… 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.

… the University of Rhode Island – routinely admit people who riot at the drop of a hat. These schools are big sloppy drunks.

First out of the gate this academic year is the storied URI:

[S]everal students were injured while fighting with broken beer bottles by smashing [them] over one another’s head. Students milled about throughout Fraternity Circle, with bystanders coming to watch the fights break out.

The URI officer stationed at the event called for backup and all on-duty URI officers responded — a lieutenant, sergeant and six officers parked in the streets, but students refused to disperse.

URI officers began using pepper spray on the crowd to get students to disperse, and several students were attended to by EMS for related injuries.

Two liberal arts types at NYU live blog a Stern (NYU’s business school) class.

Results? Amusing.

… Elaine Ellis Thomas, a Yale Divinity student, writes beautifully about the suicide of her son two years ago.

Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing, I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.

You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.

If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.

If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.

Thursday’s suicide – John Miller, a dedicated musician and teacher – had all the marks of impulsivity and enigma that Thomas talks about. He jumped from an open window in a music department building.

An acquaintance describes Miller as a “‘workaholic’ who would log 18-hour days, only to arrive at the office again the next day at 6 a.m.”

A note from the Yale Daily News reviews the vexed business of covering these stories – in particular, the business of trying to avoid copycat suicides.

A York student hears a professor say something anti-semitic, rushes out of the room in a rage, and informs on him all over the Jewish community. The professor is branded an anti-semite.

The professor, who is Jewish, was clearly using the anti-semitic statement in his lecture about prejudice as an example of a reprehensible opinion. The student failed to understand this.

Interviewed later, the student apologized profusely and …

No:

[Senior Sarah] Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.

“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

Grunfeld also expressed skepticism that Johnston was in fact Jewish.

Asked directly by a reporter whether she believes Johnston is lying, she was unclear.

“Whether he is or is not, no one will know,” she said. “. . . Maybe he thought because he is Jewish he can talk smack about other Jews.”

York is about to graduate this woman.

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Mr UD’s reaction: “The same words came out of her mouth. Context be damned. Let the word go out.”

Adam, a 22-year-old junior with a double major in psychology and sociology at George Washington University, said he’s not sorry he left school in March to join the [Libyan anti-Gaddafi fighters]. He told his Libyan parents, who also live in Washington, about his plans only after he’d bought the plane ticket.

“You value things more and get a better perspective on life,” said Adam, sporting thick black-rimmed glasses, military fatigues and a bandana in camouflage colors. If he survives the war, he plans to go back to school to finish his degree and then settle in a free Libya.

… is arrested for a chain of pharmacy thefts. Twenty years old. A freshman.