Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 21, No. 2 (2024)
The Things Left Unsaid: Student Death and Writing Centers
Genie Giaimo
Middlebury College
ggiaimo@middlebury.edu
Content Warning: This article contains discussion of student death, suicide, murder, school shooting, sexual violence, domestic violence, and cancer.
Introduction: Haunted by Death
There is a ghost that haunts my book. It is called by many names—trauma, crisis, emergency—but, really, the ghost is death. My book is haunted by but never really confronts death.
I wrote Unwell Writing Centers because I had a lot to say about the worrisome movement of the wellness industry into higher education. I also felt like our field could benefit from non-optimization framings of wellness work. I wrote about my desperate desire to keep my tutors (and myself) safe. Crises strike our colleges and universities with alarming regularity. After COVID-19, I rarely find a practitioner or educator who tells me that I am overreacting about the mental health crisis we are facing or the wellness-related challenges of working within the managed university. Emergency plans and crisis response work have been normalized and are highly visible to those of us who work in higher education. We live and breathe emergencies.
At the same time, I am witnessing practitioners’ desire for more. I am realizing that no matter the plan, no matter the preparation, there will always be some new crisis thrown at us, so long as we continue to work in academia (and even if we leave). The ultimate crisis, I believe, is student death. I can’t continue to write about how we keep ourselves and our students safe from harm—a major goal of emergency planning—without acknowledging that student death is the ultimate thing I am trying to prevent. I am saying the thing left unsaid in Unwell Writing Centers: we need to prepare writing centers, and ourselves, for the possible crisis of a student death.
As new writing center directors, we are often not trained or prepared for much of the work we do. While some graduate programs provide courses on writing program administration that include writing center work, the day-to-day lived experiences of administrators might play second string to other seemingly more important official duties. We might learn best practices in running a writing program or how to balance institutional mission with programmatic vision. If we are lucky, we might learn how to manage a budget, how to mentor and manage student workers, or how to create professional development programs. We might also learn how to assess our programs for efficacy.
I write tentatively here, using “might” because many of us do not get this kind of training, and no amount of training will prepare us for complex and unanticipated experiences we have on the job, such as active aggressor situations, pandemics, or other traumatic events. We are especially unprepared to handle student death.
Now, death is not the conclusion of every emergency. Some emergencies, like a bad snowstorm or a cyberattack—both of which are statistically more likely to occur than a pandemic or active aggressor situation—might seem terribly mundane and not all that dangerous, though weather can be. But what keeps me up at night are not the mundane and non-injurious emergency scenarios; it is the crises that lead to death with which I am concerned.
As academic workers, we are likely to experience an emergency or crisis at some point in our career. In my book, I argue that we should be prepared for pre-and post-crisis work. I also write about how to prepare for crises, as writing centers are often left out of official institutional emergency plans. On the emergency plan for our building, for example, the writing center didn’t exist; it was a big gaping hole in the plan. No one knew we were there. No one told us what to do in case of an emergency in our space. Coincidentally, our space was what one might consider to be the least optimal for sheltering in place: a long continuous room with one main door and three side doors and giant floor-to-ceiling windows. So, in my book, I provide resources for building in-program emergency plans specific to the space and structure of writing centers.
But this is where my book ends. I write about the lead-up. I write about the aftermath. I don’t wade into the specifics. I don’t speak directly about what to do when a student, or even multiple students, dies. It is here in this uncomfortable and tragic possibility that I locate this piece. It is an omission I only recognized after the publication of my book, which I worked on for over five years. This omission speaks to my development as a writing administrator and the ways in which new tragic experiences continue to shape my work. However, this omission also reverberates throughout our field—its silence is deafening. There are so few articles, as my overview below shows, about student death, yet writing centers are likely to feel death acutely when it occurs, even outside the center.
So, to remedy my omission—to expel this ghost haunting my book—I write here about student death. I hope that this conversation continues. It is only the beginning.
Preparing for Crisis: Emails in a Folder
This journey started when I first became a writing center director. I was in the first semester of my work and an email hit the WCenter Listserv asking how one might address the death of a tutor. I have maintained that folder (labeled “in case of tutor death”) for ten years. And I have added to it. Most of these emails, however, are just that: folk information shared in moments of acute crisis.
