New Framework Tackles Stress

In an effort to alleviate student stress and promote mental health at the College, several administrators are working to develop a multi-faceted plan to build community and resilience, promote mind-body well-being, increase diversity and foster inclusivity. Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Andrea Lloyd and Professor of Spanish and Interim Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández are in the process of building upon their initial platform, which has become known as “The Grid” through a series of discussions with various audiences within the community.

“The Grid” is comprised of three separate umbrella objectives: Building Community and Resilience, Promoting Mind-Body Well-being and Increasing Diversity and Inclusivity. Each objective has its own chart and associated timeline of current, near-term and far-term concrete agenda items.

This project partly grew out of a series of meetings held by the College Board of Overseers, a sub-group of the Board of Trustees responsible for the undergraduate institution, in which its anchor administrator, Lloyd, had been helping to guide a conversation over concerns and challenges surrounding inclusivity, diversity and community on campus.

Following these conversations and a presentation by Smith Abbott, Lloyd and Fernández, these three were asked to put together a list of initiatives, programs and opportunities that the College could work to expand upon in the next few years. This “wish list,” as Smith Abbott termed it, was slated to include price tags for what it would take to get the College to a better place in terms of inclusivity and diversity on campus.

Separately, at the May meeting of the full Board of Trustees, Smith Abbott presented a long reflection on what had transpired throughout the year, particularly framed around student stress.

“We discussed what it feels like to not be able to get out from underneath the stressors of day-to-day life as students at Middlebury and what that brought to the floor in terms of what types of support were missing, and what students thought we lacked on campus,” Smith-Abbott said.

These talks on diversity and inclusivity paired with what was surfacing about student stress led to a sense of urgency on the part of the Board of Trustees that the administration needed to discuss these issues and work to develop an action plan.

“We were asked by the Board of Trustees to identify the areas in which we could have the greatest impact and to identify three ‘experiments’ that we could have on the ground in September that would address some of the causes of student stress,” Smith Abbott said.

Smith Abbott emphasized that they weren’t trying to collapse the diversity and inclusivity piece into the rest of the student stress like a problem to be solved, but rather saw a great deal of overlap between the stressors that students brought with them when they came to the College or experienced as a result of being a student in a community that traversed between the realms of academic stress and issues of identity, community, student support and bias.

In what started as a brainstorming session with a white board and a great deal of buzz-words surrounding stressors across campus, Smith Abbott, Lloyd and Fernández began to separate these words into three categories which naturally morphed into the three experiments requested by Whittington.

“We started by seeing how those qualities or stressors settled into three big categories, and then within each category we started to brainstorm both what was already happening, as well as what we could imagine happening this year and beyond,” Smith Abbott said. “We picked one thing from each of those big umbrella categories that we thought we could actually try to make happen this year.”

Due to fiscal year constraints, the items slated for this fall couldn’t be the more substantial ticket items because they were out of sync, and thus not yet included in the budget cycle which starts every January. They furthermore planned to follow through with only the smaller agenda items because the whole community had yet to be involved in the conversation.

“It wasn’t meant to be, ‘here’s what is good for everybody, as we recognized the need for a much broader community conversation, which we have moved forward this fall,” Smith Abbott said. “We were trying to be really thoughtful about which of the agenda items we felt were good, solid ideas to at least try, and which we would have to hold on until more people weighed in on them.”

Thus far this fall, “The Grid” has been presented to the Board of Trustees, the President Senior Leadership Group, the Middlebury Leadership Group, the Community Council and the entire Student Life Division. Students were shown the plan on Dec. 2 and faculty will be shown on Dec. 17.

These discussions have involved a powerpoint on the components of “The Grid” followed by brainstorm sessions in which small groups address what might already be happening on the small scale in order to gauge what efforts are already afoot, perhaps departmentally or in a student organization. After recognizing what was already in place, these small groups have then fed additional ideas into “The Grid.”

“One of the ironies of this is that as this grid grows, there is a danger of the thing itself becoming an overwhelming document, which we are trying to avoid,” Smith Abbott said. “Let’s not stress people out with a thing that is supposed to be helping with stress!”

One of the experiments slated to begin this Winter Term is a storytelling series called “It’s Not What You Think,” a space for staff and alumni to reflect and converse with students on past failures and the twists and turns of life. This is built upon a program Smith Abbott had learned about at a conference and is targeted to be a natural complement to existing storytelling series such as “What Matters to Me and Why” put on by the Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Smith Abbott stressed the need to identify and build upon such synergies within the community.

President of the College Laurie L. Patton reached out to the community earlier this week outlining a list of activities working to create a more inclusive community, including several objectives outlined by “The Grid.” One such measure they have taken is inviting the Posse Foundation to host three on-campus workshops — one for admissions and financial aid staff, one for faulty and administrators and one for student leaders.

According to her email, “These half-day workshops will leverage Posse’s experience designing and facilitating interactive experiences that explore and confront challenging sociopolitical issues facing higher education today.”

In addition to these workshops, the College has contracted Romney Associates to hold four faculty-recruitment workshops designed to boost their goal of further diversifying the faculty.

Among many potential longer term goals is a pre-enrollment program for first generation students or students coming from high school backgrounds where having some kind of summer preparation program could be helpful. Another expensive potential long-term objective is the addition of new CRAs to each commons.
Moving forward Smith Abbott stressed the need to figure out how the conversation will continue.

“One of the important things we’ll need to clarify moving forward is how this conversation will continue,” Smith Abbott said. “What is a mechanism that allows the campus to own this conversation and for it to continue in a robust fashion so that people really think their good ideas are being recorded and acted upon?”

One such mechanism is slated to be a website welcoming community input to further the conversation surrounding these objectives. Such a platform would provide a space where new ideas can begin to take shape and form.

“We are beginning work on a website that will act as a hub for discussion and ideas around issues of stress, inclusivity, resilience, mind-body well-being and more,” said Vice President for Communications and Marketing Bill Burger. “Given the number of initiatives that are being considered and that are in place already across the institution, we felt it would be helpful to the community if we created a modest site to describe these efforts and invite suggestions and comments. I think we all see this as a first step and we’ll continue to evolve the site and our approach to it over time.”

While this project could potentially continue under a working group as a part of Community Council or some kind of hybrid SGA and faculty-staff council, Smith Abbott spoke to its ever-changing nature.
She said, “We’ll need to see which things are really going to stay and what is the space for experimentation. The idea here is to keep things dynamic and open.  We want people to have real influence by participating in a process to figure out what really works for Middlebury.”