Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Neuroscience and Behavior Major (B.S.) | College of Liberal Arts – UNH’s College of Liberal Arts

The major in neuroscience and behavior (NSB) offers an interdisciplinary approach to human and non-human behavior, focusing on the evolution and adaptiveness of certain behaviors, as well as their underlying neural mechanisms. Students who have always been fascinated by how the brain functions will be well served by this major, as will those who love wild animals and wish to better understand their behavior. The B.S. in neuroscience and behavior is based on a solid foundation in biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, and genetics (foundation courses). These are followed by a two-semester course sequence that covers the fundamentals of neuroscience and behavior. Students can then pick five or more electives focusing on areas of interest.

NSB students are encouraged to take advantage of research experiences in the laboratories of the psychology and biology faculty in the program. This provides valuable experience with cutting-edge equipment and techniques. Some students may share aspects of a larger project, whereas others may be relatively independent and design their own project under supervision. In either case, important skills are gained by the discipline of gathering data, analyzing and interpreting it, and presenting it to a broader audience.

The curriculum provides most of the requirements and recommended courses for students seeking admission to graduate school and to professional schools in medicine and veterinary medicine. Students who might choose not to go on to advanced degrees are well-prepared for employment as skilled technicians in research laboratories or, if their interests are in animal behavior, as field research assistants or animal trainers. With additional courses in education, the B.S. in NSB also qualifies graduates to teach at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels.

Faculty participating in the NSB major combine a love of teaching and student mentoring with a passion for research, and encourage student participation. Research facilities that students can use include the Integrative Animal Behavior and Ecoacoustics laboratory, the confocal imaging center, the Hubbard Center for Genomic Studies, and the many marine, freshwater, and estuarine laboratories associated with UNH programs. Students can also take summer courses at the Shoals Marine Laboratory.

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Neuroscience and Behavior Major (B.S.) | College of Liberal Arts - UNH's College of Liberal Arts

Human Behavior

The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard … – HSPH News

October 25, 2023 In an opinion piece in Nature Human Behavior, Laura Kubzansky, professor of social and behavioral sciences and co-director of the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her co-authors argued that prosociality is a critical, but underappreciated, factor affecting population healthand urged public health researchers and practitioners to invest more resources to better understand it.

Q: What is prosociality and how does it impact human health?

A: When we talk about prosociality we talk about the beliefs and behaviors of people who care about others and want to benefit others with their actions. Altruism, cooperation, compassion, empathy, and social capitalall of these are examples of prosocial behaviors and conditions.

Research has found that prosociality has positive health benefits. For example, scientists have looked at the relationship between volunteering, which is helping others with no apparent reward (or expectation of one), and mortality. They reliably find that people who volunteer more also tend to live longer lives. Other studies also found that during the COVID-19 pandemic people living in communities with higher levels of prosociality were also more willing to wear a mask or receive the vaccine, which are behaviors that we now know are associated with lower COVID-19 mortality rates. In fact, a recent Lancet Commission identified low levels of prosociality as a contributing factor to the numerous failures we saw during the pandemic around the world with regard to controlling deaths from this infectious disease. My co-authorsRichard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Elissa Epel at the University of California San Franciscoand I believe that the effects of prosociality go beyond mitigating effects of infectious diseases and that prosociality can improve both individual and community health much more broadly.

Q: You call for prosociality to become a novel strategy for improving population health. What do you mean by that?

A: We need to invest time and resources to better understand prosociality and its effect on population health. In public health, we try to identify factors that can improve the health and well-being of people. For example, we look at an unhealthy diet and ask ourselves, Who is more likely to consume it and why? How can we improve it and what are the health consequences if we do so?

We need to do the same with prosocialitytry to better measure how much prosociality matters for population health. And if we find out that it does in fact matter, we should study the mechanisms through which prosociality improves health. We should look at ways to increase prosociality among the population. We should also monitor the downstream effects and look at the distribution of prosocial behaviors in the population. Are they more prevalent among certain groups of people? What conditions do we need to make it more prevalent? And do diverse populations benefit from prosociality equally or are certain people more likely to see health benefits when they engage in prosocial behaviors? Those are all questions we would like to be able to answer by conducting national surveys, adding measures of prosociality to major cohort studies, and running randomized trials.