This is not to say that relying on one’s community for support and guidance in a moment of acute crisis—like the death of a tutor—is wrong. The challenge is that these conversations occur intermittently and, often, only in the moment of crisis. They do not anticipate student death. They do not assess response post-death. They do not engage in proactive rather than reactive work around death and loss. They do not, in other words, form a complete whole on how to cope with a tragic and emotionally charged event, nor do they really tell us what works or what is preventative.
The field of writing center studies has published little on death. Keyword searches for the term often result in reference to metaphors about our work, such as “working ourselves to death” (Ede 5), being “meeting-ed to death” (Simpson et al. 80), and “death knells” in the profession (Giaimo; Kinkead; Spitzer-Hanks). There are also several references to metaphorical death in writing center praxis (Petit 113; Carino 40). There are a few instances where the trauma of death seeps in, such as a student who writes about workplace sexual harassment and being “scared to death” (Welch 77); Thomas Spitzer-Hanks’s blog on gun violence’s impact on the physical and “spiritual” work of writing centers; and Marilee Brooks-Gillies’s article “Constellations across cultural rhetorics and writing centers,” which details the impact of familial death on academic work. In tutoring work, death is often the topic of research papers rather than personal and reflective writing (Blau et al.; Mackiewicz and Thompson; Williams).
There are, however, several articles and books that discuss the very real instances of death among minoritized people, such as those from the BIPOC community and from the LGBTQIA+ community, and how these deaths shape the work of BIPOC and queer writing center workers. In Queerly Centered, Travis Webster discusses the increased rates of murder among BIPOC transgender people as well as how the deaths of queer people impact queer writing center administrators. For these administrators, there are traumatic queer historical touchstones like the AIDS crisis, or the outing and subsequent suicide of a queer college student, that are profoundly impactful. Andrew J. Rihn and Jay D. Sloan—centering their argument in gay suicide and matters of life and death for the queer community—offer a very limited annotated bibliography of writing center scholarship centered on LQBTQIA issues.
Zandra L. Jordan’s “Womanist Curate, Cultural Rhetorics Curation, and Antiracist, Racially Just Writing Center Administration” details the deaths of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and Renisha McBride and the impact they had on her and her tutors, demonstrating that we do not do our work in a vacuum. Jordan argues for “life giving” practices in and around the writing center that include, but are not limited to, anti-racist practices. Neisha-Anne Green discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and “who among us actually matters, both in life and in death” (18). Green also describes the challenges Black activists face, such as burnout and suicidal ideation when she tells the story of Jedidiah Brown (20). She rightly asks how BIPOC writing center workers—who might lack the community that Jedidiah Brown had—can continue to do their work in the face of micro-and-macro-aggressions. In a follow-up piece, Green discloses her own challenges with well-being and notes her reluctance to self-disclose (19). Her articles rightly address the very real physical and emotional challenges that BIPOC workers face in writing studies, including how BIPOC people are at higher risk of death.
While BIPOC writing center workers and queer writing center workers make far more frequent reference to death, there are moments when death punctures the tutorial or even characterizes the main processing work of a tutorial. Citing Nancy Welch, Elizabeth Boquet discusses “death work” and “life work” in her book Noise from the Center (39). Framed in Lacanian terms, the writer works through their experiences of war within the confines of the writing center. Here, writing about death and life enables deeper understanding and trauma processing. Many researchers over the years have discussed how writing enables us to work through grief, loss, and other traumas related to death (Pennebaker and Beall; Range et al.; Travagin et al.). Writing about grief and death can specifically facilitate grief recovery, though several studies found that anxiety and depression are not mitigated by writing (Range et al.; Travagin et al.; Breen et al.).
While Hillary Degner et al. argue for more research on the rising challenges tutors face with mental health concerns—a call that has been met with several publications on mindfulness, wellness, and emotional labor research (see my “A Matter of Method: Wellness and Care Research in Writing Center Studies” for a review of recent literature)–there are almost no articles or stories that I could find that specifically work through the death of a tutor or a student closely related to the writing center. Like many of the challenges we face in our work, we tend to write around the issue. We write about how it arises in tutorials as part of assigned writing, or how it punctures the lived experiences of marginalized writing center workers, or the ways in which death might drive or impact our administrative work. At the same time, little space has been given in our research publications about facing death and processing grief and trauma in the writing center, or what we can do as administrators and tutors when there is a death in our community.
