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From The Faculty Chair

Transitional Adulthood

Steven R. Lerman

In what at times seems to be the very distant past, there was a widely accepted notion that colleges were, in at least some sense, serving in loco parentis for their undergraduate students. This largely mythical notion provided the foundation for regulating students' lives to an extent today's students (and to a lesser extent their parents) would find intolerable. Sometime between the often idealized times of loco parentis and now, we created an equally mythical notion that undergraduates are entirely adults and that we, as faculty, have no significant role in their non-academic lives. This view is reflected in the oft-cited mantra, "We treat students as adults." that pervaded the debate following President Vest's decision to house all freshmen on campus.

The problem with either the quaint, antiquated view of students as simply very large children or the view of them as full-fledged adults is that neither really provides much useful guidance in how we should best serve the huge diversity of real undergraduate students. The truth is that students differ enormously in their readiness for adult life of responsibility and freedom. Some come to us as freshmen fully prepared for adulthood, while others have never made any serious decisions at all. Most of our students arrive somewhere between those two extremes, making efforts at rigid categorization as "adult" or "child" particularly useless. More importantly, the models of "student as child" and "student as adult" are both so divorced from reality that they don't provide much in the way of useful guidance in making hard decisions on academic policy. Both extremes lead us to decisions that are counter-productive.

A far better way to think of our undergraduates is as a group of transitional adults. By that, I mean that most undergraduates are far more like adults than children, but that most of them are still on a developmental path to what we generally conceive of as full adulthood. For most of them, their four years at MIT are spent in finishing that transition process; part of our job as a faculty is to help them along in that process.

Viewing college students as transitional adults resonates with the experiences some of us have with our own children who are in that 18-22 year old bracket. We no longer try to regulate their schedules or social lives, but we also don't expect them to bear all the responsibilities of adulthood. At a minimum, they are usually not financially self-sufficient. They may well need our help in many domains of their lives, and we expect to be actively involved in some advisory capacity in their important decisions. Society also acknowledges their transitional status by respecting their right to vote as adults, while until age 21 restricting their access to alcohol and gambling.

At some level, the approach of treating students as fully-developed adults is seductive because it simplifies so many things. In this mythical world, we no longer have to worry about issues such as housing policies, substance abuse, or other behaviors unless they cause immediate damage or harm to other members of the community. After all, one might argue that in the adult world, it's not really any of my business if my neighbor drinks himself into a stupor each night as long as he stays out of his car and doesn't make a nuisance of himself while doing so.

The messier reality is that we do, in fact, care whether a student drinks to excess or engages in other potentially self-destructive activities. Our concern derives not just from our worry about damage to others, but also from our concern about the student's development. In short, most of us accept the idea that our responsibilities to our students go beyond that arm's length relationship we often have with adults outside the MIT community. We may choose to disavow the responsibility of being our brother's keeper in general, but we shouldn't have that luxury when dealing with our students. Moreover, the truth is that we routinely impose restrictions and provide help to students that, at least implicitly, reflect our view of them as transitional, rather than full-fledged, adults. We limit how many subjects they can take as freshmen, we restrict their choices of residence, we require them to have health insurance, and we enforce a variety of strictures on the parties they hold. Rather than skirt the issue with rhetoric about treating students as adults, we should embrace the concept of students as transitional adults and make more explicit what we mean by it.

One area where this idea comes to the fore is in making hard decisions about parental notification. Current federal law places some limitations on the circumstances when MIT can discuss a student's problems with his or her parents. Some of these strictures are open to interpretation. There have always been cases where experienced counselors in the Office of the Dean of Students (now the Dean for Student Life) involved parents or guardians, particularly when the mental health and safety of the student was of great concern. While we should continue to make these decisions on an informed, case-by-case basis, we should probably move to involve parents earlier and more often when doing so is legally permissible.

We should also recognize that undergraduates do change during their four or more years here. Freshmen and seniors are very different in the degree to which they have transitioned to full adulthood, and our policies should reflect those differences. For example, for many years we treated subject prerequisites as advisory rather than mandatory. The Physics Department has in recent years enforced the restriction that students must have passed or placed out of 8.01 to register for 8.02. This seems an entirely sensible restriction. However, I would grant much more flexibility to a senior who wants to register for a subject for which he or she might not have taken a prerequisite. In making policies, we should be comfortable with restricting the options of a freshman while respecting the decisions of seniors.

I have discussed the issue of how we deal with undergraduates with many of the housemasters, counselors, administrators, and staff who work directly with our students outside the classroom and laboratory. These dedicated individuals often implement policies on substance abuse, issue sanctions for inappropriate student behavior in dormitories and other living groups, and provide counseling support for students. Many of the decisions they have to make daily implicitly reflect the model of transitional adulthood. One of their problems is that we, as faculty, haven't caught up with the shift in expectations that students and their parents have for universities. As a result, they sometimes see us as disengaged in the non-academic lives of our students and as unsupportive of their efforts to help build a more constructive community for students. It would be far better if we, as faculty and staff, shared a common view about the role of the university in the transition of incoming freshmen to full-fledged adults, and worked in partnership.

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