Madison Holleran, a beautiful, smart, athletically gifted nineteen year old U Penn freshman, killed herself last Friday. She jumped from the top of a parking garage in downtown Philadelphia.

Already the story has appeared in Time magazine, and lots of other media outlets.

Holleran’s is the sort of suicide that gets attention.

It gets singled out because it’s a big shock. Unless there was a suicide note (right now it looks as if there wasn’t), this one was a real stunner. An extremely young woman with absolutely everything going for her (that’s how it looked, anyway) and with nothing we know of signalling depression does this thing.

In almost every case like Holleran’s I’ve covered on this blog, there was prior evidence (sometimes a little; sometimes a lot) of mental unbalance. Sometimes there was a note; sometimes a recent cryptic note on a Facebook page now made sense.

Frequently these deaths were – like Holleran’s – first-year students, which suggests that something in the transition to a new school, a new life, triggered the trouble.

In any case, the particular peril you’re in when you’re young and depressed is impulsivity – the pull toward the sudden jump. Go here for an extract from a New York Times article about youth, depression, impulsivity, and suicide. And here for a more lengthy discussion of the subject.

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UPDATE: As her father tells it, it does indeed seem to have been stress over a new school, new pressures. She had been seriously depressed. And she did leave a note.

Lots of this stuff coming out now.

Whether he realizes it or not, my son likes watching football for the same reason I did: because it’s intimate time with his dad. If I didn’t let watching football become one of the things we shared, if I told him it’s something I regret, he might take to it anyway. But it would be less likely. And if he made it to adulthood without heartwarming memories of sitting alongside his old man watching other men pulverize their bodies and minds, he’d be more able to rationally decide whether professional football is something a decent society should allow.

All my life I’ve heard that women are irrational.

Baby, women don’t know from irrational.

A music professor named Sandy
Used a U-issued Mac to be randy.
He tried not to be caught
But he outright forgot
That they had his IP address handy.

This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.

Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.

A commenter at the Charleston Gazette rebukes a columnist who dared question a planned six million dollar “auditorium to help inspire [the West Virginia University] football team.” I’m sure what set the commenter off was this:

The primary purpose of a university is to educate students — including football players.

Does anyone think educating the dudes will turn around humongous loser WVU football?

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Background on this jewel in the American university crown here (scroll down).

If universities and the NCAA continue to cling to an amateurism model that limits the earnings potential of top college athletes, all of that new television revenue must go somewhere.

“If you’re not going to pay players,” said Brian Goff, a professor of economics at Western Kentucky who has studied the business of college sports. “that money is going to try to find ways to entice players” to come to your school.

It’s weird that you never hear Tea Party people complaining that their education taxes are on top of so much sports-generated revenue that their state universities can’t figure out what to do with it… Wouldn’t you expect some proud Kentuckian to ask Why is our state university so shitty when it gets so much of our money? When it generates so much of its own money that heck it don’t know what to do with it?

The front porch of some of our greatest universities.

Life of the mind, America, 2014.

That was the kind of game it was. Rough and angry and so violent that at times it was hard to watch.

This, of course, is part of the attraction of football. And part of the reason so many players leave the sport crippled and concussed.

Richard Sherman made the big play Sunday. His team is going to the Super Bowl.

More important, he survived the carnage.

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UD thanks David.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” [President Obama remarked]… “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he went on. “[The players], they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”

True, the question was not about college football. But UD wonders: Since on many campuses college football is indistinguishable from pro, wouldn’t a person object to that as well? You’re getting just as much brain tissue kicked out at the University of Georgia.

And you wonder why people have problems with the way some American universities are run.

Donald Pope-Davis resigned as DePaul’s provost today after six months in the position…

Pope-Davis will teach and conduct research as a tenured professor in the psychology department in the College of Science and Health following a six-month sabbatical…

Yes, all that meeting and greeting and sitting around learning things was so exhausting. Six months on; six months off. That’s the ticket.

[Penn State University trustee Joel] Myers said the [Joe] Paterno statue idea came to him last week. He envisions Paterno and [Fred] Pattee — whose eras are decades apart — either shaking hands or standing arm in arm.

… Scott Paterno, a son of the legendary coach, said any Paterno-Pattee statue must include his mom, Sue…

The American university as plantation.

“[Francois] Hollande is just a beret and a string of onions away from cementing global preconceptions of the nation indelibly.”

Like the New York Observer newspaper, Brown University must by now be well-practiced in observing its highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, as he tries to avoid going to jail.

… Nick Verbitsky, the director of To Catch a Trader, told [the New York Observer] that the FBI has confirmed they are looking at three other stock trades that Mr. Cohen could personally be charged on.

Yes, it’s quite the cat-and-trustee game. Keep your eye peeled, Brown.

… they’ll be able to calculate that their share of that money is zero percent.”

Colbert on the University of North Carolina.

A cheater named Mathew Martoma
Lied his way to a Stanford diploma.
His scam MBA
Was so artful a play
It deserves to be hanging in MOMA.