Tuesday, November 15, 2022



Yale Penalizes Students for Being Suicidal

For months, she struggled silently with a sense of worthlessness. She had panic attacks that left her trembling. Nightmares that made her cry.

She’d told only a handful of friends about the sexual assault she endured while she was home the summer after her freshman year. Now, as she finished her sophomore year at Yale University, the trauma finally became unbearable.

On a June day after the 2021 spring semester, the 20-year-old college student swallowed a bottle of pills at her off-campus apartment.

As she slowly woke up at the emergency room in New Haven, Conn., one thought overwhelmed her: “What if Yale finds out?”

She’d heard about other students being forced to leave because of depression and suicidal thoughts, and about the lengthy, nerve-racking reapplication process. It was one reason that the student — whom The Post agreed to identify by her first initial, S., to protect her privacy — told only a few people about her problems.

Three months earlier, a Yale freshman named Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum had killed herself on campus after contemplating the consequences of withdrawing from the school, her family said. Her death had renewed fierce debate about campus mental health, the way Yale treated suicidal students and the university’s reinstatement policies. Similar controversies have engulfed other universities as student mental health problems soar across the country.

Confined to a room at Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, S. asked her nurses and doctors with growing fear, “Do you have to tell them?”

Yes, they replied. Because she was a student, hospital staffers said, they needed to let college officials know, she recalled. They gave her consent papers to sign for the release of her medical information. She remembers how vulnerable she felt in her thin hospital clothes as she signed the release.

The hospital declined to comment on her account, citing patient confidentiality.

Yale officials quickly set up a Zoom call with S. on a hospital laptop in a small, bare room. On the screen, she said, was Paul Hoffman, the psychologist in charge of student mental health at Yale.

She told him about the rape she’d experienced — but had never reported because she didn’t want her parents to know — and how it had sent her spiraling into suicidal thoughts.

He nodded and took notes. A few days later, he arranged a second Zoom call, with her and her parents.

“We’re going to recommend you take a medical withdrawal,” he told her, she said. “Do I have to?” S. remembers asking him. “We’re going to strongly recommend it,” Hoffman replied.

In an interview, Hoffman and other Yale officials declined to discuss Yale’s withdrawal policies or specific student cases. After Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide, the university told the Yale Daily News that involuntary withdrawals from Yale are rare and that the majority of students who apply for reinstatement are allowed to return.

For S., leaving Yale meant losing her friends and mentors — people who had kept her afloat during her depression. It meant losing her routine, her lab research, her four-year plan to get into medical school. Losing all the things that gave her purpose, identity and support when she needed them most.

S. had followed the campus debate in the wake of Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide. She knew Yale could force her to withdraw if she didn’t leave on her own.

As soon as the Zoom call with Hoffman ended, hospital staffers handed her the cellphone they’d taken when she arrived. She began typing out the email Hoffman had asked her to send. “Good afternoon,” it read. “I am requesting a medical withdrawal.”

In coming months, S. would look back to that moment with anger and regret. It wasn’t what she imagined when she was admitted to Yale, one of the country’s most prestigious universities. She recalled how her family screamed for joy. How special she felt when Yale found out Brown and Northwestern had also accepted her and raised her financial aid to match what they would provide.

“They make you feel like you’re the best of the best, like this bright and shiny thing,” she said. “But as soon as something’s wrong, they want nothing to do with you.”

It had been difficult to get into Yale. She would soon learn how daunting it was for those exiled from the university to return.

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U.S. colleges talk green. But they have a dirty secret

Harvard. Dartmouth. NYU. UNC. These and other American colleges stress their green credentials. They also use some of the dirtiest fuels to power their campuses – and crank out carbon dioxide or smog-forming gases at higher rates than the typical commercial power plant, a Reuters data analysis has found.

Harvard University has trimmed fossil fuel investments from its endowment to show its commitment to fighting climate change. Yet the school’s power plant still burns dirty fuel oil in 1960s-era boilers to generate heat and electricity for the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

U.S.universities tout their energy-efficient buildings, their environmental course offerings and their research on climate change. Some have culled oil stocks from their investment portfolios.

