… I didn’t know any of the students personally, but it’s still scary when this kind of thing goes on around you. And three in a few months seems like a really high number. I talked to a good friend of mine who happens to be a counselor, and he said that actually groups of suicides are a decently well understood phenomenon. In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.”

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Caltech had one student suicide in May, one in June, and one in late July. All were Asian-American men, and the second copied the first one’s method.

Long Phan, 23, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was found dead in his rental apartment. He is the third Chinese-American student at the school to have committed suicide in the last three months. According to the World Journal, Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau responded immediately by creating an on-campus mental health task force. According to the article, the suicides started in May, when Brian Go killed himself by helium inhalation. Hong Kong immigrant Jackson Ho-Leung Wang ended his life on June 10.

Time magazine writes:

[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.

… “Although we don’t have good statistics [yet], we believe that many Asian American students are prone to feeling depressed over a lack of achievement,” [Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at U.C. Davis] says. Getting Bs instead of As on a report card may not seem like a great sin to most students, Sue says. But in a culture and family structure where sacrifice by an older generation for the advancement — and education — of its children is a deep-seated tenet, feelings of shame for “failing” can become unbearable, Sue says, noting that this pattern is most evident in families with immigrant parents and among foreign students sent to study at U.S. universities by their families.

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UD‘s familiar with suicide clusters; her own university, GW, has had them, as has NYU. Back in 2005, two students at William and Mary killed themselves within hours of each other in exactly the same way – in a restroom, with a gun just bought at WalMart. I think only one of the students I’ve mentioned in this paragraph was Asian American. There were women as well as men among them.

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A British columnist, reflecting on the suicide of a recently graduated Oxford University student, notes that this student, like some other student suicides in English and American universities, was addicted to drugs and alcohol.

It’s difficult for universities. I think it may be easier to spot a student with, say, manic depression or schizophrenia, than to identify, and help, an “addict” – and by addict I just mean an individual whose use of substances is affecting his or her life really badly. Nearly all students drink too much and almost as many take some illegal drugs. But only a small number are driven into depression, or worse, by their drinking or drug-taking. And it’s practically impossible to spot an incipient alcoholic in an environment like a university where colossal boozing is the accepted norm.

I had a student once, a guy, in my DeLillo course. Missed a lot of classes — though he was very smart and up on the reading when he was there — and looked way unhealthy. Approached my desk at one point and shocked me with his paleness, thinness, not-thereness… Eyes jutting about. Black hair askew, heavy black earrings, wispy black t-shirt. Perfectly coherent things came out of his mouth, and, as I say, in class his comments were informed and perceptive. But there was a nobody’s-home feel to the guy for sure.

What did UD do?

Nothing. Unless you call keeping a maternal eye on the guy something. I figured he might be insulted — might see me as patronizing him… Was he, you know, just emo? Plenty of high school and university students (UD was one of them… Actually, she’s still at the stage she’s about to describe.) go through a black-suited Nietzschean thang … What if he had philosophical, aesthetic reasons for what he was doing, rather than the pathological ones I was worried about?

He did okay in the course – not as well as he could have done – and … well, here’s one thing UD did do.

The following semester, I saw him in the Starbucks across from my office. I barely recognized him — plenty of skin on his bones, a face ruddy and bright, eyes focused. I went up to him.

“You look good. That’s a relief. Last semester, you looked a bit peaked.”

“Yeah thanks I was in bad shape last semester. Got over it.”

Maybe he got over it because some other professor without all of UD‘s complexes about other people’s privacy, etc., was more aggressive with him. I don’t know. I do know that the British writer is correct when he says it’s both difficult to identify with some confidence an endangered undergraduate addict, and yet more difficult to intervene.

Group picture, Homogeneous Immunoglobulin Workshop, 1969. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

UD‘s father, Herbert J. Rapp, National Cancer Institute, is eighth from the left. In the middle of the picture. Standing between two guys wearing glasses. I scrawled a little blue line on the top of his head to help you find him.

In Silicon Valley itself …some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.

Mark Bauerlein, Wall Street Journal

From the AP:

University at Buffalo student Brian Borncamp won’t be roughing it this semester.

The philosophy and computer science major had been building a cabin in the woods on the western New York campus.

He said he couldn’t afford tuition and rent. But UB administrators gave the cabin idea an “F.”

He was almost finished when campus officials told him he had to clear out this week.

The university says Borncamp has now accepted an offer of more conventional temporary housing.

Point Two: Nobody can hold a candle to the state of Kentucky.

Who’s gorgeouser — University of Louisville, or University of Kentucky?

Well, Louisville’s got Pitino. University of Kentucky’s got Calipari.

But UK also has Gillispie.

Don’t tell me he’s not there anymore. Every time he gets in that big ol’ Mercedes and starts weaving toward Lexington, the University of Kentucky gets a plug. Plus there’s his big ol’ lawsuit to remind us of his ol’ Kentucky home.

