From the Dean: Welcome to fall semester 2024!
Welcome to fall semester 2024. I want to extend a special welcome to our newest faculty members (who will be profiled in a future edition of COEfyi) and staff members who have joined us recently. We are excited to have you join our community! I hope you will make it your goal to meet two new people this month—people who are new to the College or people who may have been here for a while but with whom you haven’t crossed paths. Just as the University encourages us to relentlessly welcome students to campus, please make a special effort to connect with a staff or faculty member you’ve not met previously.
The start of a new semester, fall semester in particular, always brings a sense of new possibilities and new beginnings. I’ve always loved the first day of school because everything seems fresh and new and exciting. But I need to remind myself that for others it’s scary or overwhelming.
The University has been talking about well-being for a few years now, and the speakers at our kick-off meeting, Samantha Arsenault Livingstone and Eric Kussin, gave us some concrete things to think about. Specifically, they noted that while there is a lot more public dialogue about mental health and public praise for athletes and celebrities who are talking about their mental health, we still have a ways to go to embrace the notion of mental health being parallel to physical health. Mental health is still divided into those who have mental health concerns and those who do not (with the associated negative and positive connotations). In contrast, with physical health, there is an understanding and acceptance that we all have physical health at all times—some of it is good (maybe your blood pressure), some of it is not so good (maybe your cholesterol). But mental health is just like physical health in that we all have mental health, and we slide along a scale from hour to hour and day to day. The notion that we all have mental health is captured in their #samehere slogan and the associated American Sign Language gesture.
Sam and Eric shared a scale that provides common language to answer the question “How are you?” They also shared a free app that allows you to record where you are on the scale on a daily basis. After the meeting, Sam shared this with me: “One way to keep this conversation going and relevant is to use the scale as a check in at the beginning of meetings. Checking in in this way also connects to the larger goal of building a deeper sense of belonging and authentic connection. When I’m working with teams/groups–even individuals—I’ll post the scale and ask: How are you today? What may be contributing to where you’re landing? It can be done in a large group setting, partner sharing and/or in small groups. Other times, I’ll use the large posters of the scale and just have people drop a post-it to capture where they are that day.”
As we enter a fall semester against the backdrop of a lot going on in the U.S. and the world—politically, economically, socially—I hope we will all take seriously the notion of actively monitoring and supporting our own mental health and making space for asking students and colleagues “How are you…really?”
Denise A. Spangler