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Hannah Nunez’s job at Northern Arizona University requires her to be a few different things at once: an advocate, a compassionate ear, a repository of information about campus resources. As a behavioral health coordinator, part of her role includes screening potential counseling patients. During a roughly 20-minute appointment—either in person or virtually, depending on client preference—students describe the problem they’re facing, and she helps them decide the best course of action, which, she says, isn’t always counseling.
“They might mention they’re struggling academically, and that might be a flag for: we’re going to talk to them about tutoring,” she said.
Some students seem to be looking for someone to talk to, and those are the students Nunez typically refers to counseling. But before she does, she tries to figure out if they have a problem that can be solved instead by accessing any of the other extensive on-campus resources at NAU.
“It can feel really validating for folks to come in with what might be an overwhelming, scary, daunting feel, like there’s not really any hope … and then to walk away with very tangible steps—‘I can join this club, I have an intake appointment,’” she said.
The principle behind such screening processes is much the same as triage in a hospital emergency room, where medical professionals assess the nature and urgency of a patient’s needs.
Though different institutions have different names for the process—triage, screening or “Path to Care,” as Northern Arizona calls it—they all work in a similar manner. Rather than sit through a traditional hourlong intake appointment, each new client who approaches the counseling center is scheduled for a short appointment, which varies in length according to the institution but is typically less than half an hour. (Some universities precede these appointments by asking students to fill out online questionnaires such as a depression screening, for example.)
During the appointment, which is often held over the phone, students provide the triage counselor with the same kind of information they might provide during a full-length intake appointment: demographic details, their reasons for seeking help, their history of mental health treatment, risk factors and more.
The counselors then use that information to determine whether, when and from whom the student should receive counseling, as well as whether they should be directed to any other campus resources—say, a tutoring center if their main source of stress is an upcoming organic chemistry exam. The appointment can also be used to give students additional details about what counseling will entail; at Northern Arizona, that includes information about the cost of an appointment ($25 for an individual session) and how many sessions they are allowed per semester.
Colleges and universities that utilize triage say the goal is to assess students thoroughly, but in less time. One of the challenges of implementing these systems is training counseling center staff in how to complete short, fast-paced evaluations.
“It took a little bit of comfort-building for our staff to realize they could gather all of that information in that short amount of time,” said Natalie Hernandez DePalma, the senior director of counseling and psychological services at Pennsylvania State University, which has included some version of triage in its counseling services since 2009.
Nunez said it can also be challenging to teach new employees about all the campus’s resources, which she mainly knows from working at NAU for about 10 years.
But some institutions that have implemented such triage systems have greatly improved the quality and reach of their mental health care. The counseling center at NAU, a large university with more than 20,000 students on its main campus, introduced a triage process about two years ago and is currently operating with no wait list for the first time in at least 10 years, according to Carl Dindo, director of NAU’s counseling services.
As requests for mental health services have skyrocketed on campuses, triage systems have become a popular tool for managing demand. In 2020, the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s annual report, which included data from 567 counseling centers, showed that 42 percent utilized some sort of brief screening appointment as their first clinical contact with patients.
Requiring students to undergo a quick assessment before they can sit down with a counselor allows more students to get care—and the right kind of care—more quickly. Additionally, triage appointments sometimes direct students toward resources that the counselors believe will help more than therapy, meaning that students who won’t necessarily benefit from counseling don’t need multiple hourlong sessions to figure that out.
Some college mental health experts say college counseling centers have long promoted themselves as a catch-all resource, overburdening their staffs by drawing students who might be better served elsewhere on campus.
Similarly, Nunez said, students have historically been funneled into counseling because it didn’t occur to staff to direct them elsewhere.
Now screenings make that a fundamental part of the process.
However, centers that use screenings are quick to note that the goal is not to push students away from counseling.
“Most of the students who come that request counseling and want counseling, we connect them just by virtue of the fact that they want it,” said Dindo. “When you have somebody who just got to school and maybe they’re not familiar with what resources exist … I think you have a lot of people sort of telling them maybe what they need or what they think they should access. I think we’ve had a lot of experiences of students coming in saying, ‘My professor told me I should come talk to somebody’ or ‘My mom is concerned about me and she told me I should check out counseling.’ In those instances—both at the Path to Care screening appointment, but also even in counseling—we’ll have really intentional, meaningful conversations around, ‘Well, what do you think you need?’”
Some experts also express concerns about the additional burden that triaging duty places on often-overworked counseling center employees. At both Northern Arizona and Penn State, screening appointments are spread among many staff members; each employee at NAU is required to do about five hours a week of triaging, while each Penn State employee does about two and a half hours. (Triaging at Penn State is completed by counselors, while at NAU it is performed by both counseling services staff and behavioral health team members, who primarily work on the health side of the university's integrated health and mental health system.)
Advocates for mental health triage systems say they also help counselors figure out which patients to prioritize: who would benefit from having a counseling appointment tomorrow and who can wait until next week.
“I’m a student and I call up and I say, ‘I need an appointment,’ and they say, ‘OK, the first available intake or the first time is two weeks down the road.’ Well, if I’m suicidal, if I’m having homicidal thoughts, waiting two weeks is not a good idea at all,” said Marcus Hotaling, director of Union College’s counseling center and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. “So that’s why a lot of centers now, including our own, have moved to a same-day appointment or same-day triage, so that we can at least get eyes on you.”
Nunez said there are unintended benefits of a shorter screening, as well. Students who are new to therapy often struggle or feel awkward talking about themselves for an hour at a time. Shorter screenings let those nervous students “test the waters a little bit,” hopefully making for a better counseling experience all around.
Hannah Nunez’s job at Northern Arizona University requires her to be a few different things at once: an advocate, a compassionate ear, a repository of information about campus resources. As a behavioral health coordinator, part of her role includes screening potential counseling patients. During a roughly 20-minute appointment—either in person or virtually, depending on client preference—students describe the problem they’re facing, and she helps them decide the best course of action, which, she says, isn’t always counseling.
“They might mention they’re struggling academically, and that might be a flag for: we’re going to talk to them about tutoring,” she said.
Some students seem to be looking for someone to talk to, and those are the students Nunez typically refers to counseling. But before she does, she tries to figure out if they have a problem that can be solved instead by accessing any of the other extensive on-campus resources at NAU.
“It can feel really validating for folks to come in with what might be an overwhelming, scary, daunting feel, like there’s not really any hope … and then to walk away with very tangible steps—‘I can join this club, I have an intake appointment,’” she said.
The principle behind such screening processes is much the same as triage in a hospital emergency room, where medical professionals assess the nature and urgency of a patient’s needs.
Though different institutions have different names for the process—triage, screening or “Path to Care,” as Northern Arizona calls it—they all work in a similar manner. Rather than sit through a traditional hourlong intake appointment, each new client who approaches the counseling center is scheduled for a short appointment, which varies in length according to the institution but is typically less than half an hour. (Some universities precede these appointments by asking students to fill out online questionnaires such as a depression screening, for example.)
During the appointment, which is often held over the phone, students provide the triage counselor with the same kind of information they might provide during a full-length intake appointment: demographic details, their reasons for seeking help, their history of mental health treatment, risk factors and more.
