Currently, students who are diagnosed with mental disorders like depression are given the opportunity to withdraw from their classes and have records from the semester expunged. What is not taken into account under the current system, however, is the case of a student who performs poorly because of a mental condition that he or she does not recognize or have diagnosed until after the semester is over. At the moment, Tufts has no recourse for a student whose poor performance in a particular semester was due to an undiagnosed condition.
Tufts Community Union Senator Toby Bonthrone, a senior, recently introduced the proposal of retroactive class withdrawals following mental health diagnoses. The idea is that students would be able to have a semester expunged if they submit appropriate evidence that their grades were adversely affected by an undiagnosed mental disorder.
We tentatively support this plan, currently in its nascent stages. It may be, after all, that some students are simply unaware that their poor scholastic performance is tied to poor mental health, and it seems unfortunate to employ such a rigidly narrow statute of limitations. The current policy appears to presuppose that students will swiftly identify their own mental health conditions and be diagnosed by professionals post-haste. Sadly, as the administration and we at the Daily know, this is often not the case. In our society, a mental illness is still a taboo subject, and students in need of help may be reluctant to be screened out of anxiety, or out fear of being labeled "abnormal." Seeking help for mental illness is a difficult and laudable undertaking, and we at Tufts should seek to be as supportive as possible for students in this position.
Naturally, there would be safeguards in this approach to avoid abuse by students who simply want to cherry-pick and expunge bad semesters. For example, the student in question should have to submit the testimony of a mental health official to an administrative board in order to ensure the veracity of the diagnosis, and there would likely still have to be some sort of time limit -- perhaps the following semester.
The administration so far appears to be uneasy with this proposal, fearing that the ability to retroactively expunge records for a semester could ruin the integrity of a transcript. We, however, believe that a greater concern is the ability of students, having sought help for their illness, to receive the support of the Tufts administration. In addition, we suggest that expunging records should apply to all classes taken in a semester, and not just particular classes; we believe that this would completely remove the ability of students to simply cherry-pick classes in which they fared poorly for unrelated reasons, and therefore focus entirely on the students who truly need the university's help and understanding.
We stress again that this proposal is still being formulated, and has not yet begun to be seriously considered by the Powers that Be. Nevertheless, we would like to support this move -- and the people who need it most.
