The Mental and Academic Costs of Campus Activism

Maxwell C. Little wasn’t in a good place last fall. Many days he stayed up until 3 a.m. to meet with fellow founding members of Concerned Student 1950, the student group protesting racism at the University of Missouri at Columbia, going home for just a few hours and regrouping in the morning. He was tired all the time — physically, mentally, and emotionally.

As the campus protests escalated, it became harder for Mr. Little to juggle being an activist and a full-time student. Meeting with administrators and other student groups and, eventually, supporting another student’s much-publicized hunger strike took priority over schoolwork. He started missing classes and asking professors for extensions.

“Every time I would go home, I would shed tears,” says Mr. Little, a graduate student in the department of educational leadership and policy analysis. “I couldn’t comprehend my work because, to be honest, when I had to catch back up it was tough. All I could think about was the movement and what to do next.”

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

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He wasn’t the only student who felt that way. “Individuals looked sick,” he says. “You could see it on their faces, because they’re constantly giving energy to addressing these issues.”

When Mr. Little went online, he read invective against him and his movement. Some comments were sugarcoated in “colorblind racism,” he says (they generally started with “I’m not racist, but …"). Others called him a “black monkey” or a communist. Still others threatened his life. When he saw a death threat against black students posted on Yik Yak, he went to a friend’s house and talked through his fears with other members of Concerned Student 1950.

At one point it became too much. He starting taking days off of Twitter and deactivated his Facebook account.

Mr. Little grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He thinks of himself as a tough person. But he felt “tarnished and destroyed” by the comments on social media.

During those tense months on the Missouri campus, Mr. Little and fellow activists talked about mental health a lot. As awareness of mental-health issues has spread, and a bruising season of public protests has worn on, students have raised questions about what their universities should do to support the mental health of campus activists.

Stigmas that once curtailed those conversations may be lifting, but not everyone is supportive. Student activists at Brown University faced intense criticism after The Brown Daily Herald published an article describing how advocacy had placed strains on some students’ health and academic success. The article described students who, like Mr. Little, struggled to choose between coursework and advocacy — a choice that, to many activists, doesn’t feel like much of a choice at all.

Breaking the Stigma

The mental and physical toll of campus activism has not been widely studied, but it certainly isn’t new to movements in the current protest moment. Activists in the 1960s faced many of the same stressors as those spurring action today, but “they didn’t have the same language to talk about it,” says Clarence E. Lang, an associate professor and chair of the department of African and African-American studies at the University of Kansas. Mr. Lang, who studies black social movements in the 20th century, says that mental-health issues have long been a taboo subject in society. But recent movements promoting diversity and inclusion have been marked by more conscious and robust discussions of self-care and community care.

Instead of the “macho vibe” of activists 40 years ago, who saw value in pushing themselves to their breaking points, activists today are more concerned with taking care of one another, says Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at the City University of New York’s Hostos Community College. Fifty years ago the average student was likely to be a white, male, third-generation college student with little debt and relatively few family obligations, says Mr. Johnston. Today that student is more likely to be a woman of color who is grappling with loans, a family, and the pressure to find employment upon graduation. Those changing demographics have birthed new protest movements, he says, and created different external pressures on protesters.

So has the appearance of social media, and of heightened attention from the mainstream news media. Many activists describe being thrust into a spotlight, bombarded by almost constant criticism, with nowhere to hide. It’s not hard to find commentators quick to criticize student demands for “safe spaces” and improved access to mental-health services as whining. The conservative columnist Ben Shapiro, for example, called out students at Brown University who had raised concerns that their activism was affecting their health. “The parents of these dolts,” he wrote, “should be ashamed they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn their teenagers into useless members of society more focused on feeling microaggressed than learning life skills.”

But Mr. Johnston argues that students today are far less coddled than they were 50 years ago. “This idea that the American academe is an ivory tower with a bunch of babied, coddled students just doesn’t reflect the reality of the American university today.”

The irony of activism, says Mr. Lang, is that many activists are motivated by the feeling of being marginalized. Yet those students then face criticism and direct attacks that can reinforce their feelings of not having a place at the university — the very feelings that led them to action in the first place. “It’s the simultaneous nature of feeling empowered but at the same time feeling powered upon,” he says.

