This is Reimagining Higher Education, your go-to podcast with remarkable education leaders sharing personal stories from their experience in and around the sector, including reflection and hope for progress. With your host Dr. Noreen Golfman, former Provost and Vice-President Academic at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and inaugural member of Studiosity’s Academic Advisory Board in Canada. Welcome. Visit studiosity.com/studentsfirst for information on the next Students First Symposium, an open forum for faculty, staff, and academics to candidly discuss and progress the issues that matter most in higher education.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome. I know that there are few hundred people attending to this live in virtual person webcast. And our theme is Forging a Path to Student Wellbeing. And this is a webcast sponsored by Studiosity. We've been doing a number of these in order to gauge really what's going on at our campuses over the last few years and currently on this topic, which is pressing more and more and I should introduce myself, I'm Noreen Golfman, and I'm on the Canadian Advisory Board of Studiosity, and it's a pleasure to be here to welcome some experts, people who are at the coalface on their campuses, three campuses in Canada, who will help us forge a path to student wellbeing. And very keen to hear what they have to say. I should, before I ask them to introduce themselves, just say that I'm located in St John's, Newfoundland. I am a former Provost and Vice President Academic at Memorial University and often say that I'm a recovering senior leader, but anybody who is a senior leader knows exactly what I'm talking about. So it's great to see you all here. It's afternoon, my time. Morning for some of you. Depending on what coast you're on. And I'm just going to go around in the order of how I see people on my screen. And I'll ask you first, Dr. Carry, to introduce yourself.
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. And Noreen, thank you so much for the introduction and getting us started. My name is Ainsley Carey and I serve as the Vice President for Students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Before my time at the University of British Columbia, I served at a number of institutions in the United States, earned my Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate at the University of Florida, and then worked throughout the United States before coming north of the border here in Canada. Prior to my role at UBC, I was the Vice President for students at Auburn University in Alabama and held the same role at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. One of the perspectives that I look forward to sharing today about the public health mission and about the work that we're trying to do in higher education is really thinking about this work as part of a public health effort. We often take individual health care circumstances and we focus on that individual challenge, but we don't step back far enough to examine the public health implications and the root cause of the challenges students may be facing on our campus. And we also need to spend more time thinking about the shared responsibility of this work. We often identify this work and place it into a single office or ask students to adjust. But we haven't taken enough time to examine how we can do this work as a shared responsibility among members of the community, which includes our students, faculty, and staff. So, I look forward to today's conversation. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Thank you, fascinating. You've already given us some potential topics here to pursue. Very much. Andrea, over to you.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Good day, everyone. It's really a thrill to be part of this hour. And thank you for having me. My name is Andrea Levinson. I use she/her pronouns. I'm a psychiatrist. And my role at the University of Toronto is I'm the Director of Psychiatric Care at our Health and Wellness Centre. I also am a staff psychiatrist and serve as student mental health liaison at CAMH, a tertiary hospital, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And in my role I am very much a frontline provider. I oversee psychiatric services on campus. I also support the larger community around issues pertaining to high risk mental health concerns. And in the past few years I did serve as clinical lead for the university student mental health redesign, which we embarked on redesigning our services across our three campuses, introducing a new model of care to promote really easy access and easy navigation of supports. And it's really a joy to be here. I'm looking forward to our discussion. Thank you.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Thank you. And over to you Dr. Anne Duffy.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Anne Duffy. And I'm an academic psychiatrist. And that means I'm both a clinician and a clinical researcher. I'm a professor of psychiatry at Queen's University and also a visiting professor at the University of Oxford in the UK. And I fully agree with Ainsley and in his view that this is a public health issue as well as for a number of students, also, of course, it's a clinical care issue. And when we say public health, what we're really talking about there is the increase in common mental disorders in young people generally and globally is now a recognized public health crisis. So it's not just on the university campus's young people in general. And of course, as we welcome a majority now, I think of high school graduates to higher education. And we're really supporting students from traditionally disadvantaged or minoritized backgrounds to come and join us in the campus community. Of course, the the difficulties and issues in the young people general population are very similar to the university student population, in fact, very comparable. And so this is something that we all share a place in. It's not just about psychiatry and mental illness. It's about mental health, wellness and significant symptoms and mental illness. So really a public health issue. I am the founding director of the U-Flourish Centre for Translational Research and Student Mental Health. I believe it's the first centre of its kind in Canada. It's certainly unique. And that was really thanks to philanthropic foundations like Rossy Family Foundation, McCall MacBain Foundation, and the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation, who really saw that, you know, there was underfunding in this area and that we we were successful in getting term grants to try to understand what the burden of illness was, what students need, where we're falling short, where we could do better, where we're doing great and should continue to do those things. And so they actually combined and put in funding to support us as an international collaborative network. So we're a national collaborative network and we're partnering with UBC and University of Toronto in research, but we're also partnering with UK universities and now UC San Diego in the US. So, so it's really a cool and important opportunity that we'd like to really build on and learn from students and leaders at the university about how to help and what's needed. Thank you.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Thank you. Terrific. Well, people can see we have a lot of, a lot of expertise here. And by the way, people are starting to ask some questions and somebody has asked, what is it called? So I guess they just want to hear that again, Anne.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
