… you’re a better man than I am.

Michele Dufault, an astronomy and physics major at Yale, has been killed in a freak accident that occurred while she was using the university’s spinning lathe. Apparently her hair got caught in the machine and it pulled her in.

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A dangerous machine. This person survived because people around him turned off the machine. Was Dufault alone in the shop?

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The Yale Daily News has details.

From comments on the YDN story:

This young woman encouraged me not to give up on an astrophys course we took together, helped me as a bewildered freshman through problem sets, sent me emails to check up on how I liked this or that course, all because of her passion for what she studied and her generous nature.

… that there are universities where riots and assaults do not occur every weekend.

… has written an attack, in the Princeton paper, on the domination of formal method over theory and normative work in that department. It has generated an immense number of comments, and has been featured on the Arts & Letters Daily site.

[W]hy choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in [the department’s] basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away? … If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.

… is a disturbing event. Universities need to be alert to the possibility of contagion.

Le, a Yale graduate student, was strangled by a lab technician during the course of a “work dispute.” The technician has, since the murder two years ago, maintained his innocence; but with his trial looming he has admitted the crime.

In the wake of a student’s suicide, Brandeis faculty meet with a representative of the Psychiatric Counseling Center, who explains that because of confidentiality rules, “Every single one of the suicides [at Brandeis] has a backstory that I can’t tell you about.”

It’s understandable that, as this post’s headline notes, students don’t want their professors knowing their medical stuff. On the other hand, this means we can’t be of much help when a student’s in crisis. After decades of teaching, I’ve only seen a couple of manifestly troubled students in my classes.

…Northwestern.

… Facebook page!

Sample comment:

In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.

[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.

Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.

“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”

Retired from a high-profile career as an academic psychiatrist, Frances now muses on the expensive and destructive medicalization of human experience in America.

In a recent post, I noted what I called his Post-Diagnostic Regret, his almost anguished reflection on his own implication in what another writer calls psychosprawl — the legitimation of so many behaviors as signs of mental illness that thirty percent of the country is now said to be mentally ill. This is great news for the pharmaceutical industry, America’s Fraud Queen.

In this piece, in Psychiatric Times (registration), Frances turns his attention to a recent, much-reported study.

The New York Times of Dec 20,2010 carried an alarming story. It seems that during the past decade, college students have suddenly become much more mentally ill. The rate of severe psychiatric disorder among those seen in school counseling services used to be 16%– now it has reached 44%. Ten years ago, 17% received psychiatric medicine– now it is 24%.

The jump, Frances suggests, is manufactured.

First, it’s far too easy for students to ace the DSM-IV tests for mental disorders. “[T]he severity and duration requirements included in DSM-IV were set too low, particularly in the criteria sets that define the milder forms of the depressive, anxiety, and attention deficit disorders.”

Second, impressionable and sometimes insecure students see endless slick ads encouraging them to palpate, as it were, their moods. “[P]rofit motivated skewing of public information about illness is rightly prohibited virtually everywhere else in the world,” Allen notes. He reminds readers that along with lavishing us with images of our mental fragility, drug companies have long “lavished physicians with industry-sponsored conferences, free trips and meals, free samples, biased research, and co-opted thought leaders. There [is] one drug salesperson for every seven doctors– sometimes outnumbering the patients in waiting areas. Not surprisingly, diagnosis and medication sales have skyrocketed and profits have risen astronomically.”

Side effects, lifelong stigma, insurance difficulties – these are obvious calamities for the wrongly labeled. More profoundly wounding is “the way a falsely diagnosed student sees himself at a crucial moment of identity formation– the reduction in the sense of personal efficacy, resilience, and responsibility.”

… UD lived in an off-campus Evanston apartment with three – or was it four? – other women.

Turns out there was always a law – the beautifully named Brothel Law – prohibiting more than three unrelated people from sharing apartments and houses in Evanston.

So pissed off are Evanstonians about loud drunken students that the town has now decided to enforce the law. NU students – some of whom will be evicted – are furious. Five hundred of them packed a campus meeting about the situation.

During the forum, Weinberg junior Taylor Barrett read aloud responses from Evanston officials she received after e-mailing them Tuesday to “respectfully express her unease” about the ordinance. Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl apparently responded by suggesting students ask the administration to change NU’s alcohol policy.

“Perhaps you might consider talking with the NU administration about allowing drinking on campus,” she wrote. “Then all partying would not have to take place in the neighborhoods.”

Ain’t gonna happen. NU doesn’t want its students falling into the lake.

No – here’s one of the better scenarios: The town of Evanston now has NU’s attention. Big time. Evanston knows which houses and apartments are the major offenders, and it should, with increased campus and town police presence on weekends, aggressively target them. NU sends letter to the students and their parents threatening suspension, whatever. Evanston leans on landlords, who also send letters. This high-profile activity scares other students into better behavior.

… poem, Desert Places, I suddenly thought of Frank Zappa’s What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?.

I mean, it suddenly seemed a very close parallel – not in terms of style, but in terms of the idea that the scariest desert place is your own mind.

The students seemed to have heard of UD‘s beloved Zappa… Or were they just humoring her?

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And then there’s this, by Philip Larkin.

If, My Darling

For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot,
And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter
Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot.

…whose result (If you’re going to learn, you must read.) is discussed here.

… has been established, in memory of Gabrielle Giffords’ murdered aide, by two graduates of the same university he went to: UC Santa Cruz. The scholarship will fund a “financially needy student committed to a career in public service or social justice.”