The counselors then use that information to determine whether, when and from whom the student should receive counseling, as well as whether they should be directed to any other campus resources—say, a tutoring center if their main source of stress is an upcoming organic chemistry exam. The appointment can also be used to give students additional details about what counseling will entail; at Northern Arizona, that includes information about the cost of an appointment ($25 for an individual session) and how many sessions they are allowed per semester.
Colleges and universities that utilize triage say the goal is to assess students thoroughly, but in less time. One of the challenges of implementing these systems is training counseling center staff in how to complete short, fast-paced evaluations.
“It took a little bit of comfort-building for our staff to realize they could gather all of that information in that short amount of time,” said Natalie Hernandez DePalma, the senior director of counseling and psychological services at Pennsylvania State University, which has included some version of triage in its counseling services since 2009.
Nunez said it can also be challenging to teach new employees about all the campus’s resources, which she mainly knows from working at NAU for about 10 years.
But some institutions that have implemented such triage systems have greatly improved the quality and reach of their mental health care. The counseling center at NAU, a large university with more than 20,000 students on its main campus, introduced a triage process about two years ago and is currently operating with no wait list for the first time in at least 10 years, according to Carl Dindo, director of NAU’s counseling services.
As requests for mental health services have skyrocketed on campuses, triage systems have become a popular tool for managing demand. In 2020, the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s annual report, which included data from 567 counseling centers, showed that 42 percent utilized some sort of brief screening appointment as their first clinical contact with patients.
Requiring students to undergo a quick assessment before they can sit down with a counselor allows more students to get care—and the right kind of care—more quickly. Additionally, triage appointments sometimes direct students toward resources that the counselors believe will help more than therapy, meaning that students who won’t necessarily benefit from counseling don’t need multiple hourlong sessions to figure that out.
Some college mental health experts say college counseling centers have long promoted themselves as a catch-all resource, overburdening their staffs by drawing students who might be better served elsewhere on campus.
Similarly, Nunez said, students have historically been funneled into counseling because it didn’t occur to staff to direct them elsewhere.
Now screenings make that a fundamental part of the process.
However, centers that use screenings are quick to note that the goal is not to push students away from counseling.
“Most of the students who come that request counseling and want counseling, we connect them just by virtue of the fact that they want it,” said Dindo. “When you have somebody who just got to school and maybe they’re not familiar with what resources exist … I think you have a lot of people sort of telling them maybe what they need or what they think they should access. I think we’ve had a lot of experiences of students coming in saying, ‘My professor told me I should come talk to somebody’ or ‘My mom is concerned about me and she told me I should check out counseling.’ In those instances—both at the Path to Care screening appointment, but also even in counseling—we’ll have really intentional, meaningful conversations around, ‘Well, what do you think you need?’”
Some experts also express concerns about the additional burden that triaging duty places on often-overworked counseling center employees. At both Northern Arizona and Penn State, screening appointments are spread among many staff members; each employee at NAU is required to do about five hours a week of triaging, while each Penn State employee does about two and a half hours. (Triaging at Penn State is completed by counselors, while at NAU it is performed by both counseling services staff and behavioral health team members, who primarily work on the health side of the university's integrated health and mental health system.)
Advocates for mental health triage systems say they also help counselors figure out which patients to prioritize: who would benefit from having a counseling appointment tomorrow and who can wait until next week.
“I’m a student and I call up and I say, ‘I need an appointment,’ and they say, ‘OK, the first available intake or the first time is two weeks down the road.’ Well, if I’m suicidal, if I’m having homicidal thoughts, waiting two weeks is not a good idea at all,” said Marcus Hotaling, director of Union College’s counseling center and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. “So that’s why a lot of centers now, including our own, have moved to a same-day appointment or same-day triage, so that we can at least get eyes on you.”
Nunez said there are unintended benefits of a shorter screening, as well. Students who are new to therapy often struggle or feel awkward talking about themselves for an hour at a time. Shorter screenings let those nervous students “test the waters a little bit,” hopefully making for a better counseling experience all around.
Nearly two-thirds of people who have never enrolled in higher education cite emotional stress as a key deterrent, a new report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation finds.
It is the fourth most commonly cited reason after the cost of higher education (81 percent), inflation (77 percent) and work conflicts (69 percent). More people cited stress than a lack of interest in pursuing a degree (58 percent), feeling unprepared (54 percent), not seeing the value of higher education (51 percent) and childcare responsibilities (44 percent), among other factors.
Emotional stress is a more significant factor for women; 71 percent said it influenced their decision not to enroll, compared to 57 percent of men. Among people between 18 and 24, 77 percent cited stress, putting it on a par with concerns about inflation and their work schedules. By comparison, 60 percent of those 25 and older named stress.
More than half of respondents—55 percent—also cited their personal mental health as an important reason why they’ve never enrolled in higher education.
“I think this just shows that they have multiple responsibilities,” said Courtney Brown, the lead researcher on the report and vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation. “They have to work. They have families. All of those things—they feel stressed out and so busy and the idea of then enrolling in college or a credentialing program on top of that is overwhelming.”
The report, entitled “Stressed Out and Stopping Out: The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education,” utilized data from a survey of 12,015 individuals, including current students, students who had enrolled but then withdrew from a college or university, and those who had never attended. It is the last in a series of three studies first launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze why students might be considering stopping out of college and determine how big a role the pandemic played in that decision.
“The frequency with which adults aged 18 to 24 who have never enrolled in college say emotional stress is an important reason for not doing so suggests the rising incidence of mental health issues among this age cohort may be a factor in their declining overall enrollment rates. Further research that includes adolescents’ experiences with mental health issues as a potential influence on their decision to pursue postsecondary education may lead to a better understanding of the problem,” the report states.
(In previous editions of the study, emotional stress and personal mental health were not included as potential reasons for choosing not to attend an institution of higher education. The top factor last year was the same as this year: cost.)
The report comes at a time when universities and colleges are facing increasingly severe mental health crises on campus and searching for ways to accommodate student needs for on-campus mental health services. To that end, researchers said advertising the resources they provide might help institutions win over individuals who cite stress as a deterrent to attending college.
“Colleges can start to promote the services they have,” said Brown. “Some of them have on-site clinics and counseling services, and sometimes that’s good for prospective students to know: ‘I will get these services as part of being a student.’ Talking about serving the whole student and putting the student first is really important to these [potential] students.”
The report also solidified a worrying trend: that students are increasingly entertaining the idea of dropping or stopping out. Last fall 41 percent of students reported that they had considered withdrawing for at least one semester, compared to 37 percent last year and 34 percent the year before.
Emotional stress remains a significant reason students consider stopping out, the report found. Fifty-five percent of those who have thought about leaving school in the past six months cited stress as a reason, though that number is lower than the 63 percent who cited it last year.
While the report shows that most students are no longer thinking about stopping out as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers believe the residual effects of the pandemic—including a sense of isolation and the challenges of online instruction—continue to impact individuals’ plans to withdraw or not enroll in higher education at all.
“When asked what emotional stress means to them, many students said that coursework can be overwhelming,” the report said, “particularly if combined with work and caregiving responsibilities or issues in their personal relationships. Some mentioned depression and anxiety specifically. Others said concerns about the ability to pay for college brought on emotional stress.”