What what is the centre called? It's called the U-Flourish Centre for Translational Research. But if you just Google, U-Flourish or I can actually put it in the chat, the website, you can learn about what's happening. We post all of our publications. We also have an advisory board which includes students with lived experience and university leaders. And actually we're looking for more membership from university leadership. So if you're out there and you're interested, just send me an email.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Great. We have an expression of thanks for that already. So thank you. And people are free to during this live webcast, submit questions, please do that. Why not get to all of them. We've also asked people who have signed on or registered for this to submit questions to us and we got a whole bunch. Try to cluster them and get to them in the hour that we have. I know time is going to pass quickly. Just want to tee off on something that that's come up around this being a public health matter. Just an anecdote. When I was in Stockholm a number of years ago as Provost doing some research on higher ed in Scandinavia, we were all talking about the increasing need to supply services, to be student facing, to think about mental health on our campuses in a way that we had not in the previous X number of decades. And colleagues in Stockholm in particular looked at us, Canadians oddly, and said, "You mean your university is responsible for that? This is a public health issue. Our state is where the services are, are, are delivered and served." And that kind of threw us back on our heels. I don't think it's an either or thing, but the way of thinking about public about mental challenges, mental health challenges and mental health in general as being a much broader social and state concern was not part of our language. We kept thinking, we're university leaders and it's our job. So I'm I'm just mindful of that. And I like the way we're starting to open this up to think about it as a bigger, bigger challenge for all of us. So my opening and kind of grand question to all of you is, you know, what does support look like in the next five years and how is it changing, if it is at all, from the systems in place right now and a kind of attending to that to partly because Studiosity is really taken up with the issue of AI, how do you see perhaps the role if it has one of AI in in those services that you are providing? You don't have to get to the AI part, but if it's top of mind, feel free. I'll start with you, Ainsley, and your thoughts about that.
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
Hey, thanks for starting off because I'm sure the other responses to this will be incredible. So I had a chance to go first. And now in order to talk about trends moving forward, we should take a minute to talk about some history here and talk about the trends that were of the past that we now are currently in the world of and we're moving forward. You might remember when universities were kind of first born their, their focus was character development and helping young adults adulting. And the enlightenment period came along and then universities moved in the early to in the early 20th century to really grabbing on to leadership development and career development. Now we are seeing universities in a position where they are at the centre point of matters relating to social justice and global impact because our universities are no longer local institution. You used to go to your small, your university in your small college town and that remains your home. Now students travel from all over the world to attend different universities, and even if you stay in your local hometown university, chances are you're communicating with a scholar or reviewing research that's happening on the other side of the world. So universities and students, faculty and staff are global participants in an economy now. So what are the trends that are necessary to support a global learning environment in a global teaching environment? Well, we're seeing students arrive on our campus with much more sensitivity towards issues of equity, diversity and inclusion as they think about their own positionality in life, their own privileges. And then they see what's happening in the rest of the world. There's a need to think about the EDI implications here. Students are arriving on campus, much needing much more support from the university with regard to trauma informed care, because as you care more about the world and what's going on in the world, whether it be climate change or catastrophes happening on the other side of the world or natural disasters happening. It generates trauma in the students, faculty and staff who are studying this work and who are embedded in this work. So the need for the university to be in a position to have trauma informed care is critically important. And as we have already discussed thus far, this need to think about a public health minded approach to teaching, learning and research in addition to what we're trying to do in all of the various subjects. Having a public health minded approach to our work is critical, and it's not about popping up a student health centre or adding more counsellors in your counselling centre. It's about reviewing every aspect of the university's curriculum, including our policies and procedures, how we assign rooms, how we determine dining locations, how we make decisions about the curriculum and how many units required in any degree program. When we step back and take a public health approach to what we have designed as a university, I could imagine we will revisit what has been in place for 150 plus years and have a real different look at the work that we're doing at universities. So with regard to the answer about supports for the future, it has to take on an EDI lens, a trauma informed approach, and it has to be a public health minded strategy to move forward. With regard to artificial intelligence. I think the main question for me is what are students interested in with regard to AI? Too often we've developed a solution using a brand new technology, and that population of students there saying, I'm not ready for that, that I don't want an AI mental health counsellor, I want a counsellor that I can see face to face that will respond to my specific question. I'm not ready for the AI counsellor. So I think the bigger question is where are our students with regard to what they want from the university? And I want to separate AI from student services and AI in the classroom. That's a - Teaching and Learning is a different world. I do think as we think about student services, we have to stop and ask students, "What are your expectations? What are your hopes, and what would you interact with as a student seeking mental health care, academic advising, etc., etc.?" That ends my response.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Well, that's that's good.