Parsing moral responsibility at Arizona State University is a subtle thing.

Yes, fraternity members encouraged a classmate to drink himself to death…

On the other hand, when he started to die they dropped him at the local hospital…

Even more nobly, before they abandoned him in the lobby one student taped a piece of paper onto his body with information about how much he’d had to drink. The world will little note, nor long remember, exactly what the student wrote, but it can never forget what he did …

Similarly, after an exploding beer bottle someone threw into a bonfire badly burned two women, ASU students “helped extinguish the girls’ flaming skin.” Then they “kicked them out of the party to avoid getting into trouble.”

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These are the sorts of moral scenarios philosophy professors like to use in their classrooms. They’re stories with a rich ambiguity that can provoke valuable discussion.

After cheering while a friend drinks himself to the point of death, should you

1. put him away in a room to die or sleep it off?
2. take him to the hospital?
3. put clothes on him? (he only had on a bathing suit)
4. stay long enough to talk to a doctor or nurse?
5. abandon him?
6. stick a note on him and then abandon him?

After setting off an explosion that grievously injures two people, should you

1. douse their flames?
2. throw them out into the night?

Now why would you do that?

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“[T]wo of the three roomates were already in custody over immigration violations…”

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More details:

Two students from New Bedford, Massachusetts, have been arrested on charges of making false statements to investigators and conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to a federal law enforcement source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. … The students are originally from Kazakhstan and were already in custody on immigration charges, according to another source with knowledge of the immigration case. The third is a U.S. citizen, the federal law enforcement source said.

More details. They certainly sound idiotic enough to have had some connection.

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What are friends for?

Three students displeased with the University of Ottawa med school decided to sue it. For one hundred and fifty million dollars.

Howsomeever, a Superior Court judge decided that depriving generations of Canadians of medical care by bankrupting a medical school was a tad over the top.

Far as I can tell, two of the three are still enrolled in the school. A bit awkward…

You put all the people who come to help you or who just happen upon you at serious risk. The method is appealing because it’s easy to mix the household material, and death comes fast and reliably.

Even if, like a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic this morning, you leave notes in your dorm room warning people off, exposure to others may well happen.

Six people were treated at a hospital; a hazmat unit spent hours cleaning up the building.

The bombs hit university students hard.

An unnamed Boston University graduate student has died.

… then you’re just not my type.

Penn State. If there are other students there like Mary Krupa, there’s hope for the place.

… has had major drug issues lately (scroll down for posts about the drug scandal) is bad news indeed. The grandson of T. Boone Pickens, a student at Texas Christian University, has died, reportedly of a heroin/Xanax overdose.

… die in a nightclub fire there.

… stand for all. Let this soul, dead in his bed from heroin and alcohol, represent all of the students who, this academic year, will drug to oblivion.

Not far from graduating from Oklahoma State, he’d been a wrestler in high school, and the autopsy notes his hardiness. “The body is that of an unembalmed, well developed, well nourished white male appearing consistent with the reported age of 22 years.”

The language of the autopsy is somehow beautiful.

The body is clad in a white hospital gown.

Needle marks are noted; a fatty liver. He had been in a hospital before, for toxicity, but this time had been too much.

… social work, which positively attracts first responders. What happens to those of us who teach aesthetics? Three of our students gather round us and recite Keats (Milton?) as we expire?

… in which a student, having taken LSD and been violent all night, showed up at campus police headquarters and apparently acted so threateningly that a policeman shot and killed him, San Bernardino city police have shot and killed a Cal State San Bernardino student who also apparently threatened them. Responding to a report of a disturbance, they confronted the student in a dorm hallway.

[T]here was an altercation in which the student became violent toward officers, who shot the student in the torso.

Obviously, there will be an investigation and a review of any security footage.

The parents of the South Alabama student – who was not only unarmed, but apparently naked – are suing.

