Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

Yes, perfectly active lives with the constant fear of death, rationing, conscription and loss of all normal ways of living.
Yes it is comparable and in not one single way was the Covid era worse. Your privilege is shocking. Deprived of developmental opportunities? Give your head a wobble.

@antelopevalley Totally disagree with this. There are assessment tools mental health professionals use to assess who is at risk of suicide.

I know - that's my whole point. The people who are making the decisions on accommodations are not mental health professionals able to carefully interrogate the nature and extent of the suffering - they are academics and pastoral staff who have perhaps done a short counselling course.

I am so interested in why so many here are unwilling to consider whether it is the system itself which is no longer fit for purpose, - instead insisting that children suck it up because our own generation managed to do so.

Our children exist in a totally different reality Many feel constitutionally hopeless - you must see the nihilism in culture? They do so not because we've told them to - Christ why would we do that? - but because they have eyes. At a global level, at a national level, there is real despair. They start to see it as pre-teens and then they can't un-see it.

Meanwhile the pressures to be compliant, to compete for an ever-shrinking pot, intensifies year by year - while the quid pro quo for being 'good kids' which existed for us (stimulating work, financial security, sense of achievement, clear path, home ownership, a family of your own) no longer pertains (though cruelly, we encourage those children least primed to see through the lie - working class kids, non-white kids) that it does if you only want it badly enough, piling side-hustle onto side-hustle.

Is the function of universities to provide global corporates (or any employer)with a broken-in human resource, with the cost born by the product ? Should academics and universities as institutions declare that a core responsibility is to toughen young humans up to withstand a brutal work life which rewards only those it has not manage to break? Or should they be protesting that brutality, encouraging young people (all of us, in fact) to stand against a systemic machine-for-profit which exists to extract everything it can from its resources before moving on to the next harvest?

Why should we churn out children resilient to an economic system which treats them like meat and which no longer offers much of anything in return? Why should we do all we can to keep this creaking, inherently unfair economic machine powering on at such human cost? Why are universities so bloody keen to be complicit in a system which all of us know in our heart of hearts is antithetical to humanity?

I think we all know that part of the answer is that their own livelihoods depend on the Ponzi scheme continuing to pull greater quantities of raw product in, and push more refined product out. I say that with real sympathy, at an individual level - I don't expect any academic to risk her own family's security.

But I do find it really odd - quite shocking in fact - that a class which purports to value enquiry, analysis, freedom, truth cannot look itself in the eye and see that it is the handmaiden at best, executioner at worst, of an inhumane economic ideology which has - sitting here in my study in 40 degree heat - already destroyed the hope of a progressively better world for our children.

I know that academics have themselves been victims , and that the world you thought you were going into has changed. But whataboutery - in this case, the assertion that individual damage is not damage if it is universal, or if previous generations suffered different kinds of damage - is exactly what the machine requires to grind on unimpeded.

To paraphrase Bob Crowe (and risk undermining my argument through literalism - I do not in fact believe that any mainstream Left position has grasped that the system cannot be reformed; that reform is itself the means of its reproduction): "Don't rail against the RMT for fighting for what all humans deserve - get a better fucking union."

Yes, that’s undoubtedly true. For example, during the pandemic if students in our halls had to isolate, the university paid for three meals a day to be delivered to the students’ rooms free of charge. The kitchen staff doing the delivering were hourly-paid young people, often the same age as the students, who if they had to isolate at home just didn’t get paid. And they couldn’t afford not to work and they came into work anyway despite the risk of getting Covid themselves. And our students complained bitterly about how there were not enough satisfactory vegan options in the free food delivered by low paid kitchen staff.

Obviously no-one said anything to them about this, and every effort was made to get them exactly what they wanted. Same with extensions and adjustments and everything else - we just get them exactly what they want because the customer is always right. We don’t say any of this to their faces!

But despite some posters on this thread suggesting that we are terrible people not fit to teach young adults, we aren’t nannies or mental health nurses or counsellors. We’re employees doing a job and seeing that the things we’re asked to give students aren’t actually helping them in the long run.

@WinterDeWinter I do not recognise the clear path you had. But I come from a different class.
What is really happening is that the middle class is shrinking fast. So there are still opportunities for high-paid jobs with good career progression and pensions, but there are fewer of them.
You want to change the economic system? I would support that. But it won't because it benefits people like you. What needs to happen is:

• the government need to stop artificially inflating house prices


• increase protection for renters


• allow local authorities to put limits on percentage/number of second and holiday homes


• seriously tackle climate change


• improve workers rights, especially those in the gig economy


• build social housing

But it won't happen because it would reduce house prices, increase costs of services many middle-class people use, and reduce income from rents.

It actually annoys me that many middle class people did not give a shit about these issues until it started affecting their own offspring. Most had no issue when it just affected the plebs.

