Well, it’s another embarrassing day for Cornell. Christopher Langone, a PhD student at our illustrious institution, recently filed a class-action law suit against rock band Rush for inconsiderately letting their Chicago concert get rained out—and he wants $$$ for those beers he bought, too, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Read the rest of this entry »
The frantic studying taking place in the Arthur H. Dean Reading Room in Uris Library was interrupted just an hour ago by a slew of cameramen and Bob Saget, the actor who played Danny Tanner in the popular 90’s television show, Full House.
Bob Saget is currently filming a show on A&E called Bob Saget’s Strange Days, and has come to Cornell to feature the rather under-the-radar-fraternity, Seal and Serpent.
What brought Saget to Uris Library is unclear. He only spent about five or ten minutes in the Reading Room sitting at various desks and conversing with two unknown college-aged young men as cameramen filmed nearby. Only a handful of students (including myself) were studying in the room at the time, yet Saget’s presence certainly caused a stir. Many students awkwardly stood around watching the scene, and Saget was rushed with a small crowd as he exited the building.
Rumor has it that Saget will be on campus throughout the weekend.
Few things should feel as idyllically collegiate as a walk down Ho Plaza in the springtime. The skies are blue and the trees are in bloom. The only problem is that recently, the Plaza has been smelling like that time in summer camp when I brought a dead crab for show and tell and left it in my cubby for a month.
What is that malodorous aroma? An equally disturbed friend and I had a hunch that it came from those beautiful white, blooming trees. After all, that was the only thing that had changed recently on the Plaza.
Chances are that the prospective students and their parents perusing our campus during Cornell Days, which began last week and runs until next Monday, are well informed about the recent spate of suicides on campus. After all, last month’s front-page New York Times article and CNN’s much-played report titled “College Suicide Crisis?” made the news hard to miss.
Now, those in charge of hosting these prospective students (known at Cornell as “pre-frosh”) and their families are being given advice on how to talk about the very sensitive subject of year’s suicides and the prominent fencing that has been put on campus bridges as a response.
When asked about the fences, tour guides are told to emphasize that the fences are temporary and bring up the wonderful mental health resources provided by Gannett and the student-run counseling program, EARS. We also hear that tour guides got detailed information about each suicide before anything was communicated with the general Cornell community.
In response to the three suicides in Cornell’s gorges this semester, Cornell has erected giant, wire-topped metal fences on all of the bridges. While the fences cannot protect against determined, pre-meditated suicides, they are supposed to discourage “impulse suicides”—that is, a spontaneous decision to throw oneself off of our readily available bridges.
The problem is, we’ll never really know whether they actually prevent someone from taking the fatal plunge. In the meantime—the fences are a “temporary” solution designed to last about 18 months—they’re just ugly. As one of my classmates put it the other day, “I feel like I’m in a concentration camp.” If anything, they serve as a constant reminder of the recent tragedies. And the flowers that people have been stringing through the chainlink (above) do little to lighten the mood.
On Tuesday, Cornell made the front page of the New York Times. With three very public student suicides in the gorges in the last month, two on consecutive days last week, we’ve hit six suspected suicides since August. With a national average that should put us at fewer than two annually, we’ve officially entered what’s called a “suicide cluster”—that is, a so-called “contagious” string of suicides.
And Cornell’s response? In the short run, they have posted guards on every bridge, effective through the end of this week. You can find them out all night, looking bored and a little chilly in reflective vests. On Saturday, Susan Murphy, Vice President for Student and Academic Affairs, called an emergency meeting of student leaders that included the heads of the Student Assembly, Interfraternity Council, and Inter-Cooperative Council, among others. She also issued a video address, emailed to every student amongst a flurry of press releases and mental health infographics. You can’t walk across the bridges anymore without passing inspirational chalk and strewn flowers. The other day, a random boy offered me a Hershey’s Kiss at the end of the Thurston Avenue Bridge.
But the culmination of Cornell’s response to the suicides occurred this afternoon with a much-publicized event on the Arts Quad entitled “Lift Your Spirits: A Cornell Community Gathering.”
So the cherry blossoms are in bloom, along with the magnolias and some other flowering trees of whose name I have no knowledge. Another picture after the jump!
SOMEBODY GOT ON CORNELL’S SERIES OF TUBES AND SET US UP THE BOMB! The virus only contages Windows though… embarrassing.
Anyway, his professional credentials seem stellar at a glance. In his six year tenure as Dean of the largest engineering program in the Ivy League, nobody seems to have had any major beef with him. MetaEzra reports: “I’m not entirely qualified to comment on Fuch’s qualifications for the job, suffice to say that he was re-appointed for the Engineering deanship and Martin thought highly of him.” There is, however, one thing about Fuchs that’s a bit out of the norm: he received a master of divinity degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1984, a year before he got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. Why this might short-circuit a few lightbulbs in our mind after the jump.
LGEvan2007