Some experts believe this shows that the after-effects of COVID-19 are still impacting students, many of whom began their college career during the pandemic.
“The personal stressors that emerged during COVID didn’t disappear the day we got back to campus,” said Zoe Ragouzeos, senior associate vice president of mental health and sexual misconduct support at New York University. “Campuses nationally saw that students had not worked the muscle of interacting with each other face-to-face, so when they got back to campus … it continued to be stressful. I think that’s getting better, but it will take some time.”
This is not the first survey indicating that mental health struggles correlate with a student’s likelihood of leaving college. A study released earlier this year by Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health, focused on students who withdrew from their institution while receiving care from the campus counseling center, showed that those who reported social anxiety, depression, financial stress and academic distress—as well as students who were identified by their therapists as having mental health struggles—dropped out at higher rates than the student population at large.
Michelle Dimino, deputy director of education for the think tank Third Way, emphasized that the study underscores a trend that was evident long before the pandemic.
“It’s unfortunately not surprising to see these findings about the huge impact mental health is having on student persistence and enrollment—a mental health crisis in higher education has been building since long before the pandemic, and today’s students are balancing a ton of personal stressors and often working, parenting, and caregiving while enrolled in school. Mental health affects how students cope with challenges and navigate their studies, and providing robust, accessible mental and emotional health supports is essential for colleges to meet the needs of their student bodies,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Doing that well can be expensive, but more colleges seem to be recognizing that campus mental health services are a necessity, not a luxury.”
Like many institutions aiming to better serve student mental health needs, Wright State University in Ohio is redesigning its counseling center. The reimagined center will incorporate more wellness services and partner more closely with the university’s College of Health Education and Human Services, which university leaders hope will lead to shorter wait times for students seeking services, as well as to increased telehealth and after-hours capabilities.
But Robert Rando, Wright State’s longtime director of Counseling and Wellness Services, or CWS, will not be involved in the restructuring. He was told in February that his employment at the university was being terminated, though he was allowed to finish seeing his current patients; he eventually left the institution earlier this month. Rando had worked at Wright State for 24 years; in 2017 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD).
Wright State dean of students Chris Taylor announced Rando’s termination in a one-paragraph email to the Division of Student Affairs staff on Feb. 3.
“I am writing to inform you that Counseling and Wellness Services is undergoing a restructuring that will involve a transition in leadership,” Taylor wrote in the email, which was provided to Inside Higher Ed. The email named two faculty members as interim leaders of CWS, explaining they would hold those positions until the end of the semester.
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Provost Amy Thompson said that she could not explain why Rando was not being kept on as CWS’s director because it was a personnel issue. She did say, however, that the university is planning a search for the new director.
“That position will actually have a dotted line to our dean of our College of Health Education and Human Services,” she said. “So, that really solidifies that counseling center–academic partnership.”
With student mental health remaining a top concern for U.S. colleges and universities, institutions are looking for innovative ways to provide students with the care they need. Some have removed caps on how many counseling sessions students can attend; others have enlisted faculty to aid in the battle.
Still others—including Wright State, as well as Texas A&M University and the University of Kentucky—are completely restructuring their counseling centers in an attempt to find a model that will allow students to access more timely, frequent and effective mental health care on campus.
According to Marcus Hotaling, president of the AUCCCD, at least 10 universities have removed their counseling center directors in the past year.
“[These institutions] have basically said, ‘We’re going to move in a different direction,’ and they’ve basically put counseling under health services or [another] realignment and then gotten rid of the counseling center director,” he said.
In some cases, the counseling center director position has been eliminated entirely; in others, the role has been revised to better fit a new vision of campus health services that often encompasses or outsources psychological services. These changes may also end up saving some institutions money, sources say.
The University of Kentucky established a new executive director role to oversee its expanded mental health offerings on campus, which essentially replaced the existing role of counseling center director. (Mary Chandler Bolin, another AUCCCD lifetime achievement award winner, retired from that position in August; the search for the new executive director, listed on job boards such as Higher Ed Jobs, appears to be ongoing.)
Kentucky’s new mental health offerings center on a “hub” called TRACS, or Triage, Referral, Assistance and Crisis Support, which refers students to the required support services and aims to hire and retain clinicians who match the backgrounds and identities of Kentucky’s students, according to an emailed statement from Corrine Williams, Kentucky’s associate vice president for student well-being.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M combined mental health and health services under one roof. In the restructuring, the university created a new leadership role called the senior director of counseling and mental health that replaced the existing counseling center director, for which the institution is currently seeking applicants.
“In order to operate, that position was expanded and created into a senior director role. So the position as it existed was revised and requires a different level of competencies and skills, so the director role was no longer needed,” said Nancy Fahrenwald, associate vice president for University Health Services, as the combined health and mental health services are called. “That’s the insight: organizational change and not personnel, not performance, not anything like that. It was organizational change.”
According to several sources Inside Higher Ed spoke to on background, the trend shows that administrators are placing less value than they should on the insights and experiences of counseling center staff and leaders in the fight to meet the overwhelming demand for student mental health care.
This is especially evident in the lack of input that counseling center leaders have had in the various restructuring efforts at their respective institutions. An individual with knowledge of CWS operations at Wright State said that no senior counseling center leaders were involved in the plan to align the center more closely with the College of Health Education and Human Services, for example.
The source also pointed out that the university chose to eliminate Rando’s position in the middle of February, one of the busiest periods for the counseling center.
“When decisions are going to be made around mental health care on college campuses, the mental health leaders of the campus should be involved in those decisions,” said Hotaling. “It shouldn’t be done strictly from a need-based model. It shouldn’t be done because of a potentially financial model.”
Hotaling warned that letting counseling center directors go could have a range of repercussions, including draining staff morale and depriving the center of long-standing institutional and clinical knowledge.
“That’s a big concern for me, when you lose someone who’s been there a number of years,” he said. “They’re taking 20-plus years of experience, 20-plus years of institutional knowledge and 20-plus years of mental health knowledge that is unique to their specific institution.”
Like many institutions aiming to better serve student mental health needs, Wright State University in Ohio is redesigning its counseling center. The reimagined center will incorporate more wellness services and partner more closely with the university’s College of Health Education and Human Services, which university leaders hope will lead to shorter wait times for students seeking services, as well as to increased telehealth and after-hours capabilities.
But Robert Rando, Wright State’s longtime director of Counseling and Wellness Services, or CWS, will not be involved in the restructuring. He was told in February that his employment at the university was being terminated, though he was allowed to finish seeing his current patients; he eventually left the institution earlier this month. Rando had worked at Wright State for 24 years; in 2017 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD).
Wright State dean of students Chris Taylor announced Rando’s termination in a one-paragraph email to the Division of Student Affairs staff on Feb. 3.
“I am writing to inform you that Counseling and Wellness Services is undergoing a restructuring that will involve a transition in leadership,” Taylor wrote in the email, which was provided to Inside Higher Ed. The email named two faculty members as interim leaders of CWS, explaining they would hold those positions until the end of the semester.
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Provost Amy Thompson said that she could not explain why Rando was not being kept on as CWS’s director because it was a personnel issue. She did say, however, that the university is planning a search for the new director.
