A former Temple University student killed himself the other day, shot himself in the head, in the busiest part of campus. Plenty of students saw it happen, or saw the immediate aftermath.

UD readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or Nora Miller, who, on another busy morning, immolated herself on the Wesleyan University running field where she (a track star) practiced.

Most suicides are private; UD remembers a GW woman going across the river to a hotel room in Virginia to kill herself. The main character in Doris Lessing’s famous story, “To Room Nineteen,” similarly chooses an anonymous hotel room for her death. Many suicides are committed in hotel rooms.

Public suicides literally want to make a spectacle of themselves. It seems important to their conception of their deaths that they be seen, that people be riveted to and disturbed by their charred or bloodied bodies in the public square. Heisman distributed, just before his death, a long manuscript about the meaninglessness of life. His public gesture seems to have been the endpoint of an elaborate argument to which we were meant to pay attention.

Private suicides seem a reckoning with private demons; public suicides often feel like an angry message.

… the sudden, quiet exit of a Kenyon freshman.

Kathryn Currier, eighteen, “died unexpectedly … after falling ill in her room.”

She loved literature, passionately. But she wanted to study everything. She “was very frustrated she could only take four classes. There was just so much she wanted to experience and learn and do.”

She wrote this about herself.

I can be a bit shy in class at the outset, but this is something I am working on; I should get better as the class progresses and I (hopefully!) gain confidence. I am looking forward to four years of learning in one of the best English departments in the country.

She also wrote

[T]he beauty of literature and poetry [is] that it can be experienced by anyone. Indeed, sometimes reading, sometimes words, are the only thing a person has; reading can be the most wonderful means of escape from this world, and reading can also be the most wonderful means of connecting to this world.

When Allen Frances and thousands of others in the field of mental health scream about the next, even heftier, edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they have in mind, among many other forms of psychosprawl, learning disorder psychosprawl.

When the manual that university mental health people rely on to confirm a learning disorder in a student has a page like this – in which, as it appears to be saying, you can have the learning disorder known as Not Otherwise Specified (i.e., not captured by the DSM’s already immense number of diagnostic categories) – you know that universities are screwed. Virtually any student who wants special accommodations for tests and papers and projects can go to the campus disability office and come out with a diagnosis.

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A medical student at UD‘s George Washington University was flunking courses and had been told that expulsion was imminent. Off she went to the disability people who duly

concluded that [she] had a reading disorder — dyslexia — as well as a mild processing-speed disorder. [The disability office] recommended a number of academic accommodations, psychotherapy, investigation of the appropriateness of psychostimulant medication…

The whole enchilada. Psychotherapy, powerful stimulants…

GW Med was unimpressed with the disability office’s generous alarm and reiterated that the student was expelled, at which point she sued.

And sued. And sued. Tenaciously, the student has dragged her disability from court to court, only to lose again and again.

She has now lost yet again.

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This post’s headline is from a Scott Jaschik piece in Inside Higher Education. Scott links to a friend of the court addition to this case, brought by a number of university organizations. Basically, they argue that universities have had it with the costs imposed (let’s not even talk about how unfair this scheme is to other students) by increasing numbers of students taking advantage of an air-tight combination of the anything goes DSM and disability offices.

These organizations point out that among the accommodations universities have had to make are “comfort animals.”

How far does this go? What if you’re someone whose learning disability can only be comforted by masturbation?

Sure, we can laugh now. GW prevailed. But it’s not funny. These cases impose enormous burdens on schools. They make already obscene tuitions rise. Allen Frances is right to be angry about the DSM‘s crucial contribution to this scam.

Yeshiva University, notorious for having featured both Bernard Madoff and his buddy Ezra Merkin on its board of trustees, is all het up about a rather good short story a student there wrote about having sex.

You’ll recall that Yeshiva’s response to having put those two men in profoundly responsible positions at the university was to quietly erase their names one night from its trustees list and then say pretty much nothing about the matter. When pushed to the wall, Yeshiva described itself as a victim, overlooking the fact that its virtually non-existent conflict of interest policy allowed Merkin and Madoff to do plenty of business at the school.

Yeshiva has never come to any moral reckoning with its shameful behavior in the Madoff matter — behavior all the more scandalous in a religious school. But Yeshiva is totally down for moral hysteria against some undergrad who writes about sex. The student council has withdrawn the paper’s funding, and the university has clamped sex filters on its male students’ computers.

Only the men get the filters because women don’t read about sex.

The head of the University of Texas Republicans tweets.

“Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama.”

… Nipissing.

Since the middle of September New Haven police have cited 70 Quinnipiac students for urinating in public, significantly more than any other local college.

Details.

… of Diaspora, a social network site, has died at the age of 22.

No cause of death has yet been given. When it happens suddenly, and that young, one has to suspect suicide.

… their outside research?”

That would be one way to go. But extend questions about business ties to trustees.