There is, however, a lot of lived experience on the topic that circulates in informal online communities and among our personal and professional networks. After sharing stories about my experience of student death, I aggregate what informal knowledge I found on death in the writing center from within the field. Then, I turn to some of the best practices and resources I have drawn from outside the field, namely in crisis response work and postvention planning. Aggregating these materials is a continuation of my book’s project; it is critical for us to examine our experiences, to collect our community’s knowledge, and to explore what other related fields have learned about student death. Putting these practices together starts a necessary if also uncomfortable conversation. As I have learned through personal experience and through secondary research, death does happen. We need to begin these conversations proactively before a crisis is upon us.
The Normalization of Student Death on College Campuses
At my previous institution, student death occurred often. It happened on campus and off campus. It happened among currently enrolled students and among alumni. It happened so frequently that, at one point, my tutors told me that they couldn’t keep track of everyone who died. Messages were sent out after the more high-profile student deaths, and task forces were established. However, I don’t recall additional mental health support services, canceled classes, memorials, anniversaries, or anything other than emails sent by University communications. The day after sheltering in place for hours due to what was initially reported as an active shooting situation, classes resumed. A week later, armed gun rights activists marched through our campus supporting a House bill that enabled institutions to permit concealed carry on their campuses.
During the active aggressor situation, a student died and many (at least 11) were hospitalized with injuries. Complexly, however, the student who died was the attacker; there was little mourning of this student because of the grief and devastation they caused to so many in our community. The active aggressor situation raised other issues related to gun rights: the alienation of Muslim students of color (the aggressor was a Muslim student of color who expressed feelings of alienation in our campus newspaper), the growing nation-wide mental health crisis, and, of course, student death and injury. Issues related to the 2016 Presidential election (Trump was elected a few weeks before the attack), like the rising hate crimes on and around campus, also contributed to this situation but were never addressed by the institution. Death can be bound-up with politics, institutional crisis management, institutional self-protection, and several other local and national networks of power. Death and trauma can also be made into a spectacle for opportunistic and bad faith actors from outside the university community.
This was a high-profile death and injury crisis on campus, but it was not the only one by a longshot. In the 2016–2017 year, there were six suicides (Hendrix). In the year and a half that followed, four more students would attempt suicide. Over a four-day period in spring 2018, two students jumped from the same university building. One died, one survived (614 Now). A writing tutor witnessed one of these attempts. They held the person’s hand while waiting for the ambulance. When the tutor told me about this experience, my stomach churned, my body tensed, and I was unable to speak.
There were still more student deaths. Regan Tokes was raped and murdered on her way back home from work. Heather Campbell was murdered by her boyfriend—who then died by suicide—in a domestic dispute, also off campus (Wells). After each death, I sent emails, I offered resources, I developed training, I added questions to my longitudinal assessment on tutor well-being.
Yet even as I try here to catalog the number of student deaths, I struggle with chronology. I struggle to convey meaning. There were times when student deaths would come so quickly that it became nearly impossible to respond without flooding my already flooded staff. I did, however, make changes in the spaces I nominally controlled. I arranged REACH Suicide Prevention training for tutors. I shared materials on domestic violence and stalking. I brought the topic of death into our weekly mentorship meetings. I assessed how tutors experienced student death. Most of the data from assessing the efficacy of these interventions didn’t make it into my book but one finding that did was how a tutor reported back that the training allowed them to broach the topic of suicide with their romantic partner. They were able to use their training to get their partner support at a moment of utmost crisis. Another finding was that tutors respond to death in mixed ways: some are deeply impacted, some are not. The more a tutor feels unaligned with the institution by identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, and political stances, the more they report being impacted by student death and other crises. From these findings we can surmise that tutors use their training in non-work situations and that our tutors’ identities impact their sense of belongingness in our institutions. Writing centers, then, can play a pivotal role in preparing tutors for the challenges of addressing and processing student death but, also, tutors are differentially affected by such crises based on their own positionality within the community. We need to learn more about how tutors process crises in and around our centers because these issues invariably impact our workplace and our community.