Q: How could prosociality help improve public health?

A: When we talk about improving health, we often focus on clinicians caring for individuals who are already struggling with problems. The call for making prosociality a public health priority is an effort to focus on upstream factors that enable people to maintain better health for longer, and thereby reduce the need for clinicians over the long run. Risk factors are very important, but sometimes they are not enough. We need to also identify the health assets that can protect our physical and mental health.

In the U.S. we are facing an epidemic of deaths of despair and a mental health crisis. It is crucial that we try to minimize or eliminate risk factors such as poverty, family medical history, or smoking, which we know put certain individuals more at risk for deaths of despair and mental health struggles. At the same time, however, we must recognize we can do better and aspire to do more than solely reducing misery. We must also identify and promote factors that can help people attain and maintain health and prevent them from developing illness in the first place.

Improving population levels of prosocialitycould also be particularly relevant in the context of climate change and other major societal disruptions like civil unrest or war. Increasing levels ofprosocialityor our willingness to engage in actions that help others, either at the individual or the societal level, could be a game changer to reduce the impacts of large-scale societal events on our health.

During COVID-19, we saw a deficit of kindness and compassion. And we also saw the public health consequences of that. I would argue that understanding prosociality isnt simply a nice-to-have luxury. It is a critical and underappreciated factor that deserves our full attention.

Giulia Cambieri

Illustration: iStock / Mykyta Dolmatov

*This story was updated to include the names of the co-authors.

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The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard ... - HSPH News

Human Behavior

The valuable link between succession planning and skills – Human Resource Executive

When labor researchers look back on this chapter in time, they will likely deem it the era of skills. Nearly every organization wants to become skills-based or skills-centric as they finally recognize the significant value that skills visibility presents across the organization. Even so, this journey remains nascent because, while employers know what they want, they dont necessarily know how to get it. And nowhere is this more apparent than in succession planning.

Historically, succession planning has proved challenging, with only some rolesprimarily in the C-suitedeemed worthy of the effort. As such, succession planning has rarely been an enterprise-wide initiative. This kind of mindset is counterproductive, especially if the goal is the organizations long-term viability.

Identifying a gap between reality and intent, Deloitte conducted a years-long research study that found, Most companies doing succession planning are often derailed by a host of symptoms that point back to a common culprit: the failure to recognize and address the impact of human behavior on the succession-planning process. This distinction is important because, as the American Psychological Association explains, Human skills are based in behavior.

Considering the link between skills and behavior, skills visibility is fundamental to building a successful succession-planning strategy. Leveraging skills and continuously reevaluating those skills to inform and update talent pools and talent pipelines is critical to long-term success.

Here are five ways to do that:

Succession planning is a what goes around, comes around talent strategy for a few reasons. For one, it enables organizations to retain employees, ensuring the ability to navigate evolving labor market conditions.

For another, researchers like Josh Bersin have known what successful succession planning entails for years that: We are greater than me. These types of strategies require empowering employees, operating collectively and measuring the results. Whats different today is how and where organizations apply succession planning to their business.

Recommendation: Rather than dust off the same succession-planning strategy used in years prior, consider how the organizations current state will inform its future state.

Rather than focus only on specific roles, focus on a desired outcome. Though outcomes vary by organization, HRD points out that succession planning is a practical way to minimize disruption through proactive risk management, enabling organizations to adapt to changing circumstances and fill critical roles with little to no negative impact on productivity and performance. Taking an expanded definition can provide benefits across the organization and enable employees at all levels to showcase skills that might otherwise be overlooked.

Recommendation: Knowing there are multiple ways to use succession planning, start by designing a strategy that connects a specific need to a measurable result.