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Can I add on to that. I would include everything you've said 100% Ainsley and thanks for such a fulsome kind of response to that. I would just add, what Ainsley is talking about is compassionate campus, and that's kind of the buzz word encapsulating. It's not just about the individual student. And there and we're having more diversity, more international students coming with more with very varied backgrounds and themselves perhaps experiencing trauma. And and so coming to the university campus with very different degrees of readiness and different backgrounds and different early adversities. But the other thing is, is the emphasis, as Ainsley points out, is not just on the individual student and what resources can they reach out for. It's how are we as an inclusive, welcoming learning community, sort of how are we communicating? How- what about our pedagogy? How are we instilling that kind of mindfulness in in what we're doing in, in in the way that we're talking to students, the way that we're actually having discourse with each other and as well as the services that we're developing. And students will tell you. And that and the data supports that. There's a lot to be done in that regard, you know, in terms of how we, for example, how we schedule exams and assignments, like instead of having them all coming at once and then counting for 50% of your mark, you know, that's, you know, the heavily weighted assignments, the crunch that happens at certain times of the year when, by the way, that those times of year are timed with higher levels of anxiety and depression and student suicides actually they're timed with examination times in the school year and there's good data on that. So so, you know, we as a university can be more mindful about our approach as well. And we've developed we didn't intend it as an intervention. But talk about digital solutions. So we developed a mental health literacy course with the course development unit at Queen's who the head, Michael Adams immediately got it like he was on board and we had a champion and he put all of his learning strategists and specialists because you know who who build these things. And we and I did the content and then we collaborated with UK collaborators to really beef up the content. And it is the most popular course. It's sold out every time and it reduces we have some data to show that actually reduces the anxiety and depressive symptoms, although we didn't anticipate it as an intervention. It was an educational offering to- and students get credit, it's an interdisciplinary elective and it sort of teaches students about, you know, what do we mean by wellbeing, mental health? What do we mean about compassionate campus? What do we mean about being welcoming and open and and how do how does how can we help students talk to other students and and how do we move from empathy to being an ally? Into action. You know, signposting colleagues to certain things. So that's how we kind of engage the whole community. And so that's an example of using digital resources that are very little cost actually once it's built and have had major benefit and we're just putting in a bid. And I'm hoping that the UofT and UBC will join us in this and we're putting in a bid to the Wellcome Trust to accelerate and enhance care. It doesn't replace face to face care and you're quite right, Ainsley, students want to see people in person. But what students want is they want a single digital entry portal. What are the services? I want one place to go and I want that to be online and then I want it rationalized. And then we have a smart recommendation engine based on personalized data to say, Hey, you know what, based on what you've told us, we think this might be up your speed, this might be important for you to know about or this might be a something supportive and then some digital solutions that can be used together in counselling and together in primary care. And so that can really build capacity and reduce burden on services and also engage students to be proactive. So those are some of the things happening in the in the space.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Great. Andrea?
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Just add just a brief few points cause I agree with all that Ainsley and Anne have shared. You know, I think we're dealing particularly in the sort of service area of mental health we're dealing with the need to scope up. We are we are under-resourced in terms of human providers, but AI and digital provision is not going to replace human providers. But using thinking about the augmenting aspect of AI, thinking about what we did in the terms of a crisis in the pandemic where we just, you know, transformed our care delivery in terms of virtual care delivery within a week. And we had barriers where we felt we couldn't do that. I think the data is out in terms of, you know, the utility of things like chat bots, etc.. There does seem to be specific populations, the more narrow you can define the cohort, the area, the actual utility of the AI in service delivery. So often it can have an educational forum, as Anne pointed out, often young people like to kind of look at things asynchronously and then bring it to their live session with their counsellor or with their doctor, etc.. We do have at University of Toronto, we have a chatbot that started off, it's called Navi. It started off purely being a mental health chatbot and in the last 18 months it's been expanded to all areas of questioning and actually student engagement has increased exponentially with that expansion, which is very interesting. So it's a it's a wonderful area, but we have to be mindful, we have to be mindful of data security issues, data privacy issues. And as long as we are mindful and we work together on this and embrace it and engage in it, there's tremendous potential.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Interesting. Andrea, just to follow up, what what would you say are the big challenges that students are coming to you with? I mean, it's easy to say, you know, work life balance, exam pressure and but how are you seeing, I guess, the key or the top sort of pressures and how are they expressed?
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
I think the top pressures as we're seeing it clinically and in the literature that we do have, I think academic pressure and workload is definitely up there. From our most recent surveys, 60 to 70% of our Canadian students feel overwhelmed. They report that as their own particular experience. Financial pressures are greater than ever. I think about 70% of our student cohort in post-secondary across the nation work part time and need to work to fund themselves. A biggie is social isolation and loneliness. The feeling of being very alone and very disconnected and not knowing how to engage or having the ability to engage in relational work on campus due to a whole host of factors. Technology overload, digital fatigue. So those would be some of the biggies that students are sharing. And of course, you know, similar to the themes that Ainsley had mentioned, students bring their own their own cultural background, their own lived experience. We are we are educating in a global manner. And there's a tremendous amount of trauma, intergenerational childhood trauma. And as a student is transitioning into the post-secondary environment, often at that transitional youth time, that is part of their narrative that they're bringing and needing a tremendous amount of support. Yeah.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Ainsley, you want to add to that?
