Voices for Voices®

Balancing Act: Academic Integrity and Mental Health in Higher Education (Part 1) | Episode 144

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 3 • Episode 144

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Balancing Act: Academic Integrity and Mental Health in Higher Education (Part 1) | Episode 144

Chapter Markers
0:02 Higher Education and Mental Health
13:03 Navigating Mental Health Challenges in Academia
27:42 Navigating Real Experiences in Higher Education

Could balancing a teaching career while facing personal and professional hurdles actually lead to a deeper connection with students? Join me, Justin Alan Hayes, as I recount my journey from Corporate America to Walsh University, where I not only navigated a new role amidst job loss and long commutes but also connected with students on a human level. Through my story, we explore the importance of understanding students' mental health challenges and the complexities of balancing personal stressors with professional responsibilities. This episode offers a window into the realities of higher education and mental health, grounded in my own experiences and the hurdles I faced.

In another compelling chapter, I tackle the evolving challenges in academia, such as the rise of AI and its impact on plagiarism. We'll discuss my efforts to bridge this gap through experiential learning and my 100-page actionable book designed to aid students in their career searches—a move that met with administrative resistance. This episode highlights the tension between individual educators' intentions and university regulations, emphasizing the need for integrating real-world experiences into the curriculum. As the landscape of higher education evolves from 2017 to the present, I reflect on the importance of preparing students for the workforce through genuine stories and experiences. Don't miss part two next week, and thank you for your continued support.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. I am your host, founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, justin Allen Hayes. Thank you so much for your support for watching, listening. We asked, if possible, if you could share like comment on this episode and one or more of the other over 140 episodes that we have. We're everywhere on streaming platforms as well as audio platforms. Thank you, and we very much are grateful for your support. We very much are grateful for your support.

Speaker 1:

This episode is going to be part one of a two-part series on the state of higher education and mental health think of things to find out where we are now versus where we were kind of at the beginning, and the beginning is in 2012, 2013,. I was working professionally at Corporate America corporate America and I always had, I guess, a sense or a feeling of wanting to give back to the community and give back to others where I could and if there was a mutual fit. And one of those areas and one of those those ways was looking into being an adjunct professor at Walsh University, where I earned my Master's of Business Administration, focusing in management, because my Bachelor's of Science and business administration that I earned was in marketing. So I felt I would like to diversify a little bit if I could. So I looked into teaching the requisites for that and it all started started. So it all started way back when Walsh had reached out to ask alumni to come in for what they call a professor for a day, where you come in and talk to a class of students in your in so marketing marketing management for me and just share professional insights, how the education that I earned helped prepare me for the real world and how to get the most out of college university. And so I was very lucky in a lot of ways, but in this way, when I was in during my professor for a day, the local media, the Canter Repository, was doing a news story on the professor for a day, and the one classroom that they came into to document, take photo, was the class that I was speaking at. So photographer came in, took some photos After I was finished speaking, asked me a few questions and the story was later published both in the online as well as the paper copy, the newspaper.

Speaker 1:

And after that I reached out to the full-time faculty and said I think I might enjoy teaching someday. What do I have to do? And so I was given a series of steps, followed those, and that culminated on a day where we were asked to grade a paper, where we were supposed to speak on a topic for 15 to 20 minutes, have a group interview with the full-time faculty and then one-on-one with full-time faculty, and I was on vacation. I remember as well, because it resonates now, as I know a lot of my family. We just got back from vacation this year and I remember we were on vacation back in the you know the 2013 know time frame and we're at the airport and I had my phone off for most of the most of the trip. I didn't check my email much during during the trip, so I checked it at the airport and I had an email from the dean asking if I wanted to teach in the fall semester, and I was very, very excited to have that opportunity. What I didn't know was it wasn't going to be as soon as it was communicated to me, meaning I wasn't going to start right away.

