My published comment (#253) in response to this article on an apparent spate of suicides at Cornell is attached as a Comment. Many of the other comments related to the rigor of academic programs and the time that faculty spend with students. My response to this is as follows:
No one is super-human; we all face limits on our time and abilities. Research requires a lot of faculty time, and where universities particularly reward research, there will be reduced time for personal contact with the typical student. When you hear otherwise, you are hearing self-serving hype. This is partially resolved by insuring that researchers have few and small classes, but this generates financial issues if your institution is primarily tuition supported.
There is a wide range of academic challenge among various programs at any institution. Generally, the degree of academic rigor corresponds to who has the power and also whether the discipline has a clearly defined and measurable corpus. If you are faculty in a program with measurable content and more than enough students, you can afford rigor. If you have very few students and you keep with rigor, you will soon have almost no students, and soon no courses and no job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/education/17cornell.html?th&emc=th
I have read many of these comments. I do believe that Cornell suicides tend to be particularly public; how many cases elsewhere are misreported or covered up? The true rate of suicide is unknown. Some numbers of gun and car “accidents” are likely suicides, but misreported as an act of kindness to the family.
“Students are almost by definition at a narcissistic phase of their lives, and they get so wrapped up in themselves and their current problems that they have little perspective and certainly no long-term vision.” I agree with this comment (having spent most of my life with the population under consideration), and it informs us of what needs to be done. But it must be recognized that good mental health care is extraordinarily expensive. Administration and student support costs already are a greater part of a university budget than is education per se. This is recent change, with its own pros and cons, and helps explain why education is so expensive nowadays.
When I was a student decades ago, at my brief orientation I was instructed to be grateful for this educational opportunity and told a variant of the classic “look to your left, look to your right, one of you will graduate as an engineer four years from now.” This was accurate and intentional for engineering during that crazy post-sputnik time, because they knew they didn’t have enough laboratories or faculty for all their students. This obviously makes for a depressing environment with depressed students (although there was minimal recognition of this at the time). When I left the sciences and attended a different institution for graduate school (where they wanted and expected you to succeed), the environment was totally different, and I felt like a new person.
There are a variety of causes for depression. In my experience, at those times when things felt bad, I was in the wrong environment. I learned to take whatever (responsible) steps were necessary to get myself out of that environment and into some place more appropriate for me. Young people today are much more sophisticated about these matters than we were years ago, but some of their life challenges have increased also.
Comment by admin — March 17, 2010 @ 6:10 pm