Another direction UD would suggest: That pesky thirty-two billion dollar endowment. That’s an awful lot of money for one university to be sitting on. What’s Harvard University doing with it? What are the moral obligations attached to having accumulated an endowment bigger than the gross national product of many countries?

Whether frightening a congressional blowhard afraid of dissent, or drawing attention to a professor who thinks concern about economic inequality is “the politics of envy,” campus protesters these days are looking pretty sharp.

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Jonathan Chait in 2005, on the envy meme:

In a recent National Review Online column in which he was forced to acknowledge the higher incomes enjoyed by the super-rich, [Lawrence] Kudlow fired off the following sarcastic ripostes to a New York Times article by reporter David Cay Johnston on the rich: “How dare they be successful earners and investors”; “Should we go out and shoot these 145,000 [taxpayers] for their success?”; and “Germans have an ‘equality sickness’ that makes them dependent on the welfare state. Is that what David Cay Johnston has in mind for America?”

Speaking as a member of the liberal media, I can answer the last question very certainly: Yes, yes it is. If you walk in any newsroom in America, you will find reporters whispering to each other in German, humming “Deutschland Uber Alles” and scheming to install somebody of Teutonic stock in the White House. (Making Arnold Schwarzenegger governor was just the first step in this plot. Shhh.)

A slightly less inflammatory response than Kudlow’s came from Harvard economist and former Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw. “The data show that the rich take a rising share of income when the economy is booming, such as during the 1920s and 1990s,” Mankiw wrote in a letter to the New York Times, concluding that if policymakers “want economic prosperity for all, they should avoid focusing on the politics of envy.”

Mankiw’s choice of decades to focus on is a bit strange. Although I’m not an economist, I understand that the 1920s did not end well. Moreover, Mankiw ignores the nearly three decades after World War II, when the nation enjoyed high economic growth while the share of income held by the very rich fell. It’s worth remembering that period because although people nowadays tend to think of the rich getting richer and the poor getter poorer as inevitable, some of our most prosperous years coincided with rich and poor growing more equal.

Anyway, it’s not just a matter of which decades you focus on. Mankiw is simply wrong. UC Berkeley economist and former Clinton Treasury official Brad DeLong ran an analysis, finding no connection between general prosperity and the share of income held by the very rich.

What’s depressing is that even highly credentialed conservatives such as Mankiw equate any discussion of class inequality with “envy” of the rich. The accusation is actually bizarre. Liberals want to make the rich pay higher tax rates not because they hate them. (In fact, as conservatives love to point out in other contexts, many liberals are rich.) It’s because somebody has to pay for the government, and the rich can more easily bear higher rates.

Moreover, there are ways of accomplishing this short of shooting the rich or imposing socialism, say raising the top tax rate to where it stood during the Clinton years. That, by the way, was the other decade of prosperity invoked by Mankiw.

Satto Tonegawa’s suicide (for an earlier post, go here) has been confirmed. These deaths, of a freshman and a sophomore, are immensely sad; they also raise suicide contagion fears.

… Camus writes about suicide.

Although every suicide is private and enigmatic, certain types of people seem particularly susceptible. Two years ago, Cal Tech experienced a cluster of suicides among Asian American students. A writer in Time magazine notes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

Satto Tonegawa, a student at MIT, and the son of a Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor, probably committed suicide (suicide has not been officially confirmed) two days ago in his dorm room.

… it could win some serious journalism awards. Even more than scandal-rich University of Miami, Columbia University, with its notorious business school professors, insider-trader-tinged medical school professor, and – most recently – Medicare fraud-accused faculty (that last one cost the university a million dollars in settlement money), represents a spectacular opportunity for ambitious young journalists.

They simply have to start bundling. Rather than deal with each breaking story, the Spectator staff needs to pull them all together in a long series of articles featuring financial corruption at the university.

An eighteen-year-old freshman at Norwich University died at the scene of an after-party crash in Vermont. Eight students were crammed in the car; the driver was drunk.

They also look at handwriting.

Plus there’s an algorithm.

… a veteran who fought in Afghanistan, dies in urban violence near campus.

He had met a friend and the friend’s girlfriend at a McDonald’s near the university campus at about 2 a.m. Friday. That’s when three men, possibly college students, harassed and provoked customers in the eatery, which caused an exchange of words between the groups, Paul Casey said.

Patrick Casey walked outside with his party and stood between his friend and one of the men from the group. As tensions appeared to subside, the unidentified man pounded Patrick Casey in the side of the head and ran off with the others, his father said.

“He was trying to step up and protect his friend,” Paul Casey said, citing what his son’s friend told him.

What… that dipshit? He couldn’t find his ass with both hands and an assmap.

(UD is trying to imagine what Great Neck North High School administrators must have said in their conversations leading to the arrest of a group of students on criminal charges of cheating on the SATs.)

And talk about the burden of intellect! Here’s poor Eshaghoff “[flying] home from college primarily to impersonate two students and [taking] the SAT twice in one weekend.” The one guy with a brain is always on call.