Having the right people in the right place at the right time is critical, so with a why in place, take the time to assess and evaluate the skills, competencies and organizational knowledge that currently exist across the business.

This level of insight will help determine succession candidates as well as any at-risk roles, teams or business units. As Deloitte suggested, failing to see whats already there is often the root cause of why these initiatives fail, making it even more important to prioritize skills visibility from the start.

Recommendation: Skills are the currency of the modern workplace and should be factored into any succession-planning strategy. By understanding what exists, its possible to envision where to go and how to bridge skill gaps.

See also: How to capitalize on skills tech offerings in a market now worth $1.3B

Remember that every employee brings a unique set of skills and knowledge to both their role and the organization. LinkedIn Research shows that employees are twice as likely to stay if they have the chance to take on other opportunities within the business. This is why succession planning cannot operate in a vacuum; it must be knitted into a larger talent framework. Keeping employees engaged and satisfied at work is as much a part of succession planning as it is internal mobility, learning and development and other strategies.

Recommendation: As business objectives are apt to change over time, so are employees wants, needs and desires. Be sure to keep the employee experience top of mind throughout the process.

To follow through on the addressing human behavior piece of Deloittes findings, organizations need to centralize and institutionalize succession planning. There are a few ways to go about this, from capturing knowledge before people have the chance to leave the organization to creating personalized development plans to advance skills development. Its one thing to have visibility. Its another to use this to the organizations advantage.

The right technology will automatically map out career paths, match employees with opportunities that facilitate growth and support talent deployment to fill vacancies and maintain active talent pipelines.

Recommendation: Dont lose sight of the plan once enacted. Lean on technology to support these changes as goals and circumstances continue to evolve.

SHRM notes that Succession planning is used to anticipate the future needs of the organization and to assist in finding, assessing and developing the human capital necessary to realize the strategy of the organization. There is nothing short-term about succession planning, nor should there be.

And while the saying goes, The best-laid plans in this instance, that means revisiting and retooling along the way, changing course as the need for different skills and behaviors ebbs and flows, and sticking with succession planning until it becomes deeply entrenched as an integral part of the organizational makeup.

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The valuable link between succession planning and skills - Human Resource Executive

Human Behavior

How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today – Penn Today

It was a sweet tooth that turned sixth-year psychology Ph.D. student Clara Raithel onto the human sense of smell.

As a masters student, I was studying how the brain responds to the sweet taste under various conditions, for example, whether we approach certain food with an indulgent or restrictive mindset, she says. I realized you cant really study eating behaviors without understanding how peoples brains respond to odors. I decided to look for grad school experiences where I could study the human sense of smell.

In the laboratory of Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience, Raithel found the perfect mentor. Gottfried has studied olfactionessentially, the science of smellfor nearly two decades. Since I was a little kid, Ive loved the sense of smell, Gottfried says. Humans have five senses, and they work in tandem, in an integrated way.

But for almost no reason at all, people tend to pick smell as the sense theyd be fine without if they had to lose one, he says. Gottfried felt smell had been highly misjudged, and as a neuroscientist, wanted to prove it by taking a deep dive into questions of odor coding and navigation.

By the time Raithel joined his lab in 2018, Gottfried and colleagues had already experimented with the ways in which humans navigate abstract smells such as banana or rose in two-dimensional spaces, finding that certain parts of the brain linked with memory and emotions help people understand which aromas surround them. Now he wanted to take the work in a more natural direction, creating a three-dimensional virtual reality smellscape (think landscape, but for the nose) that people could attempt to move through.

For the new experiment, 28 participants each entered the smellscape four times. The placement of eight odor objects in the environmentsmells like orange or bananaalways stayed the same. What changed was where participants were placed in the virtual reality arena and which target odor they needed to find.

The results surprised and excited the researchers. Although the human sense of smell has been poorly regarded across the five different senses, we are now able to establish that human subjects can actually navigate spaces using their nose in the context of a particular type of virtual reality environment, Gottfried says.

