How One University Is Working to Make Student Leaders More Resilient

Last January, Tim Davis left his post as the University of Virginia’s director of counseling and psychological services to become the institution’s first executive director for student resilience and leadership development.

Ten months into his new role, Mr. Davis is teaching a course for first-year students on resilient leadership, coaching students to become more effective leaders, and training staff members in the Division of Student Affairs on how to shift students from a “fixed mind-set” to a “growth-oriented” one.

In a pair of discussions with The Chronicle, he talked about the need to strengthen students “in the middle of the curve,” and how he’s trying to build a culture of resiliency at UVa. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What was the impetus for this new role?

A. As I was watching us get flooded with demand for counseling services, I talked with the administration about our need to provide more preventative programming — about spending some of our resources helping students in the middle of the curve stay healthy and get stronger, instead of waiting for them to become the 10 percent of the student body that we were providing mental-health services to. So they broke me off to focus on building resilience and support for student leaders into the fabric of the university.

Q. You left an advertising career in the 1990s to study strengths-based psychology, and got your Ph.D. in counseling psychology in 2001. Is that the work you were hired to do at UVa?

A. The hope in coming here was that we would be able to build out a program that really helped more students who weren’t yet in need of formal support to fortify themselves.

Counseling psychology is more of a positive, strengths-based approach, as opposed to clinical psychology, which is about diagnosing symptoms and treating more-formal disorders. What became clear was that for a variety of reasons — some philosophical, some related to capacity — it was going to be hard to return the counseling center to the more traditional, strengths-based approach, which was more typical at university counseling centers from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

When there’s no bandwidth left over to look at strengths-based programming, the clinical needs are often dictating the day. When people are in crisis, and teetering on the brink, that’s going to take precedent, as it should. Fortunately we were able to carve out a new role for me here in the UVa career center that would help us help the average UVa student leave here with more coping skills.

Q. You often hear that students today are less resilient than they used to be. Is that true?

A. It sure feels that way. But like anything else, you can’t figure out how much of what we’re seeing is due to the fact we’re paying a lot more attention to it, and how much of it is a meaningful shift in the resiliency of this generation. My guess is it’s some of both.

If you use mental-health statistics as a proxy for resilience, there is something going on. According to Martin Seligman in his book Flourish, we’ve seen the average onset of depression go from age 30 to age 15. That’s unbelievable. The frequency of serious difficulties we’re seeing in young adults is on the incline, pretty sharply.

Q. Any theories on why students might be less resilient than they once were?

A. We may be seeing a bit of a backlash from the self-esteem movement. We thought the right thing to do was to tell children how wonderful they are, and what really happened was, by accident, we created what Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mind-set” — where students learn they have a trait, such as “smart” or “talented,” that they need to protect at all costs. The idea of venturing out, once I’m identified as “smart” or “brilliant,” brings me nothing but the chance of losing that mantle. So there becomes an inward-looking, defensive approach to life and the need to protect a fragile identity.

We know parents are at least a little more involved than they used to be. There are a lot of well-intentioned, loving parents who accidentally clip their own children’s wings by heading off struggles and doing too much for their kids, and really not allowing them to learn through struggle and through failure. I can see that in myself — my knee-jerk is to wrap them in bubble wrap — and I have to pull myself back from that inclination. There’s been a shift in our society where as parents we think it’s more our job to protect rather than to push.

Q. How do you choose which students receive leadership coaching?

A. I’m letting them self-select. One of the most important factors in any personal growth is being ready. I can’t scan 22,000 students for who is ready or who is not. When I even get a whiff that they’re interested, and they initiate, they go to the top of the list.

Then, whenever I have the chance to coach members of a student executive committee as a group, I’m eager to do that, because we can reach a lot of students efficiently.

Q. What does leadership coaching of students, or “executive coaching,” as you’ve described it, look like in practice?

A. It’s providing them with a safe, confidential setting where they can explore their anxieties and their struggles related to leadership.

It’s developing self-awareness, looking at their strengths and also their developmental areas. It’s really taking them through the change process, looking at where they’re getting in their own way, and then helping them put together a behavioral plan for change.

Getting students into leadership positions does not in and of itself tend to grow leadership skills. It helps some, but it’s not nearly enough to produce the behavioral change and the increased confidence and self-efficacy of young leaders. At UVa these students have real responsibility and real stressors that can cut in one of two directions — they can be overwhelming, or they can make them stronger and more resilient.

I’m trying to operationalize Carol Dweck’s work — the idea that you have to come up against shortcomings to grow as a leader, that you have to fail some, which is hard for youth these days to get their mind around.

Q. Why is it hard for students today to understand that?

A. There is such a more intense culture of competition and comparison today than there used to be. The easy link to make is to social media, where students can almost quantify what they’re doing relative to other students.

With that culture of competition gets folded in this feeling that “I can’t take a B.” I tell students, “You need to do some things that will make your brain stronger, and that means you need to take classes where you’ll get a B.” They’ll look at me and say, “I can’t afford that.”

Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.