Speaker 1:

It ended up being another year or so so I take this into 2014 when I was actually assigned a course and began speaking. At this point in time, I had actually gone through a job loss, and so, instead of working here in Northeast Ohio and driving a short amount of time, I found myself a new employment about two hours away, around the Columbus area and I talk about this often on our show going after things you like. You might be inconvenienced, but if it's something that you really want to do, give it a shot. And so I was assigned to one class a week. It was a four-hour long class in the evening, and so for a period of time I drove from Columbus all the way up here to Northeast Ohio, taught for four hours and then drove all the way back, and so I was able to work on Fridays, and sometimes I was actually able to work from home before working from home became popular, you know, due to COVID and those types of things. Popular, you know, due to COVID and those types of things, so that kind of takes me into a lot of time in the car.

Speaker 1:

Something new, speaking in front of, obviously, people I don't know. I didn't know the students, really didn't know the faculty, and I was in a relationship with my now wife and she was not a fan of moving to Columbus, and so I looked at relocating back here to kind of a home area in Northeast Ohio, I was able to do that. At the same time as I was doing that and getting acclimated, I was just under an incredible amount of stress. There were a lot of things that you know, past experiences, relationship, all kinds of things that were just manifesting, finally manifesting itself and becoming very stressed. I you know there were times I feel like I was passing out in the conference room. I wasn't eating adequately, I was trying to take vitamins to get me through those times instead of, you know, eating real food and nothing tasted good.

Speaker 1:

And so I was, you know, speaking in front of students and there was one time where a student was presenting and after class he came up and said, you know, hey, I'm sorry. And said, hey, I'm sorry, I just get really nervous when I speak and I stutter sometimes, and at that point I was going through a lot of stress and anxiety myself and I said I understand, as I really did, how I was feeling and I was relating to the student on a human level and and so at that time, teaching, let's say, take the stress and anxiety away from it. I love to do, I love to share experience. I have a lot of experience to talk about with students, given different experiences I've had with nonprofits and working through a court case with a board member who had stole money from our organization and going through speaking in a courtroom at victim impact statement on that and all these things were going on a lot of new things.

Speaker 1:

And one thing that was noticeable outside of the stress and anxiety to me was how big publishers like the Penguin, the McGraw-Hills of the world they really have a hold on universities and colleges, meaning there's agreements that universities and colleges go into and say you'll use our publishing, our books that we publish as a part of your curriculum, and so students are asked to purchase whether it's an online edition or the you know the hardback a book, sometimes it. So I was speaking way back when I was in college. I remember paying three, four hundred dollars for books the instructors wrote themselves, so they're making a lot of money off of the books and so, as I was experiencing from the teaching side, I was running into that and I guess one of the reasons I was running into that was as I came on board as an instructor, came on board as an instructor, one of the things I wanted to do and what I was asked to do was to bring my professional experience into the classroom and sharing that and saying, hey, you know, if this happens, this is a red flag and I've been through this bad experience and I made this bad decision. I made this good decision and really going through that and what I ended up doing was writing a 100-page manual book called the House of you Five Workforce Preparation Tips for a Successful Career and very easy, actionable, starting with you know I talk about the house, right, so you have to. You know, dig out the foundation, lay the foundation. Then you can go to the first floor, the second floor, the roof and then house maintenance and put that in a visual sense of you know, as you're looking at a blueprint, and before you dig that you have to be all in with what you are. Before you dig that you have to be all in with what you are intending to go forward with. So if you're in school for marketing, attending class obviously is a good thing. It's recommended Doing the work which might not be fun, might not be the cool thing to do.

Speaker 1:

Now, with artificial intelligence, there's a big hole there with trying to, as universities are trying to, weed out the plagiarism, and that's already been and had been a sore spot for many, many universities. And so that was happening and so I wrote this book 100 pages, like $11.99 on Amazon. And again I was asked to come and bring my experience, which the fancy term is experiential learning or experiential teaching, where again you bring outside experience in but then you're still following the curriculum, whether it's the PowerPoint slides or the vocabulary or the case studies and if there's examinations and papers and projects and those going forward. So I was weaving those together and I didn't think I was doing anything, hindering the students by putting my book on the required readings for the course. So, 100 page, actionable. Actually.

