Students and mental health
Regarding your youth mental health crisis article (“A Generation In Crisis,” January/February), I would humbly suggest that a reckoning is due about our adult irresponsibility crisis. Growing up with active-shooter drills because adults can’t pass adequate gun safety laws; growing up with toxic social media because adults can’t pass adequate platform responsibility laws; growing up anxious about nature’s basic operating systems because adults can’t pass adequate fossil fuel pollution laws—that and more gives plenty for young people to stress about, all well footed in adult failure. Add in the corrupting role of corporate lobbies, and there’s grounds for anger as well as stress.
Sheldon Whitehouse ’78
Newport, RI
Thank you for putting college student mental health on your cover. Elis for Rachael applauds the many major changes Yale has instituted since we filed our lawsuit in November 2022, including allowing students to continue their health insurance coverage and not being automatically banned from campus following a mental health leave of absence. Our impression is that these changes, along with many others in the settlement, represent a new and significant commitment to improving student mental health. We have heard from numerous students about how these policy changes have considerably improved their mental health. We hope they represent an emerging, genuine culture shift in campus-wide awareness of the lifesaving importance of student mental health, along with how to foster and encourage it.
It is notable to us that the only two Ivy League universities to receive failing scores in the December 2018 Ruderman Family Foundation Report on mental health in the Ivy League—Yale (53 percent) and Dartmouth (51 percent)—are the two that have recently made the most progress. Dartmouth’s choice of Sian Beilock as their 19th president signifies a sincere commitment to student mental health. Less than one week after being inaugurated on September 22, 2023, President Beilock convened a panel of seven of the eight living surgeons general—moderated by Dr. Sanjay Gupta—to discuss mental health issues and solutions. We hope that Yale president Maurie McInnis will follow Dr. Beilock’s lead in continually improving mental health policies at Yale, well into the future.
Elis for Rachael
This letter was signed by Elis for Rachael members Alicia Abramson ’24, Paul Johansen ’88, Lily Colby ’10, Zack Dugue, Willow Sylvester ’22, April Smith ’96, and Lucy Kim ’24, ’25MPP.
I loved Doris Iarovici’s wise article “A Generation In Crisis,” which described the origins of the college mental health crisis and reported on practical changes Yale has made to support the mental health of its students. As both a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist and a parent of high schoolers, this serves as a timely reminder of the delicate balance we must strike in raising our youth: giving them space to grow (even when that involves failure, disappointment, and emotional turmoil) and offering them the support they need when things get tough.
Open communication, validating their feelings, and sharing my own stories of setbacks—where things didn’t go as planned, but ultimately turned out okay—are all essential tools in this process.
One question we must ask ourselves is this: Are we nurturing a generation that is resilient, flexible, and compassionate with themselves, or are we inadvertently raising perfectionists who fear the very concept of falling short?
Daphna (Shafir) Finn ’04
San Diego, CA
The excellent “A Generation In Crisis” article omitted Yale doctoral students. In the mid-twentieth century, their mental health seemed worse than any undergraduate woes. Jane Tompkins’s memoir described “pain and isolation,” Tom Wolfe called his years “morbid” and “poisonous,” and Alvin Kernan remembered grad students so eccentric that one decided he was Batman and prowled the New Haven streets in costume.
What changed after the 1960s? We need a book on that question, but I venture that the old stereotypes of faculty as nerds and misfits faded. Popular scorn of “eggheads” diminished, and that shift benefitted doctoral students. As Kingman Brewster knew, the prerequisites for leadership were changing. For a successful career, expertise began to outweigh family assets, gracious manners, athletic prowess, or mental health based on strict conformity to middle-class norms.
But as our society embraced the importance of expertise, we also increased the stress on the young, as Iarovici’s article demonstrated. Solutions to old problems often create new problems.
Robert Hampel ’72
West Grove, PA
While Doris Iarovici presents an excellent analysis of student angst at Yale and other schools, I believe she is leaving out one very important solution to the problem. During my freshman year, in February of 1965, I experienced what we used to call an identity crisis. On the brink of failing three of my five courses, I found some relief in drawing closer to God. Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. was of some help to me, as were others in the Department of Religious Studies. I know that Christian Union Lux and other campus ministries now provide a safe and welcoming haven for those who are looking for their true purpose in life while at Yale. Students would be wise to remember Yale’s motto: For God, for country, and for Yale!
George Taylor ’68, ’71MDiv
Santa Rosa, CA
Speaking out
As a Yale undergraduate coming of age in the 1960s, I was proud of Lux et Veritas and of leaders like the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who encouraged and manifested controversial dialogue, including statements, in matters of “public, social, and political significance.” How distressing it is to see the apparently self-protective emergence of “institutional voice,” (“Using the Institutional Voice,” January/February), perhaps more aptly named “institutional silencing,” which appears on its face and substance antithetical to Lux et Veritas. I’m extremely disappointed to see Yale’s current leadership effectively build a moat around an already existing ivory tower. What are we afraid of?
Frank M. Reed ’67
Missoula, MT
On apartheid
We write to you about YAM’s recent cover image and related article on “Fighting Apartheid” (“The Shanties on the Plaza,” November/December). We appreciate the reporting on the Yale community’s history of activism against apartheid. At the same time we are genuinely concerned about how the article, imagery, and even usage of the term “apartheid” may be received by your readers, given recent events on campus and in many locations where alumni live. The term itself is now a contested concept, pitting groups against each other and precluding productive conversation and mutual learning.
