… writing from a Brown University student, as he struggles with his sense of implication in the suicide of an NYU student he didn’t know.

In places this opinion piece gets too highfalutin. But who cares. It’s that rare bit of writing which sheds protective covering and just says it.

With full awareness of the mystery of the act in general, and his distance from this person in particular, the Brown student makes two suggestions:

… The first line of business I’d proffer would be Brown’s departure from the heinously overrated U.S. News and World Report rankings, with a clear statement from President Ruth Simmons that Brown is withdrawing to fight the elitism of Ivy academia. Expressing to the general public that higher education is not about exclusion would reshape the expectations of parents and students, almost certainly alleviating academic pressure.

Another measure would be an encouragement of student-faculty relationships. Bringing undergraduates closer to professors would assist in augmenting self-confidence and inclusion. My thinking is faculty dinners and coffee dates funded by the University (I do know that Brown-RISD Hillel has begun something like this through Shabbat dinners). In these more intimate settings, we can emphasize community…

Although I think the student’s right that isolation and pressure play into some university suicides, I don’t think statistics support the idea that there’s something special about the Ivies, and similar places, like NYU. The two most recent student suicides both happened at St. Cloud State University. It’s true that Caltech has had three suicides in the last few months, all Asian-American males; but my sense of the situation, from covering these events for many years, is that a feeling of intense academic and social pressure can be experienced on any campus.

The faculty-student relationships idea seems to me a good one; it’s likely that greater warmth from professors would make students happier and give them a boost. But administrators have lots of worries about inappropriate closeness; the writer’s language (“intimate settings”) might well scare them. And professors worry about fairness. If I take this bright, fascinating, charming, student in my class out to lunch, will it seem favoritism …?

… Brooke Magnanti, a cancer specialist at a university in western England, unmasked herself in a British newspaper as the woman behind “Belle de Jour,” the salacious online diary of a high class call girl.

… The 34-year-old said she became a call girl in 2003 to support herself in London while completing her doctoral thesis after realizing she had no qualms about being paid for sex…

St. Norbert College bid farewell to its unofficial campus mascot, an albino squirrel named Snowy, with a memorial service on Tuesday afternoon.

The squirrel gained popularity with students this academic year, with a Facebook group dedicated to the animal drawing the interest of 131 members.

Students organized the event after finding Snowy apparently had been struck by a car on Third Street on Sunday.

The service was held at the St. Norbert College Townhouse Village Square. In lieu of flowers, organizers asked guests to bring a canned food item for the Townhouse Village Thanksgiving Food Drive.

The service included music, a eulogy, poetry readings and prayers…

From an article called The Urge to End It All, in the New York Times:

… What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

… [The] tendency toward impulsivity is especially common among young people. … In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes.

… In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. ..[He]… is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall.

… “I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” …

My point is that NYU’s Bobst Library, like the Golden Gate Bridge, has unfortunately become a suicide beacon. Its creepy design, and its critical mass of student jumpers (they find attractive its high atrium overlooking a large lobby), have given it a charisma and renown.

Suicides can happen in clusters, and students sometimes imitate the methods of other students — often with striking exactitude. (Here’s a recent example of this sort of precise copying.)

If the New York Times article is right about the nature of these youthful impulsive suicides, the main thing NYU can try to do is not only make it impossible to jump from the atrium’s heights (they made it difficult, but, as this latest jumper demonstrated, not impossible), but also somehow (who knows how?) decommission the building, if you know what I mean… Do something more to its outside and inside so that it doesn’t look so much like a place you’d go to commit suicide…

… a writer for The Daily Beast reviews some of the larger reasons it’s hard to keep university students from killing themselves.

But there are subtler reasons. When UD finishes today’s teaching, she’ll write about some of them.

The New York Times notes:

At least nine students at N.Y.U. have committed suicide since 2002, including four in 2004.

This student, Andrew Williamson-Noble, jumped from the library atrium.

Two earlier student suicides took place there, so the university “made several changes in 2005, including the installation of plexiglass panels around the perimeter of the atrium. …The plexiglass panels — which are about eight feet high — apparently did not prevent Mr. Williamson-Noble from jumping to his death.”