Gillispie [has] sued the university in federal court in Texas, alleging that the school’s athletics department owes him $6 million for firing him two years into a seven-year agreement. The university says he never signed a formal contract and the school doesn’t owe the money.

So – winner hands down – University of Kentucky!

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The New York Times elaborates:

It is an otherwise lovely state, known for the mint juleps and jaunty hats of its Derby, the bluegrass and the rolling hills, but Kentucky has an alter ego when it comes to college sports, and let’s just say that alter ego should be checking into therapy any day now.

In one padded cell, you could put Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, blithely humming away despite the complete shambles he left at his last college, Memphis, and the one before that, Massachusetts, two Final Fours that supposedly didn’t happen…

Meanwhile, Calipari’s predecessor, Billy Gillispie, was arrested early Thursday and charged with driving while intoxicated.

And all of that looked positively sane compared with Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s calling an impromptu news conference Wednesday about his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal to lambaste the news media for covering his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal…

“It’s rampant,” said Jim Szaller, a Cleveland lawyer who uncovered the evidence of ghostwriting in his work representing 8,400 women who are suing the drug company Wyeth for misrepresenting the benefits of hormone drugs. “This particular practice has to be stopped. It can’t continue, because patients are going to suffer.”

Paul Hebert, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, agrees. He estimates that he rejects between five to 10 pieces per year after discovering they have been secretly ghostwritten and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

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“Just three days ago, I got a request to be the author of a ghostwritten article about the effectiveness of a cholesterol-lowering drug,” Dr. James H. Stein, professor of cardiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, said this month. “This happens all the time.” He declined to attach his name to the paper.

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Alison Bass visits the ghosts of Paxils past.

… await the updated DSM-V, with new mental disorders just for us, a voice of caution arises among the psychiatrists:

The first draft [of the DSM-V] is crucial because only the Task Force working as a whole can discipline and reconcile the often inconsistent outputs produced by the different Workgroups. It is a very reliable rule of thumb that Workgroups are always more willing to make changes than is desirable. Experts in any given area tend to have their pet ideas and to worry more about missed cases than about creating potential false positives. By ruthlessly applying the necessary rule of empirical documentation, the Task Force must provide a useful check on Workgroup enthusiasm.

Allow UD to clarify.

The Workgroups include people riding lots of horses very hard: Mr Internet Addiction. Ms Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Their careers and fortunes are riding on these things… False positives, you say? I dare you to falsify any psychiatric diagnosis. Can’t be done, and certainly not by some confused patient sitting in a psychiatrist’s office. What’s the poor fool going to say? I really doubt there’s good research backing up your claim that I need anti-psychotics because I’m shy. No, once the designation’s in the manual, we’re out of the starting gate…

Problems can result even from improvements in the wording of criteria sets. For example, the better written and more easily remembered DSM-IV criteria set for ADHD may have resulted in its overuse—especially by primary care doctors and the general public.

However perilous it is to change existing criteria sets, the risks are much greater still whenever the system adds totally new diagnoses that are at best lightly tested. The potential for false positive epidemics and forensic conundrums are much harder to predict for anything novel. New disorders are best kept in the appendix until they have achieved wide acceptance in the field. The DSM system should always follow, not lead, research and practice. It can never be paradigm shifting on its own weight.

Same crap. So the new ADHD language has netted more clients than the old. Problem?

So we’re creating new epidemics. And?

Publishing profits are the only possible driver of a fixed and implacable 2012 publication deadline, and this is obviously not acceptable.

The man’s paranoid.

One of many simple and eloquent comments in memory of a just-retired University of Wisconsin zoology professor who died in a bicycle accident. Article and comments evoke an exceptionally kind and committed scholar.

Really, a genuine and encouraging man.

“The Stanley I Dodson Rocky Mountain High” was what we called in his honor climbing a mountain and doing a headstand at the top. I’m comforted by the fact he’d find it fitting he died this way, doing what he liked in the place where he grew up and loved.

He was the real deal. Always one of those professors who had time for his students.

He didn’t make a big deal of himself. He preferred the essential things and he loved the outdoors and being with family and friends.

I remember one assignment where he had us calculate the proportion of passers-by wearing Earth Shoes (to teach us population sampling techniques).

Stanley was our neighbor. He loved his cat. He made his yard into a garden paradise with a stone wall and many native plants. He was always a kind soul.

He loved the out of doors and the simple pleasures of working around his house and yard, biking and living in harmony with nature.

I too studied Ecology with Dr. Dodson at the UW [Summer of 1985]. What an exciting class! A great professor. Assigned readings included Aldo Leopold’s magnificent “Sand County Almanac”. Additionally, each student chose a site collecting phenological data for periodic reports. I loved the guy!

A 50-year-old female professor at Ewha Womans University, who forced students to do chores at her home and extorted money from them, has lost a suit she filed against the school to nullify sanctions on her, a Seoul court said Thursday.

Among the chores were house cleaning, watering plants, trash disposal and changing the filters in her vacuum cleaner.

The students also had to take care of her around the clock when she was hospitalized and perform tax-related tasks, according to a ruling statement.

