Abstract
In response, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, administrators, and staff founded the Working Group on Bereavement to rectify this problem. In our work, we married faculty expertise with core assumptions about student retention while spending very little money in an era of budget slashing. Using our expertise, we created a support system for faculty that, in turn, helped integrate students academically and socially into the university culture when they were at their most vulnerable. The system we created provided a dedicated information source (a brochure) and a “coaching staff for faculty who could then provide meaningful support to their students, without needing MTSU's overutilized student counselors (we have six counselors for 27,000 students) and without needing to become experts in a field not their own.
This article, then, is a meditation on our process: the interpretive roots of our work, the steps we identified as crucial to building these rituals, the rituals themselves (a brochure and our coaching staff), and the initial outcomes of our bereavement work. We focus here as much on our bereavement brochure as we do on our other work—in fact, we consider it the core, at least initially—because these rituals are still new. Thankfully, only a few students have passed away since our work began, which means we have used the brochure in a number of cases while the coaching staffs work is still being tested. Finally, while we mainly address faculty in this article, we also understand this work as building bridges between student affairs and academic professionals. This work was never imagined in exclusively academic terms; instead, it incorporated a team approach that mingled together experts from all sections of the university. This article's authorship exemplifies that bridge building: Kristine is a traditional academic and Laurie is a dean in the University College, which focuses on student engagement, retention, and advising.
Colleges and universities are supposed to be focused on teaching, research, and writing. Should we include lessons on how to grieve? Studies suggest that, yes, how to grieve should be part of our curriculum, if it comes up. We will encounter two kinds of grief in the classroom: personal and collective. While we are focused here on collective expressions of grief caused by the death of a student, individual students will also be grieving deaths within their families or among their friends. In 2008, David Balk reported in Assisting Bereaved College Students that bereavement was present as a “defining issue in the lives of no less than 40%” of college students, but that “only a small portion of these students, somehow stuck in their grief, would benefit from counseling” (p. 6). Balk also reports that “at any given time, 22 to 30 percent of college undergraduates are in the first twelve months of grieving the death of a family member or friend” (p. 5).
The management of student death on the college and university campus as an area of study began in the 1980s. Anne Cusick in Death Studies reviews the literature that identifies important elements in any death response plan for a college or university. There is also a distinction made in the literature between the personal grief of one student dealing with the death of a family member or friend and the collective grief of a group of students who have all lost a common classmate. Less information is available, however, to guide the support of faculty members through their own response to the loss of a student and to enable them to deliver appropriate accommodations and interventions to grieving students. And, yet, in a given year, scholars have estimated that in excess of 18,000 college students die and most faculty members over the course of a career will have that moment when we have to announce a student death, provide information and support for our students, and tend to our own grieving process. While a report by Kenneth Kochanek, Jiaquan Xu, Sherry Murphy, Arialdi Miniño, and Hsiang-Ching Kung for the Division of Vital Statistics of the Center for Disease Control does not report numbers of college student deaths, the number of deaths for people in the 15—24-year age range were 75.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2008 and 70.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2009.
On our campus, our own data tell us that, in a typical year, a dozen MTSU students may pass away each semester, due to a variety of circumstances, including long-standing health issues, accident, violence, or suicide. Those numbers have gone up as our student population has increased. At the 2011 Convocation marking the beginning of MTSU's school year, for example, Vice President for Student Affairs Debra Sells called for a moment of silence for the 17 currently enrolled students who had died since the 2010 Convocation. This observation of a moment of silence is customary at the Convocation ceremony and is part of the ritual developed at our institution to make note of lives cut short and promise unfulfilled. As evidenced by our student who ended his life by stepping in front of a train, deaths resulting from suicide or violence bring another complicating dimension to the grief process for both students and faculty. Finally, in recent years, a number of our faculty members have died while still active in the classroom, giving our students and our peers yet another reason to grieve.
If students are to be retained by an institution, they must be integrated both socially and academically. Bereavement of any kind puts students at risk on both fronts. Thus, members of the faculty are important in identifying students struggling with the grieving process. Moreover, because of our weekly interaction with students, we are uniquely positioned to teach students how to grieve. We have an obligation to acknowledge their sadness, since grieving students are often confronted with their own mortality and, subsequently, have death anxiety; therefore, it is imperative that they perceive the classroom as a safe environment. Their peers cannot, in most cases, assist in meaningful ways. Balk reported that students’ peers often struggled with how to respond, leaving grieving students feeling even more isolated. Because students may attend college at a considerable distance from family and other support systems, and because they are engaged in time-bound classes, they may rely on avoidant emotional coping strategies or develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Faculty are engaged with students consistently over a prolonged period of time, are primed to assess changes in behavior and performance associated with students struggling with the grief process, and can connect them to campus resources early. This type of interaction with faculty may influence the students’ evaluation of how committed the faculty and institution are to student welfare. This, in turn, positively influences student retention. The absence of faulty-student interaction “almost always enhances the likelihood of departure,” according to Vincent Tinto in Leaving College (p. 117).
