… have been killed in what looks like an attempted carjacking near campus.

… has been found dead. His roommate “found him about 7:40 a.m. on the floor of their room in Roy Wilkins Hall.” It’s not yet known how he died.

… critical condition. They were driving to the airport, on their way to spring break, and were hit head-on by a person going the wrong way on the interstate.

… Scroll down to Colbert Report clip. Start at 2:41 and realize the emptiness behind your religious delusions.

… runs the headline, but the cause of death of MIT undergraduate Brian Anderson simply hasn’t yet been determined. No foul play, and no clear signs of suicide.

Here are two other possibilities:

Maybe Anderson had an underlying health problem – weak heart, epilepsy. He may have had a condition of which he himself was not aware.

The other possibility that has to be considered is alcohol/drugs.

… at America’s worst university.

Could go to prison for as many as forty years. My guess is that he’ll get twenty.

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Huguely’s father will testify as part of the sentencing deliberations. Given the gin-soaked existence he and his son both apparently led (Huguely wrote to Yeardley Love days before he killed her that “alcohol is ruining my life”), he may not be the best person to give this testimony. He will probably break down on the stand and speak of his mistakes and his feelings of guilt; but while this will certainly make him and his son look pathetic, it will not necessarily stir sympathy.

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Update: Huguely’s father did not testify. Good call.

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Another Update: He has been sentenced to 26 years.

First it was this guy, who kept evading capture. Now it’s these guys, who gathered at a student’s window to watch her having sex with one of their teammates. Just like the first pig, they got caught, and now they’re squealing.
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UD thanks Andre.

It’ll work as well as this chick’s Prozac defense worked.

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.