Despite how widely higher education institutions vary, they respond to student death in strikingly similar ways. Some of these responses are intentional and include policies that have been developed in reaction to crises. My book, for example, discusses how nation-wide interventions—such as the Clery Act which requires colleges and universities to disclose campus crimes and security policies—were enacted because of tragedy and death. In 1986, Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her campus dorm. After her death, there was a call to report crime statistics, to alert campus to imminent dangers, and to produce annual security reports. The Clery Act aims to protect students through systematically reporting on previously unreported crimes; it is an attempt to reduce potential harm through institutional transparency requirements. Another communication failure—at Virginia Tech during an active shooter situation—contributed to the development of large scale and system-level communications in emergency communication through campus-wide alert systems. During the Virginia Tech school shooting, a series of communication failures (including a delayed set of active shooter announcements) led to students coming onto campus during the shooting. Once again, a university’s communication failures contributed to student death. This incident gave rise to campus-wide alert systems among other emergency planning interventions, many of which were provided by for-profit vendors (Foster).
Communication, of course, matters during moments of dire distress and crisis. In my book, I argue that proactive—rather than reactive—approaches to crisis are necessary for the safeguarding and well-being of our communities. Emergency planning, as an example, is critical to writing center directors who might otherwise not be included in official university plans, which I experienced. But the subtext here is how to carry on once students—and other community members—have died. What happens in the aftermath? Much of the emergency planning that we do is to ensure that this doesn’t happen or, if it does, to mitigate further loss. Ultimately, of course, we hope that planning prevents loss, but it seems more a matter of when—rather than if—death will occur, as I have found both from personal experience and from data on college-aged student death rates.
A Matter of When Rather than If: Preparing for Student Death Through Examining Death Rates Among College-Aged Youth
The CDC lists the following as the leading causes of deaths in 15-19-year-olds: accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide. Among those 15-24, the World Health Organization offers a profile of risk that includes “accidents and injuries, self-harm and interpersonal violence” (“Key Facts”). Males in this age group are at higher risk for these kinds of deaths than females (“Key Facts”). In the past year, 41% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”). Black transgender and nonbinary young people reported disproportionately higher rates of suicide risk: in the past year, 58% seriously considered suicide and 25% attempted suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”). While youth deaths are declining around the world, in the United States they are stagnant or rising (Yorke).
It is, however, difficult to find aggregated university data on cause of death among students in higher education including accidental deaths (Kim; Turner et al.). A recent study supports these findings, noting “there is little published data about mortality and causes of death in the college population” (Marconi et al. 206). They found that:
contrary to published data and national statistics for the relevant age groups, intentional by self-harm deaths lead causes of death in enrolled students from 2004 to 2018. Intentional by self-harm is the main cause of death in male students, younger students, and white students. “Other” [unintentional] causes of death is the main cause in female students, older students, and students of color (205).
These findings underscore both the causal and probabilistic possibilities of death among the main population that many of us work with, which is traditionally college-aged students (18–25). However, death is hard to track from an institutional or even definitional standpoint, as researchers note. This suggests that we might not always be aware of the statistical risks of death among specific student populations, or the common behaviors or experiences that contribute to these risks. Articles about students who died by suicide often emphasize their academic achievements, as if academic success is somehow an insulator from suicidal ideation. At the same time, we know that self-harm deaths (suicide) are one of the most common types of student deaths and they have risen an alarming 40% (with some citing even larger increases) since 2000 (“Generation Z and Deaths of Despair”). We also know that substances like alcohol are involved in 2 out of 10 student deaths and “mortality related to substance use among college students is increasing” (Marconi et al. 212). The realization that death does happen—at our small residential liberal arts college we often hear the refrain “that just doesn’t happen here”—can be shocking, disheartening, and downright scary for workers and students alike. And student death often elides both cause and effect; in other words, cause is frequently left vague or indeterminate and the impact of student death on the campus community is under-studied.
Yet the general statistics and the politics of death (describing how a person dies, for example, is deeply tied to cultural, religious, and other values) do not really capture the individual impact that each student death has upon our communities. For example, to say that, by some measurements, suicide has risen more than 60% from 2000–2021 among young people ages 20-24 from “11.9 deaths per 100,000 to 19.4” (Curtin and Garnett) simply does not capture the impact that these kinds of deaths have on college campuses.
