CornellWatch

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.”

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Yesterday, IvyGate accused Alex Cain’s school-sponsored blog “Over the Top” of making light of Cornell’s serious “gorge-related suicide problem.” (You know, that one that everyone talks about but doesn’t actually exist except in hyperlinks to 1994 NYT articles.) The offending statement was at the top of his blog: “They tried to make me go to the gorges but I said no no no.” Sorry, Maureen O’Connor, but I think Cain is just making a joke about the general despair of Cornell’s campus (in the middle of nowhere, cold, snowy) and less about some mysterious “they” (the demons in his head, perhaps?) telling him to go take the plunge. The real issue here is that Ms. O’Connor was so quick to read suicide into a joke about Cornell’s sucky qualities.