… writes in the New York Times about “the horror of multiple suicides.”

In a time of unrelenting connectivity, through Facebook, Twitter and our smartphones, paradoxically it is too easy to stop connecting directly with those most able to help our young people.

I’m not sure what this means. In the Huffington Post, the mother of an NYU student who recently killed himself writes in response to David Skorton’s NYT letter:

I am also encouraged to see that I am not the only who believes that connectivity disconnects people. I think that we need to [go] back in order to go forward.

I think both writers need to clarify what they mean. It seems intuitively right to me that part of what’s weird about being in your twenties today is that you’re always online in a variety of pseudo-social ways… That you’re maybe addicted to these bizarre tethers that aren’t really tethers… But I’d like to know more about why people think there’s a link between this and self-destruction.

Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.

Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.

Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.

… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.

But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”

This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.

Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…

But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…

I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.

Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …

Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.

From a conversation between two writers on the staff of the Cornell University newspaper:

… Faculty and staff ought to engage students, one on one, in a discussion that reaches far beyond careers and academics. Part of this involves the faculty realizing just how important a role they play beyond the laboratory and the lecture hall. They are mentors for all of us, and their efforts are part of a bottom-up approach to making Cornell not just a place of instruction, but a home.

… I attended a dinner late last week with the Board of Trustees where Susan Murphy gave the closing remarks. Tears came easily to her and the rest of the room — full of millionaire movers and shakers — in part for the loss of Matt, William and Bradley, but perhaps in greater part for the feeling of helplessness adults and outsiders must feel in their attempts to prevent future tragedies and ease our suffering. We, the students, know what’s up with our classmates (or at least more so), and everyone else is almost completely in the dark….

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I don’t say the following is beautifully written, but of all the stuff I’ve been reading in the last few days about suicide – in the wake of the Cornell story – it states most concisely the core facts of the phenomenon.

The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable. In this way, acts of suicide invigorate and inspire innovation and remind us all of what really matters in life.

Last year it was Caltech. This year, Cornell University is experiencing a string of student suicides. The number is in dispute — between three and five in the last few months. Security people have been stationed at the bridges over the famous campus gorges. Most of the suicides jumped into the gorges.

Suicide is frighteningly contagious. Suicidal students are obviously watching one another for ideas as to method. In 2005, William and Mary had the same one-and-right-away-another-in-exactly-the-same-fashion pattern that Cornell is seeing. At Caltech, two of the students used the same method: helium inhalation. In the last few years, three students at NYU have jumped from the top of the library’s atrium.

… female…

The BBC reports on this shocking revelation.

Last December, a SUNY Binghamton professor was stabbed to death by a paranoid graduate student. The student was well known to police and fellow students for his threatening and crazy behavior, but was still a student at Binghamton.

Yesterday, a graduate student at the University of Florida famous for his big-lecture geography class about which one student, echoing other comments, writes “Impossible NOT to get an A,” was shot by police. It’s not clear what condition he’s in.

For a year, at least one professor and one counselor at the university had known that the student was seriously unstable:

Police first met with Adu-Brempong on Monday to check on him after a report of possible emotional problems.

Geography professor Peter Waylen had contacted police to say Adu-Brempong had sent an e-mail with troubling statements, which were redacted in the police report. Waylen told police Adu-Brempong had been having delusional thoughts for at least a year and that he previously had received help from a UF counselor because he believed the U.S. government was not going to renew his student visa, the report stated.

… Waylen and an officer spoke Monday with Adu-Brempong at his apartment.

“I asked Adu-Brempong if he had any concerns that I could help with. Adu-Brempong advised that he was fine and did not need anyone’s help,” Officer Gene Rogers wrote in the report. “I advised him that Waylen and I were concerned for his safety and were there to assist him any way we could.”

The report states Adu-Brempong refused help from a counselor and stated several times that he was fine.

Last night a neighbor called police because Adu-Brempong was screaming inside of his apartment. Details on what caused him to be shot are unclear at this point. Police say he threatened them with a knife and a pipe.

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UD thanks a reader for sending her the Florida story.