Speaker 1:

You can start out at the blueprint area but then when you're going through you can say, okay, here are my strengths, here are my weaknesses, here are potential interview questions, potential interview answers. What companies are operating in the geography that you want to be working in? So you may have grown up in Columbia, south Carolina, and you find yourself in school in Canton, ohio, so you're going to move back to a significant other and how serious is that relationship and where are they from and how's that going to go? Is it going to be a long-term relationship? There's a lot of things, a lot of moving parts, and so that obviously affects the student mentally because you're, you know, in many instances you're away from home. You know some people are nice, some people are not nice, just the way the world works as you're going through your studies.

Speaker 1:

And so it's my book and I make out of that $11.99, I think. $3 commission off of that Amazon takes quite a bit. There's the actual printing fee and then they take a part of the fee on top of that, and so it's not like the author receives that full amount. So, again, going from my experience, I was like, okay, this is actionable, this is something that's going to help somebody, you know, look for internships and have, you know, get their thoughts together, and then, after the internship, for a full-time position, things that again pitfalls that I ran into and I was running into, and then things that I learned that I did pretty well, it's included that, and so I was running into, you know I was running into, I guess you know individuals in the particular school that I was teaching you know the business school, and it was brought to the attention.

Speaker 1:

Students went and they talked administration. Professor Hayes, he's asking us, he put his book on the required materials and he's selling it in class because I figured well. And he's selling it in class because I figured well, some might not have an Amazon account or it'd be easier to sell them in class for the price that they're on Amazon and they get the copy and go out of that route. So students were kind of going back and I received feedback oh, we can't do this, you're promoting yourself. Students were kind of going that and I received feedback oh, we can't do this, you know you're, you're promoting yourself. And I was kind of taken back thinking like, well, this is part of why you hired me. Number one is to bring you know the experience that make that experiential learning, experiential teaching. And secondly, you're asking students to purchase the book for the class. That's $100, $200, sometimes $300. In my $1,199 book that again if it's purchased on Amazon, I get like $3 from a royalty room. It's not making me rich by selling the book.

Speaker 1:

My intention was to help the students and then incentivize them if they wanted to, if they filled out. There's workbook pages in the book. If they filled those out, then they would get extra credit. So the extra credit part, that's how it got brought up and so, you know, kind of the hand was slapped at that point, like, oh, you know, can't do this, this isn't right. Other faculty have books and you know they're not doing this. And so I was like, okay, and that's how the big publishers are in there, right? So the big publishers come in, they have these contracts and, heaven forbid, they find out that an instructor is selling their book for $300 less than what they're selling their book for. The big publisher is not going to receive that royalty, which is way more than I'd ever see. They'd have to sell 100, 200, 300 books to see what type of royalty they got.

Speaker 1:

So that started to bother me. I was like, okay, you know, so I'm going to conform to what I'm being asked to do Again, I didn't, and I still don't think it's right that I wasn't able to do that and not able to do that Again. Maybe my interpretation was wrong, but I made it very clear that I wanted to bring my experience and if this was going to help, then I wanted to help somebody who, like myself, I didn't have somebody help me along with the job search and process. I didn't have a counselor assigned to me to help me. I didn't have a career service department that actively reached out to me or you know, to help me. I didn't have a Career Service Department that actively reached out to me and so I wanted to be through again this, this pamphlet, this book. I wanted to be the person that I never had as I was going through, you know, the, the job search process, the internship search process. So that was bothersome.

Speaker 1:

And so over the course of the ten years I've been teaching and I'm sure it's like this at other other universities as well so this brought a little anxiety because I, you know, took a lot of work to put that together, to get a cover. There's just a lot of little things I didn't think about to put that together, and so that was kind of like, okay, well, I can't do that. So, anyways, the stress was increasing. That was just another way it was increasing. And Then there was when I, from the mental side of things, I crashed and dropped close to 40 pounds. I wasn't eating, nothing tasted good. I was at this point. I was turning down different teaching opportunities that I could have had. I had to cancel some classes because anxiety was just so high and it's hard to explain other than you know, take the time.

