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Student Deaths (by Suicide) Mar NYU's Ascent Rinker Buck, Hartford Courant - Connecticut
Deaths Disturb A `Dream College'
Students Deaths Mar NYU's Ascent To Recognition As Dream College
April 11, 2004
By RINKER BUCK, Courant Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- This should have been the year when New York University could
gloat.
From its sprawling, disparate campus around Washington Square Park, the
private university had spent the past 25 years marshaling the resources of
high-profile donors such as CBS Chairman Laurence Tisch to build gleaming
new academic towers and dormitories from the South Street Seaport in lower
Manhattan to 23rd Street, diversifying its offerings to 14 separate colleges
and divisions. NYU's 19,000 undergraduates and 19,000 graduate students now
throng to classes and labs at six separate locations in Manhattan and can
choose from more than 20 study-abroad locations around the world.
An urban school once perceived as a "subway campus" for the boroughs of New
York has been transformed into one of the most selective universities in the
nation, drawing an Ivy League-quality applicant pool from the best high
schools across the country.
By the beginning of this academic year, there were clear signs that NYU's
ambitious strategy was paying off big. Applications for the university's
4,000 freshman slots had more than tripled since 1991, a surge of interest
in the school that would result in a Princeton Review survey this year
naming NYU the No. 1 "dream college" in the U.S.
But then the students started jumping.
In an extraordinary string of tragedies that traumatized the campus and
incited a controversy about the university administration's handling of the
crisis, four NYU undergraduates have either leapt or fallen to their deaths
since last September, though only two have been ruled suicides by the New
York City medical examiner's office.
The avalanche of negative publicity and grieving and the open worries about
NYU's impersonal setting in Manhattan have overshadowed the school's
successes at a time when thousands of accepted applicants are making their
final choices about whether to attend the school in the fall.
NYU's handling of the crisis and its vexing impact on the bustling campus in
Greenwich Village also raise a conundrum at a time when student suicides
claim more than 1,000 lives nationwide every year.
With suicides a relatively common - if often hushed-up - occurrence at
campuses around the country, does NYU deserve the blame and dubious fame it
has received for its aberrant cluster of deaths this year? Can any
university do enough when shaken by such a series of tragedies? Those are
the questions now being asked on a campus where the repeated deaths have
created dramatic new divisions and strains on students and administrators
alike.
? ? ?
The first to leap was John Skolnik, 20, a junior from Evanston, Ill., who
was typical of the bright, independent idealist - seemingly at home in the
diverse and challenging environment of New York - that NYU had increasingly
been able to attract. Skolnik had just returned from a summer study program
in Cuba, where he had impressed other NYU students with his ability to make
friends and explore the country on his own.
But friends would also describe another side of Skolnik, the one that was
personally troubled and overwhelmed by the pressures of returning to classes
after a dream summer in the Caribbean.
Late in the afternoon on Friday, Sept. 12, two weeks after classes started,
Skolnik took an elevator to the 10th floor of the Elmer Holmes Bobst
Library, a towering, terra-cotta structure designed in the 1970s by
architect Phillip Johnson that takes up most of the block on the southeast
corner of Washington Square Park.
Stepping over the rails of the immense atrium that rises in the middle of
the building, Skolnik plummeted to the marble tiles of the ground floor,
landing with such force that the concussion of his impact could be heard by
students studying three stories below. Many thought the building had been
hit by a terrorist bomb and began streaming out of the building, past
security guards and police, who quickly cordoned off the body and secured
the building as a crowd of students gathered outside in the park.
NYU had not experienced a student suicide since 1996, but university
officials quickly responded in ways that seemed sensible. Consulting experts
at other universities and suicide-prevention foundations, administrators
decided to contain news of the suicide to Skolnik's family and immediate
circle of friends and classmates, alerting his professors and posting
counselors at his dormitory and the library. Skolnik's professors were
encouraged to recommend counseling to students who appeared upset.