… is featured in the Chicago SunTimes.

UD directed her honors thesis.

From the News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington:

A man reportedly infatuated with a 30-year-old special education teacher shot and killed the woman outside a Tacoma elementary school … this morning, police said. The gunman later was shot dead by a Pierce County sheriff’s deputy near Fredrickson.

The initial shooting occurred about 7:30 a.m. at Birney Elementary School, where the victim helped teach reading to kids with learning disabilities.

Witnesses told police the gunman… arrived at the school about two hours before the teacher and shot her when she and a female colleague later arrived…

A teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told The News Tribune the gunman had been in the victim’s master’s degree class when she was at the University of Washington-Tacoma. He had been stalking the victim, leaving roses on her car and notes.

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A story reminiscent of the Johanna Justin-Jinich killing at Wesleyan.

… has been murdered by her mother.

Marissa Pagli’s father is campus maintenance supervisor; she grew up on campus, and still lived there in staff housing with her parents.

She was on the

volleyball team.

You bet your ass.

***********************

I know it’s not fair to brand them all.

… in the sexual assault case involving three lacrosse players at Sacred Heart University. They apologized in court to the woman involved. (Background here.)

The 18-year-old female student from New Jersey had been having consensual sex with [one of the players] in a room of SHU’s Roncali dormitory, according to police, when he suddenly held her down on the bed and called out to two fellow lacrosse players.

One of them seems to have come into the room, though it’s not clear he did anything beyond showing up and taking a look. The third seems not to have been involved at all.

This year’s winner of the

Princeton snowman competition
reminds UD that she’s
been meaning to review the
subject of squirrels on campus.

Tame, rampant, clever, and
occasionally threatening squirrels
are a big feature of a lot of
campuses. Students get
particularly excited about them
if they’re black or if they’re white.
Gray does little for them.

Mary Baldwin College
has a squirrel on its seal.

Kent State has a Black Squirrel Festival.

Sarah Lawrence’s many black squirrels
are the college’s unofficial mascot:

When St. Norbert College’s
albino squirrel died, it was
buried with full honors.

University of Texas students
believe that if you see an albino
squirrel on your way to a test,
you’ll get an A.

Universities tired of squirrels
chewing through their electrical
systems sometimes secretly
try to kill them. Or not secretly.

But you have to be careful.

… One of my colleagues attended a media conference in Algiers last April, where post-graduate female students from the university acted as interpreters. These women, who were Muslim, were asked not to wear headscarves by the state broadcaster running the event, because it was felt they would send an anti-progressive signal to international delegates.

The young women complied, but were jeered at by men on the street as they walked bare-headed from the campus to the conference centre. Were they angered by these hecklers? On the contrary, their indignation was directed at the organiser for asking them to leave off their veils, thereby laying them open to taunts…

Martina Devlin, Independent

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Meanwhile, in Iran:

Last October Iranian police in the north-eastern town of Bojnourd launched a new crackdown on attractive mannequins in clothes stores and the main bazaar, confiscating about 65 ‘hijab-less female mannequins.’

“The use of vulgar mannequins – whether male or female – is an affront to public morals and is considered to be a crime,” said an Iranian official, adding that the display of properly veiled mannequins which adhere to the national dress code would not be considered a crime.

A University of Manitoba professor is alleging a doctoral candidate twice failed his comprehensive examination, then appealed to be reinstated on the basis that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.

The professor — who asked not to be named — said he has filed a complaint to the U of M senate alleging a senior administrator reinstated the student into the doctoral program and ruled that the student’s PhD be determined solely on the basis of his doctoral thesis…

At first it looked like an open-and-shut case of two female basketball players beating up on a male cheerleader who complained about their noisy partying.

Now it looks as though they were all friends and all partying together when a fourth person complained about noise, and things somehow got out of hand.

I mean, the details aren’t clear. They rarely are when everyone’s drunk as a skunk. But the guy’s nose is definitely broken. And everyone’s been suspended from their team or their squad.

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UD thanks David for the Smoking Gun link.