Dear Dean Grinage, Chief Health Officer Catallozzi, and the Barnard College Administration:

We, the undersigned members of the Barnard and Columbia community, are writing to demand that Barnard College reincorporate Nightline Peer Listening.

For over 40 years, Nightline’s peer listeners—student volunteers trained to provide empathetic, nonjudgmental, anonymous support—have picked up the phone with a warm greeting: “Hello, Nightline, Barnard-Columbia peer listening.” When Nightline reopened this February after taking a 10-month hiatus to rebuild, the hotline found itself having to revise its opening line. For the first time in its history, Nightline was not allowed to serve Barnard students.

Barnard’s administration, through its chief health officer, abruptly severed ties with Nightline over the summer. Since then, Nightline has tried extensively to explain the importance of its services to the Barnard administration. However, the hotline has been faced with a lack of support, understanding, and acknowledgement from the administration, leaving the hotline questioning whether Barnard truly understands the impact this decision will have on their students. 

Barnard students have long relied on Nightline and deserve the option to access and utilize the resource when needed. At its core, Nightline provides a unique service as students supporting students. The intimacy, familiarity, and anonymity of the peer connection encourages students to reach out to Nightline when they might hesitate to contact a mental health professional. Nightline is there into the late hours of the night for the student overwhelmed by their coursework, the one navigating a tricky situationship, the one missing home, and the one struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harm. By operating anonymously—callers don’t know who their listeners are, and listeners never know the identities of the students they speak with—Nightline works to ensure that anyone who uses the service can be vulnerable without fear of judgment. Nightline’s volunteers undergo extensive training, spanning a minimum of one semester, and can only begin taking calls after endorsement by Columbia and Barnard’s professional staff, including wellness deans, advisers, and residence hall directors, who support students every day.

We ask Barnard College to recontinue support for Nightline Peer Listening by explicitly allowing Nightline to take calls from Barnard students, assigning a Barnard advisor who will work to support Nightline’s existence, and providing other resources as necessary.