3 CULTURE
6 ARTS
Grandma’s Place: where you’re always welcome
The Whitney’s exhibition on the legacy of the Kamoinge Workshop comes to an end
5 OPINION
Cuomo is Unfit for Governor
VOLUME LVI | ISSUE 4
MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2021
Student Health Center removes cap on therapy sessions Free counseling services at the NYU Wellness Exchange are now available based on clinical need. By KAYLA HARDERSEN Staff Writer
PHOTO BY GEORGE PAPAZOV
NYU’s Student Health Center, located on 726 Broadway, has removed the 10-session limit on counseling sessions this semester. Students are now allowed to make appointments for free counseling services at the NYU Wellness Exchange based on clinical needs.
The Student Health Center has removed the 10-session limit on counseling sessions this semester, instead allowing students to make appointments based on their clinical need. The initiative was brought to the SHC by the Student Government Assembly’s Health and Wellness Committee. “Beginning in Spring 2021, in consultation with students, we agreed that the frequency and exact number of counseling sessions a student has will be based solely on their clinical needs and will be decided by the student and their counselor,” the SHC wrote in an email statement to WSN. “Sometimes it will make clinical sense to work with a student for longer than 10 sessions and sometimes we will refer a student to longer term providers before 10 sessions are completed.” The SHC told WSN that there has never been a firm 10-session limit on the number of therapy sessions a student could attend, even prior to this semester. According to SGA Health and Wellness Committee Chair Gavin Arneson and Executive Director of Wellness Services Dr. Zoe Ragouzeos, certain students might have been able to attend more than 10 sessions in the past. However, 10 sessions was still publicly advertised as the limit. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
Migrating birds imperiled by NYU buildings as spring approaches By ALEX TEY Copy Chief As the spring migration season begins, birds traveling through New York City face the threat of reflective glass on NYU buildings. A Washington Square News review of crowdsourced data submitted to dBird.org and iNaturalist.org between 2015 and 2020 found 35 reports of dead or injured birds lying around buildings on NYU’s two New York City campuses, including f ive birds found dead below the windows of Bobst Library. However, given the absence of organized monitoring efforts and the fact that most dead birds are disposed of by maintenance crews before passersby f ind them, these f igures likely signif icantly underestimate the number of birds that have flown into NYU buildings.
Window collisions are one of the top threats to birds in North America. The bird population in North America has declined by 25% in the past 50 years, and according to the American Bird Conservancy, up to one billion birds die annually after colliding with window glass in the United States. “Birds can’t see glass at all, period, end of story,” said bird mortality expert and consultant Heidi Trudell, of Just Save Birds. “It’s either clear and completely invisible, or it’s a reflection and completely invisible.” According to Trudell and NYC Audubon Senior Conservation Biologist Kaitlyn Parkins, the vast majority of collisions occur at the treeline level during morning foraging. Although NYU buildings are not “modern allglass behemoths” like the most notorious bird-killing skyscrapers, Parkins
said, even small windows are extremely deadly when they reflect foliage. “In a lot of cases, what we see is reflective glass that’s reflecting habitat nearby,” Parkins said. “Birds perceive a reflected tree in glass as a real tree. So many birds hit that because it just perfectly reflects this tree, and it’s at the perfect height for them.” NYU buildings, such as Bobst and the Kimmel Center for University Life, are particularly dangerous for birds because they reflect the tree canopies of Washington Square Park. Songbirds migrating at night and concentrating in the city — drawn in by the urban glow, dropping into the f irst greenery they f ind as dawn approaches — face the most risk. In 2015, Parkins and her colleagues published the results of a study conducted at Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan f inding that, on average,
the carcasses of 63% of birds that die from glass collisions are never discovered, even when volunteers are actively searching for them. When Viveca Morris was a graduate student at Yale, she worked with maintenance staff and ornithologists at Yale’s natural history museum to document window collisions. Morris, who is now the director of an animal ethics program at Yale Law, said that the cooperation of facilities managers was invaluable to the collision monitoring efforts, since she and her colleagues relied on custodians to recover and record dead birds. “I think that we’re lucky in that the facilities managers really, really do care about it,” Morris said. David Alonso, vice president of NYU Facilities and Construction Management, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for
this story. FCM Assistant Vice President Alfred Ng wrote in a November 2019 email exchange that the university does not track window collisions. However, anyone can contribute reports of dead and injured birds to dBird.org — a project by the NYC Audubon Project Safe Flight team on which Parkins works — to help inform conservation efforts. Georgia Silvera Seamans, an ecologist working in Washington Square Park and co-founding director of Washington Square Eco Projects, said she has received numerous reports from community members of birds colliding with windows at NYUowned buildings in Silver Village and Washington Square Village. “Some of those were found by kids just playing in the lawn area and coming across them,” Seamans said. CONTINUED ON PAGE 4