Durkheim’s observation plays out in a moving way in the university (or high school) setting, where students and former students may choose places on campus associated with their greatest successes or most significant experiences.

A sixty year old guy who’d been named “the University of Montana’s outstanding athlete in 1975″ killed himself on that campus. Nora Miller, a Wesleyan track star, killed herself on the track.

A football player who’d been at the University of South Carolina went not there but “to his old high school and parked near the field where he had starred as a wide receiver in football and a sprinter in track and field.”

Building prisons does seem to lower crime rates – at least if you put criminals in them. Similarly, despite this NYU student’s insistence that suicide barriers at places like NYU and Cornell are pointless, there’s evidence that they can dissuade some people from jumping.

One must have a heart of stone to read this account without laughing.

This time last year, the incredibly violent University of Massachusetts, Amherst – a university which seems to have a gang-legacy admissions category – was the scene of extensive back-to-school bloodshed.

It’s exactly the same thing this year, with party/riots so massive and attacks on police so vicious that the poor little town of Amherst, once host to gentle Emily Dickinson, now host to hordes of scary drunks, has begun considering its options.

It wants, to start with, to know just how seriously the university is disciplining its large numbers of remarkably vile students. UD isn’t sure what Amherst intends to do once it gets this information, but considering the long history of U Mass student riots (read that history here), the town has been astoundingly forbearing.

UD has proposed shutting the school down and making it an online institution. The negative here is obvious – Amherst currently enjoys a captive audience of thousands of thirsty alcoholics, and that’s got to be great for its bottom line. But gradually the whole Zoo Mass phenom is costing Amherst – and all Massachusetts taxpayers – more than it’s bringing in.

… aimed at students protesting the campus visit of Mr One Percent, Eric Cantor — a banner reading

GET IN OUR BRACKET

— so students at Georgetown University are marketing their investment fund to fellow students with the tagline

BECOME THE ONE PERCENT.

Much huffing and puffing about it here. But really – it’s a clever slogan, and it has helped attract a lot of investors.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”

Gayle Saunders, Ohio State University assistant vice president of media relations, wrote in an email, “This is not a University sanctioned T-shirt, and we have no knowledge of where it originated. It is unacceptable and appalling that someone would make light of a tragedy in this manner.”

People tend to be at their most fragile at the beginning of their freshman year. The transition can be overwhelming.

For some of the most fragile people, it can simply be too much.

… and looks like this little tyke has blown it.

Five handguns, brass knuckles, and a pocketknife.

He’s seventeen years old. Just getting started.

Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.

Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.

When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.

(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)

This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.

And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.

A commenter on an article about a student recently expelled from Portland State University nails it.

Of course people like this guy, who lied about having four guns in his apartment after campus police went there because of threatening remarks he made about one of his professors, will sue the universities that make them leave. Doesn’t matter. PSU did the right thing.

Tim Foley was among the children most extensively groomed for a future spy career, officials say. Though he wasn’t American-born, his parents lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, under the assumed names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Mr. Foley was 20 when his parents were arrested and had just finished his sophomore year at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

His parents revealed their double life to him well before their arrest, according to current and former officials, whose knowledge of the discussion was based on surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included bugging suspects’ homes. The officials said the parents also told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps.

He agreed, said the officials. At the end of the discussion with his parents, according to one person familiar with the surveillance, the young man stood up and saluted “Mother Russia.” He also agreed to travel to Russia to begin formal espionage training, officials said.

Did I teach this guy how to be even more American in an Intro American Novel seminar? Was I an unwitting tool in the hands of Russian intelligence?

As it prepares to cash in on student drinking, the University of Minnesota reminds us that its preferred focus remains academics.

Iowa’s different.

… was swept up in a drug raid. Innocent of any charges, he was nonetheless held in a DEA cell for five days with no food or water; for two days, he was in total darkness.

The UCSD engineering student said he missed several midterm exams last week. Attorney Eugene Iredale said he hoped university officials would allow his client time to make up the missed school work.

I think UCSD will find this an acceptable excuse.

It’s that time of year.

———————–

UD thanks Wendy.