In the wake of the most recent killing of a professor by a graduate student, one thing’s clear: Universities need to work harder to publicize their protocol for reporting troubled and troubling people on campus.
UD assumes no one contacted the University of Southern California’s counseling office about the graduate student who yesterday stabbed his faculty mentor to death. If someone did, we’ll find out about it; but it looks as though no one did, despite worries about his stability.
Of course reporting him would not necessarily have kept the attack from happening; but he would have had some monitoring. Maybe his mentor would have been alerted.
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You might argue that universities are uniquely bad places for the identification of unbalanced people.
There are simple logistical reasons for this. Unlike offices, universities are loosely run, with people on leave, seeing each other one day a week, finished with coursework but still sort of around, etc. It’s hard to perceive patterns or evolutions of behavior.
More deeply, universities are committed to the tolerance – even the championing of – freedom and non-conformity. You get zero intellectual culture in, say, Saudi Arabia – in repressive, conformist, strictly doctrinal, universal-surveillance societies. You get America’s spectacular system of universities when you offer exactly the opposite: individual freedom, radical self-fashioning, secularism, and privacy. Universities are hands-off zones, and indeed to the extent that they’re intrusive it’s often intrusion in the name of further hands-offism: seminars in the practice of tolerance, for instance.
But the problem goes beyond this. The combination of the valorization of eccentricity with a fierce commitment to personal privacy may mean that you think you’re respecting someone’s autonomy, and someone’s right to be different, when in fact you’re overlooking pathology.
And wait. The problem goes beyond even this. Years ago, UD got to know a fellow participant in a summer seminar for professors well enough to worry about her mental health. She said disturbing – self-destructive, delusional – things to UD, and UD was worried and didn’t know what to do. Eventually, with great delicacy and in the most tentative language, UD said something to one of the seminar’s organizers. The organizer fixed UD with a nasty look and said “Oh. Aren’t you healthy. I suppose you think you’re so healthy…”
“Uh, no,” UD replied, taken aback. “I don’t think I’m so healthy. I just worry B. is having difficulties.”
“Ugh.”
That was the end of the conversation. That was the end of the smackdown. And that was the beginning of UD deciding she’d better keep her trap shut on the matter of people at universities who seem troubled. UD vividly recalls not enjoying being made to feel like an East German Stasi agent by the seminar organizer. Being made to feel like a prison guard in the land of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. How dare I direct my smug hegemonic gaze anywhere other than at my own fucked up self …
So all I’m doing here is drilling down to what I take to be some of the underlying difficulties with identifying and reporting troubled people at universities. I fully acknowledge the vexed problem of distinguishing between fruitful, exemplary, odd, against the grain, selfhood, and mental problems. But I also think one should acknowledge the specific ways in which the university setting makes acting on your suspicions about someone’s mental health peculiarly daunting.
December 4th, 2016 at 10:41AM
It’s gotten better in the past few years, at least at my campus, but when students are involved, there are also major obstacles to responding even if it’s quite clear that they are in a mentally precarious state. Nowadays, counseling offices will at least reach out to a student who is identified as being under some kind of stress….but unless the student responds, no further action will be undertaken. I vividly recall an undergraduate in what (to my untrained eye) looked like a vivid schizophrenic/manic break during a final examination the day before Christmas break, who came and regaled me at length about his grand understanding of the cosmos (the TAs noticed he seemed disturbed). Campus was shutting down, it was cold and dark, and the student, when I asked, said nothing about going to see family or anything on a late Friday afternoon. Faut de miuex, I went down and talked to our campus police dispatcher (in person), who said that unless the student had clearly expressed an intention to commit suicide, no action could be taken. That was pretty disturbing!
December 4th, 2016 at 10:50AM
I think the hesitation to classify eccentricity as potentially dangerous mental illness applies more to faculty than students. Faculty have a track record; they have been behaving acceptably enough long enough to remain employed, so there is less reason to be suspicious of their occasional weirdness. But I do think universities are more suspicious of sketchy student behavior. The problem is really reporting and getting follow-up about it. FERPA and other privacy considerations make it very difficult for faculty and especially other students to get any information from deans about a student’s mental health history. Technically, privacy rules may even forbid faculty talking to one another about a problem student. Like you, I’m not saying we shouldn’t protect students’ privacy – far from it – but these rules do make it really difficult to address questionable behavior and potentially prevent violent incidents like this.
I ran into this problem earlier this term, when I had a student send me bizarre, accusatory messages after an exam. They weren’t violent, but they did suggest the student had lost his grip on reality. I don’t want to get into the details too much here, but the basic issue was that it was totally unclear to whom an incident like this was to be reported, and once it was reported and taken up by higher powers, nothing more could be said to me about it b/c everything was confidential. So there was no way for me to know if the student would be back in my class, or how I should respond to him when he returned, etc. Finally, a senior professor in my department whom I’d told about the emails was sufficiently concerned on my behalf that he spent a weekend hounding the admin to speed things up and have the guy removed from my course (they said “for some time,” but he never returned, so I assume they also couldn’t say that he’d withdrawn).
Later, when I (probably illegally) asked another instructor about him, it turned out that he had been behaving inappropriately in other courses, and several instructors had been complaining about him for several weeks and getting no response. But b/c the admin was not permitted to say anything to them about his case or to alert his other instructors, and they were probably not permitted to say anything to one another, none of them could know whether his behavior was just some kind of isolated obnoxiousness in their class (I’d assumed he just didn’t like me for whatever reason), or part of a pattern of alarming behavior that should make his case more urgent for the admin to address.
But I don’t really know what the solution to this dilemma is, b/c I do see the obvious problem with divulging information to faculty about their students’ mental health problems. But there should be some better protocol for dealing with red-flag students that permits more communication b/w admins and faculty.
December 4th, 2016 at 11:09AM
PQuincy, RK: Yes. Keep in mind also that once something is maybe done about a troubled student – like telling the student to leave campus for awhile in order to get serious treatment – the university can then sit back and await the lawsuit.
December 4th, 2016 at 3:26PM
And universities, especially Ph.D. programs, can be pressure cookers and some people aren’t capable of dealing with that too well.