Mental health progress
Issue date: 4/16/08 Section: Opinions
A year following the unfortunate massacre at Virginia Tech, which claimed the lives of 33 people, colleges across the nation have stepped up their mental health services in order to better reach out to potentially troubled students. Administrators and counselors are being more aggressive nationwide in their efforts to identify students who would benefit from mental health counseling and are pushing more students harder to seek help, according to the Canadian Press. Mental health counselors are viewing this as a welcome challenge that simultaneously sends more students to their offices for help, while creating a strain on their already understaffed departments.
Chief among the changes taking place is a movement away from a decades old policy that privileged student privacy. Many colleges are now taking a more proactive stance as far as sharing information with police, as well as a student's parents in the case of a possible threat to communal safety. This has caused concerns among some students, who cite their rights to privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But FERPA, which prohibits college or university personnel from communicating information about a student's educational records with their parents, has numerous built-in exceptions for potential safety threats or observations regarding a student's behavior in the classroom.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, colleges are urging professors to be more proactive about identifying patterns of troubling behavior in their students, creating a separate division of oversight that was not present before the shooting. Proponents of these increased security measures have cited the fact that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, could have been identified as a potential threat by his professors, who admitted after the fact that some of his writing assignments contained a pattern of violent material.
But there are many students who have a problem with this sort of monitoring by professors and teachers. A professor, to use Rutgers as a point of reference, stands in front of a class of students on average for 80-minute periods twice a week. If it is a large-, or even medium-, sized class, this often prohibits professors from developing a meaningful relationship with their students. This becomes a problem as students applying to graduate programs or internships approach professors for letters of recommendation. Oftentimes, the professor can barely remember a student's name, let alone a list of meaningful accomplishments to work into a strong letter. This argument seems to suggest that having professors monitor student's work and behavior for patterns of troubled behavior would be futile at an institution as large as Rutgers. To make matters worse, professors who are forced to spend time observing student behavior will be less likely to have free time to dedicate to forming relationships with their truly dedicated students, in a sense depriving them of a chance to develop a meaningful relationship with the professor.
Chief among the changes taking place is a movement away from a decades old policy that privileged student privacy. Many colleges are now taking a more proactive stance as far as sharing information with police, as well as a student's parents in the case of a possible threat to communal safety. This has caused concerns among some students, who cite their rights to privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But FERPA, which prohibits college or university personnel from communicating information about a student's educational records with their parents, has numerous built-in exceptions for potential safety threats or observations regarding a student's behavior in the classroom.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, colleges are urging professors to be more proactive about identifying patterns of troubling behavior in their students, creating a separate division of oversight that was not present before the shooting. Proponents of these increased security measures have cited the fact that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, could have been identified as a potential threat by his professors, who admitted after the fact that some of his writing assignments contained a pattern of violent material.
But there are many students who have a problem with this sort of monitoring by professors and teachers. A professor, to use Rutgers as a point of reference, stands in front of a class of students on average for 80-minute periods twice a week. If it is a large-, or even medium-, sized class, this often prohibits professors from developing a meaningful relationship with their students. This becomes a problem as students applying to graduate programs or internships approach professors for letters of recommendation. Oftentimes, the professor can barely remember a student's name, let alone a list of meaningful accomplishments to work into a strong letter. This argument seems to suggest that having professors monitor student's work and behavior for patterns of troubled behavior would be futile at an institution as large as Rutgers. To make matters worse, professors who are forced to spend time observing student behavior will be less likely to have free time to dedicate to forming relationships with their truly dedicated students, in a sense depriving them of a chance to develop a meaningful relationship with the professor.