Yet dozens of America’s leading schools still use some of the dirtiest fossil fuels to light, heat and cool their campuses, a Reuters examination of the nation’s largest university power plants has found. Most of these facilities use equipment that cranks out smog pollution at rates that exceed the average generated by the boilers and turbines powering the nation’s commercial electric utilities, oil refineries and paper mills, the news agency’s analysis of emissions data shows.

The list of big emitters includes elite Ivy League schools, large public universities and small private colleges. Dartmouth College burns sludgy oil. The University of North Carolina clings to coal. So does the University of Kentucky, where a campus boiler used to generate steam heat emits poisonous mercury at a rate that puts it among the worst coal-fired power plants nationwide. Harvard University, home to a $51 billion endowment, uses fuel oil to stoke two highly polluting steam-heat boilers installed when John F. Kennedy was America’s president.

The four universities said their power plants operate within regulatory pollution limits. They add that they are using some renewable energy on campus to reduce their carbon footprint.

Energy production is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Universities are part of the problem. That’s because many operate their own plants to ensure themselves a supply of cheap and reliable power, and to avoid dependence on surrounding electric grids that often are decaying from age and underinvestment.

Most of the operations reviewed by Reuters are so-called cogeneration plants. In addition to electricity, they produce steam for heating buildings. Some burn multiple fuels.

Combined, these 103 campus power plants at 93 universities emitted 5.8 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars, according to EIA data.

To understand how these facilities stack up against large-scale energy producers that supply electricity to homes and businesses, Reuters obtained pollution data calculated by the federal government for 103 campus power plants at 93 universities. These were the only college plants large enough to warrant tracking by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA emissions figures are estimates based on a variety of factors, including the type of equipment and fuel used by any given power plant. This information was available for 2013 to 2020.

Combined, these 103 university plants emitted an estimated 5.8 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars, according to EIA data.

Separately, Reuters obtained NOx data from 89 U.S. universities, some of it publicly available from state regulators, the rest secured through state public records requests. NOx is the shorthand for nitrogen oxides, which help form powerful greenhouse gases, smog and acid rain.

Most of the NOx data comes from emissions tests performed since 2017, plus a handful of results from 2015 and 2016. In contrast to the EIA data, which provides plant-wide estimates of CO2 emissions, the NOx results are narrower. They represent real-time emissions readings taken from specific pieces of combustion equipment operating inside a facility.

While these tests don’t measure a school power plant’s total output of NOx pollution, they do reveal how clean or dirty individual boilers and turbines are, and the environmental consequences of operating them. Regulators consider this data a useful way of pinpointing problems: Aging combustion equipment, even units used only occasionally for backup power, can produce an outsized share of a power plant’s NOx emissions.

The Reuters analysis of the two data sets revealed:

Two-thirds of the 89 plants for which Reuters obtained NOx data lacked sophisticated pollution controls commonly used in the commercial power market to cut emissions.

Nearly half of the 103 university plants for which Reuters obtained CO2 data burn fuel oil, coal or wood chips at least part of the time. Those energy sources rank among the world’s most carbon-intensive fuels.

Nearly half of those 103 campus plants produced more CO2 per megawatt hour of power generated in 2020 than did commercial utilities and other generators supplying the electric grid in their areas.

The absolute volume of carbon dioxide emitted collectively by those 103 campus plants has declined 13.5% since 2013. Still, that drop is less than half the reduction that electric grid power plants achieved over the same time period.

Nearly a quarter of the campus plants emitted more carbon dioxide in 2020 than they did in 2013.

Anti-coal activist Neil Waggoner said U.S. universities that trumpet leadership and research on climate issues need to make a priority of cleaning up their own generating plants.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently upgraded its power plant with two modern turbines. Still, MIT clings to back-up boilers – some more than 50 years old – that emit smog-causing emissions at rates up to 20 times higher than those of its newer equipment.
“There is a huge amount of hypocrisy here,” said Waggoner, a senior advocate in the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio.

