Mental and Behavioral Health
A Georgia Tech student, who was found with a knife in his pocket, was shot and killed by an officer after calling the police on himself. Scout Schultz, who led the school’s Pride Alliance and had a history of mental illness, had left three suicide notes in his dorm room. The incident was not without controversy. A peaceful candlelight vigil for Schultz turned violent, as protesters set a police car on fire. The incident called into question how police respond to people with mental illness in crisis situations.
Following the suicide death of a University of Pennsylvania senior in August, the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student paper, is running a three-week series titled “When a Penn student dies: Stories surrounding mental health on campus.” They have covered a wide range of topics including the counseling center, administration responses, and peer counseling on campus.
Kathleen Downes, a grad student at the University of Illinois, is bringing the national suicide prevention campaign LiveOn to her campus. The campaign was developed by the Center for Disability Rights to encourage people with disabilities and depression to share positive stories. “We live in a society that is in so many ways discouraging to us,” said Downes, who has cerebral palsy. “It’s important to remind others with disabilities that we can have a good life, in spite of and because of our disabilities.”
After Syracuse University’s Office of Health Promotion cut the budget for the school’s Mental Health Awareness Week activities, the Student Association allocated $5,000 of their own funds to put on activities.
In an opinion piece for the Daily Trojan, the University of Southern California’s student paper, sophomore Nayanika Kapoor writes in favor of the school’s plan to provide a 411 hotline for students. The new service, advertised on the student ID, would be a general assistance line that could divert students to a crisis intervention line if needed, while also offering additional assistance like information about sexual assault.
UCLA will offer free mental health screening to all incoming freshman and transfer students. The effort is part of the broader UCLA Depression Grand Challenge, which aims to decrease the economic and health impact of depression by 50 percent by 2050.
Brigham Young University’s HumorU stand-up comedy club will start its fall season with a show about the pain of losing a friend to suicide. The topic is personal: one of the club’s members died by suicide earlier this year. “It has been extremely difficult to cope with his loss, but the members of our club just keep moving forward,” said club presidency member Lauren Bade. “Whether they use comedy to remain optimistic or reach out within the club, HumorU has been very important in their recovery.”
Nancy Rappaport, a part-time associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells WBUR how parents can talk to their college-age children about depression and suicide. She recommends regular communication including sharing stories of their own failures and talking about heartbreak.
Diversity and Inclusion
UCLA’s vice provost for enrollment management, Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, tells the Washington Post that many schools’ financial aid structures hinder their vocal efforts to increase diversity on campus from low-income, underrepresented minorities, and first generation families. She cited one-year scholarships, requiring community service, and rigid financial aid structures among seven ways colleges are thwarting their diversity efforts.
The University of Virginia will use money pledged by the Klu Klux Klan in 1921 to pay the medical bills of people injured by white supremacists in last month’s march. Despite the gesture, UVA Black Student Alliance President Wes Gobar writes in the Washington Post that the violence in Charlottesville was only the most recent iteration of American racism. “We can’t let this pass without confronting what made deadly violence possible in Charlottesville: the inequality, racism and white supremacy that is entrenched in our communities.”
At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, students are demanding the removal of “Silent Sam,” a Confederate statue. The school has argued that it doesn’t have the legal authority to remove the statue because of a 2015 act that prohibits state agencies from removing “objects of remembrance.”
According to an Inside Higher Ed survey of admissions directors, 52 percent of public colleges and universities are stepping up their recruitment of rural and low-income white students, due to post-election pressure claiming that higher ed has ignored this population. However, a larger fraction of admissions directors believe that higher education needs to redouble its efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minority groups. (86 percent of public schools and 66 percent of private schools)
The University of Maryland’s LGBT Equity Center launched its #TransTerps campaign last week, which will share good practices for transgender inclusion and distribute campus resources for transgender people. “A lot of people want to be more inclusive but don’t really know how, and so we wanted to provide more concrete tools for that,” said Nic Sakurai, the Equity Center’s acting director, in the student paper, The Diamondback.
A black student at Cornell University was hospitalized after being physically assaulted and subjected to racial slurs. University President Martha Pollack wrote in a statement Sunday, “I will not tell you ‘this is not who we are,’ as the events of the past few weeks belie that. But it is absolutely not who we want to be.” One student has been arrested and reports indicate others were involved.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
The Atlantic interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, & Consent on Campus, about assault on campus and changing Title IX standards. “It’s not as simple as DeVos is portraying it,” Grigoriadis said. “I do understand that we are not a fascist country and we don’t want to punish the innocent—that we would rather 100 guilty people go free than punish one innocent person—but again, tell me what the better system is.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth writes that in the face of impending changes to Title IX policies, colleges “must calibrate campus disciplinary proceedings so as to protect the innocent. But we must also resist the urge to turn back the clock to a time when those who were raped were greeted with mistrust and worse.”
In an op-ed for The Diamondback, University of Maryland sophomore Caitlin McCann writes that DeVos is right that Obama’s Title IX guidelines need revision. “At first glance, her remarks seem like an obvious rebuke to the progressive stance the Obama administration took on campus sexual assault prevention,” she writes. “However, her speech isn’t yet cause for concern, and may even improve the handling of sexual assault and misconduct cases on campuses.”
WBUR’s Radio Boston hosted a conversation between Lee Burdette Williams, former dean of students at Wheaton College and Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, about the potential changes to campus sexual assault policies.
A report by Kansas University’s Gender Equity Committee recommended several changes to school policy regarding gender, including better education on and definitions of sexual violence. It also found that female faculty leave jobs at the school more than twice as often as their male counterparts.
In a New York Times op-ed, Nicole Bedera and Miriam Gleckman-Krut, campus sexual violence researchers and Ph.D. candidates in sociology at the University of Michigan, ask the question: “who gets to define rape?” They argue that “accused men’s pain does not excuse rape, and men shouldn’t be the ones defining it.”
DACA
The Atlantic explores what ending DACA could mean for colleges. Without the program, undocumented students would lose their work visas, which many use to pay for tuition, placing them on a more difficult path to obtaining financial aid.
At UC Berkeley, the number of undocumented students seeking mental health support services has spiked 350 percent since President Trump’s announced he would repeal DACA. The school’s Counseling and Psychological Services has been offering special counseling for Dreamer students.
Free Speech
The Atlantic turns to two historians, Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, and Morton Keller, a professor emeritus of history at Brandeis University, to discuss if free speech is, indeed, being challenged on campus. The New York Times brings together the newspaper’s On Campus editor, Natalie Shutler, and Erwin Chemerinsky, a First Amendment scholar and the new dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law to discuss the line between free speech and hate speech.
Homelessness
NPR focuses on how students in the Houston area who are homeless and housing insecure are coping with the aftermath of Harvey as they return to school. “The No. 1 reason students are leaving higher ed is logistics, not academics,” said Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer of Civitas Learning, a company data and analytics company that helps colleges get more students to graduation. “And Harvey is one hell of a logistic.”
College Affordability
In a New York Times op-ed, Juan Salgado, the Chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, praises the city’s free community college program for its success. Chicago offers free tuition to to all public high school graduates with a B average or higher and college-level proficiency in their work. Two-thirds of the cohort that started courses in the fall of 2015 have either graduated or are on track with credits.
Hazing
Louisiana State University police is looking at hazing as a possible cause of death of a freshman student. Maxwell Gruver, 18, was taken to the hospital from Phi Delta Theta because of a “medical emergency” and was later pronounced dead. LSU President F. King Alexander suspended all Greek Life activities while the school investigates the death.
