Susan Schultz, a professor of English and editor at Tinfish Press, has created a petition pushing the University of Hawaii at Manoa administration to improve their handling of student deaths.
The petition will be closed on Monday and the signatures forwarded to the Board of Regents, so please review the petition and her background links, and add your signature if you’re so inclined.
This is taken from her email now being circulated.
Friends,
I just created a new petition and I hope you can sign — it’s called: UHM administration: Develop student death protocol, mount suicide prevention activities
This issue is very important to me, and together we can do something about it!
Read more about it and sign it here.
Campaigns like this always start small, but they grow when people like us get involved — please take a second right now to help out by signing and passing it on.
Thanks so much,
Susan
PS For more of the backstory, please check out:
http://hawaiiindependent.net/story/why-uh-manoa-needs-a-student-death-protocol
http://hpr2.org/post/conversation-tuesday-august-25th-2015 (scroll down a bit)
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only 279 signatures as of now.
not surprising at all. this is a bit too The Catcher in the Rye. i do not see any real, genuine benefits from this petition. this is a feel-good-about-yourself-f0r-doing-so-little campaign. no more, no less.
want to help prevent suicide? spend more time with your son and grandson. even if they seem a bit crazy.
We have no protocol for faculty deaths either. When Tom Bopp, who had devoted his life to UH, serving not only on the faculty but as both the (non-interim) VPAA and the chair of the faculty senate, passed away 2 years ago, there was no official announcement. I contacted the Chancellor’s office about it at the time, and they just blew me off.
However, I don’t think adopting protocols will address the real problem, which is that the sense of community — almost of family — that used to be so strong at UH has eroded down to practically nothing.
“dr” wrote:
“However, I don’t think adopting protocols will address the real problem, which is that the sense of community — almost of family — that used to be so strong at UH has eroded down to practically nothing.”
Tell me, dr. What kind of normal “family” would sue each other for privacy violations?
Alas, there’s no turning back the clock on this. Announcing names without notifying next of kin first, publicly passing out information that is not substantiated…. all this and more can get administrators in hot water.
Betcha if this prof was a chancellor, she will quickly find out that some of the things she’s petitioning for aren’t so simple. Not if she valued her job and reputation, that is.
Allen, I agree that this petition is a simplistic approach to a significant social issue.
But your reading of the “dr” is not correct. the UH class-action privacy lawsuit was just a few years ago, 2000-2012. the “dr” is talking about “the sense of community — almost of family — that used to be so strong at UH”. the “dr” is talking about life at UH 30+ years ago.
this published charter predates the lawsuit and addresses the loss of community at UH, primarily blaming the development of Manoa:
http://www.hawaii.edu/envctr/ecotourism/docs/UHM_Sust_Charter.pdf
the “dr” is right: UH’s old sense of community has dwindled into California-style carelessness. hence, the money-driven privacy lawsuit. death of community is never easy to fix. i think the “dr” and “allen” are mostly in agreement.
the petition is silly. i wouldn’t even call it a band-aid solution; this would be an insult to band-aids.
@”t”;
The comments that “dr” made were in response to Ian’s post about Prof. Schultz’s petition. “dr” can certainly respond to me if he/she wishes to.
But with all due respect, “t,” it seems like we may not be thinking about the exact same thing as far as “family” is concerned. Family and community are different. I think of family/’ohana where members feel free to be frank and speak candidly, with a genuine sense of affection that goes beyond having professional respect for each other. Above all else, there’s trust. Some organizations have that, others don’t. As the organization gets larger, it gets harder to maintain that sense of family. Having been a UH student at both the undergraduate (’80s) and graduate (’90s) level, I could sense the culture on campus changing even then. Coaches/SIDs freely talking about how a student-athlete hurt himself in an injury occurring away from the playing field. School sanctioned functions where the untimely death of a staff member was talked about in some detail. These things happened because people were curious and concerned. But by the mid ’90s or so, I noticed that such candid talk through official channels began to cease. HIPPA was enacted about 20 years ago, so this concern about maintaining privacy did not suddenly spring up “a few years ago.”
UH students, faculty, and staff will always have the coconut wireless to pass along info to each other. But when it comes to revealing information that the law considers private or sensitive, it cannot be freely channeled through UH administration. For better or worse, that’s just how it is in the 21st century.
HIPPA does not apply here as long as the cause of death is not part of an official announcement, and FERPA would not preclude a campus-wide acknowledgment of the death of a student, staff, or faculty member, or the use of official channels of communication to facilitate mourning. There are no legal barriers to doing this; many of our peer institutions do it as a matter of course.
Nobody said HIPPA precluded simple death announcements. I mentioned HIPPA as it pertains to the privacy rights of students (even prominent athletic stars) not to have their the circumstances of off-field injuries be casually talked about publically by coaches and other school officials. It was mentioned as just one example of how privacy and confidentiality has been heightened on college campuses.
I was contacted by the family of the young man who died, and about whom the petition was created. They never heard from UHM, nor did some of his close friends.