“Are you burnt out?” I asked.
Her face was flat. “I still am,” she said. “Yeah. Yes, and I still am.”
Worcester is famous For snow dumps received in winter. It has to do with the city's location relative to the Appalachian Mountains. As the temperature drops, the clouds spread, and then the snow falls relentlessly, making the weather harsh. All winter it was cruel, cruel, cruel, but somehow, slowly, it wasn't anymore. Thus ended the WPI crisis. No one I spoke to could fully explain how they knew the emergency had subsided. The only thing they were sure of was that, at one moment in the spring of 2022, they felt intuitively that the final death was behind them. From summer 2021 to winter 2022, the faculty was on hiatus. “We were always waiting, waiting for there to be a next time,” Fu said. “It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop.” But somewhere deep in the winter, it became clear that winter was over, she said. There were no clear boundaries, only subtle changes. “The culture on campus felt really upbeat,” she said. “Like we've been through this traumatic experience, but somehow we can see the end of the tunnel. Somehow something is over.”
King said she knew “it” was over sometime in the spring when people started looking each other squarely in the face again. For months no one seemed able to bear eye contact. “That kind of pain is usually something you don't want. If I look into your eyes, I can feel your pain.” Then one day, something changed. “People started looking me in the eyes, and even though I couldn't see them smiling, I could tell they were smiling,” she said, gesturing to the masks everyone was wearing at the time. “And I knew I was about to turn a corner. People were looking me in the eye and just like looking at me. And I was looking at them.”
It is clear that the mental health crisis has forever changed the structure, culture, and expected role of academia in American society. More than half of American college students now report experiencing depression, anxiety, or seriously considering suicide. This is an issue that extends beyond geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources, prestige, academic ability, and more. Nearly one in four Americans enrolled in college considered dropping out in the last year due to mental health issues. Adjusting pedagogy to account for illness and, in some cases, disability on this scale is a new frontier in postsecondary education.
In early 2022, WPI opened a large new wellness center right next to the school's main cafeteria, proclaiming that health is central to the school's organizational mission. By the time I visited Worcester this fall, almost all of the short-term recommendations made by the task force, as well as some recommendations from Riverside's independent review, had been implemented.