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
Sure. I think the basics have been covered. One. The only addition I would make to that, I'd call it basic life services, largely around issues of affordability. So housing, food, transportation, child care. I remember when I started this work in the late 80s, early 90s, we were talking about student engagement. That was the focus, making sure students found ways to get involved in campus because of the priorities around getting engaged within the first 6 to 8 weeks. It was a key to student retention and graduation, and those were critically important for universities. But now universities have been pulled into the public services sector and a lot of work around things that public services would typically provide - housing, food, transportation, childcare for students, faculty and staff - that is now the university. The university is the public service provider. And it beckons that question that you started us off with, the question around who is responsible for delivering these services, because as you can imagine, the tuition structure is not designed to provide everything, every person's need. So universities are struggling because students, faculty and staff are looking at the university to be that primary provider. So one of the challenges is determining responsibility and sharing that responsibility with our public sector and local governments to make sure that everyone feels like they're supported. I think a second challenge that I'll mention that that would be an addition is a book that a few colleagues developed a few years ago Tia Brown McNair and a number of colleagues published a book called Becoming a Student Ready Campus or Becoming a Student Ready College. And if you notice the changing in that word, it used to be preparing students for college. Now it's becoming a student ready college. Meaning what are the ways that the university needs to pivot to respond to the current generation of students that are on our campus? Many of our campuses were designed centuries ago, and our policies are reflective of when they were designed and who they were intended to serve. And we have made incremental progress towards accepting greater diversity on campus. But if we ever revisit all of our policies, I think we would see significant gaps of decades of inappropriate policies that students are now trying to live by that just don't make sense in a in a much more technology advanced world. We have some things in place that were based on accounting practices from the 50s and 60s that aren't necessary anymore. So I think it's time for universities. One of the biggest challenges will be universities finding out how to pivot, how to turn the ship in the direction of the generation that's on our campus right now. So the real work isn't with the students. The real work, I think, is with college administrators and members of the faculty and staff to reimagine our universities so that they can fit the students who are joining us today, not those from yesterday.
"The university is the public service provider. And it beckons that question that you started us off with, the question around who is responsible for delivering these services [...] So universities are struggling because students, faculty and staff are looking at the university to be that primary provider. So one of the challenges is determining responsibility and sharing that responsibility with our public sector and local governments to make sure that everyone feels like they're supported."
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Well, if I may just quickly onto that. I totally agree with that student Ready campuses idea, because where where we fall down is, I think a lot of times that we're just so fixated reviewing these kinds of policies and processes. Because if we think about students coming to university, the message to students says, it's your adults now and your parents are over here, well, that's just not true. And and the developing brain is still a work in progress. And one of the things very much in progress is executive functioning. So frontal lobe and so, you know, planning, anticipating, being proactive. And then what we do as universities is we have all this sophisticated learning platforms and digital this that. And so these kids come and they have all this information and they're used to often times leaving home and they're used to their parents, you know, sort of doing all of these things. And then it gets put to the side. And so then all of a sudden they're reacting rather than being proactive. They get, you know, if there's any troubles, then then, you know, it's amazing how many students will tell me they don't know where to go or they don't know the processes. And yet, you know, it's all in orientation and everything. But they're just throwing all this information all at once. And they and we're and the other thing is, is we're expecting them to navigate it. And it was interesting. I got asked to review the three main services at Trinity College Dublin recently, which is a huge honour and actually they're doing a great job. And their question wasn't review our individual counselling, service, college health and abilities service. Their question was can you review gaps and where we can build synergies? Can you make can you suggest ways that the student journey through our services is more seamless? That was the question. And I thought, wow, like. Awesome. And and so that's I think that kind of work is more what we could do in our roles is looking for gaps, like Ainsley says, but also looking to have a more joined up cohesive system for students to navigate through and to make that somehow more accessible. Because that's what I hear from students a lot. And, you know, especially here we are, you know, trying to support students, say, with certain needs, and then we throw this very complicated mix of steps at them. And it's it's really not very helpful. Are you muted? I think you're muted.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
I am sorry. My door was ringing. You know, this is live. Life is happening somewhere in my house. A question has just popped up that I think is timely in view of what we're talking about, because we're talking about listening to students and tending to students and being student centred. And but somebody has asked, are we also doing the education needed for faculty who are teaching our students? We continue to see faculty expecting students to go through their educational experience in the way they did two or more decades ago, not recognizing how the world youth has changed. And of course, that's that's a big question. And I, I can imagine that that's a difficult one to answer in some ways. But, Anne, what do you think?
