Mental and Behavioral Health
A new sober and supervised home for college students will open in the Chicago area this year. The home, designed for students with mental health and substance abuse issues, will provide counseling, mindfulness and meditation, community dinners and regular drug testing.
Findings from the Massachusetts opioid working group will guide more than 40 governors across the country to improve their own state’s prescription rules. In a recent oped Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Tufts Medical Center CEO Emeritus Ellen Zane shared lessons the Massachusetts opioid bill holds for colleges and universities.
Diversity and Inclusion
In a Chronicle op-ed, Marvin Krislov, President of Oberlin College, lauds the recent supreme court decision to uphold affirmative action as an admissions criteria, and encourages leaders to “look beyond this decision” by valuing diversity writ large. One strategy: providing students from diverse background access to college resources well before they reach college age.
A University of Georgia junior calls for gender neutral housing on her campus. “The lack of central community for students in the LGBTQ community and the open discrimination they face from peers is a major problem for these individuals,” she writes.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Multicultural Student Center separated students by race to discuss the recent fatal shootings of African-American men in Missouri and Louisiana, and police officers in Dallas. The decision, meant to “to give minority students and employees a space to voice their concerns,” drew criticism from several statewide and national conservative news sites.
A dialogue course about race at the University of Maryland strives to make students more knowledgeable about diversity, and encourages them to re-examine their long held assumptions about difference. In order to gain perspective on other people’s experiences, instructors ask encourage students to have uncomfortable conversations, and to to express and hear things that make them uneasy.
In the wake of fatal police shootings in Dallas last week, University of Houston Student Government Association’s vice president Rohini Sethi wrote on Facebook, “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like #AllLivesMatter.” The post, which has been taken down, provoked outrage from the university community, and calls for her to resign her position within the SGA.
Addiction
Michael Siegel, a Boston University School of Public Health professor, argues that the FDA’s recently released rules around vapes and electronic cigarettes do more harm than good. The new rules prohibit companies from making changes to their products, banning critical safety updates in the process.
Hunger and Homelessness
The Atlantic reports that increasingly colleges are creating emergency-aid programs such as food pantries and campus bookstore vouchers to address hunger among students. According to a new report from Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education (NASPA), the efforts are both humanitarian and pragmatic. As the study suggests, these programs are implemented in part to increase graduation rates, particularly among first-generation, low-income students, and students of color, who drop out at higher rates than their white and affluent peers.
At Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Mass., multiple programs serve the food insecurity needs of their student body, many of whom are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and are first generation college students. In the June Mary Christie Quarterly, Dr. Derri Shtasel examines how community colleges could better serve the health and wellness needs of their student body.
Title IX and Sexual Assault
The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights settled with Minot State University after the school was found to be in violation of Title IX. Under the settlement, the university must offer student counseling, develop a way to document complaints, and submit copies of all sexual-assault grievances filed to the ORC for the next three years.
The US Departments of Justice and Education filed court documents this month saying that Kansas State University is in violation of Title IX by maintaining a policy not to investigate accusations of rape in off-campus fraternity houses.