Justice Gaines, a senior at Brown who has been involved in campus activism for several years, says activism can be isolating and mentally draining because it involves constantly explaining oneself and trying to educate others.

“Students don’t choose to be an activist,” says Gaines, who prefers to use gender-neutral pronouns. “They feel like they are fighting for themselves to have a supportive community.” Protesters don’t want to protest all the time, Gaines says, but if no one else is addressing critical issues, there’s no choice but to stand up.

Sustaining Self-Care

Dara M. Huggins, a junior at Yale University and the president of the Yale Black Women’s Coalition, recalls feeling a “baseline exhaustion” during a stream of protests around Halloween in 2015, when a controversy over costumes heightened racial tensions on the campus. She says she wasn’t eating as often as she should have been, and she was hardly sleeping at all. But while her physical health may have deteriorated, her friends and colleagues helped keep her strong mentally. Ms. Huggins says students supported one another, whether they preferred to avoid “negative energy” or to reflect on the actions taking place on the campus.

Ms. Huggins never reached her breaking point. But she noticed other students who did, and she saw friends take time away from the campus as a result of the racial climate. As a minority student, she feels as if universities don’t fully understand the extra time many students in underrepresented groups spend outside of the classroom doing meaningful “educating work.”

Those discussions, she says, “can be tiresome and can take a toll on people — a toll they didn’t necessarily sign up for when they matriculated into university or when they were born.”

At Missouri, on days when he and other activists felt drained, Mr. Little says he and friends would “level each other.” When activists gathered, they would give one another “black love,” share inspiring quotes, and pray. God, he says, “was my mental-health counselor that looked out for me when I didn’t have a physical one to go to.”

According to a survey commissioned by the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the emotional well-being of college students, and the Steve Fund, a group focused on the mental health of minority students, black students don’t seek help as often as do white students for their mental and emotional problems. Mr. Little’s experience demonstrates why. While he knew there were mental-health counselors on the campus, he didn’t feel they would relate to what he was experiencing as a black man.

So he turned instead to professors like Amalia Dache-Gerbinio, an assistant professor in Mr. Little’s department, who opened up her office and her home to him and 11 other founding members of Concerned Student 1950. Ms. Dache-Gerbinio is black and Cuban and grew up, like Mr. Little, in an urban, underprivileged family. “We both know the struggles,” he says. “She was just there.”

At the University of Kansas, where mounting protests of the racial climate led to calls for the resignation of the student body’s president and vice president, Mr. Lang also found himself meeting with more students. He did so gladly, but he says that minority professors often are required to go beyond the call of duty to support those students.

Mr. Lang recently became co-chair of a newly formed advisory group on diversity and equity that reports to the provost. He sees it as a positive but feels it’s another weight that could conflict with his research and departmental commitments.

Action for Universities

Mr. Lang says that universities need to acknowledge the effects that lasting stigmas over mental-health issues can have on politically engaged students. “Otherwise, people may feel defective or that they are not resilient or tough enough,” he says. “And in fact this is something that all generations of activists have had to struggle with.”

Recognizing that students don’t work in a vacuum, administrators at Kansas decided not to dismiss the 150 students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences who had failing grades at the end of the fall semester, as the university normally would. Instead, officials created a mentorship program that allowed those students to pair with a professor and work through some of the external factors keeping them from succeeding on the campus. According to the university, 125 students chose to join the program.

While the policy stood for all undergraduates in the college, Mr. Lang says the mentorship program grew out of concerns about the racial climate and the rise in student activism on the campus.

As a professor, Mr. Lang says, his role is chiefly to be sympathetic to students. He listens, but he also voices support — so students like Mr. Little don’t feel alone in their advocacy.

When Mr. Little looks back at his involvement in Concerned Student 1950 last semester, he wishes he hadn’t put quite so much energy into it. “With my ex-girlfriend, we were having conversations that I talked about race too much, that I wasn’t home enough,” he says. He has lost relationships with friends and family members because of his role in student activism. It’s been tough and troubling work, “but sometimes you have to make those sacrifices if you are really passionate.”

Correction (3/16/2016, 6:43 p.m.): This article originally stated incorrectly that Mr. Little participated in a hunger strike. He was not a participant; instead, he supported the efforts of another hunger striker, Jonathan Butler. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.