Withdrawal policies lack compassion

Sacrelicious
    By Carl Bialik

Sarah—the name has been changed to ensure her privacy—was having a tough time last semester. While she tried to focus on her studies, her mind was always partly at home with her father, who was very sick. Halfway through the term, she learned tragic news: her father was dying. To Sarah, the decision was clear. Though her academic career was very important to her, she was determined to be with her father during the final weeks of his life.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

Unfortunately, Yale restrictions refused to allow Sarah a single-semester leave. When she turned to the Yale College Programs of Study to investigate the ramifications of leaving Yale for the semester—realizing that she would likely relinquish a full semester's cost of tuition, room and board—Sarah hoped to find assurance that human beings would review her case, recognize that her desire to withdraw was reasonable, and grant her permission to return to Yale the following semester. Instead, these were the words that she found: "Students who withdraw either for academic reasons or for personal reasons must remain away for at least one fall term and one spring term, in either order, not including the term in which the withdrawal occurred."

This short passage, with no justification or explanation, presented the rule that decided Sarah's fate. No leeway, no individual consideration was to be found here. Essentially, she would have to choose and lose. Either Sarah could follow her initial instinct and leave school, only to be barred from returning for more than a year, or she could struggle through the rest of the semester, tormented by her decision.

Fortunately for Sarah, she lived close enough to Yale to create a workable solution. She dropped a class, leaving her at the minimum of three credits, and she commuted back and forth between home and school. She also found that the people she worked with at Yale were very supportive. Somehow, despite the great difficulty of her situation, she survived the semester.

Yet the larger question of fairness remains. As Sarah noted, "Suppose my home were several states away; there is no way I could have accomplished what I did. I would have had to make an extremely difficult decision: my family or my future. Choosing to return home would not only mean that I would likely suffer a tremendous personal loss, but that I would also have to put my academics on hold for a full year—regardless of whether or not I felt psychologically ready to return to campus and resume study." Sarah says she would have chosen to be with her family. "I would not have missed the last few weeks of my father's life for anything," she explained. "However, why should I be penalized for making that judgment?"

The Blue Book specifies four categories of withdrawal: medical, emotional, academic, and personal. In the case of a medical withdrawal, students may return the following term. If a student withdraws for emotional reasons, as recommended by Mental Hygiene, he must remain away for one full term. And for students in the final two categories, two full terms away are mandatory.

The rigidity of this rule is staggering. No matter the cause of a student's withdrawal, if it cannot be categorized as a medical or emotional disorder, the student is forced to stay away from Yale the following year. No distinction is made between the student who decides to leave on a whim, the student who is failing out, and Sarah.

Yale enforces many rules blindly, without allowing for human oversight. The rules are elevated above the people who should be given the power to overturn them. An appeal by students for some common sense and a little human decency is met with the equivalent of a blank stare and a recitation of the inflexible rule.

The Committee for Readmission is responsible for deciding whether or not students who withdrew can be readmitted to Yale. Occasionally students apply before they have remained away for two full terms. But according to Dean Jill Cutler, chair of the committee, these applications are rejected automatically.

It is not the committee's job to decide the merits of the rule. What is needed is a fundamental change in the way Yale treats these matters—a change in the Blue Book to pass control of such decisions to human beings. Not all students can be as brave as Sarah, who asks, "to be in such a situation is hard enough—why should the school system compound the problem?"

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