What Happens or Doesn’t Happen When Death Occurs?
At my current institution, we are contending with three student deaths this past semester. One death was ruled an accidental overdose, one was initially ruled an accident but is now described as a suicide, and the third was a murder. Two deaths occurred on campus and one, just over the holiday break, off campus. These are not the first student deaths since I arrived. In the past several years, we have lost others: to suicide, to cancer, to accidents. Death, as my student said recently, is becoming part of our college’s experience, so much so that the school newspaper has published several articles against normalizing it. The editorial board published “Student death is now part of the routine at Middlebury” collectively urging our institution to act. And the deaths themselves are complicated by their circumstances as well as the institution’s response and the response of family, which has erased conversations about harmful and at-risk behavior, as well as suicide on campus.
Student death raises all kinds of issues for those of us who have made our life’s work in academia. In many ways, despite many arguments to the contrary about the role work should play in our lives, when a student or worker dies, our community mourns as if we lost a member of our family. In Judaism, when a loved one dies, we practice Kriah, or the rending of a garment which represents the pain of loss and grief. A student death tears the fabric of our community; there is an absence, a loss, a frightening puncture of the quotidian. At small schools, this loss is even more acute as students are more likely to know one another and to feel the loss, especially if the student death happens on or close to campus.
Yet, once a student dies, a bureaucratic response kicks into high gear. Their information is removed from the advising portal. An email is sent out first announcing a death and, later, identifying the person who died. On our campus, emails are also sent out with—as students ruefully note—the same five resources (spiritual center, wellness center, therapy, etc.) alongside a more detailed set of facts about the student. Otherwise, it often seems like business as usual.
Usually, classes are not canceled. Faculty are told to return to the classroom to keep the routine and to put “eyes on” students. Acknowledgment of the fear of death “contagion” drives these decisions, yet they are implemented unevenly. Some faculty cancel class. Some engage students in off-topic discussions about their well-being. Others, as one student told me, hold tests and quizzes as if nothing happened. Often, informal memorials are immediately planned by students and occur within days or even hours of the news circulating through campus. Official college memorials occur a little later, sometimes a week or two after a student’s death and sometimes a month or longer. There might be no official memorials but many unofficial ones outside the spaces where the student died. Flowers, photos, stuffed animals, and other offerings outside of dorms, parking garages, and other on-campus spaces. Despite being considered a best practice, most institutions where I have worked do not celebrate death anniversaries or create official memorials. Furthermore, at every institution where I have worked, students have struggled to access mental health support in timely ways. At my previous institution, the wait could be several months long. Here, students have been advocating for on-campus psychiatric care and specialized mental health services for decades (Ji; Pagni; Walters).
Findings from a survey of university and college counseling services point to the challenges of supporting students’ mental health and well-being. In the survey, directors of mental health centers report challenges with attracting and retaining staff because of low pay and poor working conditions (Gorman et al. 31). High turnover in counseling services is also a perennial issue. Additionally, staff are often unprepared for supporting grieving students, especially those with complicated grief and those who refuse to seek support (Wrenn). There are challenges, then, in how colleges and universities collect and report data on student death, in how they respond to student death, and in their material support for mental healthcare. Students, in turn, struggle to access services and often reject official support services, perhaps because of institutional distrust.
Postvention Plans and the Illogic of Student Death
After several experiences of student death, and passively collecting information for years, I intensively researched how institutions respond to student death and the efficacy of emergency response protocols. Last fall, I attended workshops and meetings held by my institution’s crisis response team. I talked with colleagues at my institution and at other institutions. I examined research on postvention plans, including the commonly referenced Comprehensive Crisis Plan Checklist (CCPC-2) and interrater agreement on plan development (McCleary and Aspiranti). I hoped the research on crisis management and student death plans would give me answers, but it only added more questions. I found that we still know little about the efficacy of specific postvention actions and how death impacts students on campus (Devore).
