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.

I was horrified by how students were treated during the pandemic - the students in Manchester literally fenced into their accommodation blocks at points, the ones in my city being blamed for social gatherings and causing us to move up a covid tier - when the uni had covid tested anything that moved and the social gatherings in question were waiting at a tram stop to travel onto campus... and healthcare students had a really really crappy time of it with the ever-changing rules and placement stop-gos.

Yes, there are some entitled babied idiots out there - I can think of a couple of my course, but they were in the minority and most of the cohort I was with really did knuckle down, get on with it, find workarounds for as much as they could do and slog on through changed assessments, screwed up placements and the whole debacle. Even the ones who were awestruck by the initial experience of how a washing machine worked have come out the other side of it with heads screwed on - and through it all they took all the shit hurled at young people being blamed for all the covid tiers and eternal Leicester lockdown, followed all the rules (except the one spoilt princess one who caused chaos and pissed off an entire house-share of half the bloody course) and really really tried to do the right thing.

I think the pisstake contingent was always there but in the past they would have drifted into jobs post-school and kind of muddled along - but now they HAVE to go to university and some of the more consumer-savvy universities who have to actively push for numbers DO tend to bend over too far backwards to keep them on-board. Mind you I think it's probably one half of the ex-polys as you sure as hell aren't going to be allowed to doss about on a vocational healthcare course!

A lot of people are ignoring that this was a problem before Covid. It’s not a case of returning to how things were before the pandemic, as things were pretty bad then too. Covid just increased it. This is a longer-term and deeper problem among this generation of students. So acknowledging they’ve had it tough (and no, not tougher than their lecturers, as a PP suggested) won’t get us anywhere near solving the problem, as it’s more deep-seated than Covid alone.

Well yes, there is a bigger issue in society around all kinds of "reasonable adjustments" for lots of reasons which some would call "dumbing down".

Look at entry requirements for say the police or fire service where physical abilities has been massively watered down. There was a time when you couldn't get in the police if you wore glasses or couldn't run the specified length in the specified time, but no longer. Likewise there used to be a weight lifting requirement for the fire service which has been massively watered down. There are now even hoists and lifting equipment on fire appliances to get, say, the portable pump off the appliance, whereas in the past, it would just take a couple of burly blokes to carry it off!

And then there is dyslexia and dyscalculia where pupils at all stages can be awarded "accommodations" but where such people would really struggle in a workplace, i.e. someone with dyscalculia really, really, shouldn't be working in a numerical job such as book-keeping or accounting or tax, and someone with dyslexia shouldn't be a book editor or proof reader!

But that is a problem for society in general. Not sure why it's fine and dandy for someone with a recognised disorder to get extra exam time, a scribe, deadline extensions, but someone whose been severely affected by covid restrictions, but has no MH diagnosis doesn't deserve any accommodations at all?

@TullyApplebottom , even amongst soldiers, the nostalgic idea of war building resilience is true only for the lucky. According to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2089086/,
15% of British soldiers were discharged from WW1 with shell shock, about 1/3 of the Allied casualties in the 1943 Tunisian campaign were neuropsychiatric, and about 25% of soldiers in the early years of the Korean conflict suffered neuropsychiatric diseases.

In the recent article militaryhealth.bmj.com/content/early/2022/01/17/bmjmilitary-2021-002045
the authors report that in a large, comprehensive search of NHS records in a certain area of the UK, 38% of veterans sought MH care between 1985 and 2021. This is significantly higher than the general population.

I am not prejudiced against soldiers. My adored grandfather's family had a long military tradition. He was the somewhat indulged baby of a large family; WW2 was the making of him and he went on to a successful military career. I just think resilience is built only for the lucky ones. These data would appear to support my hypothesis, as there is surely a large grey area between 'resilient' and a psychiatric diagnosis.

But again, I was not making a point about active combat. Of course that can impact mental health, but Most people in this country did not see active combat.
the point is really quite a simple one; the comparison between the wartime generation and the covid generation is inapt, because their experiences are not comparable. The comparison does not afford a basis for concluding, as some here have done, that the covid generation’s current behaviour is evidence of inherent defects in their character or upbringing.

I disagree with a lot of what Tullyapplebottom had said, but I agree that the WW2 comparison is unhelpful - for different reasons though.

How the British behaved during WW2 has become something of a national myth, and makes for a belief (which I think is no longer true) that the British tend to tough things out by paying insufficient attention to their mental health. The result is an overreaction to feeling bad about stuff in a way that I don't see happening in my adopted country.

