Grant focuses on Indigenous collections at Hood, College libraries

SEE PATHWAYS PAGE 1 my relationship, artistically, will be with this collection,” Obomsawin said.

In addition to programs like Obomsawin’s residency, grant resources have gone toward technologies that connect Indigenous communities with museum and library items, Cuyler said.

“A community may want increased digital access,” Cuyler said. “We might use photogrammetry to create 3D models or build a digital exhibition of cultural heritage that we have.”

Assistant director of digital platforms at the Hood and steering committee member Meredith Steinfels described a new “linchpin” software associated with the grant called, International Image Interoperability Framework, She added that IIIF helps to “unify the library and museum holdings” by allowing interoperability between images and objects in Dartmouth’s collections.

With a physical basket at the Hood Museum and photos of a woman making the basket in the Rauner Special Collections Library, for example, “IIIF would allow us to put those two images together in a single viewer, and then start to annotate and add text and context,” Steinfels said.

Beyond increased digital access, Indigenous communities may ask for the physical repatriation of objects within Dartmouth’s collections, but that process occurs outside the realm of the funding provided by the Advancing Pathways grant, Mehrer said.

Multiple steering committee members said that the grant is a step forward in the College’s relationship with Indigenous communities. Carini said that the broader work associated with the grant “is still in the early stages.”

“Whatever we learn here needs to keep going,” Steinfels said.

Obomsawin hopes that the grant would help Dartmouth “right its relationship” to Odanak.

“I think there is a really awesome opportunity here with this grant to open a new chapter in the relationship between the Odanak Nation and Dartmouth,” she said.

Additionally, Miller said the grant marks a shift in how the College conceptualizes the role of institutions like the museum and libraries. “Museums can be pretty hostile places for Indigenous cultural heritage,” Miller said. “The Advancing Pathways team is working to right historical wrongs and change structures within these spaces.”

Improving mental health at Dartmouth will require confrontng students’ roles in feelings of loneliness and isolaton that cause peers to struggle.

Dialogue around poor mental health on campus largely centers around Dartmouth as an institution, focusing on the administration’s failings, faulty healthcare and lack of academic support. The College deserves this scrutiny, and these criticisms have successfully pushed for institution-wide positive change, as seen by the College signing a four-year partnership with the youth mental health nonprofit JED foundation. Yet, these conversations around mental health frequently omit crucial parts of students’ wellbeing — peer support, perceived acceptance and belonging.

By excluding campus culture and social dynamics from the discourse, we fail to address our own roles in our peers’ mental health. Loneliness, isolation and social stress play substantial roles in young people’s mental health.

To combat this, students must build a culture of compassion and sustained support. Students can provide peer support and social acceptance crucial to each other’s well-being by working together to dispel misconceptions surrounding the frequency of mental distress, discourage speech that negatively targets individuals or specific groups and maintain a consistent, baseline level of support and acceptance of one another.

The importance of peer support is nearly impossible to understate. The biggest obstacle to the average college student’s mental well-being comes not from academics, finances, romance or family, but from perceived peer acceptance. A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology concluded that peer acceptance, dependable friendships and ease of making new friends all significantly reduce depressive symptoms in young adults. Without that peer support and acceptance, students’ mental health drastically struggles. A Boston University study found that two-thirds of college students reported struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation. The impact of loneliness disproportionately affects students of color, further emphasizing the need for community and peer acceptance. A 2017 poll found that students of color are 16% more likely to feel isolated on campus and twice as likely not to seek mental health support compared to their white peers.

Of course, the academic pressures of a rigorous school like Dartmouth play a role in deteriorating mental health. However, there is the question of the chicken and the egg: What comes first, poor mental health or poor academic performance? The American College Health Association’s assessment discovered that mental afflictions had the most significant adverse effect on academic success. That said, there is no doubt that academic struggles and mental distress in college students are closely related, and students do require support and accommodations from professors and Dartmouth as an institution, in addition to support from friends and the student body.

This is not to say that students should shoulder the burden of their peers’ mental health struggles alone. The American College Health Association’s assessment further reported that 10.8% of students say concern for a troubled friend or family member negatively impacted their academic performance. This would surely feed into a cycle of continually escalating mental distress within the student body. For serious or extended circumstances, students need the formal support and treatment provided by clinicians. And luckily, as an institution, the College has taken significant steps to ensure this

Dartmouth must renegotate its laundry contract to ensure that students have access to functonal and afordable laundry facilites.

is possible — including increasing the number of counselors on call and providing free, confidential teletherapy to all students via Uwill. However, a campus culture that defends against loneliness and encourages peer acceptance would hopefully reduce the number of students who end up needing that professional help.

First, the student body must embrace mental illness as an ongoing and common struggle. Mental health struggles are widespread and likely far more prevalent than you might think: Nearly half of students nationally have received counseling or therapy for mental health concerns in their lifetime. Despite this shared experience, the Healthy Minds Network found that 45% of students perceive a public stigma towards mental illness — believing that most people would think less of someone receiving mental health treatment. Contrary to that perception, only 6% of students report a personal stigma, admitting they would think less of students who seek mental health treatment. Combating this public stigma will require working towards mutual compassion facilitated by openly sharing experiences with mental health struggles and treatment.