While most schools have crisis or postvention plans, the majority “are significantly below best practice criteria for each of the three subcategories of prevention, intervention, and postvention” (West 57). West found that—in line with other findings—such plans “lack comprehensiveness” (58). In addition to the challenges of maintaining crises response plans, it is difficult to assess whether these plans are effective because there are no validated rubrics on crisis response. So, on the one hand, these plans are critical in responding to and mitigating crisis, and on the other, they are unevenly enacted from institution to institution. We know little about their efficacy.
Yet postvention plans following student death have long been argued to be a critical element of community intervention. O’Neill et al. note that postvention plans are a key component of suicide prevention programs and in addressing suicide contagion events. In the K–12 education system, multiple states in the U.S. require suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention plans (62). The “core goals for suicide postvention include: (a) returning the focus of school to education; (b) facilitating natural coping responses of those affected; (c) providing resources for those affected; (d) preventing suicide contagion or imitative behaviors; and (e) identifying ongoing needs of the school community” (62).
Despite the wealth of information available on how to develop postvention plans, empirical research on the efficacy of postvention plans is lacking (62). There are only a few systematic reviews of postvention plan efficacy, likely due to the high amount of variation in plans alongside a “void of rigorous experimental designs and methodology” (62). There are downstream effects in how postvention plans are developed, implemented, and assessed due to the dearth of rigorous studies. As O’Neill et al. notes:
Without evidence-based postvention programs for schools, school districts and their crisis responders are advised to utilize clinical judgment and refer to published toolkits, general guidelines for community responses and safe reporting, and expert recommendations for conducting postvention within schools to support students and mitigate contagion effects. (62)
Without large scale assessment, we are left to rely on in-house support and guidelines, which themselves might be limited, out of date, or incomplete. Alarmingly, we know that how we respond to student death matters and can exacerbate or reduce further student crises, yet we know little about the degree to which specific interventions work.
For example, a study on the effectiveness of interventions for people bereaved through suicide found that the quality of studies was weak which led the researchers to conclude that “while there was some evidence of the effectiveness of interventions for uncomplicated grief, evidence of the effectiveness of complicated grief interventions was lacking” (Andriessen 1). While research has found that individuals bereaved by suicide are at higher risk for several mental health issues, as well as at a higher risk for completing suicides themselves, there is little empirical research on what interventions work best. Most research on the subject “focused on the experiences of those who have been bereaved and the characteristics of suicide bereavement, whereas the effectiveness of postvention in terms of its impact on the grief process and mental health of bereaved individuals remains unclear” (2). So, while we know that proactive and reactive responses are necessary, and there are several important elements of postvention response to student death—including clear communication, student support, community member triage, and memorials/anniversaries—we also know that a major limitation to effectively carrying out crisis response plans is that “there are no empirically validated rubrics to evaluate school crisis plans” (West 7). So, it is hard to assess if our plans are actually working, not to say anything of the material challenges with establishing and maintaining crisis response teams and ongoing work outside of an immediate crisis.
To be sure, there are many different people who are part of the crisis response teams for institutions of higher education. Often, these response teams are led by the Office of Student Affairs alongside campus mental health offices, campus safety, and other on-campus organizations tasked with managing day-to-day residential life and well-being for students. At the same time, we teachers and administrators are not outside of the campus community. When a student dies or other crises occur, we too are impacted. More often, we are also asked to do crisis response work in our classrooms, offices, and centers. One way to become involved in this work is to meet with your on-campus crisis response team and to become part of the team and/or to receive crisis response training. Another approach is to learn from others in our field about their responses to student death.
Wisdom from WCenter for Ways to Take Action After Student Death
The WCenter Listserv provides practical folk guidance on responding to crises; it is filled with compassionate people who are willing to share advice on any number of crises, not just about student death or the death of a tutor. I have, over the years, found myself returning again and again to the collective wisdom and, namely, experience of thousands of colleagues. And, when I have seen things come across my desk that I have yet to experience in my center, such as the death of a peer writing tutor, I put this information into a folder for safekeeping and future reference.
In reviewing the keywords tutor loss, student death, tutor death, and tutor memorialization, I came across several shared responses of how colleagues have responded to student death in or around the writing center. Below, I paraphrase and summarize much of what they share, but I want to note that this is only an partial list as the Listserv archive only reaches back a few years.