“That position will actually have a dotted line to our dean of our College of Health Education and Human Services,” she said. “So, that really solidifies that counseling center–academic partnership.”
With student mental health remaining a top concern for U.S. colleges and universities, institutions are looking for innovative ways to provide students with the care they need. Some have removed caps on how many counseling sessions students can attend; others have enlisted faculty to aid in the battle.
Still others—including Wright State, as well as Texas A&M University and the University of Kentucky—are completely restructuring their counseling centers in an attempt to find a model that will allow students to access more timely, frequent and effective mental health care on campus.
According to Marcus Hotaling, president of the AUCCCD, at least 10 universities have removed their counseling center directors in the past year.
“[These institutions] have basically said, ‘We’re going to move in a different direction,’ and they’ve basically put counseling under health services or [another] realignment and then gotten rid of the counseling center director,” he said.
In some cases, the counseling center director position has been eliminated entirely; in others, the role has been revised to better fit a new vision of campus health services that often encompasses or outsources psychological services. These changes may also end up saving some institutions money, sources say.
The University of Kentucky established a new executive director role to oversee its expanded mental health offerings on campus, which essentially replaced the existing role of counseling center director. (Mary Chandler Bolin, another AUCCCD lifetime achievement award winner, retired from that position in August; the search for the new executive director, listed on job boards such as Higher Ed Jobs, appears to be ongoing.)
Kentucky’s new mental health offerings center on a “hub” called TRACS, or Triage, Referral, Assistance and Crisis Support, which refers students to the required support services and aims to hire and retain clinicians who match the backgrounds and identities of Kentucky’s students, according to an emailed statement from Corrine Williams, Kentucky’s associate vice president for student well-being.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M combined mental health and health services under one roof. In the restructuring, the university created a new leadership role called the senior director of counseling and mental health that replaced the existing counseling center director, for which the institution is currently seeking applicants.
“In order to operate, that position was expanded and created into a senior director role. So the position as it existed was revised and requires a different level of competencies and skills, so the director role was no longer needed,” said Nancy Fahrenwald, associate vice president for University Health Services, as the combined health and mental health services are called. “That’s the insight: organizational change and not personnel, not performance, not anything like that. It was organizational change.”
According to several sources Inside Higher Ed spoke to on background, the trend shows that administrators are placing less value than they should on the insights and experiences of counseling center staff and leaders in the fight to meet the overwhelming demand for student mental health care.
This is especially evident in the lack of input that counseling center leaders have had in the various restructuring efforts at their respective institutions. An individual with knowledge of CWS operations at Wright State said that no senior counseling center leaders were involved in the plan to align the center more closely with the College of Health Education and Human Services, for example.
The source also pointed out that the university chose to eliminate Rando’s position in the middle of February, one of the busiest periods for the counseling center.
“When decisions are going to be made around mental health care on college campuses, the mental health leaders of the campus should be involved in those decisions,” said Hotaling. “It shouldn’t be done strictly from a need-based model. It shouldn’t be done because of a potentially financial model.”
Hotaling warned that letting counseling center directors go could have a range of repercussions, including draining staff morale and depriving the center of long-standing institutional and clinical knowledge.
“That’s a big concern for me, when you lose someone who’s been there a number of years,” he said. “They’re taking 20-plus years of experience, 20-plus years of institutional knowledge and 20-plus years of mental health knowledge that is unique to their specific institution.”
The University of California, Berkeley, will shutter three libraries—the anthropology, physics-astronomy and mathematics statistics libraries—in the next few years, part of a long-term plan to save money, Berkeleyside reported.
The closures aim to “cut costs in the face of rising financial pressures, including inflation, repairs for aging campus infrastructure and the wage increase won by graduate students during the recent strike,” according to Berkeleyside. Currently, libraries make up 1.3 percent, or $42 million, of the university’s $3.2 billion budget, down from 3.5 percent of the total budget in 2006.
The anthropology and physics-astronomy libraries, both of which are slated to close entirely by August 2025, have been largely emptied already. While the materials from the libraries will still be available, accessing them will be less convenient, and some worry that the university may eventually get rid of the collections.
Students, faculty and library workers are petitioning and protesting against the closures.
The University of California, Berkeley, will shutter three libraries—the anthropology, physics-astronomy and mathematics statistics libraries—in the next few years, part of a long-term plan to save money, Berkeleyside reported.
The closures aim to “cut costs in the face of rising financial pressures, including inflation, repairs for aging campus infrastructure and the wage increase won by graduate students during the recent strike,” according to Berkeleyside. Currently, libraries make up 1.3 percent, or $42 million, of the university’s $3.2 billion budget, down from 3.5 percent of the total budget in 2006.
The anthropology and physics-astronomy libraries, both of which are slated to close entirely by August 2025, have been largely emptied already. While the materials from the libraries will still be available, accessing them will be less convenient, and some worry that the university may eventually get rid of the collections.
Students, faculty and library workers are petitioning and protesting against the closures.
When somebody on the University of California, Riverside, campus commits a low-level infraction—such as playing music too loudly or riding their bike unsafely—campus police don’t get involved. Instead, campus safety responders are called in—unarmed individuals tasked with handling situations that don’t necessarily require police carrying weapons.
Four campus safety responders were hired in the summer of 2021, with more likely to come.
Along the same lines, UC Riverside is preparing to implement a new team of behavioral health specialists—known as Student Well-being, Intervention and Follow-Through, or SWIFT, counselors—to respond to individuals experiencing mental health crises (although campus safety responders are also trained in de-escalation). A vehicle called the SWIFT van, not a police car, will transport those students if needed.
“It’s less triggering,” said Associate Vice Chancellor Denise Woods. “If we have a student who has a mental health crisis and they need to go to the hospital, they don’t have to ride in the police car. So, we’re just trying to incrementally pull out our police from being in situations where they’re not necessarily needed for that type of support.”
These are just some of the initiatives that the university in Southern California, which enrolls over 26,000 students, has taken to reduce the presence of police and make the campus safer over all. The university has also combined a number of departments—including, among others, the basic needs department, the counseling center and the police—under one roof: the Division of Health, Well-being and Safety, which Woods heads.
UC Riverside’s efforts to decrease the number of police responses on campus comes in part from work done in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020—though Woods says conversations about “how the campus could be more inclusive” had begun the year prior.
The steps the university has taken mirror those adopted by cities across the United States since 2020 to provide alternative options to police, especially for citizens experiencing mental distress. One study indicated that individuals with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely than the general population to be killed by police.
In Eugene, Ore., for example, a team of crisis responders called CAHOOTS, or Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Street, has been providing people with mental health support, medical care and other resources since 1989. In 2017, the team handled 17 percent of the city’s 911 calls, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Other cities, including Oakland, Calif., have begun replicating the CAHOOTS model or something similar.
“We are [required] to meet people where they are and display empathy to find out what is going on with them,” the manager of Oakland’s program (called Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland) told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2022, shortly after it launched. “We want to offer them some sort of service, whether it’s a soda or some water, a piece of chocolate, blanket or some socks. If eventually you decide you want service, you want to get off the streets, you want help, then … we will connect you to services in Alameda County.”
UCR’s model was inspired in part by CAHOOTS, as well as by recommendations presented by both the university’s Campus Safety Task Force and a set of campus safety guidelines released by the University of California system in 2021 to “ensure that all members of the community feel welcomed, respected and protected from harm.”