We also demonstrated that this behavior was associated with the emergence of a particular neural signature indicative of what we might call cognitive maps, Raithel adds. This neural signature not only appeared in areas traditionally associated with navigation behavior, but also in olfactory-related brain regions. Their findings suggest that these two sets of brain regions share a common spatial code, something that hadnt previously been known.

Read more at OMNIA.

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How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today - Penn Today

Human Behavior

Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? – Psychiatric Times

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Over 13 years ago, on March 2010, I wrote an article for Psychiatric Times titled Wrestling with Evil in Prison Psychiatry. My writings on prison psychiatry actually won health care journalism recognition.

Having never before applied the word evil in psychiatry, I ended up doing so in regards to one patient. Nothing else seemed to apply, neither gang involvement, antisocial personality disorder, or his religious beliefs. At that time, for clinical applicability, I came up with this definition of evil:

Evil is unacceptable, destructive behavior, exhibited without remorse and without a more general moral framework, which cannot be explained solely by psychopathology.

The word is most often used in relationship to religious beliefs, and especially in situations that seem horrific. Since that prison encounter, I have come to conclude that any evil-seeming behavior is likely intertwined with whatever psychopathology may be present.

I feel a sense of deja vu as the Mideast and Ukrainian-Russian wars go on. Evil has been tossed back and forth as an explanation of the atrocities that have taken place in the invasions, but without explaining its genesis. Here, gang behavior seems as prominent as any other evil explanation.

Then there is the recent mass shooting in Maine, the only news to get the Mideast war off the front page of the mainstream news. Here, though, there seems to be a clearer psychiatric explanation, with the perpetrator having a history of auditory hallucinations. He spent 2 weeks in an inpatient facility this summer after apparently threatening a military facility, but more information will be required to understand the role of mental illness and its treatment in his crime.

Ultimately, almost by definition, human nature and human behavior seem to be at the genesis of any such violent horror. Freud wrote much about it, especially in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, even suggesting a death wish. Regardless of the need for better gun safety, it behooves us in psychiatry to try to increase our knowledge and interventions to reduce evil.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry, and is now in retirement and refirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled Psychiatric Views on the Daily News and a weekly video, Psychiatry & Society, since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

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Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? - Psychiatric Times

Human Behavior

Shimmying like electric fish is a universal movement across species – Earth.com

Navigating the world around us might seem like a complex task, but it turns out, we all have something in common with an electric knifefish. Whether its a dog sniffing around or a human glancing in a new setting, the core behavior of trying to understand ones surroundings remains the same.

Recent research reveals that such movements arent unique to humans or even larger animals. It extends across a wide spectrum of organisms, from single-celled amoeba to complex beings like us.

Amoeba dont even have a nervous system, and yet they adopt behavior that has a lot in common with a humans postural balance or fish hiding in a tube, said study co-author Noah Cowan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins.

These organisms are quite far apart from each other in the tree of life, suggesting that evolution converged on the same solution through very different underlying mechanisms.

This fascinating discovery originated from a study that was focused on the workings of the nervous system during movement to enhance perception. Observations of the electric knifefish, a creature emitting weak electric discharges to sense its location, were key.

In darkness, the fish shimmied back and forth more frequently than in the light. The darkness made the fish increase their movement, mimicking a rapid explore mode to understand their environment better.

The concept of switching between an explore mode during uncertainty and an exploit mode when familiar with the environment isnt restricted to these fish.

We found that the best strategy is to briefly switch into explore mode when uncertainty is too high, and then switch back to exploit mode when uncertainty is back down, said study first author Debojyoti Biswas, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher.

Supported by a model simulating these key sensing behaviors, the team identified similar patterns in amoeba, moths, cockroaches, moles, bats, mice, and even humans.

Not a single study that we found in the literature violated the rules we discovered in the electric fish, not even single-celled organisms like amoeba sensing an electric field, said Cowan.

To further illustrate the ubiquitous nature of these movements, Cowan related it to everyday human behavior.

If you go to a grocery store, youll notice people standing in line will change between being stationary and moving around while waiting, said Cowan.

