“Beyond Silos”

Around 500 professionals across higher education logged on Thursday for a webinar focused on how to institutionalize a culture of wellbeing on college campuses. 

The virtual event, called “Beyond Silos: Bridging Academic and Student Affairs to Advance Student Wellbeing,” was a joint initiative of the LearningWell Coalition and U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network, two national organizations dedicated to promoting health and wellbeing at colleges and universities.

The webinar was inspired by the understanding that the efforts of a few positive actors on campus, no matter how committed, can’t move the wellbeing needle alone; they need the support of each other and collective action of the wider institution to make meaningful change.

“What if our systems were designed so that without any external intervention, they produced wellbeing and flourishing just by the way that they function?” asked Kelly Gorman, one of the four panelists and the director of the office of health promotion at the University of Albany.

The other three experts included Jennifer Fee, the assistant director of curriculum and training development for the Skorton Center for Health Initiatives at Cornell University; Angela Lindner, the interim vice provost for undergraduate affairs at the University of Florida; and Joe Tranquillo, the associate provost for transformative teaching and learning at Bucknell University.

Marjorie Malpiede, the editor-in-chief of LearningWell magazine, moderated the session, which began with a discussion of why a whole-campus approach to wellbeing is the right one.

Several of the panelists described how implementing wellbeing efforts institution-wide creates a system of support for students that extends beyond bare-bones crisis management or clinical mental health care. The goal is not just to keep issues from worsening, they said, but to foster new heights of flourishing. 

Jennifer Fee noted how these kinds of wrap-around supports are key to student academic performance. As for faculty and staff, she said, developing the whole-campus approach pushes them to practice creative problem solving and work across differences and between departments — that is, “beyond silos.”

On a higher level, Joe Tranquillo called out how the whole-campus approach, and ideally improving student wellbeing outcomes on a mass scale, might be influential in improving public trust in higher education as a whole. 

“I think that we need to show what transformations are occurring in our students — how they're becoming these amazing citizen leaders that are going to go out into the world and do great things,” he said.

But the panelists weren’t shy about identifying the challenges that come with trying to unite different departments and disciplines under a common goal, even one as non-threatening as wellbeing. Institutions of higher education, they noted, are famously quick to factionalize and historically slow to change.

Angela Lindner called one foundational barrier to institutionalizing wellbeing a “challenge of the heart.” “This is less about how to do the work,” she said, “and it’s more about convincing folks that it's important to do.”

Lindner described a steady struggle to inspire broad interest in an issue that faculty and staff may perceive to be outside their usual focus and adding to their already full plates. From there, sustaining any energy that does emerge is another battle.

Buy-in from top leadership is particularly key, given presidents’ ability to fund and promote a wellbeing agenda. But again, the panelists said, such a champion is not so easily won or kept.

Still, the spirit of the panel remained hopeful. All four experts are as familiar with the obstacles to institutionalizing wellbeing as they are the workarounds.

“One mistake is only paying attention to the coalition of the willing,” Tranquillo said he’s learned. “That feels good. It works great at first because you make really quick progress… But what it does is it means that there's then a bunch of people who are not included in the change.”

Tranquillo urged the audience to be persistent in efforts to draw fresh support, but also to be patient with the process. “Sometimes the best you're going to do is to get them to stop fighting you,” he said. 

Gorman added that bringing in new and diverse leadership for projects can help expand involvement as well as impact. “You can't have just one person or one office leading everything,” she said. “You need leaders from all different areas to bring their perspective to the table.”

Most of Fee’s attention is directed toward helping faculty understand the importance of incorporating wellbeing in the classroom and then actually doing so.

“I have to make sure that they're seeing the strategies that I'm sharing with them as not one more thing, but helping them do their jobs better, contributing to the academic success of students,” she said.

The online toolkit Fee developed, called WISE (Well-being in Scholarly Environments), includes evidence-based resources for instructors to, for example, write a wellbeing-forward syllabus or develop coursework that builds connections between students.

The need to develop ways of tracking and measuring student wellbeing was also a recurring theme. Clarifying the desired outcomes can reveal gaps in the work and roles that need to be built, Tranquillo said. 

“There should be dashboards,” Lindner added. “It should be open and available, and everybody can see how we’re doing in this agreed upon set of wellbeing metrics across the board.”

Meanwhile, buy-in may build with time and necessity. Faculty will come up against wellbeing’s impact on academic performance; residential life will see repercussions for social involvement; admissions will connect the dots to stop-outs and retention.

“At some point, when you get to a level of root cause analysis,” Gorman said, “you're going to be on the same playing field. You’re going to be at that same table.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.