BY HANK REICHMAN

The following is from the Tampa Bay Times:

The only mental health counselor at Florida Polytechnic University got laid off in June. She suspects she was too loud about the ways the troubled university was, in her eyes, failing its students.

Her departure left some 1,400 of them with no on-campus counselor.

On the day Casey Fox was asked to leave campus with her boxes and books, she says she told a Florida Poly official that she feared the abrupt change would lead to the death of a student.

A month later, after others at Florida Poly also raised concerns about upending care for vulnerable students, Fox woke up to the buzzing of university alerts she’d forgotten to turn off. She had 60-something texts.

A student was dead. A student she knew.

Before dawn on Wednesday, soft-spoken, always-smiling senior Kevin Masculine had gone to a concrete bench on the empty campus and shot himself.

“There’s no way to tell if that student would have reached out,” Fox said Friday. “There’s no way to know because there was no one there. There was no one on campus to be that person.”

We faculty members often complain about the swelling ranks of administrators and staff while faculty positions, especially those on the tenure track, grow ever fewer.  But essential — often life-saving — counselor positions are hardly the source of the problem, as college and university administrations nationwide seek ways to cut back on mental health services even as increased homelessness and hunger among students puts more and more individuals at risk.

In 2011, the American Psychological Association (APA) noted an “alarming trend on college campuses nationwide” of students seeking help for mental health issues.  Reports the APA,”In the 2014 National Survey of College Counseling Centers, respondents reported that 52 percent of their clients had severe psychological problems, an increase from 44 percent in 2013.  A majority of respondents noted increases over the past 5 years of anxiety disorders, crises requiring immediate response, psychiatric medication issues and clinical depression.  In a 2016 survey of students by the American College Health Association, 52.7 percent of students surveyed reported feeling that things were hopeless and 39.1 percent reported feeling so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.”

The International Association of Counseling Services (IACS), the major accrediting board for collegiate counseling centers, suggests a minimum student-Counselor ratio of one Counselor for every 1000-1500 students.  I seriously doubt that even a significant minority of institutions meet that standard.  For example, in the California State University system, the nation’s largest four-year institution, 20 of 23 campuses fail to meet this standard.  According to the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP-affiliate that represents faculty, coaches, librarians and counselors in the system, “many CSU campuses have one Counselor for 4,000 students or more. . . .  At a growing number of CSU Counseling Centers, permanent/tenure-track counseling positions have been eliminated and all Counselors are temporary.  To make matters worse, the most seasoned Counselors on these campuses have been working there three years or less.”  At CSU Los Angeles, there are only 7 full-time counseling positions for over 28,000 students, and none of the Counselors have permanent positions.  At CSU Sacramento, there are only 12 positions for nearly 31,000 students.  Between 2007 and 2017, the number of full-time, tenure-line counseling positions decreased by 30 percent, while temporary counselor positions increased by more than 350 percent.

In California, Senate Bill 968, sponsored by CFA, “would require the Trustees of the California State University, and the governing board of each community college district, and request the Regents of the University of California, to have one full-time equivalent mental health counselor per 1,500 students enrolled at each of their respective campuses.”  If passed, the legislation would be an important start, but since it would not require full-time tenure-track hiring, even if it is passed California educators will still have their work cut out for them. 

Back at Florida Poly, mechanical engineering professor Christina Drake said, “We have a campus makeup that is a ticking time bomb” for mental health issues.  Nevertheless, since the end of the spring semester, the university has laid off a string of employees.  Faculty union members insist the cuts largely target those who’ve spoken up about campus issues.

According to the Tampa Bay Times,

In February, a “concerned Poly employee” mailed a letter to university trustees at their homes.  It described a toxic workplace, overpaid bigwigs and a culture of silence.

The letter also mentioned mental health: “We have one counselor here doing a job meant for three people,” it said, putting the campus “dangerously close” to avoidable tragedy.

The university’s president Randy Avent told the Lakeland Ledger: “My concerns are more around the group responsible for the letter.”

Nevertheless, the school’s audit and compliance unit investigated, finding in a May report that several claims could be substantiated.  The report found that some top administrators got raises of 20 to 29 percent even as the university’s foundation was $5.9 million in debt.  The next month, the layoffs began.

In early 2017, Florida Poly started working with BayCare Behavioral Health to supplement mental health care.  After Fox was laid off, the privatization and outsourcing accelerated.  The school agreed to pay BayCare $42,480 per year for a 24/7 hotline, three in-person counseling sessions per student, emergency counselors, and online modules.  The school will also hire a case manager, but will no longer have a full-time, on-campus counselor.  Instead, a BayCare counselor will visit weekly, holding four to eight hours of counseling sessions.

Soon after, professor Drake met with members of the Board of Governors, telling them, “You cannot put students in this high-stress situation and outsource it and say, ‘Hey, call this number.’”  The board thanked her for her comments.  The morning of Masculine’s death, Drake wrote to the state’s top higher education leader, chancellor Marshall Criser: “One of our worst nightmares for our students has occurred on our campus and it was likely something that was preventable.”  She begged him to “please investigate and hold the university accountable so that we might not encounter such a horrible circumstance again.”

According to the Times report, Rhodes Conover, a May graduate who has spoken out about student grievances at Poly, said the decision to lay off Fox disgusted him. “I don’t know if I can look another administrator in the eye. My blood boils,” he said. “They were specifically warned about the risk. … It’s unbelievable to me that that was the choice they made.”