The creation of this systemwide resource had been a top priority of UC president Michael V. Drake, according to the Los Angeles Times. Among other things, the systemwide guidance calls on universities to hire a range of emergency responders and to define each role’s responsibilities.
Experts are encouraged to see tiered response models expanding from cities and towns to campuses.
Michele Weinzetl, a retired police officer and a consultant who works with police departments to figure out alternative response models, said such approaches could be especially impactful on college campuses, where a significant portion of students may be dealing with mental health issues.
“Across the country, access to mental health services has declined, and there are growing concerns among various professionals about the lack of mental health services across our service spectrum, I think, nationally,” she said. “I would argue that college-aged people represent a large portion of those who struggle with various mental health needs. They also are oftentimes removed from their significant support systems.”
She noted that implementing such programs on college campuses presents challenges that don’t exist elsewhere; because of the academic year calendar, for example, there will likely be less demand for mental health responders during the summer, which “complicates the staffing model,” Weinzetl said.
UCR isn’t alone in trying to adapt such a model to a university setting; other campuses, including Oregon State University and California State University, Long Beach, have launched similar mobile crisis response programs in recent years.
Some experts argue that efforts to combine mental health care, medical care, policing and other services in one department haven’t always succeeded.
“The idea of merging care teams and police officers into a single public safety department has been discussed in quite a few places, but has rarely if ever been actually implemented. There are substantial data sharing, supervision, certification/licensure, and information access barriers to merging these separate fields into a single unit,” said Lisa Daugaard, a criminal justice reform activist and the director of the nonprofit Public Defender Association, in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “In some situations where this has been explored, it’s become clear that the administrative costs alone of making this transition would consume funding that was urgently needed to expand housing, shelter, mental health and drug user health responses. We’re interested to follow this proposed move at UC Riverside to understand any solutions they’re able to arrive at for these practical barriers and costs.”
Woods acknowledged that “there is no real blueprint for what we’re doing,” beyond programs like CAHOOTS. She said she has drawn in part upon her background in public health to inform UCR’s public safety experiment.
“We’re using, really, a collective impact model here, where our Health, Well-being and Safety Division is—it’s kind of the backbone organization, and then we’re relying on campus stakeholders and different schools and partners internally to be able to work with them to have these common goals,” she said.
The latest college drinking trend is as simple as it is potent: equal parts water and liquor, combined with some sort of sugary flavoring. And while some see the beverage as just another way to get drunk quickly, others consider the fad a safer alternative to drinking games of yore, such as Slap the Bag or Edward Fortyhands.
Called a borg—short for “blackout rage gallon”—the beverages have been around since at least early 2020, when the first recipes for the concoction were posted on the video-sharing app TikTok. But borgs have garnered increased attention in recent months as more and more TikTokers, often college students, post videos of themselves making or drinking them.
Borg parties, in which every attendee makes, names (something punny like Ruth Bader Ginsborg, U.S. Borger Patrol or Soulja Borg) and drinks a borg, are especially popular fodder for viral videos. The drinks are often consumed over the course of a daylong party or tailgate.
The recipe for a borg is simple. First, take a plastic gallon jug of water and drink (or pour out) half of it. Then, refill with liquor, typically vodka. The quantity can vary, but many recipes opt for a fifth—approximately 16 shots—of alcohol. Then, add flavoring, which can contain caffeine, like MiO Energy, or electrolytes, like Liquid I.V.
Despite its somewhat hostile name, the drink has actually gained attention as a potential harm-reduction tool, given that diluting the alcohol with water—and drinking it over the course of a day—ostensibly makes it safer. In addition, as TikTok user erin.monroe_ pointed out in a video with over 4.3 million views, because borgs are sealable containers that drinkers create themselves, they always know what they’re drinking.
“We were drinking gin buckets and jungle juice out of plastic containers and trash cans in the basement of frat houses,” she said in the video, noting that she is credentialed in substance use prevention in New York. “Gen Z said, ‘No, we want better for ourselves.’”
Other proponents have applauded borgs for keeping drinkers hydrated and incorporating electrolytes—which some believe help prevent hangovers—and for being more sanitary than shared drinks and punches.
But not all substance use experts are excited about the trend.
Ashley Linden-Carmichael, an associate research professor at Penn State University’s Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, appreciates that individual portions and sealed containers can keep students safe from being drugged, but she believes that the harm of drinking 16 shots of liquor in one day generally outweighs the potential benefits of borgs.
“If someone is having 16 drinks in one sitting, even if it’s mixed with water, that still counts as high-intensity or extreme drinking,” she said, noting that binge drinking is defined for men as having five or more drinks in a sitting, and, for women, four or more. “Adding water to it is not necessarily making someone less intoxicated. It’s a myth that drinking water or having caffeine or taking a cold shower lower your blood alcohol content.”
She also noted that alcohol and caffeine can be a dangerous combination because caffeine, a stimulant, can mask the effects of the alcohol, making students feel more sober and causing them to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t, such as drinking more or driving while intoxicated.
Christine Cockley, development coordinator for Moderation Management, a nonprofit that helps people address alcohol dependencies, noted that borgs aren’t the only option for those who want to be in control of mixing and carrying their own drinks; individual bottles of beer or homemade cocktails mixed in a standard-size water bottle achieve the same goal.
“I think that is a little more mindful than drinking a full gallon,” she said. “I see how people could make the argument that it’s safer and more hygienic and you know what’s in it, but at the same time, that’s true about so many tools.”
Students themselves seem to see borgs primarily as an efficient and tasty way to get drunk, with the water diluting the flavor of the vodka while also, they hope, helping stave off a hangover.
“You don’t taste any alcohol. This is deadly,” said one TikTok user, sipping a combination of Grey Goose vodka, water and MiO Energy in a borg tutorial video that has received more than 236,700 views.
One student currently attending a large public institution in the South, who asked to remain anonymous, said that although he doesn’t drink alcohol, he does attend parties, and his impression of borgs is that they’re mostly consumed by people who want to get extremely drunk.
“A lot of people have the feeling that they’re not going to have a good time at a party unless they do a borg and they black out,” the student said. “They’ll walk around at a party, like, ‘Borg, borg, you want to do a borg?’”
And while it is important to know exactly what is in your drink and how much you’re drinking, the borg doesn’t inherently help with that; some video tutorials show individuals pouring a partial bottle of vodka into their borg without measuring.
Cockley said that it should be obvious from the name “blackout rage gallon” that the students drinking borgs are more interested in getting wasted than the potential harm-reduction benefits of the trend.
Still, she believes borgs could be used to help college students be more mindful of their alcohol use, but that would have to be the drinkers’ intention. For example, a student could consciously decide they want to have three drinks at a party, fill the bottle just those drinks and consume only the borg throughout the night.
“If it was more internal reflecting that helped them create a plan … I could see this being really helpful,” she said.
Thus far, universities have been largely silent—or in the dark—about borgs. Inside Higher Ed reached out to 12 universities and university systems to ask whether the trend had reached their campus and, if so, how it was impacting students. Only one institution, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, provided a response.