Second, we must discourage hateful, targeting or discriminatory speech — especially the sensationalization of rumors. Fizz, an anonymous discussion app, illustrates this malady by reflecting attitudes and language in interpersonal relationships and conversations on campus. Though there is plenty of positive content shared on Fizz, the negative content is striking: fraternity rankings, judgments on sexual histories, polls on what’s considered attractive or unattractive, hateful and discriminatory posts about marginalized groups and targeted rumors — all of which contribute to feelings of isolation, loneliness and judgment from peers.

Cultivating a collective disdain for negative speech would strengthen social connectivity and, in turn, build a campus with stronger friendships and creator connectivity. A 2022 University of Virginia study found that college students who refrained from engaging in negative gossip were much more likely to have stronger friendships and greater connectivity to others compared with peers that did participate in the spread of such gossip. Discouraging the spread of harmful speech online and in real life would increase students’ feelings of connectivity to other students and the Dartmouth community — reducing stress and symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Third, we must emphasize proactive over reactive support for other students. Following tragedies this academic year, professions of empathy and support soared on social media apps like Instagram and Fizz, with people posting their own stories or offering themselves up as a helping hand and ear. However, it only took a few days for the status quo of social stratification and derogatory comments to return to Fizz. If that peer support isn’t sustained, it may be considered fleeting or ingenuine — or simply be forgotten.

Accepting a degree of personal responsibility for the feelings of isolation and loneliness felt by your peers is daunting. It requires becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable feeling of curbing social behavior unconsciously reinforced by unhealthy social norms. Only once we address our own role in shaping Dartmouth’s culture — including social pressures and norms that favor stress, isolation and loneliness — can they change Dartmouth’s culture to one where students feel accepted and cared for by their peers.

Last month, The Dartmouth reported some of the challenges students face when trying to do laundry in their dorms. From dryers that require several cycles to dry, to washers that leak or don’t adequately wring out clothes, to machines that don’t work at all, the current laundry system sets students up to fail. When adding in the exorbitant cost that students incur when these machines don’t work properly — it is clear that the current laundry service provider, CSC ServiceWorks, is not able to keep up with student needs, at least in its current state.

As Dartmouth is currently in the eighth year of a 10-year contract with CSC ServiceWorks, it is vital that the College negotiate terms that address the issues students face while doing laundry.

Although faulty and unreliable washers and dryers may seem like a small inconvenience, it is one that can consume much of students’ free time and money. While it is reasonable to expect that students can allot two hours a week to do their laundry, faulty machines mean that a two-hour task may take several hours longer to complete. Laundry facilities are also communal — which means that if students aren’t available to switch their laundry or start another cycle, they risk their clothing being left in the laundry room soaking or damp or moved to the foor by other students. This can lead to a vicious cycle where, since clothing was left out wet, it must be washed again.

Additionally, these minor inconveniences are rather costly. If each wash and dry cycle costs $1.50 and students are having to wash and dry one load of laundry two or three times, they may spend upwards of $6 on a single load of laundry. Additionally, if students have several loads of laundry to do per week — which is often necessary to avoid overloading the small machines and causing them to break further — they may pay $10-15 per week on laundry. This payment, importantly, is not billed with a student’s tuition, where it might be covered by fnancial aid. Rather, most must pay with a credit or debit card. Although the expense appears small, for low-income students who have to work to provide for themselves — and in some cases also for their families — this extra expense means an additional, unavoidable fnancial burden.

The students who opt to pay for the laundry pick-up services such as E&R Laundry do not have to worry about the unreliability of the College’s laundry facilities. However, E&R services cost between $486.2 for the most basic plan and $953.71 for the premium package each year — making them a luxury few students could have.

This means that students who can aford to access these services never have to deal with the timeconsuming, aggravating process of trying to do laundry with broken and dilapidated machines. In short, the time burden that students spend waiting for their laundry to fnish its second or third cycle is endured primarily by students who are not extremely wealthy.

Although it is up to students to report issues with laundry machines to Residential Operations, a necessary service such as laundry should not be such a large problem that these struggles are a ubiquitous experience. In short, it is the College’s responsibility to ensure that their machines aren’t in such poor condition that they are so easily broken. We understand that improper use — such as using too much detergent or overloading the machines — can lead to some of these problems, but students would be less likely to do these things if the machines worked in the frst place. If each typical load of laundry would cost less than $6 and more laundry machines were available, students would be less likely to overfll the machines — consequently extending their lifespan. And at a certain point, if a problem is this widespread, the issue seems to be with the system itself.

That being said, we understand that some machines do break down from time to time. However, why else are we paying for laundry, except to cover the costs of the machines? Without addressing the poor quality and high price of doing laundry, the cost of these services only compounds the inconvenience of such issues. To this end, as the College negotiates their contract with CSC ServiceWorks, we urge them to ensure that free laundry — or at least laundry costs which are billed with tuition — is a part of this contract, as are working laundry machines. Many of Dartmouth’s peer institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, have already implemented such policies and it is time that Dartmouth does the same.

Laundry is a necessary chore. However, it is unacceptable for students to be constantly dealing with broken and inefcient machines at a school like Dartmouth that touts the amount of resources it has. In short, the College must do more to ensure that the current inconveniences students face in doing something as simple and necessary as their laundry do not continue into perpetuity.

The editorial board consists of opinion staf columnists, the opinion editors, the executive editors and the editor-inchief.