Kansas University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

In January, 150 Kansas University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences students who failed out and weren’t supposed to be back this spring were given a pardon of sorts.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, or CLAS, made them an offer: Participate in a new faculty mentoring program aimed at helping you improve your grades, and you can stay.

Of the 150, 125 agreed and returned to KU this semester for a second chance, CLAS Dean Carl Lejuez said.

Lejuez — a brand new dean — said it’s hoped that the quickly hatched program will help student retention until a more calculated faculty mentoring program can be put in place.

“This isn’t just being permissive; this isn’t just ignoring the rules,” he said. “This is saying we’ve identified that we have an issue, we are planning to do something comprehensive, but in the short term it seems only reasonable to marshal the resources we have to help these struggling students.”

Lejuez officially started the KU job Feb. 1 but said he’s been working with KU administrators and faculty and laying groundwork for plans since his hire was announced last fall.

In the process it became apparent that while many who have been here love the KU experience, the school also is struggling with student retention, he said.

Carl Lejuez

The mentoring program idea came up in conversations with faculty over winter break, he said.

Lejuez said more than enough CLAS faculty members volunteered to mentor students with no reimbursement, so the stopgap effort is coming at no cost. Faculty were mobilized and the program was sketched out in time to notify students in early January.

“The response with faculty was unreal,” he said, adding they actually had to turn some faculty away.

So far, halfway through the semester, 124 of the 125 students who signed up are still in school, Lejuez said.

Lejuez said he wants to apply data and response from this semester to develop a long-term comprehensive plan that will identify struggling students earlier in the process, then work with academic counselors and “one-to-one” faculty mentors to help get them turned around.

Lejuez said he has not yet determined whether students will be offered the same option again at the end of this semester.

He said it definitely won’t be a permanent option.

“This is the last time we want to do this,” he said. “This is a reactive strategy. What we need to do going forward is be proactive.”

The KU CLAS mentoring program was mentioned Wednesday in a national news story, published on the Chronicle of Higher Education website with the headline “The Mental and Academic Costs of Campus Activism.”

With racial protests that started last fall and have been ongoing on many university campuses, the story quoted student activists from other schools describing exhaustion, emotional distress and difficulty with schoolwork from pursuing their cause.

Lejuez said the same offer was extended to all KU CLAS undergraduates facing dismissal and that administrators didn’t “make a value judgment” about the reasons their grades were insufficient.

Students struggle for a lot of different reasons, he said.

He said activists are one example of students the program is hoped to help.

“Faculty could help them in terms of thinking about, how do you still do the things that matter to you but also balance your school work and remain successful?” Lejuez said.

“It’s helpful to bounce it off people … here’s a choice that I want to make, what are the consequences?”

Based on CLAS policy, all students who would have been dismissed after the fall 2015 semester had had failing grades for more than just that semester, however.

“Students who were offered the opportunity to have a faculty mentor had been on academic probation and faced dismissal because they had not met the terms of their academic probation,” CLAS communications director Kristi Henderson said. “Good academic standing for undergraduates is the same universitywide: a cumulative KU GPA of 2.0 or better. When students are not in good academic standing, the policy for addressing the status of such students is left to each school at KU to determine.”

In CLAS, students whose cumulative GPA is less than 2.0 at the end of any term are placed on probation, Henderson said. They’ll be on academic probation the following term, and must either return to good academic standing or meet a minimum term GPA to stay on probation. If they don’t meet the terms of probation, they are then dismissed.

Henderson said the number of students being dismissed, 150, was consistent with what the CLAS undergraduate office typically sees.