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Let& #39;s imagine components of student life could be put on a continuum between "core/essential" and "non core/optional". I know, I know. But run with it for a minute.
Instinctively we think that teaching is core. Ironically when we decided to promote "blended" before we really worked out what that would mean we made the result harder to explain / justify. Hence Times today headlining on "as little as three hours".
F2F contact hours are, lest we forget, frequently higher in other countries and correlated with better student wellbeing.
But let& #39;s set aside that end of the telescope for a minute. The problem with the other component of the Times headline (sex/parties) is that it "sounds" at the very opposite end of the continuum - here in a pandemic it feels very optional.
Hence the two common takes. The disparaging version says "the selfish young will jolly well have to sacrifice" and the benign version says "Gen Z will be creative and sacrifice"
There& #39;s the anti-masks take of course, which tends to be "its all a conspiracy! They /noone will die! Open the universities!" although that lot also wasn& #39;t to close them bc mickey mouse courses etc.
Anyway none of those takes are what matters for me. It& #39;s all the stuff in the middle. Not the formal contact hours - there was hardly any of them anyway.
Not the "wild parties and sex" - there& #39;s not that much of that either. It& #39;s all the in between moments. Not the big dramatic events, the day to day.
Particularly if you& #39;re away from home it has the prospect of being awful. It& #39;s not clear where you are supposed to spend all week, or who you are supposed to spend it with.
One of the dangers I think is that thousands of people have been very busy working on their bit working, and there& #39;s no doubting the herculean effort. But lots of it doesn& #39;t take up much time. The day to day being bearable is the glue in the bundle.
The hum drum, hour by hour experience away from the set piece teaching, events etc is what& #39;ll matter. A university that& #39;s conscious of this and has a plan around it would, for me, be one that& #39;s genuinely student centred and mental health aware. I& #39;m just not seeing one yet.
If, by the way, the answer to the question "where are students supposed to be all week, and who are they supposed to spend it with" is "in their room, alone" we have a monumental mental health crisis coming.
One that& #39;s even bigger than the monumental student mental health crisis we& #39;ve already spent a decade trying to fix.
One other thing for now. SUs, clubs and socs etc play an enormously important role here - and need their net budget (not grant, net budget after commercial collapse) to reflect that role. It& #39;ll still be tiny in the grand scheme of things.
But that alone won& #39;t cut it. When we did our loneliness research we concluded that it was vital to maximize participation in activities and groups. But we also concluded that there needed to be a "whole institution commitment" to solving student loneliness.
It has to become the partial responsibility of everyone. Module leaders need to be thinking about students forming friendships within the teaching. Do all we can to retain student employment and pay more student volunteers than we used to. Phone banks of paid students...
... calling others regularly. Allocation of space on campus to make social mixing possible. And so on and so on.
What it all really means, is that when a year ago everyone was happy to say “we should take mental health as seriously as physical health”, it means looking like we meant it.
This time, all the apps, awareness weeks and top tips in the world aren& #39;t going to cut it.
It means looking at the reams of physical risk assessment already completed, and adding a bunch of rows to the table on the deep risks to student mental health of a socially distanced term.