Faculty are also important because grades are the best predictor of academic integration. In a study of the educational performance of bereaved students at Purdue University, Heather Servanty-Seib and Lou Ann Hamilton in the Journal of College Student Development wrote that grades and overall GPAs for bereaved students were significantly lower in the semester of the loss. Those lowered GPAs put them at risk for academic difficulties that may have resulted in their leaving the institution. The study further found no difference in student GPAs in the following semester, highlighting the need for timely intervention to assist and retain the student. Thus, providing support at an opportune time is crucial and has the added benefit of teaching a vital life skill that can be modeled by a trusted adult.
Though likely fortified with more information, maturity, and life experience, our position in the front of the class does not inoculate faculty from the bereavement process. Faculty will also be affected by the loss of a student, advisee, or colleague. There are a number of factors that impinge on this grief. Faculty tend to be idealistic and see educating the college-aged student in futuristic terms. We see students’ potential, what they will become; the loss of that potential due to an early death can be devastating. Moreover, faculty are experts in our chosen field. Our skills at writing and research have led us to prestigious positions where we seem always in control and capable. Few of us are schooled in grief or mourning and, therefore, are doubly impacted when pushed out of our comfort zone. That grief, whether from the loss of a student or from a personal loss, can manifest in multiple ways. Jonathan Silin, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reviewed his own grief that led to his inability to produce the same type of scholarship as before the loss of his life partner. His grief also led to a change in his classroom teaching and his relationships with students, evident once course evaluations had been completed. Tanya Fitzpatrick examined the bereavement process of faculty members as they returned to their university following a personal loss in Social Work in Health Care, finding that, while the university could be a supportive place for faculty to grieve because it offered needed distraction, the demands and challenges presented at the university allowed the grief of faculty members to go unrecognized by some colleagues and academic administrators. Fitzpatrick reported that “the demands of teaching and research overshadow the role of grief and mourning for some faculty members” (p. 99). Bereaved faculty members reported “temporary cognitive deficits, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and eating problems” (p. 100). These difficulties are certainly hard to traverse, but faculty who have done so are in a better position to recognize and respond to grief in their students.
Our student's death in December 2010 forced us to reckon with these issues in real and meaningful ways. Before his death, our only rituals were administrative ones. Notification was a key first step. Personnel from the University College notified Housing, if the student lived on campus; Financial Aid, if the student had loans; and Food Services, if the student had a meal plan. They notified the professors, advisor, department chair, and dean of the student's college, although the speed of information these days means not everyone is informed as quickly as is desired. The student was coded in computer systems as deceased so that no mass mailings were received by the family. The university also refunded that semester's tuition to the family and flew the university flag at half-staff, normally on the day of the funeral.
These are important administrative tasks and are still part of death work at MTSU but they are focused on the deceased and his or her family, not on the student and faculty communities that also survive. To rectify this, we formed the MTSU's Working Group on Bereavement and identified faculty and staff on campus with expertise in death and dying. We found two sociologists, one historian, one global studies professor, and four nursing faculty with that expertise. Our experience included hospice care, research on death rituals, and experience with a deceased student. We also knew that if the faculty were going to “buy in” to this process willingly, our leadership had to be invested in the group, so we contacted the faculty senate president at once. He provided immediate and helpful encouragement by appointing a faculty senate liaison to our group; that liaison has made subsequent reports back to the Senate. We also included campus administrators such as the vice president for student affairs, the assistant dean of the University College, and student counselors, who regularly work with grieving students and who enact the administrative tasks necessary when a student dies. Their participation and expertise was crucial so that the university could act as a cohesive unit.
The Working Group prepared a communication plan to support faculty when they received word of a death so that faculty could handle the circumstances in a positive, meaningful way. The core of our plan was the development of a brochure, available to faculty, staff, and students in both paper and electronic forms. Rather than focusing on the administrative functions detailed in most death response plans, however, we focused on the personal and social reactions to the death and the impact on the surviving academic community. The content of the brochure is constructed around a series of commonly asked questions. The complete brochure can be found at http://www.mtsu.edu/countest/docu-ments/RespondingToGriefLossGuide.pdf A sample brochure question is:
4. Do I share the information with the deceased student's peers (in a class, in a cohort, in a graduate program)? Do I have to pay attention to FERPA regulations when a student dies? How much information is appropriate?