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Well, I'm going to give you another Trinity. I learned a lot from Trinity College. I'll tell you another thing I loved when I was at Trinity College. Now everyone has their challenges. But one thing that they're interestingly doing well, but they haven't actually systematically evaluated it. So that's where I was interested. But one thing they're doing well is any incoming first year student is assigned, I was telling Ainsley this, is assigned to a faculty mentor and the faculty mentor is not an academic mentor. The faculty mentor is meant to be a first contact person, to be there for the student, whatever their concerns are. So it might be academic, it might be personal. I broke up with my boyfriend, whatever it might be, you know, my parents split up. It might be I'm out of the house. Like I don't have a house nearby or I have anywhere to live. Whatever it is, the mentor is supported by the university. And so anybody who steps forward to be a faculty mentor and they're very clear, you are not a clinician, you are not meant to be, but that is really viewed very positively by the university. So it's a it's a real kind of feather in your cap if you're a faculty member, and you get proper support and training, so you get support from academic services, you get support from student wellness services, support from. So you are really knowledgeable about what's happening on your campus and you're the first contact person. And when you pick up the phone or send an email to one of those services, they respond because everyone's bought into this support, onboarding students into the university, into a collective campus. And so what happens is they also get student marks. And so if a student starts to slide, they'll reach out to that student, say, hey, you know what? Looks like you're having some trouble. How about we meet let's go for coffee. Let's, you know, let's talk about this. So so it's proactive. And and I think that's one way of of, you know, sort of really making sure that that faculty gets support and and are supported as to how to reach out and talk to students and not feel responsible to be a clinician and understand what the what the resources are and what their procedures are of their university so that everyone's on the same page.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
But faculty have to volunteer to do this, obviously.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
My understanding is that currently faculty volunteer. There is an there is a senior lead tutor who takes that job on for a period of time because that's more of a, you know, full time commitment. But yeah, so it's faculty stepping forward and and and it's really it's been there for hundreds of years.
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
Well Noreen.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Or - first Andrea and I'll come to you Ainsley sure.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Just to add locally at McMaster in Hamilton a colleague Katherine Manners developed a wonderful innovative faculty training and development program called Professor Hippo. And so there's been institutional endorsement from the Provost and President down to support faculty and staff engaging in these sessions. And it's considerable number of hours, both asynchronous and synchronous and an investment in time. But I think I think it's in it's in the first couple of years so the jury is out in terms of measuring outcomes. But you do have to have top down investment in voting. This is really, really important. As Anne's pointing out. Obviously, Trinity College has done this for a long time. I mean, it it speaks to the collective sense of historically, you know, before the 2000s, it was the students issue. Maybe between 2000 and 2018 was seen as a sort of collaboration and now we recognize it really is all we own it all and we own it all. And that actually translates into the learning environment really being that much richer. If, if it's broad based and there's joint ownership and faculty have the tools to be able to engage in this in this arena.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
So yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? Like when you think about when I was at Oxford too it at All Souls College, the college system has an embedded fellowship. So it used to be in the old, you know, in the in the traditional university setting, you would be in a community, you wouldn't just be at the university, you'd be within your college and in your college, you'd have meals and break bread. And and they also had a college doctor and they had a college in those days, chaplain who would be the counsellor. And so there was this there was this community of support. And somehow we got away from that model. And and then you're right, it became a very different model where you come on to this camp, this very big campus, and you're taking these courses and you don't have any even place, maybe a desk to go to, a place to study, you know, and and so and it's very lonely.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Maybe as I can just. Sorry to butt in again, but at UofT, as you know, we're close to a hundred thousand students. On our biggest campus, we do have the college model and there's been a lot of reformation in this idea of kind of communities of learning and wellbeing. And there's actually a transition one program in each college for those first year students to be in smaller groups, identify themes of learning, identify leadership and co-curricular opportunities that all speak and weigh into mental wellbeing and involve faculty involve faculty in mentoring and nurturing that. So it speaks to the idea of kind of smaller collectives. Yeah.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Ainsley?
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
Sure. I'd like to address the general question of faculty members who may be suggesting, Hey, you should do it the way I did it, the hard way. I do think that is changing. The members of our community that have been advocating for student mental health services, sexual violence prevention, support, academic accommodations have been members of the faculty because the students who used to look for the Dean of Students to answer this question or to navigate this with now go to their faculty member and they meet with that faculty member for the office hours and they say, I'm going to miss tomorrow's exam because I have an appointment or I'm a survivor or I'm going through an experience. And that faculty member then says, Wow, who at the university is helping you? And that faculty member shows up in my office, or that faculty member sends the vice president an email and said, Who helped students navigate this? So I have found more and more faculty members being supportive of students needs during these very difficult times, being very accommodating with academic concessions. I'm not suggesting this is universal, but I'm suggesting that this is a major pivot happening among the faculty. And remember, many of the faculty, the majority of the faculty members who are leading and doing cutting edge research in our universities right now are, you know, from the kind of current generation from the 80s and 90s. So they are now, having that experience as students themselves, they are now supporting students not only in teaching and learning, but advocating for those students with regard to student services. Our students tell us that the faculty members are the most receptive to their needs for academic accommodations. What faculty members need are, where's the information? So over the past several universities I've worked for, we've designed designed whether a red folder or green folder or a yellow folder, but a manila folder that simply has all the facts and data about the university and easy to find information about the counselling centre, mental health services, centre for accessibility. And it's all in one folder and we produce it at the beginning of each year, send it out to every faculty member and they put it into their file folder and when they need to refer to it, they know where it is. So that has been the key, making sure that faculty members are equipped with the information so that they can appropriately refer a student. They know that they are not financial aid advisors, but boy, they want to help a student who is in need. And I am hearing all the time from faculty members who are advocating for students. So I only want to argue that I think this is changing.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Interesting. I hope you're right. You know, we've had a few questions, and I don't really want to go down the rabbit hole. But just to note that there is always faculty concern about workload and faculty concern about, you know, how the advising time might undermine or impact the other duties and responsibilities of faculty members have. And that's a time honoured challenge. But if the culture, I can say sort of optimistically, is changing, perhaps people don't see it as an extra thing to do. But part of the normal fabric of teaching and learning and serving one's collective in unity.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