“Universities across the country have long been concerned about binge drinking among students and have worked to address this. The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point is no exception,” the university said in an emailed statement. “While familiar with the borg concept, UW–Stevens Point Dean of Students staff have no reported incidents of university policy violations involving this method.”
The latest college drinking trend is as simple as it is potent: equal parts water and liquor, combined with some sort of sugary flavoring. And while some see the beverage as just another way to get drunk quickly, others consider the fad a safer alternative to drinking games of yore, such as Slap the Bag or Edward Fortyhands.
Called a borg—short for “blackout rage gallon”—the beverages have been around since at least early 2020, when the first recipes for the concoction were posted on the video-sharing app TikTok. But borgs have garnered increased attention in recent months as more and more TikTokers, often college students, post videos of themselves making or drinking them.
Borg parties, in which every attendee makes, names (something punny like Ruth Bader Ginsborg, U.S. Borger Patrol or Soulja Borg) and drinks a borg, are especially popular fodder for viral videos. The drinks are often consumed over the course of a daylong party or tailgate.
The recipe for a borg is simple. First, take a plastic gallon jug of water and drink (or pour out) half of it. Then, refill with liquor, typically vodka. The quantity can vary, but many recipes opt for a fifth—approximately 16 shots—of alcohol. Then, add flavoring, which can contain caffeine, like MiO Energy, or electrolytes, like Liquid I.V.
Despite its somewhat hostile name, the drink has actually gained attention as a potential harm-reduction tool, given that diluting the alcohol with water—and drinking it over the course of a day—ostensibly makes it safer. In addition, as TikTok user erin.monroe_ pointed out in a video with over 4.3 million views, because borgs are sealable containers that drinkers create themselves, they always know what they’re drinking.
“We were drinking gin buckets and jungle juice out of plastic containers and trash cans in the basement of frat houses,” she said in the video, noting that she is credentialed in substance use prevention in New York. “Gen Z said, ‘No, we want better for ourselves.’”
Other proponents have applauded borgs for keeping drinkers hydrated and incorporating electrolytes—which some believe help prevent hangovers—and for being more sanitary than shared drinks and punches.
But not all substance use experts are excited about the trend.
Ashley Linden-Carmichael, an associate research professor at Penn State University’s Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, appreciates that individual portions and sealed containers can keep students safe from being drugged, but she believes that the harm of drinking 16 shots of liquor in one day generally outweighs the potential benefits of borgs.
“If someone is having 16 drinks in one sitting, even if it’s mixed with water, that still counts as high-intensity or extreme drinking,” she said, noting that binge drinking is defined for men as having five or more drinks in a sitting, and, for women, four or more. “Adding water to it is not necessarily making someone less intoxicated. It’s a myth that drinking water or having caffeine or taking a cold shower lower your blood alcohol content.”
She also noted that alcohol and caffeine can be a dangerous combination because caffeine, a stimulant, can mask the effects of the alcohol, making students feel more sober and causing them to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t, such as drinking more or driving while intoxicated.
Christine Cockley, development coordinator for Moderation Management, a nonprofit that helps people address alcohol dependencies, noted that borgs aren’t the only option for those who want to be in control of mixing and carrying their own drinks; individual bottles of beer or homemade cocktails mixed in a standard-size water bottle achieve the same goal.
“I think that is a little more mindful than drinking a full gallon,” she said. “I see how people could make the argument that it’s safer and more hygienic and you know what’s in it, but at the same time, that’s true about so many tools.”
Students themselves seem to see borgs primarily as an efficient and tasty way to get drunk, with the water diluting the flavor of the vodka while also, they hope, helping stave off a hangover.
“You don’t taste any alcohol. This is deadly,” said one TikTok user, sipping a combination of Grey Goose vodka, water and MiO Energy in a borg tutorial video that has received more than 236,700 views.
One student currently attending a large public institution in the South, who asked to remain anonymous, said that although he doesn’t drink alcohol, he does attend parties, and his impression of borgs is that they’re mostly consumed by people who want to get extremely drunk.
“A lot of people have the feeling that they’re not going to have a good time at a party unless they do a borg and they black out,” the student said. “They’ll walk around at a party, like, ‘Borg, borg, you want to do a borg?’”
And while it is important to know exactly what is in your drink and how much you’re drinking, the borg doesn’t inherently help with that; some video tutorials show individuals pouring a partial bottle of vodka into their borg without measuring.
Cockley said that it should be obvious from the name “blackout rage gallon” that the students drinking borgs are more interested in getting wasted than the potential harm-reduction benefits of the trend.
Still, she believes borgs could be used to help college students be more mindful of their alcohol use, but that would have to be the drinkers’ intention. For example, a student could consciously decide they want to have three drinks at a party, fill the bottle just those drinks and consume only the borg throughout the night.
“If it was more internal reflecting that helped them create a plan … I could see this being really helpful,” she said.
Thus far, universities have been largely silent—or in the dark—about borgs. Inside Higher Ed reached out to 12 universities and university systems to ask whether the trend had reached their campus and, if so, how it was impacting students. Only one institution, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, provided a response.
“Universities across the country have long been concerned about binge drinking among students and have worked to address this. The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point is no exception,” the university said in an emailed statement. “While familiar with the borg concept, UW–Stevens Point Dean of Students staff have no reported incidents of university policy violations involving this method.”
The educators charged with developing the new civics curriculum for Arizona’s public universities have their work cut out for them. The state already requires students to pass a citizenship test to graduate high school, so the college-level offering has to go deeper.
“If you do another course that’s like, ‘how many electors are in the Electoral College?’ students’ eyes just glaze over,” said Suzanne Dovi, a professor at the University of Arizona who is leading the university’s committee on developing the forthcoming American Institutions and Civic Knowledge curriculum.
To keep students engaged, Dovi and her colleagues are seeking to tie civics back to students’ individual interests and goals.
That means general education students at the University of Arizona will each take one broad survey course followed by an additional course of their choosing that goes into depth on a specific topic, such as American capitalism. Dovi said she hopes the more focused courses will allow students to explore how their specific passions intersect with American institutions.
The state’s two other public four-year universities will devise their own way of fulfilling the American Institutions requirement, mandated by the Board of Regents in 2021.
At U of A, the survey course will be piloted this fall, with the full requirement going into effect in fall 2026.
Dovi is scheduled to teach one of the survey courses. While it has to meet several curricular requirements developed by the regents—including studying founding federal documents and landmark Supreme Court cases—she wants to make sure it is not too repetitious of Arizona’s high school curriculum.
To that end, she is focusing the course on the concept of flawed democracies, looking at what American institutions do right and wrong, and giving students the tools to make such assessments themselves. Core assignments will include writing a modernized Declaration of Independence and conducting a “democratic audit” of the United States, she said.
Other courses at U of A that will fulfill the requirement are still in development; some may adapt existing survey courses in the history department, for example, to become American Institutions courses.
The requirement comes at a time when many politicians and educators are pushing for colleges and high schools nationwide to strengthen basic civics instruction in an effort to create a more informed electorate.
While university-level civics requirements are not new—the University of Utah has had an American Institutions general education requirement since before 2000—more colleges have begun adding them.
