Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times has a featured article this morning examining a spate of student suicides at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Seven students had died in six months. There was no precedent for dealing with loss like this. Furthermore,no one knew when it would end. A task force was established to review the crisis and make recommendations while the college administration encouraged the faculty to retain as normal an educational experience as possible. The university had organized no memorials or vigils. Here are several excerpts from the article.
Many students and parents found the situation on campus baffling. Students published an open letter that February calling W.P.I.’s response to the deaths “inconsistent and trauma inducing” and suggesting that the lack of time for group reflection and grief disregarded the “gravity of recent tragedies.” A new student group called the Mental Health Committee organized a “support walk” for an evening in February, at which students formed a candlelight processional and exchanged flowers to demonstrate community resilience. Local florists donated thousands of flowers. Mothers from the community lined up to give hugs to any student that needed one.
Broadly, the analysis run by two faculty members, Stacy Shaw with Kimberly LeChasseur who identified several issues requiring immediate intervention: intense academic pressure; insufficient self-care habits among the students; lack of social connection; insufficient awareness of information about the existing health resources at W.P.I.; and pandemic burnout. The task force had several clear recommendations that could be implemented almost immediately: Hire more counselors for the health center; increase the number of mental-health trainings available to the faculty and staff; expand student mentoring programs; build up social programming for students, giving them more opportunities to make friends and feel connected to the campus community; once a term, set aside a day to cancel classes and meetings so that everyone could do something — not homework — that would boost their well-being.
The article concludes:
Like many universities, W.P.I.’s focus has evolved from taking responsibility solely for the academic education of its students to becoming the custodian of individual student wellness. This is, perhaps, the new vanguard: the academic institution as wellness community. It has a slight dystopian ring to it. The all-encompassing beneficent administrative machine, with eyes everywhere. And yet, the circumstances producing these conditions seem to justify it. Many students who struggle with their mental health or suicidal feelings never reach out to a counselor. The school’s goal is to reach struggling students however it can: during classes, on scheduled rest days, through the entire community, including the janitors.
It is clear by now that a mental-health crisis is changing academia forever: its structures, its culture and the function it is expected to perform in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or seriously considering suicide. This is a problem that reaches across geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources or prestige and academic ability. Almost one in four Americans in college considered dropping out in the last year because of their mental health. Adjusting pedagogy to account for this scale of illness and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.
In a word, we need to do more to support our students.
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