I think you're exactly right. I think that that that was my observation at Trinity. It's it's part of the culture there. It's part of your joining our fraternity, this is what we believe in. And so so that and I do agree with Ainsley. It is changing. But I also agree that I think giving faculty the information is key so that they don't feel left out on a limb and having the services be responsive, not only the health services, but the academic services be responsive to faculty who are advocating and reaching out on behalf of students. I think that's really important.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
So one question that emerges from this discussion often is about loneliness. And we've talked about that. And one would think that certainly since the pandemic and going forward with technology and the siloing of exchange with the world that that we all have, you know, kind of hooked on our doomscrolling or, you know, our techno technological devices, you know, the paradox is you're both connecting with a bigger world and some through a device, but you're also separated from that world, I mean, that's the sort of a classic tension of that of that habit now of that custom of that way of being. And I we're talking about meeting individual students needs in view of a collective responsibility. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are about how you connect students to to something bigger than themselves and what sort of tools or frameworks are we thinking through to engage students to recognize, you know, they're not alone? Or how do you, how do you how do you deal with loneliness. That's a big question.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
First of all, I think loneliness is the major problem. So so one of the most common problem presenting to student wellness is anxiety and and depressive symptoms. And a part of that is this feeling of loneliness and imposter syndrome and do I really belong here? And I can't really tell people how I'm feeling because then they're going to then I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to belong here. People are going to judge it negatively. And the whole, you know, sort of expectation like these these kids are coming in, having met the criteria to be at university, which is getting increasingly ridiculous. I'm looking at the entry GPA is going, that's that can't be real. Anyway, but so so the bar keeps getting higher. You get these, you know, high achieving kids coming in and then all of a sudden they're in a group of high achieving kids. And so and they're having to deal a lot of learn a lot of higher education skills all on their own. So I think it's about, again, a culture thing about really, really starting from the university messaging and leadership and then down to the residences and so on, echoing this idea of study life balance, of getting involved like this is a community, this is an opportunity. It's not just about getting this GPA or, you know, being this rank in your class. It's about enjoying university life. And so joining an intramural team, joining an association, joining a club, whatever is interesting, whatever, and volunteerism, this idea of giving and contributing to the to the community, I think is really, really important. And I think that's a culture thing about university life that also has changed and now needs to, I think, shift back. And I think that starts with us too.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Others?
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
I'll offer, often we bundle this conversation about connectedness and we almost make it a universal challenge for the entire university, when in fact it's happening in different ways. So with regard to connectedness and teaching and learning, if I stayed in that space during the pandemic, we were forced to go online. So for two years or a year and a half, depending on where you were in the world, courses were delivered online. So now faculty members had to develop a new tool on how to deliver very complex content online in a virtual way. So students lost that kind of intimate interaction, that exchange in the classroom. Some students appreciated it. Some students who were more introverted were like, Great, I have a comfortable place in my basement. This really works for me. Students with accessibility needs also appreciated that that virtual hybrid model of teaching where they had a chance to be in a comfortable place where all their needs were met. So that connectedness isn't universally lost in regard to teaching and learning. But if I moved over to the student services side, the student experience, the student development side of this conversation, I think we see a different set of challenges. Students lost two years, no matter how we slice it. It's either two years of high school, two years of middle school, their first two years of university or their last two years at the university. And during that time, it's an incredible developmental process going on where students are becoming themselves, understanding their challenges, more importantly, building social skills. And we lost that period of time. I remember hearing about parents who were now taking their first graders to school for the first time, and that first grader hadn't had an ounce of pre-school. So now they were struggling with some of the basics. That went through our entire system of education because we lost that developmental time. Where I am focusing on and really starting to pour our brains in. How do we structure the university so that it's structurally unavoidable for students to tap into the things that we need them to tap into? If any of you have experienced the book Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers Dan and David Heath. Made to Stick has a point in the book about universities or schools. If you want something done, a public health initiative, make it hard for people to avoid it. So in the best example is in a public school cafeteria. They used to have the pizza and the cake up front, and then students would stack up their trays with the junk food. And by the time they got to the end, it was the salad and the water. They flip the lunch, the cafeteria line around, and they put the salad in the water and the fruit first and then the pizza and the snack at the end. And they found kids were eating more healthy foods in school. So that is making it structurally unavoidable for students to make better decisions. So universities have to think about how do we structure the first year experience - housing, dining, recreation, classes, engagement after hours? How do we structure the university so we make it structurally unavoidable for students to make the right decisions? And we control that. We actually can put things in place to think about the outside the classroom curriculum for the student experience. At too many institutions, we're far too hands off when the outside the classroom curriculum. And outside the classroom, that's where students spend 75% of their academic career outside the classroom. Yet we don't we don't manage it as if it's part of the academic curriculum. So I think in the future, we have to make it structurally unavoidable for students to step away from the things that we know that will be good for them - career development, healthy eating, healthy exercise, time management, sleep, drinking water, all the things we know that can be important to them.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
