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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Taking a Moment to Reflect

As the school year comes to a close, the Campus would like to reflect on this passing of time. We saw a long foliage-filled fall, a perhaps longer bone-chilling winter and now enter the days of spring, soon to be summer. While the sun has re-emerged and an excitement for the end of school builds, a conversation also rises. That conversation is the long-awaited one on mental health.


Many of us on the editorial board cannot remember a discussion in which the student body seemed more engaged than the one we are currently having on stress and emotional well-being. Additionally, the faculty are even more concerned than usual; their emergency meeting last week saw remarkable attendance from almost all members of the academic staff. At the meeting, faculty expressed a desire to come up with a solution to alleviate the College’s exigent problem with stress.


Since the meeting, many professors have spoken with their classes about stress due to the academic workload. There has been a range of conversations between faculty and students; some professors have simply gauged how stressed their students are and discussed ways to cope with that stress while others went so far as to cancel final exams or make the tests optional. As a student-run newspaper, we would like to express to our professors how comforting their acknowledgement of Middlebury’s academic rigor is. It helps us students feel like professors are on our side, a sentiment a liberal arts institution should surely embody.


While we therefore commend the faculty for their attention and dedication to minimizing stress, we at the Campus impel administrators to continue to consider possible long-term solutions. The faculty’s discussion at their emergency meeting, as well as the conversations students and teachers are continuing to have as a result, should not just take place when tragedy is in the air or final exams are on the table.


The Campus strongly recommends that Middlebury’s faculty hold an annual discussion on the current status of the College’s mental health. Although our editorial board acknowledges that mental health problems are not not solely attributable to academic stress, we urge our professors to keep in mind that school is a large part of our lives as students, and the choice to be more sympathetic in the academic sphere greatly affects us.


Such sympathy could include more leniency on extensions or avoiding excessive assignment of homework; it could mean taking the last five minutes of class to decompress and walk outside with students; or perhaps it merely entails an


academic advisor going out of his or her way to check in with an advisee. The exact course of action is up to the professor, but we at the Campus feel that if the faculty is aware of stress and talking about it, that will foster a better environment for mental health.


In addition to the faculty’s engaging with students on the issue, students also need to engage with other students on the issue. Our next SGA President, Ilana Gratch, has set the College on the right path with her peer counseling service plan, for mental suffering should not be a taboo subject. In a community like Middlebury, we should feel like we can talk to a neighbor or friend if we are not doing well. Furthermore, that neighbor or friend should be able to easily refer us to College counseling services, or we should be able to refer ourselves. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to take the step to ask for help. As such, help should be readily available, not inaccessable due to bureaucratic hurdles such as long wait times and unreturned phone calls.


So, where are we as a college now that the school year is coming to a close? We seem to be at a point where the mental health of our community is on everyone’s mind,  but not enough action has been taken. We are eager to see the implementation of SGA President-elect Gratch’s plan to address these problems and we look to the faculty and incoming College President Laurie Patton to join her on the issues.


Just to plant a few ideas on the topic of stress in the heads of those with the power to implement them – some of our peer institutions, like Swarthmore, offer the first semester of college as pass/fail to first-year students. Additionally, we could take into account the recommendations of our own “Sophomore Experience Committees,” which have identified programs and policies to aid Middlebury students experiencing the “sophomore slump” in their second year of college.


Because right now, the entire College faces a slump. A mood of mourning for Nathan Alexander, Robert Prasch, Young Hie Kim and Kelly Boe has mixed with stress and other mental woes to pervade campus. Although the change of seasons has put many in better spirits, we need to make changes to the way our faculty, staff and student body cooperate so as to produce long-lasting, positive mental health.


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