Campus looks inward after deaths

Some of the most haunting images of Sept. 11, 2001, were of people -- desperate to live -- jumping 100 stories to their deaths.

So it is all the more disturbing that another group of people -- college students with no inferno at their backs, and their lives ahead of them -- are choosing to fall from skyscrapers in this city.

On Sept. 12, a college junior from Evanston, Ill., who had just turned 20, climbed over the railing of a 10th-floor balcony of the New York University library and jumped to his death. Four weeks later another undergraduate, an 18-year-old freshman from Ohio who had joined the diving team and made a lot of new friends, leaped over a 10th-floor railing of the same building.

Then, on Oct. 18, an NYU sophomore from Brooklyn went out the sixth-floor window of her friend’s apartment. The friend had frantically tried to save her, holding the 19-year-old’s legs as she dangled out the window. But she slipped out of her burgundy sweatpants and died on the red bricks of the courtyard below.

Three apparent suicides in one semester do not mean that NYU, the largest private university in the country, is under some sort of shocking curse. The tragedies do, however, leave the students, faculty and suicide experts -- never mind the nervous parents who have shipped their children off to a “hot” university in Greenwich Village -- asking, “Why here? Why now?”

There are no obvious answers, not even in this learned place. Police and university officials say they don’t know enough to draw conclusions, and the two most recent deaths have yet to be officially classified as suicides. Investigators are conducting tests to see if drugs were involved.

But now, with the campus grieving and the media coverage intense, there is a pressing need to understand what happened and to make sure more suicides do not occur.

Sitting in her office 160 blocks north of NYU, Madelyn Gould, a Columbia University medical school professor, wondered what impact the first death had on the second. She is an epidemiologist who studies teen suicide. When she read this week about student No. 3, her wondering turned to concern.

“There are enough vulnerable people out there that someone else’s suicide can have them start ... thinking about their own suicide,” she said. “I’m concerned that contagion was in play at NYU.”

The university’s administration insists these incidents not be lumped together -- portrayed as copy-cat acts. “Each one is a grievous loss,” said NYU spokesman John Beckham. “Each one is felt deeply by people through the NYU community. But ultimately, whatever cause is ascribed to them, we have to remember they were individual acts.”

That said, the university has become increasingly alarmed without wanting to seem alarmist. “It is important not to glamorize these deaths, as that might unwittingly, the experts advise, make suicide more attractive to someone who is vulnerable or fragile,” warned faculty provost David McLaughlin in an e-mail to the faculty.

Meanwhile, the entire university has seemingly been placed under a suicide watch. Administrators have been feverishly advertising all the mental health and other student services the university has to offer. Counselors were dispatched to the dorms where the students who died had lived.

At meetings, students can air fears and concerns about how the deaths have affected them. Walk-in hours at the mental health clinic have been expanded.

Security guards have been deployed on all 12 floors of the Elmer H. Bobst Library, one of the most heavily used buildings on campus. The library’s balconies were also closed off, and construction begun on glass barriers.

Not everyone appreciates the new precautions. On a downtown-oriented Web log, one recent post read: “Just returned from a grueling experience at Bobst Library, which was reminiscent of ‘The Great Escape.’ Because of the recent suicides, you have to take the elevator to the 7th floor where the doors open and security guards with cattle prods force you onto the fire stairs. Even a moment’s hesitation gets you yelled at. A serious jumper would have to get a running start from the elevator bank.”

NYU’s library has had those unprotected balconies since it opened 32 years ago, and though students have joked about the precariously low railings, no one had even attempted to hurtle over them until last month.

In fact, university officials have had to strain to recall when an NYU student had last committed suicide. Some say 1996; others 1993.

More on their minds in the last decade has been this campus’ wild growth. Last year, the Princeton Review poll named NYU the second-most-coveted university in the country, after Stanford.

Freshman applications have tripled. Despite the Sept. 11 attacks and continuing concerns about terrorism, 33,312 applicants competed this year for 3,800 freshman spots. NYU has become more attractive as the city has spruced up, and television shows like “Felicity,” which centered on a girl at a thinly disguised NYU, haven’t hurt.

Still, this is not a school for everybody. Unlike most American campuses, it is not a protected colony but a collection of separate programs and a jumble of buildings smack in the middle of a megalopolis. It has no gated quad, no nucleus where students can gravitate to feel connected to the college community.

Kids walk out of their dorms into the middle of chaos, free to find their interests and free to lose themselves.

The library used to be considered a gathering place, but now some students avoid it as a symbol of something dark. Last week, clusters of them could be found hanging out in a nearby Starbucks, where suicide was very much a topic.

One junior said she had known the first student who committed suicide because they were in the same freshman dorm, but she didn’t have much memory of him. Rather, she was obsessing over a friend who was quite upset because he had seen the bloody pool at the library where the student had landed.

Another freshman carped that the media were damaging NYU’s reputation -- that she was hearing from friends all over the country who wanted to know what was up in Greenwich Village. After all, Howard Stern was making jokes about NYU jumpers.

This may be a campus crisis but it is not NYU’s problem alone. Student suicides occur not just in this vertical city but on campuses everywhere, although the experts aren’t certain that it is a growing phenomenon.

What is certain is that a vastly increasing number of students, who might not have made it to college in the past, are now showing up on campus with a history of mental illness, many managed by prescription drugs, according to two 2002 studies, one published in Psychology Today and the other in Psychiatric News.

“Mental illness is absolutely going off the charts on college campuses,” one of the authors noted.

So, it seems, more young adults are coming to colleges everywhere vulnerable to the private infernos at their backs.

One recent NYU graduate, an aspiring actress from Los Angeles, was drawn to the university for the big city experience. “I thought if I came to college in New York, that would surely mean I was a grown-up.”

Four years later she realized that living in this diverse, vibrant, unsentimental place wasn’t enough: “I wonder if those kids who jumped were struggling with that, too.”