The campus plants fared particularly poorly with their commercial counterparts when it comes to production of NOx. These gases include nitrous oxide, which has a global warming potential 273 times greater than carbon dioxide, according to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

Turbines generating power for ExxonMobil’s refinery in Beaumont, Texas, posted NOx rates in 2021 that were lower than about 95% of the rates recorded in nearly 260 campus pollution tests reviewed by Reuters, according to EPA data and results from individual combustion units at 89 schools. The comparison was based on a standard EPA metric: pounds of NOx created per million British Thermal Units (Btus) of heat created from fuel combustion.

The college with the highest rate of nitrogen oxide emissions was the University of Wyoming, according to the data. Last year, one of its three 40-year-old coal-fired boilers produced NOx at a rate higher than all other school combustion units analyzed by Reuters: 0.62 pounds per million Btu. That rate was 9 times higher than the 2021 national average of nearly 2,500 combustion units at work in about 800 grid-connected power plants across the country, according to EPA data and the school’s 2021 emissions test.

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Australia: Home education popularity soars in past year as state school attendance sunk by floods, Covid

The Queensland Education Department has been slammed for failing to engage and retain students with the number of home school enrolments more than doubling in the past four years.

State school attendance rates plummeted this year, while home education registrations soared, according to Department figures.

The data revealed a gradual increase in home education registrations from 2018, with 3232 home school enrolments to 2021, with 5008, before a leap of almost 3500 to bring the 2022 level to 8461.

Shadow Education Minister Dr Christian Rowan said the state government had failed in student engagement and retention.

“Between 2017 and 2021, (Semester One state) school attendance rates have declined in every single educational region and it’s even greater among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander state school students,” he said.

He said Queensland families had experienced “profound difficulties” in enrolling their children in distance and home education.

“The time it takes for processing applications is leaving students at home and not learning. The lack of consultation and ongoing delays has caused parents immense distress,” he said.

The Department of Education said it does not fund home education programs and registrations still only accounted for one per cent of all enrolments.

However, it has commissioned research “to better understand the likely future demand for home education registration services”, due to be completed at the end of the year.

Home Education Association state leader Samantha Bryan said she was surprised by the jump in registrations, describing the 69 per cent increase as “staggering”.

“The pandemic did a few things,” she said.

“People have chosen to home educate because a family member is vulnerable and they wanted to minimise the risk, some did not want their kids to be subjected to the directions around vaccinations and masks, while others found they liked homeschooling during the pandemic and decided to keep going with it.”

Meanwhile, department data also showed a slow decline in Semester One state school attendance rates from 2018-2021, before a nosedive in 2021-2022.

Education Minister Grace Grace described the past few years as “disrupted”. “For large parts of 2021, Queensland’s schools were the only ones on the eastern seaboard that had face-to-face learning,” she said.

“Like everyone, students were asked to stay home if they were sick, and that’s exactly what they did. Widespread flooding and an influenza outbreak also impacted attendance figures this year.”

Elizabeth Galbraith pulled her children out of private education in October 2019. The family lives on acreage in Redland City, 20 kilometres southeast of Brisbane.

Ms Galbraith said 13-year-old Rebekah was getting lost in the crowd, 10-year-old James wanted to be around older children, and seven-year-old Patrick preferred to work on vehicle engines. “I felt the system was failing them,” Ms Galbraith said.

“For their individual needs, I felt the best way to meet them was independent learning, allowing them to work at their own pace on their own interests.”

“And once the children are done for the day, they can ride their bikes, or the two older ones go horse riding as part of a job-ready program.

“I used to do three pick-ups and drop offs, so this has also relieved so much stress, particularly because my husband works remotely.”

Ms Galbraith sends her children’s tests into Australian Christian Homeschooling every month for marking and they then receive an end-of-semester report card.

“The children say the only thing they miss about going to school is not playing sports, but they can still play sports at private clubs,” she said.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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