Sharing this information depends on your class. Is it a large class? A small one? A close-knit one? It also depends on the timing. Is it at the beginning of the semester when no one knows anyone else? Or is it at the end of the semester when everyone knows each other, but your students still need to finish finals?
Share information honestly at a time that is appropriate for your class. Be aware of their reactions. Help them remain on task while at the same time acknowledging their grief.
FERPA regulations allow faculty and staff to share information with other faculty and staff since FERPA regulations do not extend past death. As always, please be aware of the privacy needs of the family.
Other answers identified the administrative functions enacted when a student died, potential reactions our students might have at the news and how to handle the variety of reactions, and a discussion of our own responses.
We also recognized that a student death is hard for faculty who have to share the news with a class and we created what we believe is an effective support system for our colleagues who are asked to deal with these often unnerving circumstances. We reminded them, first, that our health insurance plans pay for an Employee Assistance Program in which faculty can seek individual counseling. But the core part of our support system is our “coaching staff,” which includes all of our committee members. The coaching staff helps in whatever manner faculty deem necessary, whether by sitting in on a class when the news is shared with the deceased's peers or by providing support one-on-one to the faculty. The brochure provides our phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and administrators and faculty across campus now know who to call when a student dies.
This support proved essential when a draft of our efforts had to be shared when a popular MTSU basketball player was killed by her roommate, also an MTSU student, during an altercation. Though unfortunate, the experience assisted in developing our program to better serve the faculty and, through them, our students. A draft of the brochure was immediately e-mailed to all faculty. The coaching staff was also deployed, but for reasons of confidentiality, we cannot disclose specific details. Confidentiality is crucial if this system is going to work. We can say that this tragic event reminded us that there were many who grieved the student charged with the death as well as the student who was killed. We can also say that when the coaching staff was deployed, we were able to identify specific students who were potentially at risk, and Dr. Witherow contacted those students’ advisors. Dr. McCusker also realized which students in her class (a large section of United States History II) needed help, and both she and her graduate teaching assistants were able to keep watch over those students for the rest of the semester. In general, the faculty, who were as stunned by this loss as anyone on campus, responded positively. A journalism professor wrote us that she had several of the deceased's friends in her class and our brochure was helpful as she, too, assisted them in their grief.
We further found that our work was incomplete. We had not addressed deaths that had legal ramifications for the university nor had we acknowledged that some deaths were more public and would have a more public response than others. There was a university-sponsored memorial for the deceased basketball player, for example, but not one for a student who died from illness a week later. The death of an MTSU professor soon after also showed us that we had not addressed issues regarding faculty members who were dying or had died unexpectedly. We revamped the brochure's question-and-answer section to address this.
Immediate access to this information also proved key. The administrator charged with notifying faculty of the death of a currently enrolled student included the link to the brochure in her notifications to faculty, affording easy access to the resource when the information was most needed. The link was also included in our New Faculty Orientation, which means faculty will know how to act proactively rather than be reactive. MTSU's Learning, Teaching and Innovative Technology Center created a workshop to inform faculty about the processes in place for responding to a student death as well as the work product created by the Working Group, although it has yet to meet. Finally, the Working Group intends to evaluate our work in a research study that, over the next three to five years, will use scholarly methods such as oral interviews to assess our work and fine-tune our procedures.
We have come to four main conclusions. First, an established ritual is necessary for college campuses. Invented traditions are fine, but it is important not to leave faculty, staff, or students without support. Expected rituals act as anchors when we feel vulnerable and unstable. Moreover, campuses are perfectly willing to acknowledge Virginia Tech-like situations, which are extremely rare. But an individual student's death is far more common and should be recognized. Second, use your campus's own experts. There is no need for outside help; the expertise should be available right there. Third, be flexible with the many kinds of grief that exist and do not be frightened when it manifests as anger. While we cannot state why because of confidentiality, there will be those who have experienced loss in the past and present who will react out of anger. That is perfectly normal. Your experts can help. Fourth, the information must be available at any time. Because many faculty will be informed via e-mail, which can be opened at all hours, there has to be immediate support for that faculty. Online resources solve that issue.
Given the inevitability of a death among the college or university community, institutions would be shortsighted not to put rituals like these in place. Bereavement consequences can lead to serious student performance and attrition outcomes if no programs are in place to assist students. Faculty, assisted by their peers with grief experience, have direct and consistent interaction with students and have often built relationships that allow them to evaluate changes in performance and behavior, and to offer assistance. Sometimes support for and education of the faculty is the weak link in student-support programs. If faculty are best positioned to serve the needs of students, more energy and resources must be allocated to supporting and preparing faculty for the call to respond to a death on campus.