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students would much prefer incurring a one-time disciplinary sanction such as a warning than undergoing intensive counseling.

Some administrators request that counselors carry out mandatory coun- seling because they fear that disciplining the student will cause him or her to wreak revenge on the college with a lawsuit or an act of retaliatory violence. Although their fears may not be entirely unfounded, this motive—the avoid- ance of litigation or violence—is clearly not a sufficient or legitimate basis for relinquishing their administrative authority to carry out warranted discipline, and, therefore, this practice strongly deserves the derogatory appellation that has been widely applied to it: CYA (cover your ass).

Administrators Unqualified to Determine Who Needs Counseling: Ethical Dilemmas

When administrators require students to meet with counselors and coun- selors to meet with students, a generally overlooked and misunderstood institutional anomaly takes place. These administrators are, ipso facto, car- rying out the clinical role of determining when, how, whether, and for how long a student should participate in counseling, a role that normally requires extensive clinical training, skills, and acumen. Regrettably, most administrators have not acquired this set of skills during the course of their career. Its counterpart in the corporate world is the situation of having clinically untrained gatekeepers working in managed care who dictate the duration and modality of treatment to professionally trained psychothera- pists. As well, when administrators determine that disruptive students must undergo mandatory counseling, they are unilaterally and often quite illog- ically redefining a behavioral problem into a mental health or psychiatric problem. After all, behavioral problems presumably require disciplinary measures; psychological problems are apt to require treatment. Nothing other than the administrators’ power and authority gives them the right to use such sleight-of-hand measures to effect a transmutation of a behavioral problem into a psychological problem simply to avoid the use of legally based disciplinary measures.

College counselors who receive directives from administrators to under- take mandatory counseling with disruptive students are faced with a formidable ethical challenge. First, if they surmise that the directive is moti- vated by the administrators’ intention to divest themselves of disciplining the disruptive student by transferring the disciplinary role (in the form of mandatory counseling) to counselors, counselors may question whether the assumption of such a quasidisciplinary role is compatible and consistent with the ethical codes of their profession. In other words, can counselors reasonably expect to fulfill their primary professional obligation to heal and guide students while at the same time wielding the weapon of disci- pline (in the form of a threat of expulsion for a student’s noncompliance

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with the requirement of mandatory therapy) without making serious ethical compromises? Second, counselors who assume a quasidisciplinary role by undertaking mandatory therapy with a disruptive student may also question the matter of their own basic professional loyalties. They might legitimately ask themselves: Am I, by carrying out an administrative directive to under- take mandatory therapy, truly serving the student, or am I largely serving the administrator and the institution? Can I really serve all three equally well in this endeavor or will one of them—the student, most likely—get a short shrift by having his or her civil rights abridged? If his or her rights are being abridged in counseling, how do I justify being actively complicit in such a scheme?

Many years ago, Thomas Szasz (1973) raised this very point in his article titled “The Psychiatrist as Double Agent.” Szasz had created a straw man by positing his argument in a way that ineluctably situated college therapists in the cross fire of a nasty clash between students and college administrators that inevitably led to serious ethical compromises on the part of the thera- pists, at times to the detriment of students. I was determined to not let this happen to me in my college work, and I discovered there really was a quite navigable pathway I could use in my college practice to avoid such a con- sequence. I took a quite intransigent stand against mandatory counseling and made it known to all segments of the campus community—students, academic counselors, administrators, and instructors—that our clinic would not be accepting such referrals (except, of course, in cases of demonstrable imminent danger to self or others). At the same time I persistently expressed to anyone making such a referral my eager willingness to meet with them, as often and as long as necessary, in order to discuss effective alternatives to mandatory counseling, such as the use of proportionate and clearly war- ranted disciplinary measures. This tack—respecting and actively fostering the rights and prerogatives of instructors and administrators to use essen- tial disciplinary sanctions rather than relinquish them to counselors who could not execute mandatory therapy without straying into serious ethical compromises—became a highly serviceable and respected paradigm that worked splendidly for many years, just not at first, of course. Several of the old guard, benighted administrators, many who were trained and educated at authoritarian colleges, took umbrage with me over my refusal to follow their orders to conduct mandatory therapy. On several occasions I was even informed that I was not doing my job, and there were even intimations that my employment at the college might be in jeopardy. But over the ensuing years the old guard was eventually replaced by a more enlightened coterie of administrators who embraced the concept and practice of cleanly separat- ing the psychological service from the college’s disciplinary system, and the result was an exemplary mutual respect and a clear and effective delineation of respective responsibilities between college therapists and administrators in the handling of disruptive incidents.

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Pitfalls for Counselors

College therapists who accede to administrators’ directives to conduct manda- tory therapy are wont to justify their acquiescence on several rather spurious grounds. For example, one of the pitfalls of mandatory counseling is that it is usually not confidential. (I used to naively think that confidentiality was an essential cornerstone of standard psychological treatment.) The referring administrator ordinarily requests or requires some form of feedback from the therapist following a mandatory session (“Did the student show up? Is he dangerous?”). Ordinarily, the therapist then arranges for the student to “vol- untarily” sign a form consenting to mandatory counseling and the therapist’s release of “pertinent” information to the administrator regarding his or her counseling sessions, especially his or her attendance record. This, such ther- apists argue, is a humane and voluntary procedure. Unfortunately, therapists who make this argument are either extraordinarily naive, ethically tone deaf, or are disingenuously lying. When students are confronted with the “choice” of signing or not signing such forms they are being offered a “Hobson’s choice” (referring to Thomas Hobson [1541–1631], an English keeper of a liv- ery stable who required that customers take either the horse nearest the stable or none at all). In other words, students are given a “choice” offering only one option—the student will either sign the confidentiality-breaching form or, like Mr. Hobson’s customers, hit the road on foot (suffer an ignominious suspension or expulsion). In such an entrapping situation the entire matter of choice is clearly illusory and dishonest.

A rather curious defense of mandatory therapy that is sometimes advanced by its proponents is based on the fact that psychotherapists in this country are prevalently providing treatment to their clients on a mandatory basis in prisons and under mandates imposed by the criminal justice sys- tem in such programs as anger management, alcohol treatment, and spousal abuse. Proponents who enlist the specious argument that widespread prece- dents for these compulsory programs within the criminal justice system provide the imprimatur of legitimacy for establishing them on college cam- puses are, to put it bluntly, perpetrating a nasty hoax on their clients. The last time I looked, colleges were not prisons (even though some administrators and counselors arrogate to themselves wardenlike prerogatives and tactics), nor did they have the legal authority to adjudicate cases of criminality. Yes, they certainly are endowed with and wield considerable disciplinary author- ity, but in no wise are colleges and universities allowed to serve as a proxy for the criminal courts of our country. It is very interesting, I think, that some exponents of mandatory counseling would actually enlist as their clinical guide and model a practice that is endemic within the authoritarian culture of prisons and criminal justice systems. Is this perhaps a stark, albeit uncon- scious, acknowledgement and reflection of their own authoritarian values and clinical philosophy?

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Gore Vidal, the noted playwright and novelist, in a television interview many years ago on the topic of pornography, was asked to recommend remedies for the harmful effects of pornography. He replied, “I think it might be more socially beneficial to study the psyches of the rabid censors of pornography than its alleged harmful effects.” Analogously, I would suggest that it is more socially and clinically productive to comparatively study the psyches of college counselors and administrators who support or oppose mandatory counseling, particularly with respect to their respective levels of authoritarian beliefs and personality traits, than to assume that mandatory counseling is both ethically acceptable and socially beneficial.