Guidance for Administrators Upon a Tutor Death:
Work with grief counselors to determine needs for writing center workers.
Bring grief counselors to all-staff meeting.
Have someone from the counseling center lead a discussion on student death and processing loss and grief.
Check-in with tutors and see if they're able to continue their writing center work, and, if they're not, allow them to step away or flex their time.
Send the message that everyone grieves in their own way and that they shouldn't hold themselves or others to a particular standard of how grief “should” happen.
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Memorialize Tutor(s):
Create a collection of things that belonged to the deceased student. You can create an altar, a memorial wall, a picture box, or a plaque in the main area of the center. Tutors can participate in selecting objects.
Give tutors and others the chance to fill out a book of memories and messages to the deceased tutor. Place the book in a communal space where people can easily access it.
Create a memorial fund or prize in honor of the deceased tutor to support tutors annually.
Hold a celebration of life or other grief/support event.
Archive materials that the deceased tutor created and showcase in the center.
Create a book of memories about the deceased tutor to share with their family.
Petition the school, the city or town to set aside a bench or space in a green space to memorialize the deceased student.
Record tutors’ memories of the deceased tutor as a way to remember who they were in life and to memorialize them.
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Collectively Grieve:
Write. Engage in letter writing to the deceased to process grief (Larsen).
Reflect. Engage in therapeutic journaling (Neimeyer et al.).
Create a memory box about the deceased tutor.
Celebrate. Celebrate what the tutor brought to the community.
Gratitude. Set-up a card bank where tutors write thank you cards to medical or emergency personnel who helped in the situation, if applicable.
Connect. Find out what your institution has planned for memorializing the deceased, for reaching out to their family, and for providing support for students, staff, and faculty.
Connect with the broader college community to celebrate the student.
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Personally Respond to Loss:
Withhold judgment before entering conversations about the death of the tutor.
Witness: Be open and available to whatever unfolds, not to solve it or fix it but to really see, hear and experience what it is with the others there.
Respond with loving action.
Take time to grieve.
Take time to process.
And, as one person on the WCenter Listserv noted:
Be prepared for the very individual responses your tutors will have, and the very different ways they will have of coping with this loss. Some will want to talk about it, but others won't have much to say. And they will process this loss at different rates. For some, it will hit them right away, and it might hit others later, or in waves. For us, this meant finding as many different, small ways (some non-verbal) to honor and remember the tutor as possible, over the course of the entire year. And yes, find out what they want, but be prepared for them to be too struck and too numb to be able to come up with anything particularly coherent or actionable. My staff didn't want to cancel meetings or trainings; they wanted to be together. But that was about as clear a plan as they could come up with at times.
On Processing Grief as an Administrator
Many of the administrators who responded to the WCenter queries noted that they processed their own grief over tutor death in unique and highly varied ways. Because administrators hold the continuity of the program—they will likely remember individual tutors long after they have moved on from the writing center—they also hold the responsibility for memorializing and remembering losses. At the same time, they also might process tutor death differently because of their unique relationship with their tutors as managers, mentors, teachers, and friends. Writing administrators carry the loss of a tutor in longstanding ways; over time, they might find themselves in the unenviable place of being the only person in the writing center who remembers the tutor who died. As one writing center administrator shared: “As I write this, I realize with some real sadness that soon enough there won't be students around who knew [the tutor], and it will be less palpable a personal and communal loss. But it remains a personal loss for me, and, of course, for his family and friends.”
The “wrap-around” role that administrators serve for their tutors might make the grief complicated and long-term. Administrators might feel responsible for the tutor’s death because of the often close-knit and long-term relationships that tutors share with their directors. As one administrator wrote:
I was also not entirely prepared for my own sense of loss and grief. And regrets. I could think of so many ways I could have been a better mentor, teacher, and friend. And sometimes I wasn't very good at helping my staff process this loss because I was having a hard time processing it myself. So go easy on yourself.
As writing administrators, we carry the history of our programs alongside their legacies on campus. Student involvement is critical for our work. Tutor death punctuates a community that is often otherwise close knit and connected, sometimes for years. So, while we administrators may carry grief well beyond academic semesters or years, try not to do so alone.