There are certain universities – Southern Illinois, Brandeis – where the students are smarter and more mature than the administrators.

The administrators are childish, impulsive, absurd. The students, as expressed in their newspapers’ editorials, are constantly hushing and calming them.

And so it is again at Brandeis University, whose hot-tempered president — most recently seen shutting down its museum for no good reason and creating an ongoing scandal — has exploded with rage at a Harpers magazine article that says his university hasn’t handled money well lately. He’s threatening to sue.

Of course it’s true that Brandeis, like many other American universities, has fucked up its endowment this way and that way and this way and that way. But Harvard bleeds a billion every minute, and do you see Harvard suing people?

University President Jehuda Reinharz recently sent an e-mail to the faculty listserv in response to the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine article “Voodoo Academics: Brandeis University’s hard lesson in the real economy.” In this e-mail, Mr. Reinharz explained the problems he had with the article and claimed that the article’s financial figures were inaccurate or, at times, completely false. Additionally, Mr. Reinharz explained that the article’s author, Christopher R. Beha, was motivated to write an article casting Brandeis’ finances in a negative light because his aunt Ann Beha’s architectural firm was rejected by the University in its bid for a 2004 building project. [This is so embarrassing. Look at the world view the president of a major university harbors. The aunt did it!] In response, says the e-mail, Brandeis is considering taking legal action against Harper’s. While this editorial board believes that the University should take action to correct any incorrect facts Harper’s published, we do not believe legal action is the correct choice.

While Harper’s Magazine’s descriptions of the University’s economic woes may be exaggerated, there is no denying that Brandeis’ financial status is less than ideal; thus, another lawsuit is the last thing the Brandeis community needs straining its pocketbook. The University is currently playing defendant in two high-profile lawsuits – one involving the Rose Art Museum-and recently reached a settlement on a third involving the demolition of the Kalman Science Building, and we imagine these lawsuits are coming at a hefty cost to the University, win or lose. At a time when Brandeis is looking to cut funding to nearly every one of its departments, Brandeis simply does not have the resources to spend on a lawsuit that Mr. Reinharz admitted in his e-mail “is an arduous task and one that is difficult to prove.”

… has died this academic year.

Andre Narcisse, nineteen years old, was found dead in his bed by his roommates. No cause of death has yet been given, but it was not foul play.

Annie Le, a pharmacology graduate student, was murdered; Sylvia Bingham, who had just graduated, was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle to work.

Arizona State University police say a graduate student fatally shot himself in a professor’s office.

ASU police commander James Hardina says the shooting occurred about 11:40 a.m. Monday.

Police say the student was apparently talking with a professor when he pulled out a gun and shot himself once on ASU’s main campus in Tempe.

The name of the student has not been released.

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Update: A little more information, from the Arizona Republic:

… The student apparently walked into the professor’s office [in the Architecture building], pulled out a gun and shot himself without warning… The student apparently had battled depression for most of his life… He was a third-year grad student [in architecture] on track to graduate. He had been a student of the professor’s, but [a police spokesman] said he was unsure if he was currently in the professor’s class.

Most suicides go off and do it someplace solitary.

Some, like this one, seem to seek out someone they care about or hate or whatever and do it in front of them.

A friend of mine in college — her father called her mother on the phone from work one morning, said a few words to her (the two of them were estranged) and then, into the phone, so the mother could hear it loud and clear, shot himself to death.

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Another Update: Details, from ASU’s newspaper:

A male graduate student committed suicide in front of a professor at around 11:40 a.m. Monday in the College of Design South building on the Tempe campus.

David Solnick, a 59-year-old student in the graphic design program, was talking with Associate Professor Mookesh Patel inside Patel’s office when the student pulled out a handgun and shot himself, ASU Police spokesman Cmdr. Jim Hardina said.

Solnick died instantly, police said, and he never posed a … danger to anyone around him.

“At this point, we have the weapon, the student is deceased and there is no threat to the campus,” Hardina said about 20 minutes after the incident was reported.

