Covid has left a deep impact on the students, said the international secretary of higher education at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, while addressing heads of colleges and universities here on Saturday.
“It (Covid) has left a deep impact on the people, particularly the students. We see an increasing level of decrease in mental health of our students resulting in unfortunate suicides all over the world...” said Father Joseph Christie, secretary, Jesuit higher education, Rome, Italy.
Father Christie was addressing vice-chancellors, principals and directors of institutes at the annual conference of the Jesuit Higher Education Association of South Asia (Jheasa) at St Xavier’s College.
“How are we going to help our students to withstand all this pressure, tensions, and to have a good healthy well-being?” he asked.
The three-day conference from January 26 is on Discernment-Networking-Collaboration: Where is the Spirit calling us?.
The delegates at the conference will deliberate on “contemporary issues faced in the arena of higher education and also the response of the Jesuit institutions of higher education towards them.”
Father Dominic Savio, principal, St Xavier’s College (Autonomous) Kolkata, while talking about the challenges and concerns of higher educational institutions spoke about mental health, too.
“...area of concern is taking care of the mental health of our students, which has become a major problem in the society at large. We have organised regular counselling facilities in the college and taken several measures to take care of this problem of our students,” said Father Savio in his address.
On the sidelines, Father Savio said the number of students seeking help from counsellors was coming down than what it was immediately after classes had started after the pandemic. “... I always feel more than teaching and learning in the classroom we need to give this kind of help to students,” he said.
Father Savio said the institutions of higher education are confronted with several challenges.
“Some of them are related to the New Education Policy, repositioning of our history, prioritising of socio-political issues, hindrance to pluralism in our democracy to name a few. However, our concern is how to look at them from the Jesuit perspective,” he said.
Reverend Stanislaus D’Souza, president, Jesuit Conference of South Asia said: “We need to reimagine and reinvent ourselves so that we can make our institutions academically, structurally and culturally future-ready.”
The secretary of Jheasa, Father C. Joe Arun, spoke extensively about collaboration.
“We need to make an impact...that can happen by collaboration...,” he said.
Father Jeyaraj Veluswamy, rector, St Xavier’s, has nearly 12,000 students both in school and college, including rural campus at Raghabpur village.
“More particularly in the last 10 years this mother campus St Xavier’s College has given birth to three more campuses — St Xavier’s College campus Raghabpur, St Xavier’s College campus Ajaynagar and St Xavier’s University New Town campus,” he said.