We think thats the same thing going on, that to maintain a stable balance you actually have to occasionally move around and excite your sensors like the knifefish. We found the statistical characteristics of those movements are ubiquitous across a wide range of animals, including humans.

Beyond just understanding the natural world, the implications of this research are vast. The findings have the potential to revolutionize robotics, especially in applications like search and rescue drones and space rovers.

Next, the experts will test whether their insights hold true for other living things, including plants.

Electric knifefish are a diverse group with over 200 species that are found primarily in Central and South America. These fish are known for their ability to generate electric fields, which they use for navigation, communication, and sometimes for capturing prey.

Electric knifefish have an organ that produces weak electric discharges. This is distinct from the strong electric discharges produced by electric eels, a different group of fish.

They use their electric field to sense their surroundings. Objects around them distort this field, and the fish can detect these distortions to understand their environment, much like a sonar.

Different species, and even individual fish, may have unique electric organ discharge patterns. This allows them to communicate and recognize each other.

They are primarily found in freshwater environments, especially in slow-moving or stagnant waters like swamps, ponds, and riverbanks.

Electric knifefish are typically nocturnal, using their electric fields to navigate in the darkness.

The study is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

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Human Behavior

Why do dogs get the zoomies? – Care.com

Every morning, my mini dachshund Walter sprints into the day. Yes, sprints. The second the door of his cozy little crate opens, hes rounding the corner out of the bedroom and down the hallway as fast as his short little legs can carry him. While I admittedly love the way Walter enters every day with such gusto, Ive also never understood why in the world he does it.

Zoomies are a sudden explosion of activity from your dog often manifesting as the tucking of their hindquarters as they race wildly, or zoom, around the house or yard, says Dr. Karyn M. Wesley, an assistant professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona. There may be many causes for zoomies, but ultimately, we consider this behavior to be normal in dogs.

Here, experts explain why dogs get the zoomies and the most common times they occur, plus what pet owners should do when their pup gets a crazy case of the zoomies.

The most common reason for the zoomies is that a pet has pent-up energy that it needs to release, says Dr. Lori Teller, a clinical professor at Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. The zoomies arent specific to certain dog breeds, Teller adds, but they may be more common in high-energy dogs, especially those that do not get regular exercise.

However, a lack of exercise is not the only cause of dog zoomies, Wesley says. The zoomies are also a way for dogs to release their emotions, she explains. Many dogs simply have the zoomies because they feel big emotions such as excitement. And just like expressing emotions is healthy for humans, its also perfectly healthy for dogs.

Have a dog that never gets the zoomies? Thats normal as well, explains Dr. Christa Kahuda, the owner and medical director at Charleston Harbor Veterinarians in Charleston, South Carolina. Some dogs may have more outlets for their energy during the course of the day and are too tired for zoomies, Kahuda says. Others may be less likely to exhibit the behavior based on breed, age and personality.

The zoomies are also a way for dogs to release their emotions. Many dogs simply have the zoomies because they feel big emotions such as excitement.

The official scientific term for dog zoomies is frenetic random activity periods or FRAPs. The key word here that dog owners should note? Random. It is most common for zoomies to start without warning, Wesley says. When they take off running, they may jump on furniture, run in circles, take sharp turns, and some may bark.

But despite their unpredictable nature, zoomies do serve a purpose, and some circumstances can tell you a lot when it comes to determining whats causing your dog to zoom. These are a few of the most common types dog zoomies and why they happen, according to experts:

The cause: An abundance of stamina

Puppies get the zoomies because they tend to have higher exercise requirements and more energy to burn than older dogs, Teller explains. In fact, zoomies appear to be most common in younger animals in general, and puppies can start experiencing zoomies at just a few weeks old. Many dogs continue to get the zoomies their entire lives, Wesley adds. But as dogs age, the frequency and duration of zoomies often decline.