Hardina said the department will not release details of the conversation between Solnick and Patel until the investigation is complete.

Patel was unavailable for comment.

Solnick was preparing to graduate in December, according to his personal blog. He also received his bachelor’s degree from ASU.

According to the blog, he had worked as a visual designer since the 1980s in the areas of ceramics, print and paint and was working on a series of pictures of two of his friends…

… Chase Mejia.

Mejia has been a solid camp performer at every stop he has ever made. His top end speed and size may have held him back from some big offers, but he is amazingly quick off of the line and is almost unstoppable in a one-on-one type of situation.

This skill set has taken him from Division I to [CAUTION: This link leads to Not Safe for Work links.] a much bigger industry in no time flat.

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Thanks to Dave for the link.

… in his dormitory room. He kills a fellow student and then is shot by police. He is apparently alive, under treatment at a local hospital.

It looks as though Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, 23 and doing his second year of university over again, will NOT be running the billion-euro enterprise that is La Défense.

A Johns Hopkins undergraduate was killed a few days ago by a hit and run driver.

… Miriam Frankl, a junior molecular and cell biology major from the Chicago area, was surrounded by dozens of friends at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where she was taken after the accident at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

Frankl had serious head wounds, as well as other injuries, Moses said. She remained on life support, dying at 2:30 a.m.

The university released a statement Saturday saying Frankl’s parents “told us they were deeply moved and comforted by the presence of so many of Miriam’s friends at the hospital with them.”

… The death of Frankl, who was a member of Alpha Phi sorority, coincided with Hopkins’ Greek Weekend. Organizers postponed events and asked that participants at other events wear red in honor of Frankl and to support her sorority sisters.

Anna Johnston, a senior at Hopkins and one of her friends, said five or six of her good friends gathered at the hospital shortly after the accident, but as the evening wore on 70 Hopkins students came to be with her and her family.

“She had a lot of strength and personality and had a lot of confidence,” said Johnston. Her favorite color was purple, and friends around the Hopkins campus began wearing small purple ribbons Saturday in her memory.

A petite woman with freckles and short brown hair, Frankl had recently become interested in science and had begun working at a Hopkins laboratory that studied the brain. While Johnston said Frankl spent a lot of time in the library, she also was devoted to working with the sorority and was supposed to plan the recruitment of new members in December.

Johnston said her friend was very poised, loved scarves and getting other women interested in the sorority. She was learning to cook and Johnston believes she might have been on her way to a Greek Weekend cook-off when she was struck…

He was one of two students stabbed after a fight broke out at a university-sponsored dance.

The other student survived.

The student killed was a football player for the school.

… Jean Sarkozy, who [has] yet to complete a university degree, is all but assured of being elected to the presidency of Epad, the public corporation that runs the La Defense office park, after his candidacy was endorsed by his father’s ruling UMP party.

Epad brings in more than 1 billion euros a year, and has plans to triple the size of La Defense, a cluster of office sky-scrapers to the west of Paris.

“Whatever I say, whatever I do, I’ll be criticised for it,” Jean Sarkozy, who only recently cut his long blond hair into a more respectable serious style, said Monday night in an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper.

On Tuesday, UMP officials rallied to the young Sarkozy’s defence.

“The political scene is made up of people who started very young, very early, without having too many diplomas, and we’re lucky because this acts as a social elevator,” said UMP spokesperson Dominique Paillé.

“Jean is the son of a political genius, so it’s not surprising that he’s precocious,” said UMP regional counsellor Thierry Solère.

“I can tell you that Jean Sarkozy, at 23, might just have more talent than his father did at his age,” UMP official Patrick Balkany said.

Sarcastic endorsements have proliferated online. The twitter feed jeansarkozypartout or “Jean Sarkozy is everywhere” sprung up Monday night, with comments like Florent Latrive’s: “Jean Sarkozy, candidate for L’Académie française”, referring to the French-language council of wise men, or Bertrand Lenotre’s “Jean Sarkozy is chosen as the model for the next bust of Marianne,” an honour already bestowed upon French beauties Catherine Deneuve and Letitia Casta…