Last week, Northwestern announced major changes to the Women’s Center, including the elimination of long-term counseling services starting Winter Quarter, sparking uproar from students. Along with the recent passings of Scott Boorstein and Chuyuan Qiu, issues of mental health and wellness have resurfaced in the NU community.

This recent announcement reflects that students seem to be low on NU’s totem pole of priorities. Contrary to what Wildcat Welcome may lead us to believe, NU does not revolve around us undergraduates. This is the drawback of attending an elite, multi-faceted research university but should come as no surprise. Many aspects that attract record levels of applicants each year — the prestige, the massive research output, the B1G athletics — are the same aspects that the administrators and donors hold dear. When the opportunity comes for NU to recruit more elite high school football players or to break through to the cutting edge of a lucrative scientific field, the administration must value those opportunities over the concerns of current students. And unfortunately, as we recently discovered, the opportunity to increase administrative efficiency and organization trumps the concern of students’ mental health.

The administration claims the elimination of counseling from the Women’s Center does not mean that there’s a net loss of counseling resources on campus. Counseling at the Women’s Center will move to CAPS in an effort to consolidate and streamline mental health resources. This plan, however, neglects many of the important nuanced differences between the Women’s Center and CAPS. For example, the Women’s Center provides a more specialized environment for women and survivors of sexual assault than CAPS. But more importantly, the Women’s Center has, in the past, presented itself as a longer term alternative to CAPS. In contrast to CAPS’ now-defunct 12-session limit for counseling, the Women’s Center offered up to 52 counseling sessions. Despite the CAPS session limit being lifted last spring, the goal of CAPS is still only to provide short-term mental health options, serving as a way-station to private, off-campus services. The consolidation of counseling services could also significantly increase wait times for mental health services, as all recipients of counseling at the Women’s Center will be rerouted to CAPS to continue their sessions. By attempting to streamline mental health services for efficiency and ease of administration, NU will effectively make mental health resources less accessible for students.

Since my own arrival on campus two years ago, NU has gone through several changes — both administrative and physical — and a common theme across many of these changes is the lack of concern regarding their potential impact on the lives of students. Two projects that immediately come to mind are the renovation of Mudd Library and the debate surrounding reallocation of space in the Black House. The decision not to house administrative offices in the Black House came after a series of student protests and demands, perhaps some evidence that the administration is not completely deaf to our voices, although they are very, very hard of hearing. The Mudd library is currently under renovation to create a new research center, but the plans call for a significant reduction in the size of the Mudd library from three floors to a single floor, reducing space available to the general student population.

Changes, big and small, have arisen from the outspoken determination of students. In addition to the Black House, the successful creation of an Asian American Studies major occurred after 25 years of student advocacy. The saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” holds true.

This is where new students play a vital role. With their doe-eyed, gung-ho attitudes and unstrained voices, new students have the capability to squeak the loudest. They must be willing to learn about and participate in campus activism, campaigning for things that will benefit themselves, as well as future generations of NU students, over the next four years. Beyond that, new students must take advantage of the resources that NU does provide. After all, not every school has access to world-class faculty and research labs, an entertainingly-unpredictable football team and lakefront views.

Colin Wang is a Weinberg junior. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.