Unfortunately, there is all too frequent labeling of Israel as an “apartheid” state that should be the subject of boycott, divestiture, and sanctions. Of course, the accusation ignores the actual and historical meanings of “apartheid,” as both Muslim and Christian Israeli Arabs are integrated throughout Israeli society, serving as Supreme Court justices, holding Parliament (Knesset) positions, going to the same universities as Jewish Israelis, serving as doctors, lawyers, etc., and often living next door to Jewish Israelis in cities and towns such as Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Lod, and Acre. Not to mention that in fact there are more Jewish Israelis who are “of color” than who are racially “white.” The underlying implications of apartheid and false accusations against Israel are obvious to us.
In any event, there was no apparent reason to run this article at this particular time when tensions on campus are still at a feverish pitch, as the article gives no indication that this year or date is a notable anniversary relative to the 1980s movement. Perhaps in the future, YAM could utilize sensitivity to readers of many backgrounds to screen its content and avoid insensitive articles that might inflame its readers, including alumni, students, and their parents.
Yale Jewish Alumni Association Executive Board
This letter was signed by board members Neil Herbsman ’85, chair; Gittel Hillebrand ’90, vice chair; Ariel Nurielli ’93, treasurer; Rob Greenly ’83MBA, secretary; and Rachel Littmen ’91.
I assume I’m not the only one who was struck by the parallels between the brave and principled students described in your moving tribute to the South Africa protests of the 1980s and the students engaged in protests last spring against Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza. Then, as now: a regime widely condemned for adopting a brutal regime of apartheid; Yale’s investment in companies facilitating the machinery of apartheid; student demands for divestment from those companies; and, finally, in the face of Yale’s refusal to engage with the students, the establishment of a shanty town/encampments as a peaceful symbol of the students’ determination.
Sadly, there is one more distressing parallel. In 1986, when the shanty town remained on campus following the refusal of Yale’s trustees to consider divestment, Yale called in the police, who tore the shanties down and arrested some 150 students. Although Yale’s decision to call in law enforcement was widely condemned, and, by the following year, Yale had even divested from three companies doing business in South Africa, last spring Yale again turned to law enforcement rather than seriously engaging with the urgent moral issues raised by the students’ peaceful protest. And so the encampment was violently dismantled and students were again arrested.
Once again, Yale failed to appreciate the moral consequences of its investments. By contrast, the students at last spring’s encampment understood the importance of the message that would be conveyed by Yale’s divestment from companies doing business with Israel. At a time when the world’s human rights agencies have uniformly condemned Israel’s inhumane tactics in Gaza, including the use of starvation and the deprivation of water as weapons of war, Yale should remember the lesson that your article so eloquently tells: that great universities must never be complicit in injustice. That is the meaning of the quote you attribute to former Amherst president Tony Marx ’81: Yale’s “mission” is education, and that “what you teach is partly based on what you do.”
Alan Levine ’62LLB
Miami Beach, FL
Responding to “The Shanties on the Plaza,” Geoffrey Cohen cites Yale Rep productions of Athol Fugard plays for increasing campus awareness of apartheid (Letters, January/February). This is undoubtedly true. Four productions in the 1980s—before the 1986 protests—are set in South Africa and embody the suffering of Black, “Coloured,” and White South Africans under apartheid.
However, Fugard’s contribution to “consciousness raising” at Yale began a decade earlier. The Winter 1973 issue of yale/theatre, later renamed Theater, edited by prescient doctoral students in the Drama School, included five articles on Fugard. (I enrolled a year later.) Running over forty pages, this constituted, by far, the deepest focus on him in any theater journal or magazine up to then. Barely 40, Fugard was on the brink of becoming one of the best-known and frequently produced playwrights in the world, a stature he retains today at age 92.
In 1967, South Africa withdrew Fugard’s passport, which prevented him from seeing overseas productions unless he chose to leave permanently on a one-way “exit permit.” He stayed, rejected silence, and continued dramatizing complex lives of compatriots living under apartheid. His passport was returned years later.
I find it ironic—and profoundly disheartening—to amplify Yale’s history with Fugard so soon after my alma mater formally adopted the position that its leaders “should refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” This encourages the silence that apartheid tried—and failed—to impose. Restrained by such a policy, President Giamatti would have needed different words to award Fugard an honorary doctorate, in 1983, when he praised him for illuminating “our common capacity for inhumanity.”
Russell Vandenbroucke ’78DFA
Louisville, KY
Tapping alumni resources
I learned about the Students and Alumni of Yale (STAY) program for the first time in the most recent President’s Letter (“Building Bridges to Support Our Students,” January/February). The activities called out on the website look right on target. However, the STAY home page features news from 2022, and the site only provides links, without any testimonials from students or alumni.
Hundreds of us are ready to share our experience and serve as sounding boards for students online. I, for example, am assembling first-person profiles of outstanding civil servants from a dozen different federal agencies. My own career in the nonprofit world led to working up close with Paul Volcker, Henry Kissinger, and others. Many alumni, whose interests may not lie in public service, probably have more to offer than I do. It may be difficult to compete for students’ time, but Yale’s alumni are a resource second only to the faculty. Perhaps President McInnis should make realizing the online potential of STAY a priority.
John Yochelson ’65
Bethesda, MD
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