By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

“If I don’t make a good grade on this test, I am going to hurt myself.  If you understood my background, you’d be worried about me.”

This is a statement made last week to one of my colleagues by a student who had already been identified as being unstable.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is something that faculty face from time to time.  All sorts of people go to college and many are not mentally as stable as others.

Also, we have students come to college who have been coddled all their lives.  They’ve never been allowed to fail.  But, when they get to college, suddenly things change.  They are no longer the star student.  No one is there to make sure that they don’t fail.  They have to take responsibility for their missteps.  And for many that is hard to do.

For many students this is a very difficult time.  I feel that what we’ve done is, in part, move some of the awkwardness of growing up from the early to mid teenage years into the late teens early twenties.

The problem with that is that many of these students are no longer living at home, and parents can’t do as much to help (assuming that the parents are not too busy with their own lives to worry about the kids).

Now, the higher education doctrine of “in loco parentis” applies.  We wind up being the counselors and parents for these young adults.  The problem is that faculty are not trained for this.  Colleges have support staff for the students.  This includes counselors trained in dealing with these sorts of issues.

The student support service staff often have some training in how to look out for these problems.  Faculty, though, are trained primarily in only their fields.  Physics faculty learn about how to do physics.  History faculty learn all about history.  Psychology faculty may know what is going on, but not necessarily Business faculty.  We learn what we need to about how the college works, how to submit grades, etc.  Sometimes colleges offer seminars on effective teaching.  I never hear about seminars on dealing with suicidal students. Yet, I’ve had to deal with three of them in my years teaching, one being a quite serious case.

But this raises another question.  Was this student that I mentioned at the beginning of this post really suicidal or was this a very childish attempt to manipulate her professor into giving her a higher grade? Do we forward the matter on to higher ups?  Do we refer the student to the counseling center?  Do we need to call the police to report a possible suicidal student?  Or do we just tell the student to grow up?

If we refer the matter on to student services, then this incident becomes part of the student’s permanent record at the college.  If we notify the police, then it becomes a permanent police record, which are not as protected by confidentiality as student records.  How do we know what to do?  After all, faculty are not trained in dealing with these sorts of things.

The matter is not as easy as simply saying that it is better to be safe and report it than to be sorry and not report it.  Students have sued faculty for forwarding on disturbing papers and writings. Our campus attorneys have trouble keeping up with current legal interpretations.

• Before Virginia Tech, we were advised not to report students who have disturbing writings.  After all, if we report a student for writing an essay about going around shooting people, the student can sue saying that the essay was nothing but his freedom of speech and artistic license.

• Before Virginia Tech, that may have been upheld.  But the shooting incident at Virginia Tech changed things.  Faculty there got into trouble for not reporting the shooter’s troubling works.  Those faculty that did report it found that nothing was done because the administrators were afraid of doing something that would get them into trouble.

Now we can get in trouble for not reporting such things.  Unfortunately, we can still get in trouble for reporting things too quickly.  That puts us into a difficult position.  And, again, we are not trained to deal with these sorts of things.

Do you see a pattern?  We are continually put into positions of dealing with issues that we have never been trained to deal with.

That is not unique to college faculty, though.  Anyone in a leadership position will have to adapt to new situations that he or she has never seen before or even contemplated.  It is how we respond to these situations that separate good leaders from those who simply happen to have a supervisory job.

So what was our solution to the situation with this student?  (I say “our” since I am serving in a temporary administrative roll at the college.)  Since we already knew that this student has been seen at the counseling office, we called them to have an informal consultation.  They did not seem too concerned.  We also knew the department in which the student is actively pursuing a program of study (psychology!), so we called the department chair to inquire about the student.  It turns out that this particular student is seeing a psychologist, has done this sort of thing to instructors on a regular basis and the people with the training feel that the student is not really a risk for suicide, but rather has learned that some professors yield to this sort of pressure.

The head of the psychology department tells the student to simply grow up when the student does this sort of thing.  So that is what my colleague did when the student began crying after the test was passed back.  The student quit crying and began to pay attention for the rest of the class.

There have been times when we’ve had to deal with actual serious mental health issues.  And, of course, most of the time we don’t know whether or not a situation like this is serious.  In this case, the student was known, and the behavior had been identified by professionals in the mental health field as manipulative not suicidal, so we went on their recommendations.

But what would we have done in the event that this student were not already known to be one who pulls this sort of thing on a regular basis?  Well, at this point, we would have had to make a judgment call and either passed it on to the police if we deemed it an imminent threat of safety to the student or to the counseling center otherwise.

These are the things that make the job tough.

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Image credit: rt1352 CC license