The cause: Hours of built-up energy

It is common for dogs to get zoomies at night after spending a day home alone or in a crate since theyve had limited activity to release their energy, Wesley says. The same goes for early morning zoomies for dogs that sleep in a crate like Walter. At these times, dogs may feel the need to expel their built-up energy suddenly with a FRAP, says Wesley.

The cause: Having to be still for too long

Dogs often get the zoomies after a bath, as well as after or even during a training session, says professional dog trainer and behaviorist Sally Grottini who has over 30 years of experience working with canines. This can come from frustration from not being able to move around enough, and the dog suddenly feels the need to get out a burst of energy, Grottini says.

The cause: Excitement or overstimulation

Zoomies during playtime are often due to pure excitement, Wesley says. This is even more likely to occur when your dog is in a new environment, like a new daycare or dog park. For example, Walter used to get the zoomies every time hed enter the playspace at his daycare as a puppy. (He ran so many laps that he garnered the nickname The Blonde Bullet!) According to Kahuda, these zoomies were likely due to a mix of Walters excitement as well as his need to get out his puppy energy. He has lots of excess energy and loves running it off!

Zoomies most often come out of the blue when least expected, and it is the dog using excess energy.

Signs of a happy dog are actually different from signs of the zoomies. Dogs may exhibit happiness when they see a favorite person or when theres the expectation of something good coming, such as when youre making their dinner. This can cause uncontrollable movement, explains Grottini. They may run, jump, spin in a circle, but this is not really zoomies as much as it is over excitement for something they know they enjoy, she says. Zoomies most often come out of the blue when least expected, and it is the dog using excess energy.

That said, experts agree that its safe to say dogs are not unhappy when they get the zoomies. We cant read their minds, but based on their body language, they appear to be having a good time when they have the zoomies, Teller says.

In general, experts recommend letting dogs simply enjoy getting out their energy when the zoomies strike, unless they are in danger of hurting themselves or others. If the time of day is predictable, you can even consider taking your dogs outside to zoom, Teller says. Otherwise, try to make sure they have an unobstructed area to zoom, then sit back and enjoy the fun.

Once the zoomies start, they may be hard to stop until your dog decides theyre tired, Wesley adds. Some human behaviors can intensify a zoomie session, like chasing your dog or making excited noises. Once you have ensured your valuables and fragile items are out of the path of the wild zoomies, I would try leaving the room or [staying] quietly out of harms way. Your calm energy may help your dogs excitement subside more quickly.

Again, dog zoomies are normal and not a cause for concern. However, to keep your dog safe, try to discourage zoomies from occurring around stairs or slippery floors like tile or hardwood to keep them safe indoors, says Wesley. Outside, make sure the space is enclosed and do your best to remove hazards like holes, water and sharp objects.

Think your dog is zooming a bit too much? Take note of the timing of your dogs bursts of energy. If your dog always zooms after being home alone, after extended periods of rest, or in the middle of your sleep schedule, this may be your dogs way of telling you they need more exercise or mental stimulation, Wesley explains. In that case, she recommends adding these activities to your dogs day to avoid a build-up of explosive energy:

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Why do dogs get the zoomies? - Care.com

Human Behavior

How Stuart Robinson’s misconduct went overlooked for years – Washington Square News

The ensuing case would detail Robinsons harassment and unequal treatment of mens and womens sports teams at the university, and be the first publicly-recorded allegation of a decadeslong pattern of behavior.

The complaint claimed that Robinson allotted unequal resources to and purposefully derailed womens athletics programs, such as in one case, where he allegedly refused to plow womens lacrosse fields during the winter at the same time that he dedicated a large amount of funding to new facilities for mens teams. After years of proceedings, Students case ended without a jury trial. As a result, the state paid Student a sum of $200,000.

New Paltz chose to protect the abuser rather than their staff and students. NYU either ignored Robinsons past or was too lazy to do the proper hiring diligence to protect NYU from Robinson, a former coach at New Paltz told WSN. Sadly, Robinsons victims could have avoided the degradation.