I. I just. I'm sorry, Noreen. You want to go?
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
No, go ahead, please.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
You know, it's so exciting to think about creating, you know, the the unavoidable. I mean, I think just to add that the loneliness conundrum started way before COVID and COVID accentuated it. And absolutely, we've got this kind of developmental arrest in everyone and in our cohort, it really has impacted. And, you know, I think that some of the benefits of, you know, these these young people, the the engagement in, say, digital platforms is seen as, you know, a real precursor and a cause of loneliness and disconnection. But it's also it enables it enables connection. We're utilizing, you know, hybrid ways of connecting. We have to kind of lean into it. I'm not so sure we can create a full sort of brick and mortar structural entity where someone can avoid that. I think you meaning it more Ainsley in a metaphorical sense because, you know, this is our conundrum. We, we, we, we have a campus where so much is going on beyond the kind of physicality, beyond the health and wellness centre and how do we actually elicit that connectedness and that, that, that sense of community with so many complex variables. My my my brain hurts. I thinking about it.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Well, you know, I was just thinking here, here's a sort of concrete example, but I was just thinking, I agree totally with Ainsley, and I think it should be part of like a pedagogy. Like, you know, if you're learning about health and wellbeing, if you're in health sciences, maybe you should do a field, something in the field like you should join something. You know, if you're learning about art history, join something, you know, join an art history club. So instead of just these graded assignments that, you know, write this test, write this paper, how about doing something? And then what are the barriers for that and what did you find and what did you learn from the experience? And I can't think of a I can't think of a topic where that couldn't be the case. So I think it's about sure, and I'm looking at some of the chat that's of course, we're not disempowering students. We're not suggesting that students shouldn't grow up and shouldn't take incremental responsibility for these things. But we could also provide structure that would reinforce that. And that was the whole idea behind the mental health literacy course, which sounds so boring, but we are sold out every time because students are getting a credit for it. It's a - we put it through the curriculum committee. It's an accredited interdisciplinary course. Students love it. We just get we've had thousands of students through it and touch wood we haven't had any complaints, but it's we keep, keep getting positive feedback and and it's because students take are are able to take the time to take it because it's accredited it's it's a structured course in the curriculum so so I think there you know we have to be mindful about how we're building the kind of first especially first year experience. I agree.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
We got about ten minutes, and I, I really should bring up a question that we had kind of locked in. And it comes from a Yorkville student who wants to remain remain anonymous. But this student asks, how can student mental health be a continuous process, not, you know, one and done not a one off. And I know that there are, you know, continuing relationships between mentors and advisors and students. But I think this speaks to the bigger picture that we're talking about here, about supports and structural change and community responsibility. But it's obviously coming from a place from somebody who thinks, you know, you go get help and then you're supposed to be cured or done or less anxious or any thoughts about that and what you see happening on your campuses or elsewhere about that continuous process? Andrea?
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Yeah, I'll jump in first and think sort of focusing on the individual level. I think traditionally on campuses, I mean, we're thinking now mental health and mental well-being being way beyond the health services and the counselling services. But within those services there were traditionally lots of silos due to mental health stigma. They would be counselling services separate from health, there would be quotas of appointments where you could get ten, that you know, and this is in many universities and colleges, ten sessions across your life span of learning and, you know, one size fits all. And I think all of our institutions have done a lot of work on thinking about health and mental health, integratively. So who ever you see, be it a family physician, a nurse, a mental health provider, a counsellor, a psychiatrist they're going to tap into where you're at. We acknowledge that young people, particularly in their transitional youth years, need support when they need it. So there's an immediacy, there's an access piece, and for about 80% of people, if you get that access within the next day or two, that will suffice for now, but it doesn't necessarily mean one and done. You may need something else a little way down the line and there needs to be a flexibility within your service delivery model to be able to support that. So those would be my sort of top of mind comments around the journey of mental health being students engage in the university often longitudinally for more than four years. They do graduate work. They take longer over an undergraduate degree, and that should be absolutely accepted, validated when we think about an inclusive curriculum and inclusive institution. So we really have to be mindful about how we how we structure our services, our supports to be as barrier free as possible, as flexible, and to allow for that kind of, you know, individualized journey that a student should take.
"So there's an immediacy, there's an access piece, and for about 80% of people, if you get that access within the next day or two, that will suffice for now, but it doesn't necessarily mean one and done. You may need something else a little way down the line and there needs to be a flexibility within your service delivery model to be able to support that."