Sometimes one or another guy in one of my classes hangs around after class and doesn’t say anything but sort of looks sideways at me and I sort of smile at him, encouraging him to ask a question or make a comment or something. But he doesn’t say anything, and I gather my notebooks and walk out; and he follows me for a little, at some distance, and then, rather sadly, goes his way.

I don’t know what it means, but I’m moved by it, and I wonder if there’s a maternal something I’m giving off in class, and, if so, whether these young men, missing their mothers, want to be around a certain warmth they’re perceiving. Is the effect – I go on to speculate, wildly – deepened by my talking in literature classes about confusion and suffering and longing?

Literature classes are special, Mr UD often reminds me; they’re not like his political science classes, where they cozy up with constitutions and international law. Not even philosophy has these embodied characters aching for clarity and thrown back on mysteries.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the strange intensity of the literature classroom – an intensity to which my students are highly responsive… That is, I mean to say, I’m grateful to my students.

I’m grateful for their resistance to me – the way a few of them will always, all semester, have a cocked head and skeptical eyes; how some of them will say “Why are all the stories you’ve chosen so dark?”

Which will make me think, and think hard: Am I choosing dark? I riffle through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, desperately looking for happy stories I’ve missed. I want there to be a world in which that student is right, and serious art is as joyous as it is tragic. But even the one story that ends with a reasonably unclouded epiphany – Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” – gets there by way of the evocation of a fully despairing form of life.

I’m grateful for the class sessions when discussion is just dynamite — ideas and questions and jokes and anecdotes blasting away for an hour and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, my blissed-out head spins. My brain’s lit up. I feel the same way I do when at the piano I play non-stop – with some fluidity, some feeling, and even some proximity to the piece as written – through a longish composition. I’ve been engaged – with energy, precision, rapidity, nuance – and the result has been rather beautiful.

I’ve formed lifetime friendships with a surprisingly large number of my students. I’m grateful they let me watch their passion and disillusionment and then their rebuilding of passion. Some of them have terrible crises in which they sit in their stopped cars for hours staring through the windshield and wondering what they’ve missed out on and if they’ve made disastrously wrong decisions about what to do with their lives. I tend to tell them to calm down; that they’re still ridiculously young, and there’s plenty of time to make more mistakes… I try to make them laugh. They do laugh.

On the simplest level, I’m grateful to them because they’re so beautiful. I mean, just beautiful to look at as they gallop their city campus in skinny jeans and low boots. Their faces are ruddy with life.

But the deeper gratitude, the one I’m mainly trying to convey, involves what you might call intellectual vulnerability. It glitters in their eyes as they sit in front of me and begin to take in, in a disciplined way, the difficulty of being human.

… fails to bring context to SUNY Albany student hazing and other rituals. Like Chico State and U Mass Amherst, SUNY Albany is one of America’s most violent, dangerous universities. Fights, sometimes escalating to riots, are part of the fabric of life for students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. Suspensions happen; a few fraternities get shuttered… Nothing changes. Things get worse. The administrations of these universities assume a sort of perpetual crouch, waiting in dread for the next horror.

Naturally, an important element of the SUNY Albany mix is a huge expenditure of funds on sports. Without it, Albany wouldn’t be able to attract all those applicants who want to come to SUNY to watch games and get drunk and beat up people.

A campus policeman killed the person wielding the sword. It’s too soon to know whether this was a student at Metropolitan State University, or whether the person with the sword was drunk or high, etc.

… loser.

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Swift and excellent statement from the chancellor:

“… [T]he reports of uncivil language and shouted racial epithets appear to be accurate and are universally condemned by the university, student leaders and the vast majority of students who are more representative of our university creed.”

[Dan] Jones said parents are being notified that “one of America’s safest campuses is safe again this morning, though all of us are ashamed of the few students who have negatively affected the reputations of each of us and of our university.”

SOS would only tweak this in the following way: Instead of negatively affected, just say hurt, or harmed, or damaged. Remember Thomas Jefferson:

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.