Multiple people close to the New Paltz athletics department said that many staff members and student-athletes were impacted by Robinsons behavior, but that few were in a position to take legal action. Many said they made complaints to the universitys human resources department or to the Title IX office, and others said they went to their union. When no action was taken, some decided to leave the university. New Paltz did not respond to questions about allegations against Robinson during his time at the university.

He had been called into investigations within the administration about his behavior, one source said. Nothing was ever done with it, and that was very frustrating.

The way that female coaches were treated was unheard of, another source said. If that was my daughter, I would have hit him with my car.

Robinsons alleged harassment was not limited to athletics department staff. Rachael Purtell, a former student-athlete at New Paltz who played for Student, said she experienced sexual harassment involving Robinson. When Purtell reported her experience to the universitys department of human resources and Title IX office, she said nothing changed. This pattern would continue at NYU.

I observed Stuarts impact on the department in the forms of disparities in scheduling, facility maintenance, funding and uniform quality disadvantaging the womens sports teams, Purtell wrote to WSN. This was a consensus among the student-athletes as was the fact that sexually harassing behaviors were normalized and condoned within the department.

The university has maintained that it was not aware of Robinsons history when it hired him as athletics director. According to email correspondence obtained by WSN, now NYU president Linda Mills was a member of the committee that selected Robinson. The university did not respond to questions about Mills role in Robinsons hiring.

NYU has told WSN that it used a search firm to conduct a background check on Robinson during the hiring process, which it said included looking into candidates civil and criminal legal history. University spokesperson John Beckman said in a statement that NYU was not aware of Students case before it was reported by WSN.

NYU had not seen the lawsuit before it was reported in the WSN, and the search firm has indicated that it likewise had not seen the lawsuit before it appeared in the WSN, Beckman wrote. Thats a source of concern to us, and we intend to look into this matter to see how that can be avoided in the future.

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How Stuart Robinson's misconduct went overlooked for years - Washington Square News

Human Behavior

Whatchamacolumn: Homeless camps back in the news – News-Register

By Jeb Bladine President / Publisher October 27, 2023

Its clear, as reporter Scott Unger continues News-Register coverage of homelessness in McMinnville, that the laws of physics have analogies in human behavior: When you squeeze one part of a balloon, another part expands, and thats how homeless camps respond to enforcement of laws against illegal camping.

Consider the past decade: Homeless camping downtown triggered a public outcry leading to aggressive enforcement, and camp sites spread to city streets, Marsh Lane and Dustin Court. One controversial response was to let homeless RVs turn parking lots at Joe Dancer Park into a homeless RV campground. When the program drew strong public protest, residents of that well-kept homeless village moved back onto public streets from whence they came.

Now, as illegally parked RVs continue to be confiscated, Marsh Lane has become more of a tent city with growing piles of debris and garbage.

Behind the scenes, theres a complicated, contentious body of court decisions on enforcement of homeless camping laws. It began in 2018 when a Boise panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared: as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.

One-time Oregon congressional candidate Diarmuid OScannlain, now a senior 9th Circuit Court judge, joined 14 other judges this year in protesting the original decision. OScannlain wrote that it wrongfully forced cities to surrender their sidewalks and other public places to homeless encampments, and that the full 9th Circuit Court should reconsider our unfortunate constitutional mistake.

Cities can enforce limits on sleeping at certain locations and in certain times. As Unger reported last week, McMinnville police recently filed 36 prohibited camping notices and five arrests for prohibited camping in a three-day period.

However, results of enforcing homeless camping laws in McMinnville are little more than whack-a-mole. We havent solved homeless camping problems, and were paying high public costs just moving them from one place to another.

Weve tried everything but city-run homeless camps. Portland, in contrast, opened its first of several city-sanctioned homeless camps in July. Responses from homeless residents range from safer than on the streets to feels like a minimum-security prison.

McMinnville toyed with that idea in 2019, but surrendered to citizen opposition; Sheridan City Council discussed similar ideas in August.

Perhaps in McMinnville, despite the controversy, its time to test those waters again.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.

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Whatchamacolumn: Homeless camps back in the news - News-Register