But it's worth remembering that the reason why the WW2 comparison was raised on this thread - because of the allegation that no generation had been through what this one had. That allegation strikes me as either not capable of any meaningful comparison and therefore meaningless, or it is hyperbolic. And hyperbole is going to distort a person's view of what they've gone though in a very unhelpful way. A person's perception of their own suffering can be a very suggestible, malleable thing.

I’m afraid the statement that no generation has been through an experience like lockdown is actually true (it’s probably necessary for this audience to spell out that that is not the same as saying that no generation has been through anything as bad). I cannot think of a time when inaction and isolation has been forced on the population on this scale. It was a psychological experiment on all of us and we do not yet understand what all the impacts have been, especially on the young.
i am not suggesting we should tell them they have been damaged but as the adults in the room who let this happen - indeed in many cases bayed and shrieked for it to happen - we should acknowledge our responsibility and have empathy and compassion.

We also, of course, indulged ourselves in a lot of rhetoric about how the young had a responsibility to those older than them to protect them and should therefore comply, as potential vectors of disease. Which we certainly could have chosen not to do. That may also have an effect.

True.

@TullyApplebottom
That’s not quite true. Lockdowns and quarantine have been pretty common in history during times of plague. I know that we haven’t had a significant disease outbreak in living memory, so it felt “new”, but social distancing was mandated during the Spanish Flu, for example, (see this article www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus which explains how that worked) . Even the word “quarantine” derives from a specific period of mandated social isolation-the 40 days (“quaranta”) a ship had to spend in harbour before the inhabitants were allowed ashore, to try and stop the spread of bubonic plague.
The main differences between this generation and the ones in the past are that a) unlike in the past, a big epidemic was unexpected and the subsequent public health responses frightening and unfamiliar
b) they had access to the internet.
In theory having access to the internet should have made this easier but, as social media is such a strange phenomenon anyway, in some ways the internet seems almost to have made it worse. To what extent there should be continued accommodations is a difficult question and it is one I don’t really have an answer to. I just wanted to correct the misconception that this experience was particularly historically unique; public health quarantines were the norm for a very long time, just not recently.

I am well aware of all that, thank you. The measures undertaken to combat Spanish flu were not comparable in scale to the national lockdowns we have just experienced. If you have to reach back to the time of plague for a parallel I think that reinforces the point that the period we have just been through is truly extraordinary. It is simply not reasonable to expect it not yo have affected young people adversely.

Yes, lockdown and quarantine are two very different things. Quarantine is ancient. Lockdown as practiced in the UK during this pandemic is brand new.

Not true. Lockdowns happened for polio outbreaks.

Polio outbreaks as recent in the fifties led in some places to school closures, swimming pool and library closures and people avoiding shops. Work continued though.

What you describe here is not a lockdown as practiced in the UK during this pandemic. Some regional school closures and work continuing is not the same as nationally decreed closures of schools and whole economic sectors, and it didn't involve people being subjected to significant restrictions on leaving their homes.

@ApplesandBunions There were no national lockdowns because people in the recent past did not travel much. It could take many months for an infection to spread across the country. So of course the response was more localised. It would have been ridiculous to have a national lockdown for a part of the country that may not have a polio outbreak until six months later.

Exactly, there were no national lockdowns and so the experience of them is something new and specific. It's immaterial to this discussion what the reason for that was.

The reality is that pre the internet, we simply couldn't have had lockdowns on the scale that we did. There's no way that Universities could have continued operating at all if lecturers/students weren't on campuses without an alternative method (albeit very flawed) of delivering the tuition online. Likewise no way we could have closed down so many other workplaces, i.e. offices, banks, etc without the internet. I think it's now obvious that the internet is a double edged sword as it facilitates crazy things like lockdowns, but at least now that the resultant damage can be seen, we can only hope that they're never happen again and some more sensible alternative measures are planned to deal with future pandemics.

Oh yeah, I don't see how it could've happened until well into the 2010s. Even in the late 00s things were just so much less internet-ised.

I think there’s a pressure/anxiety that comes from being up to 50k ‘in debt’ at the end of your degree that I certainly didn’t have. And the ‘waste’ of money on the lost seminars, contact time and experiences.

