Mental and Emotional Health
The Wall Street Journal reports on “embedded counselors” who are based in campus dorms, coffee shops and other spots that provide easy access to students in need. Administrators hope that embedding counseling in familiar locations will also ease the stigma of seeking mental health services, as students don’t have to enter the counseling center. At Virginia Tech, for example, there are embedded counselors in athletic facilities, residence halls, and a popular Starbucks.
Indiana University’s “Let’s Talk” program works to make CAPS resources more accessible to international students, who are adapting to a new culture and are generally less likely to seek counseling. The program employs native Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking counselors who provide services at various campus cultural centers.
The University of Iowa is expanding its University Counseling Services to a second main location on the east side of campus. The center will hire eight additional counselors, paid for by a new mental health fee proposed by student leadership. “We’re only going to get busier,” Counseling Service Director Barry Schreier said. “I think more students will seek out service.”
Diversity and Inclusion
Nearly two years after the University of Missouri received national attention for wide-scale protests against institutional racism, freshman enrollment at the school’s flagship Columbia campus has fallen by 35 percent. The decline has been sharpest in the black student population, already a minority group on campus. The decline has many on campus questioning how the school might have avoided the impact. “I think we squandered a rare opportunity that we had to be a local, regional, national, global leader in terms of showing how a university can deal with its problems, including related to race relations,” Berkley Hudson, a journalism professor, said.
The University of Texas-Austin’s College of Natural Sciences Diversity and Inclusion Committee is developing CNS-Q, a new club to build LGBTQ visibility within the STEM community. “There is not necessarily a lack of LGBT representation in STEM,” said a source, who asked to remain anonymous. “But rather a lack of connection between LGBT STEM faculty and students.”
After President Trump announced a temporary travel ban in January, higher education leaders warned that it would deter talented scholars from attending school in the United States. But a new national study led by the Institute of International Education found that interest on the part of international students to study in the U.S. has remained stable compared to previous years.
The Atlantic reports on the Women’s Mentorship Program at Princeton University, which was created to narrow the gender gap in student leadership, among other dynamics. Princeton formed the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership in response to some troubling data about gender diversity on their campus.
After a year-long review by the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Context, the University of Mississippi announced that is has decided to remove the name of James K. Vardaman from a building. The former governor and U.S. senator opposed African-American education and advocated for lynching to maintain white supremacy. The school is the latest institution to publicly grapple with how to acknowledge the darker parts of its history.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
A University of Wisconsin student who was suspended and convicted of second degree sexual assault will face no prison time. He was sentenced to eight years of probation and will be registered as a sex offender.
Disability and Access
Last year, more than 100 colleges and universities received a letter from a law firm representing “disabled individuals throughout the United States who access or attempt to access internet-based educational services.” The letter claimed that the contacted schools’ websites were inaccessible to their clients, in violation of federal disability-rights laws. The firm offered to use “a collaborative approach” to resolve the problems in lieu of filing a lawsuit. It doesn’t appear that any of the schools have been sued, and that the threats have subsided over the past few months.
In an op-ed for the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student paper, Hannah Soyer writes from personal experience about how the GOP health care bill’s Medicaid cuts would be devastating to people with disabilities.
Hazing
The preliminary hearings into the death of Penn State student Timothy Piazza resumed this week. Recovered text messages from Beta Theta Pi president Brendan Young were shown in court, including one that read “I don’t think you fully comprehend the situation. He looked f*****g dead. At the end of the day I’m accountable for it all.”
Substance Abuse
The Clinton Foundation and Adapt Pharma recently announced a program that will provide universities across the country with 40,000 doses of NARCAN nasal spray, the drug that reverses opioid overdoses. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Plumb, the medical director of Utah Naloxone, and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah, argues that these well-intentioned programs miss the mark on preventing overdose deaths if they are only stored remotely at campus health centers. Plumb writes that because the window to reverse an overdose is so small, to have an affect, naloxone must be accessed directly with the people who are most at risk of overdosing or of witnessing an overdose.
Guns on Campus
A U.S. District Court Judge for the Western District of Texas dismissed a lawsuit filed by three University of Texas at Austin faculty members who sought to reverse the state’s controversial campus-carry law. The professors argued that the law would affect free speech on the campus but the presiding judge wrote that they could not provide “concrete evidence to substantiate their fears.”
College Outcomes
Money Magazine released its college rankings on Monday, which attempt to measure the outcome of college. This year, the rankings include data that provide information about economic mobility in order to illustrate the track record of a school in moving less-affluent students into the upper middle class.
