A&S faculty develop initiatives to promote student wellness through Supporting Mid-Level Academic Leadership program
William & Mary’s mission to cultivate creative thinkers, leaders and citizens among its nearly 10,000 students is no mean feat. According to Ashleigh Everhardt Queen Ed.D. ’20, teaching professor of kinesiology, that mission “doesn’t work if we are not all participating.” Its success depends on a community-wide effort to ensure that students are thriving.
“I think part of our collective responsibility is that we look out for each other,” she said.
That conviction led Queen to partner with Gexin Yu, chair and professor of mathematics, to develop a two-phase proposal to train W&M faculty and staff as campus mental health and wellness resources.
The dual initiative, combining Queen’s Wellness & Resilience Empowerment Network (WREN) and Yu’s Faculty Caring Network, emerged from the two professors’ participation in the Faculty Affairs & Development office’s Mid-Level Academic Leadership program. Both will be implemented in the coming year with support from the Office of the Provost.
Queen and Yu teamed up after they independently realized that faculty were uniquely positioned to close the gap between students and campus support systems, including the Counseling Center, the Student Health Center, the office of Academic Wellbeing and The Haven. As Yu explained, faculty members’ close proximity to students enables them to build trusting relationships and help students avoid issues of stigma and accessibility in utilizing these resources.
Such help is more critical now than ever. College students always face academic pressure exacerbated by “distance from familial support networks and the process of redefining personal values and beliefs,” Yu said. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, these challenges have grown more severe due to an array of factors ranging from learning loss to disruption of social traditions.
“Things changed, and I don’t know if we ever stopped and really acknowledged that,” Queen said.
When students approach Queen in her capacity as a pre-health advisor, their stress and need for support are palpable. They are often unaware of campus resources available to them, and simply directing them to various offices’ webpages has proven insufficient.
“If I tell a student, ‘Just look it up on the website,’ nine times out of ten, they’re not going to follow through,” Queen said.
The Mid-Level Academic Leadership program presented an opportunity for Queen and Yu to address this problem head-on. Introduced in 2022 to support the professional development of faculty interested in taking on greater responsibility in their academic and service roles, the program offers training sessions on such topics as promoting inclusion, navigating conflict, modeling and fostering wellbeing, and translating ideas into action. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Queen and Yu were part of a cohort of 10 faculty, including six from Arts & Sciences, who drew on these lessons for projects they pitched to the provost and other university leadership.
As a former doctoral advisee of Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs & Development Pamela Eddy, who runs the Mid-Level Academic Leadership program, Queen was particularly inspired by the program’s sessions at the Wellness Center and by a leadership style inventory that revealed her to be “very much a social-type leader.” WREN, she believes, reflects the synergy of her personal approach to leadership and her concern for the mental health and wellness of those around her.
Launching in spring 2025, WREN will offer faculty members and staff four two-hour training sessions, held monthly from January through April, in which professionals from Student Affairs will introduce their respective offices’ functions, ways students can access them, and specific individuals with whom participants can establish relationships and connect students personally. The trainings will also include concrete case studies that will enable faculty to recognize scenarios in their interactions with students and thereby streamline the search for the appropriate resource.
Following a post-training assessment, participants will serve as WREN Advisors, available to meet with fellow faculty and staff as well as students and direct them to campus support systems as needed. WREN Advisors can also become Wellness Partners, promoting monthly wellness events within their departments.
Queen hopes that WREN will allow W&M faculty to become a bridge between the academic and Student Affairs sides of campus.
“We should not be siloed, because we’re all here in the community to serve the community,” she said.
Starting in fall 2025, WREN trainees will have the opportunity to take this service one step further by applying to become Faculty Fellows of Student Wellness as part of Yu’s Faculty Caring Network. Trained through workshops on addressing student wellness needs, Faculty Fellows will offer “personalized support and guidance” to students themselves. Whereas WREN Advisors serve a triage function, Yu explained, the Faculty Fellowship represents “a proactive approach to addressing mental health challenges among students,” based on regular, in-depth meetings between trusted faculty and individuals requiring support.
Yu and Queen are excited not only to get their dual projects off the ground, but also to expand them in the future. Interest in the pilot of WREN, currently accepting applications from faculty and staff, has already exceeded Queen’s initial expectation of roughly 15 participants, and she welcomes more. In the coming years, she hopes to extend the program, not only to more faculty members and staff, but also to undergraduate and graduate students. With advisors drawn from all these populations, WREN will become a true “campus-wide effort.”
“The more people we have invested in our own community’s wellness and mental health, the better we all are,” Queen said.
Without the Mid-Level Academic Leadership program, Queen and Yu both acknowledge, their bold vision could never have become a reality.
Were it not for this initiative, Yu said, “I might not have been able to organize my thoughts on student wellness so clearly or propose a new program that actively involves faculty in supporting students’ wellbeing. This program provided me with the structure and systematic knowledge I needed to grow as a mid-level academic leader, and I’m deeply grateful for this incredible opportunity.”
The Faculty Affairs & Development office is currently accepting applications to attend all or some of the six spring 2025 sessions of the Mid-Level Academic Leadership program, starting on Jan. 16 with a workshop on identifying individual leadership strengths. Queen and Yu are proof that faculty participants, equipped with the knowledge and skills imparted by this program, will be prepared to make a unique impact on the W&M community.
