First Monday

President Corrigan's ViewPoint

ViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publications offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu


October 4, 1999

Four years ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) began an ambitious effort to link the critical global issue of HIV/AIDS with universities’ undergraduate educational mission. Could an academic focus on HIV/AIDS strengthen student learning and curricular development, while promoting community engagement and social responsibility? President Corrigan’s answer, a strong "yes," is presented in his essay for AAC&U’s new publication, "Learning for Our Common Health." Following are excerpts from that article.

San Francisco State University’s engagement with the HIV/AIDS crisis began much as it probably did on many other campuses: with the discovery in 1982 that a member of the campus community had AIDS. … What no one could have predicted then was the way San Francisco State’s HIV/AIDS response would, over the next 17 years, expand, evolve, and mature into a tightly-woven academic/student affairs/human resources/community relations effort that has made the University stronger as an educational institution and as a community.

It is no exaggeration to call the overall effect of our HIV/AIDS response transformational. … SFSU’s HIV/AIDS response has become—as crises can—a point of campus-wide pride, a reinforcer of key university values, and an interdisciplinary vehicle for learning. It has changed lives and opened minds.

It is also a work in progress. As knowledge of and treatment for AIDS has advanced, as the demographics of the disease have changed, and as AIDS has become "old news" to some, the campus program has had to adapt, developing ways to fight "compassion fatigue," complacency, and the sense of diminished risk bred of powerful new medications. …

In the fall of 1998, I arrived at San Francisco State to find a campus already deeply engaged with an issue that had only begun to register on the East Coast campus I had left. SFSU’s AIDS response, largely a dedicated volunteer effort up to now, needed institutional stability and support. In the next few years we made the AIDS Coordinating Committee (ACC) a regular university budget item. We updated the AIDS policy [passed in 1986] adding reference to HIV and the ADA.

We provided support and funding for a very important ACC project: the creation of the Memorial Grove in a beautiful campus site. Though AIDS prompted the creation of the grove, the site is deliberately inclusive in name and use. … The establishment of the Cindy Kolb Fund [which] provides grants to faculty, students, and staff with HIV/AIDS, to be used for any purpose; the creation by a dedicated University group of an SFSU panel for the national Names Project quilt, and the catastrophic leave plan, which allows university employees to donate some of their earned sick leave to a central pool, were other significant projects of those years. …

Curricular engagement expanded greatly. By 1994, about 60 courses included an HIV/AIDS component.

The net effect of these projects of the middle years cannot be measured by dollars raised or leave hours donated. The real—and lasting—value has been the much broader sense of common effort and community that emerged. As we steadily increased the number of people who were engaged in some way with the University’s HIV/AIDS effort, we became a more compassionate community, a more thoughtful community, and a more united community. …

In the fall of 1994, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story on SFSU’s AIDS response. One of the people who had been a leader from the very start, counseling and biology faculty member Ann Auleb, said: "The response that’s come from this campus, that’s the real story."

Three key developments characterize the last few years in SFSU’s HIV/AIDS activities. The subject of HIV/AIDS has taken academic root, and now appears throughout the curriculum—even in a Russian class. Health and sexuality support programs have come together across administrative lines to link efforts in effective ways. And students are taking on a new peer leadership role that is, in many cases, linked with service learning.

Each of these developments suggests that out of an initial effort to cope with a terrible disease has come something more deeply tied to a university’s educational and social mission.

As is often noted, HIV/AIDS offers powerful and wide-ranging opportunities to teach and learn. It can extend well beyond the sciences into ethics, public policy, international relations, economics, literature, the arts, and more. At SFSU, AIDS/HIV is integrated into the curriculum in many of the expected academic areas: clinical science, biology, nursing, counseling, health education, psychology, but faculty are also weaving it into mathematics, philosophy, statistics, history, Black Studies, art history, and international relations. It has also become one of the general studies options for the 9-unit "relationships of knowledge" segment. …

In the classroom, HIV/AIDS engages students not just with facts, but with discussion of values, ethics, policies. Outside the classroom, a growing number of courses provide service learning opportunities involving HIV/AIDS, some community-centered, others linked with the growing campus peer education effort.

Instead of fading, as they are reported to have done on many campuses, peer education activities are burgeoning at San Francisco State. … Much credit must go to a united Student Affairs effort, of which the ACC is a key part, which has made peer education the new wave in its efforts to deal with a changing problem.

"The biggest crisis we’re facing now is a feeling that HIV/AIDS is over," says ACC Chair Michael Ritter … He and his colleagues have found—as have several studies of successful drug education programs—that peers have powerful voices. …

One of the best of SFSU’s new approaches to HIV/AIDS education is what Ritter describes as "the deliberate infusion of HIV education into all areas, including alcohol and drug prevention. There’s such a connection. …"

Grass-roots peer education efforts are a mainstay of the campus HIV/AIDS response. For the last five years, students have staffed a Peer Education booth at the Student Center. Others give presentations to residence hall students—probably the youngest cohort on campus —to classes (at faculty request), at the student union, and to student groups. Another peer group has, over the last year, worked with Ritter and another faculty member to conduct focus groups with students from various communities—Latino, African American, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, fraternity, bisexual women, students with disabilities, to name a few—in order to target effective prevention efforts to each community. U.S. AIDS demographics show that the disease is growing fastest in communities of color, so these focus groups make particular sense.

Peer education has spread to the Web, with the creation this year by several students of SFSU’s "Web Peers" (www.sfsu.edu/~aidsinfo/peer/). The site allows students to send in questions, which are answered on-line by ACC members and University health educators.

Typical of the strengthened campus partnerships is Student Health Services’ commitment of three of its health educators to different aspects of HIV/AIDS, and the allotment of specific time of two of its physicians to HIV testing and the HIV Positive Care program. The campus’ first AIDS Health Fair was created by ACC in the ‘80s. The health center now runs several health fairs a year.

Over these years, we have seen some welcome changes – the Kolb Fund now receives requests for books and fees, things that imply a future, rather than, as in early days, money to go home to say goodbye to family. The Bob Westwood Scholarship Fund has been created for the student with HIV or AIDS who is thinking about the long term, about a career path. …

Because of our HIV/AIDS response, administrators, faculty, and staff have cut across boundaries to come together in a common effort. We have enriched the curriculum, tied education to life in powerful ways, given students a range of new opportunities for responsibility and active learning, strengthened our ties to the community beyond the campus, and, perhaps most important of all, come to feel a shared pride in this multi-faceted and still-evolving effort.

Though the University’s HIV/AIDS response began long before our new strategic plan was conceived, I can look at our HIV/AIDS efforts now and see that they address every one of our six planning themes. That is pretty good assurance that we have developed something that will endure.

Today, 14 years after its founding, the AIDS Coordinating Committee is a recognized, respected, and administratively-supported center of HIV/AIDs efforts. Once ad hoc, with no administrative charge or home, it is now fully institutionalized, reporting to—and receiving budgetary support from—the Vice President for Student Affairs. ...

We know that higher education cannot think of itself in a vacuum, that every campus needs community ties and partnerships. We have the capacity—and, I believe, the obligation—to be value leaders, as well as knowledge leaders. All this comes together powerfully in HIV/AIDS.

San Francisco State University is a sadder community because of HIV/AIDS, but it is also a better one.

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