased against him during a sexual assault investigation because he is male.
This summer, Dartmouth College received the Campus Prevention Network’s 2017 Prevention Excellence Award for its success at preventing campus sexual assault. For the past few years, Dartmouth has implemented a number of programs, including partnering with community advocates and researching best policy practices to prevent and report sexual assault. Read more about Dartmouth’s partnership with WISE, a local sexual violence prevention organization, in the December 2016 Mary Christie Quarterly.
Free Speech
This summer, the Berkeley College Republicans, along with the conservative advocacy group Young America’s Foundation, invited conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak on the University of California campus. Now, the advocacy groups claim that the administration is blocking Shapiro from speaking at the school. The University, however, claims that Shapiro is welcome to speak, but that the largest spaces on campus offered free of charge are already booked for the night in question.
Claremont McKenna, a Southern California liberal-arts college, has punished seven students for trying to shut down a speaking event last spring. In April, about 170 people from the Claremont Colleges and the community organized and executed a blockade of the venue where Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute scholar, was to speak. Mac Donald’s controversial work focuses on law enforcement. She’s argued that protest movements like Black Lives Matter are part of a “war on cops” that make everyone, especially cops and black men, less safe.
Access to higher ed
House Republicans issued a 2018 budget bill last week that rejects several higher education cuts proposed by President Trump. The bill maintained existing funding for the federal work-study program that helps students work their way through college, rather than cut the program’s funding in half, as Trump proposed. The Trump administration sought nearly $200 million in cuts to program that help disadvantaged students in middle and high schools prepare for college, but the new bill adds a combined $70 million more into these programs. The bill does, however, uphold Trump’s plan to pull billions of dollars in reserves out of the Pell Grant program for eligible college students.
Drug and Alcohol Use
According to a 2016 survey of Duke undergraduates by the American College Health Association, 72 percent of the student body had consumed alcohol within the past month, almost 10 percent higher than the national average. David Mallen, assistant director of the Duke Wellness Center, told told The Chronicle, the school’s student paper, that the numbers could be attributed to the “work hard, play hard” attitude on campus.
George Washington University hosted “America’s Opioid Crisis: A National Town Hall,” an evening of discussion about how best to help people addicted to opioids. The event was sponsored by the Hazelden Betty Ford Institute for Recovery Advocacy and the Association of Recovery in Higher Education. On Oct. 17, the Mary Christie Foundation will co-host “Substance Use On College Campuses: New Approaches to a Perennial Problem” at the University of Maryland. Registration for this free event is now open.