You are being very dishonest now. No-one is saying that appraisal methods don’t change, they are saying that failing to comply with them now as they currently are is a problem.
Do you have an actual point to add here or are you just trying to ruin a decent thread by pretending not to understand the points that people are making?

There's no need for dramatics - I'm not trying to ruin anything. I was mainly responding to the call for exams to go back offline, but deferments, extensions etc are a part of the appraisal methods. There's no less worth in a degree because someone with extenuating circumstances took a longer time to complete it. Why is a degree only valid if complete in an arbitrary 3-year window? And I do somewhat accept the point about cheating, although just like anything else universities have to adapt to the times and possibly even change the definition of what cheating is.

Fair enough. How about getting back to fully face to face lectures, seminars, working groups, etc which is what the majority of students want? Or does it only work one way?

We have done, the minute the government allowed us to to that. My students only had one term and one week of online teaching, after the government locked us down in December 2020. The rest of the time we’ve been in classrooms or offices for lectures, seminars and tutorials, wearing masks, until last term when the mask requirement was removed.

Though going by the attendance rate this academic year, (20-30% amongst our first year cohort) I’m not even sure that this is what a majority of students want.

Interesting thread. I would say that people who were children or in their teens during the war lost out on a lot of developmental opportunities, for all the obvious reasons. Many of the things now deemed necessary for optimal development were impossible for the majority of young people until very recently, and still are for the majority around the globe.

Anyway, the point I want to make, tentatively, is that leaving aside lockdown, the obvious difference between people under and over 25 now is 24-hour a day access to the internet and the arrival of social media. I'm not surprised some young people claim to be constantly anxious. I'm not on Facebook but some of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is worrying. There are some very vocal young people who seem to be online almost all the time. Minimal time spent exercising, engaging with the natural world, reading a book, watching a film (with full attention), talking to real people face to face, and so on. Lots and lots of people agreeing with anyone expressing a minor worry that this is a mental health crisis. Lots of talk of 'hate' describing normal disagreement. It's not healthy.

Should academics and universities as institutions declare that a core responsibility is to toughen young humans up to withstand a brutal work life which rewards only those it has not manage to break? Or should they be protesting that brutality, encouraging young people (all of us, in fact) to stand against a systemic machine-for-profit which exists to extract everything it can from its resources before moving on to the next harvest?

This is frankly ridiculous. You really do need to give your head a wobble as the kids say, if you think that expecting a 20-year old to be able to read a nice novel and write an essay on it in one week - perhaps also reading a couple of short online articles too - is “extracting everything from them before moving on to the next harvest.”

Geez, I’m a Marxist by training, and even I think some people do need to sit their bums down and do what is objectively not exactly hard factory labour.

When my DS and his flat mates had to isolate due to one of the flat mates having covid, their flat only got a packet of bog rolls provided by the Uni. That was it. Nothing else. They had to make their own arrangements for food deliveries. Not allowed out of the flat. No Uni staff made any attempt to contact them to see if they needed anything. So making out all Unis made a lot of effort to help their students during covid is simply untrue. I'm sure some did, but some provided no help at all (other than a pack of bog roll, which is very strange!).

I'm glad to see you being open about this as it gives me hope for change.

My DD has a disability & can genuinely struggle badly, but she's very bloody minded & pushes on regardless, which isn't always in her best interests tbh. She postponed Uni due to the pandemic & took a local college course to fill her time. She hit a lot of problems there & asked for help, that just was never forthcoming as they were just snowed under dealing with other young people making more fuss than she could muster as she was genuinely bloody struggling. She refused help from us & ended up dropping out as a result. Thankfully it wasn't an important course for her, but it worries me for upcoming Uni

It actually annoys me that many middle class people did not give a shit about these issues until it started affecting their own offspring. Most had no issue when it just affected the plebs.

I think this is fair @antelopevalley and I'm ashamed of my own class and, to the extent that I've been complicit (though always left, and always with a Marxist-lite analysis of power through the axis of Class/Race/Sex), of myself.

In my defence, I now feel compelled to look well beyond the collapse of the middle-class quid pro quo (and to alienate my own class by saying it all out loud, creating... awkwardness ;-)

I was at uni before Covid (grad 2017) and saw regular uni destroy some people utterly. Horrific mental health issues. They could not cope. I hate to think how many are even worse now.

agree @antelopevalley My FIL was in Burma during WW11
He died of skin cancer as did many soldiers who were in Burma. I never met him and my children never knew their grandfather.
Apparently he never talked about his experiences and ended up an alcoholic which affected my DH's childhood.

At the uni where I work (RG) there seems to be a total unwillingness (from the university and the students) to accept that university is meant to be a bit difficult. Not overwhelmingly difficult, but harder than school - for all sorts of reasons.