My Dd had to live in just one very warm, small room for 2 weeks solidly as everyone else in her house had covid fairly early on, pre-vaccinations. Students either side were vomiting and leaning out their windows coughing so she didn’t even have the window open until she guessed they were in bed. Dd couldn’t come home as her younger sister was medically vulnerable and couldn’t visit her sister who was rushed in hospital several times for serious problems. It was stressful (for all of us) when she did occasionally come home, thinking she could infect us and the consequences. So she became a volunteer at the vaccination centre in her Uni city and got a lot of satisfaction from that.

When Dd finally did get covid she was on her own in the house, hours away from us. At least by now she was vaccinated and she could move around the damp flat freely. But she couldn’t breathe easily and was starting to hallucinate with a high temperature, which again is pretty stressful for anyone on their own. And, may I say, for a mum on the phone at 3am who can’t just drive several hours and pick her up.

It was the lack of physical face-to-face contact, that is so vital for us as primates, that has been so difficult. Leave most primates isolated (with the exception of adult orangutans) and their mental health suffers.

Dd managed remarkably well mentally but it was not a nice experience at times for her. She has just graduated with a first and is very ready to work hard.

As for war comparisons, I remember the phrase ‘don’t mention the war’ when I was little. And our town didn’t let off any loud fireworks as the older people still got very upset. And this was decades after the war.

My 93 year old uncle reckons the war was easier than the pandemic. However, he obviously was too young to fight.

I do agree with the OP. What I find is that the younger generations seem to have a mindset where they expect everyone and everything to be available 24/7 while at the same time having a very short "plan-ahead" window. I think this is primarily caused by them having been practically born with social media and web 2.0, but I think it has also been exacerbated by the pandemic when most of our lives were online.
For example many students will be surprised if you tell them that if our deadline to post grades is 15th June at noon, no they cannot submit their dissertation on the 14th at 8pm. It's as if it never occurred to them that the dissertation will be marked by a real person (rather 2) who needs to sleep and eat and possibly have a family life too, and there are other various administrative processes (external boards etc.) that need to be followed.
I've also encountered students who seem to operate under the assumption that if they've been e.g. off 1 week with Covid then all of their assignments, right until the very end of the term, need to be moved back by 1 week... I feel that every class I have to point them to the assignment briefs and remind them "with what we've covered so far in class, you should have enough to answer question 4".
On the other hand, if you want to stick to the university's rules for extensions and mitigating circumstances, in the hope that this will maybe teach the students some time management skills and make your life a bit easier (without extensions and m.c. becoming a "free for all"), you are out of look if you have "kind" colleagues who the students know they can turn to and who will insist that you grant a (non-permitted) extension or waive late days. And they get to be the kind cool guys while you're the witch.

@aridapricot yep — I frequently encounter students these days who will send me a draft or paper by email at 9, 10 or 11pm - or even in the middle of the night, 3 or 4am! - then are genuinely surprised and annoyed that I haven’t marked it for a meeting at 9am or 10am.

Obviously I don’t need to get up, have breakfast, have a shower, drive to work, etc., but am just in suspended animation in my office ready and waiting for The Essay to arrive. 😂

Sorry for disappearing from my own thread. I hope no one has started AWOL procedures with threat of deregistration😃Have been too busy with work stuff and end of school term etc. 😬

I guess my overall feeling is that - regardless of disagreements on Covid and lockdown impact and whether or not it was right to make allowances at the time - how do we move forward from this? I feel that, at this point, it's more important to find a solution that we can work with going forward. It seems clear that reverting to 'situation normal' isn't going to be successful because students are unable/unwilling to adhere to this. But neither do I feel that having a total free-for-all is the answer. Over this past academic year we seem to have swung between those two and it's clear there is a need to find some middle ground.

Whatever the nuances of the situation, this thread has made me, as an academic, feel a bit less alone. It's easy, as a lecturer, to feel just a wee bit of resentment at undergrads going partying for New Year's when I still couldn't see friends/family after a year, yet at the same time be expected to accept any and all excuses and explanations for extensions, while not being given the same courtesy by my institution...my tag-line throughout has been, "At least it's not 1350", meaning that at least most of us had a decent hope of making it out the other end alive and with most of our loved ones alive. You do have to be alive, in order to profit from mental health of any sort...

...that said, it's sucked.

@aridapricot Agreed.

@Trivium4all I agree here too. The lack of staff support from many institutions makes it even worse. Students get a two-week extension, but there’s no extension to the marking deadline. Impossible when half the cohort in some cases are receiving extensions.