Dr. Anne Duffy:
But I'll jump in there and say, I agree. But I think we should acknowledge, too, that there's lots of work still to be done. So. So I don't think it's a barrier free journey for students and groups in in my experience and we've looked at this in terms of data. And so students what students are telling us is that they want easy access like a a a digital front door. They want they want to be able to go in to see what services are available, and then they want to be able to have them organized in some sort of rational way that pertains to them. And then students tell us, of course they would like everything on campus, and I understand that because, you know, a lot of students don't have vehicles, they're not from there. But what what they what really makes sense and what we know makes sense nowadays is to have health promotion and wellness and primary care available on campus. And most of our universities have some form of that or have that, which is great. But then there's a barrier in terms of moving between services, often even within the same university, if there's an escalation or if somebody needs maybe less intense that not everyone's in a really what we would call collaborative care model, which is where you have embedded in the primary care and mental health team and you have a navigator or a case manager that can organize all that. And so maybe some do, but most don't have that really fully modelled. And then there's the piece about, okay, what about for the minority of students, but significant minority of students who have more severe care needs. Some need to go to psychiatry, for example, need to go into the community because the university cannot and should not try to duplicate those speciality services. And so what are the facilitated transitional pathways there and back again? And we really talk a lot about that, to be fair to the student who raised that. And I think that there's quite a lot of work to be done. And I and it's hard for students because you're right, they're reactive, so they need help now. And then students graduate. So there's you know, I was doing a history paper on on suicides actually at Oxford. And and they're using a student journey as an example with one of the students. And what we learned from that student is that there was a huge advocacy, really constructive, that was built up that really changed the conversation about what needed to happen. And then those students graduated. So so then, you know, so then then then there's that. So then things sort of stall. So students really do have a lot of power in advocating and should continue to. But but we get that you've got a lot on your plate and and so we need to be doing that as well, not dropping the ball. And I think continuing to work together on these conversations about how can we make a more sort of seamless transition based on student need in a timely fashion. But, you know, against already under-resourced services where in the community, even if you're not a student, there's long, long waitlists. So how do we how do we solve this, you know?
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Yeah, indeed.
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
I think everything's been said. I won't add to that.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Perhaps I have time for one more question, and it comes out of some questions that we've we've had about talking about the journey, about the perhaps special challenges that students coming in from high school have and what you see along that journey, what supports, you know, how does your thinking respond to the different kinds of challenges or obstacles or anxieties that students have coming in from high school? I mean, is it all is it all kind of, you know, one thing or do you start thinking about, you know, stepping up to different kinds of care and attention and mentoring based on where they are in their academic journeys?
Dr. Ainsley Carry:
I think what we're seeing from the high school student is relatively simple, hasn't changed much in the past decades, from from my experience, I'm still seeing students in their first year challenging with struggling, struggling with time management. Now their courses are scheduled differently than they were in high school. They have more free time than they can ever imagine, but it's actually not free time. It's time that you're supposed to be studying. But they have 1 or 2 classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and then on Tuesday and Thursday, their schedule is full and they haven't figured out how to manage that. So the first year they're still trying to figure out how do I manage my time and my time requirements. They are still making a transition to the academic rigour of the university and the amount of reading that's done for assignment and the few evaluations that will be required. Some classes have two exams, a midterm and a final, and everything is right there. So that first year, that's quite a shocker from their high school curriculum that may have given them more opportunities to test their skills and evaluate themselves. One of the surprise, not maybe not surprising. I have a teenage daughter myself. But sleep and water and eating right still first year challenges and it simply being 17 or 18 and showing up in a university without the structure of your parents around you. I think that's critically important. Or care providers. So all of the things that used to keep them grounded and connected are gone when they arrive on a university campus and they have to rebuild those connective tissues to the people around them that help them feel stable. And that takes some time. And that's why I hope that we can think about the first year experience more critically and provide students a little more grace in the first year to make the first year mistakes that all of us made and our universities were gracious to us.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
I agree. And I'll just add that, you know, peer students are also very influenced at that age. And it's it's a neurocognitive thing about peer acceptance and peer, you know, what their peers are doing and here they are. They have to come in. They have to meet new friends. They're trying to keep their existing friends, but they're making new friends. And then there's peer pressure to do things like we know in first year, like binge drink, use cannabis. And this is all going to be counterproductive to healthy living, sleeping, doing well at school time management. So those are those are other challenges as well on making healthy. It's around that making healthy choices and supporting students to do that.
Dr. Andrea Levinson:
Another area that has shifted, I'd say, in the last 10 to 15 years is a good news story. And the number of students entering post-secondary with pre-identified mental health challenges. So that's sort of due to early intervention in the secondary school system. So, you know, there's there's ongoing work to do, but ideally you want good transfer and good transition planning, good sharing of, you know, health information from maybe a team in high school to the post secondary team on campus, that kind of thing. And that's very different from 15, 20 years ago. And, you know, that's the product of our universities being more accessible to a very wide range of students with, you know, various strengths and vulnerabilities.
Dr. Noreen Golfman:
Terrific. Well, I'm going to have to end it. Ainsley very unfortunately has a clock right behind him. So it's 11AM in BC and it's 3:30 in St John's, Newfoundland. So it's a big country. Big challenges. Thank you all so much for enlightening our listeners and our spectators. Indeed. And we have a note in our chat that says that we will be posting in the next few days resources and information following this and a link to this webcast itself. You should know, all of you, that there's a various people have said, Can we get in touch with these experts, these people on your campuses? So be prepared. Read your email. I think you'll be getting some questions from people, faculty, students, staff who are really keen to tap your experience. So thank you all so much. We could be talking for another two hours, but go out into your day and keep doing your great work and thank you so much.
Dr. Anne Duffy:
Thanks, everyone.
Visit Studiosity.com/studentsfirst for the next Students First Symposium. An open forum for faculty, staff and academics to candidly discuss and progress the issues that matter most in higher education.
