December 28, 2007

Cornell 'Alert Team' Tries to Identify Troubled Students

Student mental-health problems pose a troubling dilemma for colleges: Intervene, and risk violating privacy and being sued for it. Ignore the problems, and they could deepen, resulting in suicide or harm to others.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Cornell University is confronting the conundrum by relying on an exception to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa: The university assumes that students are financial dependents, freeing officials to share concerns with parents.

Those concerns might arise from reports by staff members, who are trained to spot mental-health problems among students. The Journal describes how a custodian identified a bulimic student after cleaning up her messes in a dormitory.

Since 2005, Cornell has also relied on an “alert team” of administrators, campus-police officers, and counselors who meet weekly to compare notes on potentially troubled students. Timothy Marchell, the university’s director of mental-health initiatives, says the group was founded after a campus advisory council realized that warning signs that might have averted campus tragedies went unheeded because “each person knew pieces of the story but no one saw the whole picture.”

“When parents send their sons and daughters off to college,” says Mr. Marchell, “there’s an expectation … that there will be people looking out for them.” —Don Troop

Comments

1. Kudos to Cornell and other institutions who are trying to address these new realities.
   I began my career as a university administrator when “in loco parentis” was very much in vogue. Many complained about those protective restrictions including parents and students. So we moved away from those days.
   Since then state and federal legislation has made it more difficult for institutions to protect students even if they wanted to.
   Now is a new day. Mechanisms must be devised to protect student privacy rights but at the same time provide all students with more than a modicum of safety.
   So congrats to Cornell and the slew of others who will soon join her.

   — Gus Mellander    Dec 30, 05:06 PM    #

2. Cornell helps students

   — Cassandra Miller    Jan 2, 04:40 PM    #

3. If the students are under 21, doesn’t Cornell have an obligation to act as the students’ parents’ agents on their behalf and protect their charges from self-harm, harm and injuring others?

   When I was a school bus driver, kids sometimes would complain of having to conform to minimal comportment rules. I explained that there was only a very short list of rules; that they were under 21 and because was in charge of the bus, I was responsible for their actions.

   Seems simple enough to me.

   — h dunbar    Jan 2, 08:04 PM    #

4. I agree with the above statements. Surely caring enough about people overrides any ‘right to privacy’. As a psychiatrist, I know that many people present late for treatment and suffer many losses, including their university studies, friends, family, prison terms etc because no-one was caring enough to force them to seek treatment.
   I think Cornell is a trendsetter that deserves acclaim

   — Joyce A    Jan 3, 02:24 AM    #

5. I certainly agree but it makes me smile to think the flower power generation has now turned into their parents. Thanks for being responsible after you’ve had all your fun.

   — John    Jan 3, 06:21 AM    #

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