In 2018, Missouri’s Legislature passed a law requiring all public university students to pass a civics exam. Purdue University, a public institution in Indiana, began requiring students to fulfill a civics literacy requirement to graduate in 2021; the requirement consists of completing an “educational activity,” such as attending a civics-related event or listening to a civics podcast, and passing a civics exam. At the high school level, 40 states and the District of Columbia require some degree of civics education, and at least 14 require their students to pass a citizenship test. (Arizona was the first state to implement such a requirement.)
These requirements haven’t necessarily had the desired effect. One study found that students who took a mandated civics test in high school were not significantly more likely to vote than their peers.
Arizona’s universities are adding the American Institutions requirement amid a larger reshuffle of their general education requirements. Regent Larry Edward Penley said the board has been planning to update the requirements for at least five years, with the aim of tailoring them more to each university’s unique goals and identities.
Penley also noted that the requirement is not the same as a traditional civics requirement, which typically focuses on “how our institutions, our branches of government, were built,” he said. “In the end, we expect graduates to be educated individuals … we also expect them to be good citizens.”
Donald Critchlow, the Katzin Family Professor of History at Arizona State University, is the head of the university’s new Center for American Institutions. While the center is not associated with the new requirement, it shares a similar goal of increasing “confidence” in American institutions, he said.
He lauded the American Institutions requirement, noting that recent classes of students have known less and less about the way the country functions—but have continued to hold strong views about its operations. He hopes that the American Institutions courses will help them gain the context and information they need to develop informed opinions.
“The students need to understand, as the regents believed, just how institutions work and what they are,” he said. “I have students all the time in the classes that will not know whether the Supreme Court justices are elected or selected.”
Dovi, on the other hand, is less bothered by what her students know or don’t know than by their hopelessness about the future of the country and their lack of faith in the government’s ability to make things better.
“They’ve given up on our government. There’s a kind of political despair,” she said. “They have different reasons for despairing about the government, but there’s this sense that we don’t find solutions.”
She hopes learning more about the U.S. government’s historical successes will empower students to believe that change is possible.
Critics argue that the American Institutions requirement is redundant, given that Arizona high schoolers already study civics. Anna Ochoa O’Leary, who heads the department of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona, said the regents haven’t made clear how it differs from the high school requirement or what the intended educational outcomes are.
“Do you want more voting? Do you want them to be more engaged in our politics?” she asked.
She also noted that U of A offers a number of courses, including some in her own department, that already incorporate instruction on American institutions—in many cases, critiquing the ways those institutions have harmed people.
Patrick Robles, the U of A student body president, noted that while he is a proponent of civics education—he credits it with changing his life in middle school—some civics courses can, however inadvertently, promote American exceptionalism and uncritical patriotism, as Florida’s revised civics curriculum has been accused of doing.
“I believe it’s important that we have civic education at the university level, but it must not be at the expense of us blindly following the American urban legend that has historically been present in history classes,” he said. “I believe it’s possible to have civic education while also being critical and demonstrating America’s ugly past, as well as demonstrating how we can learn from these experiences.”
Penley said that he and the other regents fully meant for the requirement to be nonpartisan.
“The approach that we’ve taken has been one of engagement with faculty,” he said. “The belief here is that individual faculty members are going to put these courses together around some general constraints the board has set up in their policy. That tends to ensure that certain ideological perspectives will not be insisted upon because of the collaborative process.”
Dovi said the committee working to implement the new policy at the University of Arizona is as ideologically diverse as the regents intended, including both progressive and conservative professors—and one member of the Federalist Society, she said.
In her American Institutions class, she certainly plans to present her students with materials that span the political spectrum.
“If you aren’t reading something that offends you, I’m not doing my job. This class should make you angry and proud,” she said. “I want angry and proud citizens.”
The educators charged with developing the new civics curriculum for Arizona’s public universities have their work cut out for them. The state already requires students to pass a citizenship test to graduate high school, so the college-level offering has to go deeper.
“If you do another course that’s like, ‘how many electors are in the Electoral College?’ students’ eyes just glaze over,” said Suzanne Dovi, a professor at the University of Arizona who is leading the university’s committee on developing the forthcoming American Institutions and Civic Knowledge curriculum.
To keep students engaged, Dovi and her colleagues are seeking to tie civics back to students’ individual interests and goals.
That means general education students at the University of Arizona will each take one broad survey course followed by an additional course of their choosing that goes into depth on a specific topic, such as American capitalism. Dovi said she hopes the more focused courses will allow students to explore how their specific passions intersect with American institutions.
The state’s two other public four-year universities will devise their own way of fulfilling the American Institutions requirement, mandated by the Board of Regents in 2021.
At U of A, the survey course will be piloted this fall, with the full requirement going into effect in fall 2026.
Dovi is scheduled to teach one of the survey courses. While it has to meet several curricular requirements developed by the regents—including studying founding federal documents and landmark Supreme Court cases—she wants to make sure it is not too repetitious of Arizona’s high school curriculum.
To that end, she is focusing the course on the concept of flawed democracies, looking at what American institutions do right and wrong, and giving students the tools to make such assessments themselves. Core assignments will include writing a modernized Declaration of Independence and conducting a “democratic audit” of the United States, she said.
Other courses at U of A that will fulfill the requirement are still in development; some may adapt existing survey courses in the history department, for example, to become American Institutions courses.
The requirement comes at a time when many politicians and educators are pushing for colleges and high schools nationwide to strengthen basic civics instruction in an effort to create a more informed electorate.
While university-level civics requirements are not new—the University of Utah has had an American Institutions general education requirement since before 2000—more colleges have begun adding them.
In 2018, Missouri’s Legislature passed a law requiring all public university students to pass a civics exam. Purdue University, a public institution in Indiana, began requiring students to fulfill a civics literacy requirement to graduate in 2021; the requirement consists of completing an “educational activity,” such as attending a civics-related event or listening to a civics podcast, and passing a civics exam. At the high school level, 40 states and the District of Columbia require some degree of civics education, and at least 14 require their students to pass a citizenship test. (Arizona was the first state to implement such a requirement.)
These requirements haven’t necessarily had the desired effect. One study found that students who took a mandated civics test in high school were not significantly more likely to vote than their peers.
Arizona’s universities are adding the American Institutions requirement amid a larger reshuffle of their general education requirements. Regent Larry Edward Penley said the board has been planning to update the requirements for at least five years, with the aim of tailoring them more to each university’s unique goals and identities.
Penley also noted that the requirement is not the same as a traditional civics requirement, which typically focuses on “how our institutions, our branches of government, were built,” he said. “In the end, we expect graduates to be educated individuals … we also expect them to be good citizens.”
Donald Critchlow, the Katzin Family Professor of History at Arizona State University, is the head of the university’s new Center for American Institutions. While the center is not associated with the new requirement, it shares a similar goal of increasing “confidence” in American institutions, he said.
He lauded the American Institutions requirement, noting that recent classes of students have known less and less about the way the country functions—but have continued to hold strong views about its operations. He hopes that the American Institutions courses will help them gain the context and information they need to develop informed opinions.
“The students need to understand, as the regents believed, just how institutions work and what they are,” he said. “I have students all the time in the classes that will not know whether the Supreme Court justices are elected or selected.”
Dovi, on the other hand, is less bothered by what her students know or don’t know than by their hopelessness about the future of the country and their lack of faith in the government’s ability to make things better.