This leads to problems at both ends of the mental health spectrum. We are incredibly unwilling to tell students that they are simply too ill (mentally or physically) to study and we keep offering 'accommodations' that don't actually help. (As pp have said, if you have crippling anxiety, or ongoing depression, or you're so ill from long covid you can't concentrate on reading a text, it won't much help you to assessments in August rather than May.) On the other end of the spectrum, we end up giving lots of 'mental health support' to students who would honestly do better with (more) study skills advice, more guidance on structuring revision, working out how to do two pieces of coursework that have the same deadline, etc. Being worried about that and unsure you can do it to the best of your ability is not the same as diagnosed anxiety and counselling probably won't help you through it either. But because we're not supposed to admit that assessments are inherently a bit stressful and difficult (they're supposed to be a test!), anyone who is finding them stressful must need some sort of accommodation or MH support.

Why is a degree only valid if complete in an arbitrary 3-year window?
I would absolutely argue that it isn't, but often in these cases, interruption is a better option than deferral.

I would also agree that students' campus lockdown experience was fairly dreadful, but we as staff were in a difficult position. If the Government said that we weren't to do campus teaching, etc., we couldn't do it. In my institution there was some disparity between departments - definitely some HoDs who were very Covid-cautious and moved slower. I would say the majority of students want an in-person experience, but those who do not are a noisy minority.

I really didn't say that. I was responding to the idea, expressed many times on the thread, that Finals /immovable deadlines are functionally brutal in order to toughen up young people for corporate careers.

One poster said effectively 'Absent this, how can an employer trust that graduate employees won't break at a critical point, when it's too late to prevent the damage (to the corporate!).' They said (paraphrasing) 'Work doesn;t care that your grandmother died.' Most have come at it less sociopathically, taking as given their moral responsibility to the students themselves to prepare them for Work, and then debating whether understanding and acoommodation actually acquits that responsibility. No-one has suggested that Work, as it is currently constructed, and the economic system which constructs it, might be the problem.

As I said I think quite clearly, it is not about « better » or « worse ». It is about the experiences not being comparable. One involved deprivation of developmental opportunities. One did not. I hope that is now clear.

I think the comparisons between the war and the pandemic slightly miss the point. We can probably agree it’s been crap, varying degrees of crap. But for me the most interesting part of this thread is how we best support this generation to rebuild their resilience and whether large scale adjustments/extensions/ shift in expectations to an unrealistic level actually help in the short, medium or long term. And I do think it’s clear that teenagers and young adults who genuinely are facing huge challenges are (and will) find it harder to access proper support because a substantial majority consider their needs equally as urgent, when they simply aren’t.

I think it is hard to change this mindset when there are payoffs i.e. longer time for exams.

I am not saying that any of the terrible experiences of war did not happen (to some; by no means most). I am, it seems necessary to repeat, making a point about better or worse. But it does seem to me, if you cannot understand that lockdowns deprived young people of opportunities to have formative experience, the one who needs to « give her head a wobble » might be you …

I agree with the OP. I'm an academic of 30 years' standing and can really see the difference over time. As well as students not meeting deadlines, the other thing I have noticed is the increasing number of students who have it written into their individual learning plans ( which are written by the Student Support team) that their anxiety means you cannot ask them to speak in class, cannot ask them questions, cannot expect them to engage in group work, etc. It makes running a class very difficult and it means they don't get a good learning experience . It is also terrible preparation for the world of work, as not many employers are going to be happy with someone they are allowed to interact normally with.

I would absolutely argue that it isn't, but often in these cases, interruption is a better option than deferral.

Completely agree and I like the actual premise of your thread (How is "kicking the stone down the road" as it were actually going to help most students). But not the odd rigid attitudes and dismissal of mental health conditions within.

@Bluevelvetsofa

I think it goes further back than university. So many young people doing GCSE and A level have special arrangements of one sort or another and I wonder what percentage it now is. When I worked as a SENCo, the expectation was that about 2% of students would require additional support. I’d be interested to know the percentage now.

I looked at the Estyn (Welsh equivalent of Offsted) report for our local primary school the other day. This wasn't what I was looking for but it jumped out at me when the report was describing the pupil background - apparently one third of the pupils in the school have additional learning needs. In case anyone's wondering, this isn't a school with any specialist unit or anything, just a standard village primary.

I wouldn't of course assume that all those pupils would have GCSE adjustments in the fullness of time, so it doesn't answer your question, but it struck me as a very large proportion.

This is exactly right. Young people have faced a highly abnormal period. These accommodations look on the surface like kindness, while actually being a cowardly failure to face and fix the problems; in face they make them worse.

How did the university do this? Did they kidnap them, force them into a box, beat them, starve and rape them, and cut their fingers off, or did they provide lectures for them to attend, accommodation and tutors, and ask them to then submit some coursework and sit some exams?

I presume you are at Oxford or Cambridge, the only universities to have higher suicide rates than the general population, as most other universities tend to stress students far less, but if so did you and others not understand what university is, and what it involves?