The professor, identified only as Park, well known in the field of textile arts, even extorted part of one student’s scholarship, worth 2.76 million won ($2,200), saying the student did not fulfill her duties, the court said.

In 2007, Park faced a one-month salary reduction after a student filed a complaint with the school authorities. Park denied the charges.

As the school refused to withdraw the punishment, the professor filed a suit with the Seoul Administrative Court. But the court also went against her wishes.

Presiding judge Lee Nae-joo said, “The punishment against her was appropriate.”

Does the Internet have to be such a pervasive part of almost every class? What ever happened to good old-fashioned verbal communication?

A Penn State student, in the campus newspaper.

… a post about Ian Hacking, this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize.

Title of the post: HACKING TUTORIAL.

Should be up pretty soon at IHE. I’ll link to it when that happens.

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Update: The Hacking piece is now up at Inside Higher Ed.

And what are they doing with that money?

The paper’s headline for its Dominick Dunne obituary:

DOMINICK DUNNE: IN MEMORIUM

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Update: They fixed it! Took about twelve hours.

People are always warning you against these things, but here’s one diploma mill grad who’s really going places!

… One by one, Gov. Crist has summoned the contestants on his not-so-short list of finalists to replace Mel Martinez. After private interviews, he’s trotted them out to stand before the cameras and publicly declare their admiration for Crist and to tout their assets.

… [Among the nine finalists for Senator is] State Rep. Jennifer Carroll of the Jacksonville-area. A conservative African-American Navy veteran, Carroll would surely earn Crist a huge burst of glowing national attention for looking like a new breed of Republican. But Carroll is no stand-out in the Legislature (and she once claimed an MBA from a diploma mill called Kensington University that was later ordered closed). She could be a risky, unpredictable choice.

Aw c’mon. It’s the last frontier! And after that, who knows? President?

Rick Pitino just gave a news conference in which he assured the world that his tabletop indiscretion six years ago hasn’t scared off basketball recruits.

No surprise there.

Because traffic and links to University Diaries have been exploding lately (I figured, as the academic year neared, readership would grow, but I’ve been surprised at just how much it’s grown), this might be a good time to introduce myself and my blog to new readers.

I teach literature at George Washington University, a wonderful school, insanely well-located right under the Presidential helicopter flight path. Over the years, from my office window on the sixth floor of Academic Center,

I’ve watched hundreds of limos float by, foreign flags flapping, armored SUVs fore and aft, sirens gone mad.

When truly exalted people come to speak on campus, we’re instructed to stay away from our windows. We can see black-suited men holding weaponry on the tops of the buildings across the street.

Our hospital, a few hundred yards from UD‘s office, hosts angina-ridden vice-presidents and madmen who shoot people at the Holocaust Museum.

UD‘s daughter was born in the old GW hospital, recently pulverized to make room for a corporate tower.

Most mornings, UD stops in the hospital’s Starbucks (there are countless Starbucks in and around campus) for a latté and a roll, though sometimes – because of security-sensitive patients – it’s not easy to get in. UD likes the fact that the hospital is steps from the Foggy Bottom Metro, so that she can move smoothly from a seat on the train to a seat in the café.

UD enjoys eavesdropping on interns.

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UD‘s been on sabbatical for a year. It was strange for her, the other day, returning to campus for the first time in a long while. She met Carolyn, a student, for lunch, and after, as they walked back to Academic Center, they bumped into Dasha, another student of UD‘s.

Dasha and Carolyn know one another, and Dasha was excitedly on her way to her first law school class (she’s in an accelerated BA/JD program), so there was hugging and chatting and UD thought A rather sudden change from my sabbatical life in Key West, where I walked silently over the island knowing no one…

But why be surprised by these campus encounters? UD‘s been at GW for more than two decades, and she grew up in the Washington suburbs. If students don’t stop her to say hello, old high school buddies do. One of her GW friends, Helen, went to a Joan Baez concert with UD in 1969.

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Since UD started this blog, she’s noted, as each academic year begins, various changes. Not at GW necessarily, but at many universities across the country. A few years ago, for instance, she registered the fact that landlines were disappearing from dorm rooms. (UD still hears landmines when people says landlines. This dates her somewhere around the First World War.) This year she reads about vanishing university email accounts for new students. (UD hasn’t used her GW account for years; everything’s forwarded to her GMAIL.)

It’s the larger university changes, though, that keep University Diaries going. If there’s one dominant theme in UD‘s writing on both of her blogs (she also blogs for Inside Higher Education), it’s the commercialization of the American university (UD also covers foreign universities) in all its manifestations — corrupt, para-professional campus athletics, mercenary hoarding of non-profit endowments, crass conflict of interest in medical schools.

But really, she looks at just about everything going on at universities.

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An English professor, UD also, in her Scathing Online Schoolmarm persona, subjects terrible prose to stern correction.

She madly praises excellent prose.

She’s been known to write limericks and other verse forms here; she also analyzes the poetry of others, great and crappy.