“They’ve given up on our government. There’s a kind of political despair,” she said. “They have different reasons for despairing about the government, but there’s this sense that we don’t find solutions.”
She hopes learning more about the U.S. government’s historical successes will empower students to believe that change is possible.
Critics argue that the American Institutions requirement is redundant, given that Arizona high schoolers already study civics. Anna Ochoa O’Leary, who heads the department of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona, said the regents haven’t made clear how it differs from the high school requirement or what the intended educational outcomes are.
“Do you want more voting? Do you want them to be more engaged in our politics?” she asked.
She also noted that U of A offers a number of courses, including some in her own department, that already incorporate instruction on American institutions—in many cases, critiquing the ways those institutions have harmed people.
Patrick Robles, the U of A student body president, noted that while he is a proponent of civics education—he credits it with changing his life in middle school—some civics courses can, however inadvertently, promote American exceptionalism and uncritical patriotism, as Florida’s revised civics curriculum has been accused of doing.
“I believe it’s important that we have civic education at the university level, but it must not be at the expense of us blindly following the American urban legend that has historically been present in history classes,” he said. “I believe it’s possible to have civic education while also being critical and demonstrating America’s ugly past, as well as demonstrating how we can learn from these experiences.”
Penley said that he and the other regents fully meant for the requirement to be nonpartisan.
“The approach that we’ve taken has been one of engagement with faculty,” he said. “The belief here is that individual faculty members are going to put these courses together around some general constraints the board has set up in their policy. That tends to ensure that certain ideological perspectives will not be insisted upon because of the collaborative process.”
Dovi said the committee working to implement the new policy at the University of Arizona is as ideologically diverse as the regents intended, including both progressive and conservative professors—and one member of the Federalist Society, she said.
In her American Institutions class, she certainly plans to present her students with materials that span the political spectrum.
“If you aren’t reading something that offends you, I’m not doing my job. This class should make you angry and proud,” she said. “I want angry and proud citizens.”
Multiple buildings were evacuated and closed on the University of Delaware campus Wednesday after researchers accidentally created “a small amount of a shock-sensitive explosive chemical” in a campus laboratory, according to the Delaware News Journal.
Delaware State Police deployed an explosive ordnance–disposal unit to remove the substance from the laboratory and conduct a controlled detonation on the campus’s South Green. Hundreds of students initially gathered to catch a glimpse of the detonation after police notified the campus about the incident, but only about 50 remained by the time it finally occurred, according to the News Journal. No injuries were reported, and the buildings reopened Thursday.
Multiple buildings were evacuated and closed on the University of Delaware campus Wednesday after researchers accidentally created “a small amount of a shock-sensitive explosive chemical” in a campus laboratory, according to the Delaware News Journal.
Delaware State Police deployed an explosive ordnance–disposal unit to remove the substance from the laboratory and conduct a controlled detonation on the campus’s South Green. Hundreds of students initially gathered to catch a glimpse of the detonation after police notified the campus about the incident, but only about 50 remained by the time it finally occurred, according to the News Journal. No injuries were reported, and the buildings reopened Thursday.
A professor at California State University, Fullerton, contacted the campus police Tuesday when she received an email she believed to be a threat, imploring her to cancel the next day’s class due to a “once-in-a-lifetime event.”
But campus police who investigated the threat discovered it referred to a Nintendo Direct event scheduled for the same time as the class, according to the Los Angeles Times. Nintendo Direct events are livestreams in which the video-game company announces upcoming releases. The student wrote back to the professor to admit the email had been a “bad joke” about the Nintendo Direct release, CSUF’s acting police chief, Scot Willey, said in a statement.
Even so, some professors opted to cancel class, the Times reported. Additional CSUF police officers, including a K-9 team, patrolled campus on Wednesday as well, though the police department did not believe there was any legitimate threat.
A professor at California State University, Fullerton, contacted the campus police Tuesday when she received an email she believed to be a threat, imploring her to cancel the next day’s class due to a “once-in-a-lifetime event.”
But campus police who investigated the threat discovered it referred to a Nintendo Direct event scheduled for the same time as the class, according to the Los Angeles Times. Nintendo Direct events are livestreams in which the video-game company announces upcoming releases. The student wrote back to the professor to admit the email had been a “bad joke” about the Nintendo Direct release, CSUF’s acting police chief, Scot Willey, said in a statement.
Even so, some professors opted to cancel class, the Times reported. Additional CSUF police officers, including a K-9 team, patrolled campus on Wednesday as well, though the police department did not believe there was any legitimate threat.
As part of a larger redesign of its central Academic Quadrangle, Rice University will move a statue of its founder and namesake, William Marsh Rice, to a less prominent location within the quad, Chron reported Wednesday. The university also recently announced the landscape architecture firm that will lead the redesign: Nelson Byrd Woltz.
According to Rice’s announcement of the project last year, the new location of the Founder’s Memorial will include “historical context and information” about Rice, who enslaved people. The announcement noted the administration has already stopped using the memorial as an “iconic image of the university in its publicity.”
The decision to relocate the monument came after a recommendation from the university’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice and a resolution from the Rice Student Association.
“Rice and the Board of Trustees worked diligently to honor all of the viewpoints expressed by the university during those conversations, while also being mindful of the need for bold change that the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice emphasized in its 2021 report, ‘On the Founder's Memorial,’” Rice president Reginald DesRoches said. “Nelson Byrd Woltz’s concept both respects our desire to create deeper thoughtfulness within the Academic Quadrangle and awakens the site’s potential to become a dynamic and welcoming gathering space for students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors year-round.”
A monument celebrating integration at the university will take the statue’s former place in the quad. The redesign will also include designated space for future monuments and artworks.
Spring 2023 graduates of the University of Minnesota will be able to walk across the stage after previously being told they wouldn’t be able to, CBS News reported. The university’s usual graduation venue, 3M Arena at Mariucci, is currently under construction, and students can’t walk across the stage at the Huntington Bank Stadium, where a combined ceremony is being held outdoors instead.
But after a student petition asking administrators to let students walk received nearly 9,000 signatures, the institution announced in an email that it would allow graduates to register for a time slot to walk across the stage at one of several designated locations on campus. The email also stated that the university’s different colleges would hold their own celebrations.
However, not all students found the solution satisfactory.
“Still kind of takes away from the fact that we don’t get to walk across the stage that day, we get a time slot, it’s kind of like the pandemic all over again,” one senior told CBS.
Spring 2023 graduates of the University of Minnesota will be able to walk across the stage after previously being told they wouldn’t be able to, CBS News reported. The university’s usual graduation venue, 3M Arena at Mariucci, is currently under construction, and students can’t walk across the stage at the Huntington Bank Stadium, where a combined ceremony is being held outdoors instead.
But after a student petition asking administrators to let students walk received nearly 9,000 signatures, the institution announced in an email that it would allow graduates to register for a time slot to walk across the stage at one of several designated locations on campus. The email also stated that the university’s different colleges would hold their own celebrations.
However, not all students found the solution satisfactory.
“Still kind of takes away from the fact that we don’t get to walk across the stage that day, we get a time slot, it’s kind of like the pandemic all over again,” one senior told CBS.
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