Speaker 1:

If there was a time where you were very, very anxious, very nervous, you know, almost at a point where you're freezing a little bit, and you know, multiply that out of where you're freezing a little bit and you know, multiply that out of lasting for a long period of time, not just a minute or two minutes. You know, hey, just shake it off and just go for a walk. And you know, do these tips. Well, those things are great, but they're again. There was something that I needed to address. So I hit rock bottom and entered the hospital. I was diagnosed with major depression, generalized anxiety, adhd, low-spectrum autism. You think of it, that's pretty much how I was diagnosed. You think of it, that's pretty much how I was diagnosed.

Speaker 1:

But I was at that point where I didn't know if I was gonna, how I was gonna live any longer, the way I was going, then went through that process, came out of the hospital and I reverted from my iPhone back to a flip phone, tried to make things as simple as I could. You know, use the phone as a phone because obviously texting is really hard to do and you know, checking email and that is really even harder to do on a flip phone Is it really even harder to do on a flip phone? And so then I got to the point where, okay, I'm ready to kind of reintegrate myself as a human being, and that was with a counselor, and I tell people like it's being with the counselor, it's may. It gets a bad rap, and I think that might be because maybe sometimes people reach out to counselors and that counselor might not be a good fit for them. So you may go through two, three, four or five different counselors till you find that fit, somebody you feel comfortable speaking to and speaking with. I can talk about now. So now I at this point the state so not in 2017 when I hit the rock bottom and started working my way up out of that hole that I was digging myself, literally With my dad, passing I now also include talking with a bereavement counselor, and so it's actually interesting.

Speaker 1:

I didn't, I didn't plan this way, but because of vacation and different things, different uh events and and uh that uh I was I had already agreed to do appearances. Uh, the way it worked out is I have the bereavement counselor from one time to one time and then, right after that, I have my regular counseling appointment, and so I'm going to get kind of back-to-back, which is good and it gets a bad rap, but I literally just talk about what's going on in my life, what's been stressful. One of the things I'm going to bring up is family vacation. It's always stressful, you know, going through security and there's just a lot of stress of you know who's carrying what bag and who's holding a bag and which one's getting checked, which one's going overhead and which one's going underneath, and so those are those things are just stressful on on its face anyway. So you got a little stress going into it.

Speaker 1:

But what made it even more stressful was show up for a nine o'clock flight and absolutely horrible weather comes. The flight that was coming in that we were going to be taking had to get diverted from. Instead of landing in Akron, they went to Flint Michigan. Well, we weren't in Flint Michigan, we were at Akron, canton, and so they had to refuel that plane and go through that process. So what ended up? A flight that was going to leave at 9, I think we left at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon and go through that process. So what ended up? A flight that was going to leave at 9, I think we left at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon. So, luckily, with what we had planned, we were okay, we weren't missing anything. I guess is what we're trying to get at. So that was stressful.

Speaker 1:

Then I didn't I'm not going to speak for my wife, but I guess I didn't check the weather very well and so there was a hurricane that was kind of going up the Atlantic coast and we were going to Hilton Head and so almost all of the time that we were planning to be at the beach and doing that, we found a lot of that time staying indoors, which that was a bummer, but one of those things you know, I talk about in my books and my appearances and speaking engagements. There's things we can control. I don't say control with like oh, we have a joystick and we're controlling. It's more of like we can impact that. So I can impact what time I wake up, what time I go to bed, those types of things, but I can't impact the weather. I can react to the weather, but I can't really be. I can't say, oh well, it looks like it's going to rain and I wanted the rain to hold off. I mean, we can think that, but that's not really the case, so that just made things a little bit even more stressful.

Speaker 1:

So in the second part of our conversation, I'm going to continue.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to fill in that gap of the state of higher education continued pretty much from the 2017 kind of, as I hit bottom and coming out to the current state of I'll tease it a little bit of people trying to limit classes to teach because they receive some feedback from faculty or students about different experiences that I'm sharing. And again, we're in college, we're in university to learn and to basically be ready to hit the ground running with the job, and I find that's by giving real stories, real experiences and if things are happening at that given time, I'm going to share that with the students. I'm still going to cover all the content, but I'm going to share that with the students. I'm still going to cover all the content, but I'm going to include that experience in there as well. So catch us next week for part two of our conversation. Thank you, as always, for the support. Please like share this episode Until next time. I am founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, justin Allen Hayes, and be a voice for you or somebody in need.

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