Conclusion: Postvention Planning After Student Death
So much of what my colleagues intuitively or professionally landed on are indeed standards of best practice for responding to student death in other spaces on campus. The impulse to gather in community, to process, to seek counsel, to memorialize, and to grieve align well with postvention plans in higher education spaces. Writing, of course, can also be a powerful tool in processing death and grief.
At the same time, many of the postvention plans at the college or university level might be too generalized or too focused on single loss events. Instead of understanding student death—each student death—as an ongoing iterative process of making sense of loss and responding to grief as it emerges, changes, compounds, and is shaped over time, many of the practices in postvention plans seem like a “one and done” model. The lack of assessment of these plans further begs the question of whether these protocols are helping our community members to process and heal. And, finally, these plans often include a lot of practices around communication that adhere to legal frameworks (such as not immediately disclosing cause of death or identifying information) and controlling the death narrative rather than engaging in healing practices. At times, the well-being of the institution and the community align, but, frequently, these protocols and plans appear more about reputation and liability than compassion or care work.
Of course, there are legal and ethical obligations that institutions have to students around disclosure that make sudden displays of memorializing or grief challenging or even downright illegal. Though I advocate for center-specific responses to crisis, I also believe it is critical to be aware of one’s institutional policies and structures around crisis. This knowledge is critical for shaping programmatic response to student death.
As a field, however, we need to do more to address student death as it might occur in and around the writing center. We need to prepare new administrators in crisis response and management work, and we need to conduct more research on how deaths in and around the writing center impact us. The data above suggests student death is becoming more frequent, especially among LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and intersectional youth populations. This is not a numeric issue alone, however; the anti-racist mission of many writing centers indicates that the students most likely to staff and attend our centers are becoming increasingly at risk. My hope is that we develop data-informed response plans and eventually aggregate information about student death and its impacts on writing centers and its community members. We need to learn more about student death, and we need to share what we learn in professional spaces like conferences, journals, and workshops. This is a matter of preparation, of course, but it is also one of inclusion and anti-racist praxis and prevention. We need to support our community, particularly the most vulnerable among us.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)—a research-intensive STEM university—exemplifies how an institution can respond to student death through intentional, neutral, and data-driven approaches. After several students died by suicide in fall 2021, they created a task force (made up of administrators, students, staff, and faculty) to collect data on what was wrong in the community. Another task force was created to implement the first task force’s findings. An independent review of the school’s mental health practices was also conducted by Riverside Trauma Center. Instead of leaping into action, the task force intentionally built a multi-tiered assessment and implementation system that included data collection, assessment, external consultation, community listening sessions, and a campus wide survey. They presented initial findings in January 2022. That same year, WPI opened a Center for Well-Being. Currently, nearly all the task force recommendations and most of the independent reviewer recommendations have been implemented.
Using methods familiar to many of us, the institution’s taskforce created and implemented a multi-stage plan for learning about and then addressing the challenges with mental health that the community faced. They recognized the limitations of prior best practices in student mental health support—none of the students who died by suicide were identified as at risk under the prevailing criteria—and, the failures of conventional wisdom around responding to student death, such as foregoing memorialization. The institution provided resources to address the issue and brought in community members at each stage of the process, from design and fact finding to implementation.
Several of the task force’s findings mirror other mental health surveys and research in higher education. For example, faculty who are BIPOC, female, trans, and nonbinary do more care work than their white male colleagues. Junior and mid career faculty support students more than senior colleagues. Faculty struggle to keep up with student demands for support and feel underprepared to do this front-line work. Similarly, students struggle with the fallout from the pandemic, “specifically citing the feeling that their ability to perform academically was demanded at the expense of their feelings, health and humanity” (Kisner, par. 13).
Writing centers are not colleges or universities. In many ways, we are well situated to support student well-being over academic performance; empowerment and process over product. This starts with tutor training and developing a clear mission and benchmarks for center outcomes. At the same time, as I have learned, research can be a critical element of understanding the new landscape that we are in post-pandemic. We can learn a lot from WPI’s unflinching and comprehensive approach to exploring mental health and student death on campus. Of course, I hope what I write here remains theoretical for readers. But in case of emergency this piece begins the conversation of how we plan for, respond to, and address student death.
Acknowledgement: Thank you to Dan Lawson for feedback on early drafts of this project.
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