One Step Forward

THE NOTION is almost paradoxical. Dapper deans gather in the stately Harvard Faculty Club to discuss students' most pressing and personal problems, the ones that are triggered by stress, and usually explode into severe depression or rash action, turning priorities, sensibilities, objectives inside out. These experiences, when they befall those close to us, prove so deeply personal that the idea of more than 100 college deans coming from all parts to discuss stress and substance abuse and suicide in a formal conference on "Stress-Related Problems Among College Students" strikes a distasteful chord.

It's simplistic, though natural, to be skeptical about the motives of folks like Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III in an endeavor like yesterday's conference. Epps and his peers on other campuses conveniently and unavoidably serve as college bad guys, the ones seen engineering "crackdowns" and laying down the law. Especially at big schools, deans are local and often forbidding public figures.

But the objectives of the conference are sincere, and, if Epps is typical, the meeting provided deans an opportunity to look at their roles with rare candor. They had done their homework: Two years of planning and a year-long survey on stress of more than 3000 college students preceded the conference. The College Task Force, an ad hoe committee of 11 New England college deans sponsored by the Boston-Area Medical Foundation, has met monthly since the fall of 1979 to discuss how best to understand and respond to alcohol and drug abuse, and with this conference is moving to wrestle with questions of stress in general.

Many acknowledge that a mammoth gap exists between officials and vital undergraduate life, and yesterday the deans seemed bent on closing it. Epps, in particular, spoke beforehand in very certain terms about learning more intimately about current student concerns and communicating a different images for himself.

"One notoriously thinks a dean of students is there to keep order. The job is much more creative," Epps said in an interview "I don't think we have a tradition of showing that to our college administrators and our students," Epps, who heads the College Task Force, views yesterday's meeting as an important step in reversing the trend toward distant, impractical administrating. "We tend to react to the problems of the present in terms of solutions from the past," Epps said, emphasizing the importance of the new data from the surveys "I think it's time to clear the decks and start again."

It's slightly disarming to hear a Harvard dean talk in such earnest, self-critical terms, saying, for example. "We've got to stop relying on anecdotal information passed on through old-boy stories" when trying to understand current student problems. But such words--and substantive action like yesterday's conference--ought to provide encouragement.

Obviously, one conference will not transform bureaucracy into student-administration intimacy. Beginning promptly at 9 a.m. Monday morning, some student or other will fail to get an audience at University Hall, and others will not dare enter. Yesterday's conference won't effect dramatic campus change. But its premise--and, more importantly, the humble, honest talk which took place away from the podium--are constructive, healthy signs.