“Were you exhausted?” I asked him.
His face was flat. “I still am,” she said. “Yes. Yes, and I still am.”
Worcester is famous due to the snowfall it receives in winter. It has something to do with the city's location in relation to the Appalachian Mountains. The clouds fall when the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. The whole winter is brutal, brutal, brutal and then somehow, little by little, it isn't anymore. This is how the end of the WPI crisis came. None of the people I spoke to could explain how they knew the emergency had subsided; the most they could be sure of was that, at one point in the spring of 2022, they intuitively sensed that the last death was behind them. Between summer 2021 and winter 2022, the faculty existed in a state of suspension. “We were always waiting, waiting for the next thing, if there was going to be one,” Foo said. “Like waiting for the other shoe to drop.” But then, at some point in the winter, he said, it became clear that it was all over. There was no clear point of demarcation, just a subtle shift. “The campus culture felt a lot lighter,” he said, “like we had gone through this traumatic experience, but somehow we could see the point at the end of the tunnel. Somehow something was over.”
King said he knew “it” was over when, sometime during the spring, people started looking at each other's faces again. For months, it seemed as if no one could stand eye contact. “In that pain, you usually don't want; if I look into your eyes, I can feel your pain.” And then one day, something had changed. “People started looking into my eyes and I knew they were smiling, even though I couldn't see the smile,” he said, gesturing to the masks they were all wearing at the time. “And I knew we were turning the corner. People looked me in the eyes as if they were simply looking at me. And I was looking at them.”
By now it is clear that the mental health crisis has changed academia forever: its structures, its culture, and the role it is expected to play in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or are seriously considering suicide. This is a problem that extends beyond geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources, or prestige and academic ability. Nearly one in four Americans in college considered dropping out in the past year due to their mental health. Adjusting pedagogy to account for this scale of illness and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.
In early 2022, WPI opened a large new Wellness Center, right next to the school's main cafeteria, as if to declare that wellness is central to the school's institutional mission. When I visited Worcester this fall, almost all of the short-term recommendations made by the task force and several from Riverside's independent review had been implemented.
