Clarifying and cracking down on STINFs

Just five weeks into the spring semester students have begun to feel the mounting pressures of midterms, applications for summer experiences and the general demands of Duke’s busy campus. A great deal gets lost to the balancing act of student life and to the high expectation nature of our stresses. Unfortunately, the biggest hit from our lifestyles is received by student health—mental and otherwise. Yet given these varied stressors and the longstanding issues surrounding mental wellbeing on campus, the use of short-term illness notification forms for mental health remains ambiguous. As Duke comes off of last week’s mental health awareness week, the policy on STINFs deserves revisiting.

Over the years, the way mental health issues are regarded and responded to by society and institutions is also evolving. For example, Duke’s medical leave policy that constricts students to taking two semesters off and requiring readmission. The policy, as we have noted before, is incongruous with the needs of students facing mental health issues. Proper support for students should be prioritized over the enforcement of such a blanket policy. Given this context, last year’s mental health focus month drew a list of goals for Duke that included increasing ease of access to CAPS services, normalizing discussion around mental health issues and connecting students with relevant services. The push on campus has had success with some of these goals and has certainly sparked conversations amongst students over the years through initiatives such as the What I Be Project and Me Too Monologues.

As Duke’s campus moves towards creating a more mental-health friendly environment, STINFs should follow suit. The point is not that STINFs do not have room for mental health issues, it is that the form elects to be vague about incapacitating illness. Clarifying the use of STINFs for mental health issues will better serve students who may have confidence issues as things stand with having their personal challenges accepted. The clause that limits the use of STINFs to, “sufficiently debilitated as to be unable to perform basic academic tasks” is good but not totally clear. Without compromising the privacy of students by adjusting how professors and others are notified of a STINF submission for a class, this serves as a step to legitimize the problems some face. While it is not unreasonable for professors to be skeptical of a large number of STINFs or repeated absences from one student, they should also understand the plight of students who may be going through very hard times in private.

What remains further is the issue of STINF abuse, which is a perennial problem for professors and departments. Contributing to the epidemic is the oversaturation of already busy academic schedules with other obligations. The use of STINFs for some classes with graded attendance serves largely as an easy way to skip class and extend deadlines to accomodate for trips, events, responsibilities and sometimes other work when the constellation of deadlines just becomes too much to handle. In abusing STINFs, students are doing themselves no favors. There comes a time when it is sensible and the right thing to do to cut back. For students who are merely lazy or just “need this one time,” they are effectively cheating themselves out of an education and contributing to a distrust of the form that hurts its original purpose. In the case of non-medical issues for which STINFs become the go-to option, students should have more faith in their professors to be understanding and willing to offer extensions for extenuating circumstances.

STINFs are a tool for good. Easily made changes to the form to explicitly accommodate mental health issues and a push for students to change their schedules and not their attendance habits are crucial to keeping the tool to its original purpose.