Despite furious efforts to save it, a free counseling clinic on the Sonoma State University campus is still headed for closure at the end of the current semester.
"It's kind of a dire situation," said Michael Morris, a 2010 SSU graduate who interned at the clinic and has helped organize a campaign to keep it open.
SSU administrators in February said concerns over potential liability prompted their decision to shut the 19-year-old clinic, which serves an estimated 300 students and other community residents.
Negotiations to allow it to continue operating at an off-campus location have stalled, said Mark Doolittle, a counseling professor who founded the clinic.
"What I thought was a possibility literally last Thursday has become impossible, apparently, by today," Doolittle said Thursday. "They're making it very, very difficult for us to find an alternative."
University officials have said the clinic is not adequately supervised. No one is paid to oversee it, exposing the university to potential liability, they said.
Supporters have aimed a letter, email and petition campaign at SSU President Ruben Armi?na, but Provost Andrew Rogerson said the university won't budge from its position.
"When the actual facility is located geographically on this campus without any oversight by faculty or staff employed by Sonoma State, we felt that's not an ideal situation," he said.
The decision has infuriated Doolittle, current and former graduate student interns, and other supporters, who are questioning the explanations behind it.
One critic, Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane, requested a meeting with Elaine Leeder, dean of SSU's School of Social Sciences, to discuss the decision. Afterward, Zane said, "I don't feel that their reasons are sufficient."
"I think they need to make this work," said Zane. Among the most prominent of local advocates for increased mental health services, Zane was a SSU counseling student though not a clinic intern.
Rogerson said he still supports a plan under which graduate students would perform their internships - part of a state licensing requirement - at a Petaluma clinic run by Doolittle.
"We would love to see it serving the community for free off the campus," he said.
Doolittle declined to explain Thursday what new obstacles had emerged in talks about operating the clinic off-campus.
Rogerson said SSU is unwilling to continue to pay stipends to graduate student interns out of a fund established from student fees, as has been the practice. Those fees, about $20,000, are the total cost to SSU for the clinic.
"If you were to start paying interns off campus you would have some liability," Rogerson said.
Doolittle, a psychologist, retired in 2004 as a full-time member of the faculty but still teaches some classes, for which he is paid. That, and the fact that he never was paid to run the clinic, undercuts SSU's reasoning, he said.
"We're in a position of having to defend something we've done for 19 years without any problems," he said. "It represents a turning away from the university's responsibility to the community."
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