Like many universities, W.P.I.’s focus has evolved from taking responsibility solely for the academic education of its students to becoming the custodian of individual student wellness. This is, perhaps, the new vanguard: the academic institution as wellness community. It has a slight dystopian ring to it. The all-encompassing beneficent administrative machine, with eyes everywhere. And yet, the circumstances producing these conditions seem to justify it.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine

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It is clear by now that the mental-health crisis has changed academia forever: its structures, its culture and the function it is expected to perform in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or seriously considering suicide. This is a problem that reaches across geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources or prestige and academic ability. Almost one in four Americans in college considered dropping out in the last year because of their mental health. Adjusting pedagogy to account for this scale of illness and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine

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Worcester is famous for the snow dumps it receives in the winter. It has something to do with where the city is in relation to the Appalachian Mountains. The clouds bear down when the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. All winter, it’s brutal, brutal, brutal, and then somehow, slowly, it’s not anymore. That’s kind of how the end of W.P.I.’s crisis arrived.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine

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Worcester Polytechnic is a STEM-focused research university, and its curriculum emphasizes project-based learning: Students train toward junior- and senior-year projects that involve real-life impact, like developing a low-cost device to feed premature infants; or running analyses of the distribution system for Panama’s national water authority to identify opportunities to minimize shortages. Robots the size of small coolers on wheels scuttle around the quads delivering food to students in their dorms or labs.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine

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Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine

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