"The advice we received from all the experts was to handle this delicately -
delicate, delicate, delicate," says Linda Mills, NYU's vice provost for
university life and a professor at the university's school of social work.
"[We were advised to] tell only who you need to tell. If you say too much,
you run the risk of glamorizing a single death and the contagion can
influence other vulnerable students who might be tempted to do the same
thing."
But containing the "contagion" of a suicide's impact proved difficult for
the circle of university administrators who would be huddling in the coming
months with Mills and Marc Wais, university vice president for student
affairs. Limiting news of a suicide on a need-to-know basis might be
possible at a relatively removed university, but it was extremely difficult
in a rumor-prone, media-intensive environment like New York City.
"We first heard about [the Skolnik suicide] when our cellphones started
ringing all over the newsroom," says Kate Meyer, 19, a sophomore from Los
Angeles who is the news editor of the NYU campus daily, Washington Square
News. "I immediately ran down there and started to report the story. The
police had the area roped off ... and there were 30 or 40 people just
standing there on Washington Square Park. It was a very public event and the
campus was buzzing with e-mails about it."
Limiting the "contagion" was complicated by another factor, too, a bit of
NYU lore. The immense atrium of the Bobst Library had always seemed eerily
mysterious to many in the NYU community, giving rise to what some students
know as "the legend of Bobst" - more of a shared notion, really, but popular
enough to earn asides by student guides during campus tours.
The 12-story atrium is separated on the floors by a single horizontal rail
and vertical supports about 41?2 feet high. Walking the upper floors can
create a feeling of vertigo as the atrium space sweeps vertically down. The
geometric patterns on the marble floor below, according to the lore, give
the appearance of spikes, or pyramids, dissuading anyone from wanting to
jump.
"You definitely felt as soon as you walked in there, `Oh, someone could
jump,'" says Meyer. "It's a dark, spooky place and I didn't like going to
classes or studying there."
"The feeling everyone had was, `Wow, this is a place where someone could
jump,'" says Lisa Fleisher, 20, a junior from Tenafly, N.J., who is the
managing editor of Washington Square News. "It was a very common feeling on
campus."
Because official notification was restricted to Skolnik's immediate
classmates and dorm, many NYU students were critical of the university for
not notifying the entire community or scheduling a memorial service. Mills
said NYU administrators decided to forgo a service on the advice of their
suicide-prevention experts.
But by the end of September, the situation seemed to be contained. Single,
random suicides, after all, can strike any campus, and the university's
handling of this crisis seemed to be a successful reprise of its response on
Sept. 11, 2001, when students at its lower Manhattan dormitories on Water
Street were evacuated and given hotel rooms in the wake of the terrorist
attacks at the nearby World Trade Center.
? ? ?
Freshman Stephen Bohler, 18, hardly fit the model of someone who would join
the legend of the Bobst Library. He was an optimistic, popular student who
had been the star of his high school soccer team and earned a 4.05 grade
point average at Stivers School for the Arts, a magnet school in Dayton,
Ohio. His family had just moved to Irvine, Calif., where his mother had
become pastor of a United Methodist Church. Accepted as an early-admission
candidate, Bohler was in love with New York and outwardly extremely happy
with his opening weeks as a language major.
"Stephen had just spoken with us and told us how excited he was with his
courses, about joining the diving team and everything," says his mother,
Carolyn Bohler. "All the signs were that he was happy. People saw him as so
well-adjusted."
But there were other signs. In high school, Bohler had once been suspended
for having marijuana in his book bag, discussed the problem with his
parents, and, his mother says, indicated that he had no intention of giving
up pot. After six weeks at NYU, he had begun to experiment with
hallucinogenic mushrooms.
After Skolnik's suicide, Bohler had spoken to his parents by phone about the
case because a classmate didn't want to attend any more classes in the
library, and he had mentioned to his mother the dark legend about Bobst.
On Oct. 10, on the way to a late Chinatown lunch with two friends, Bohler
spontaneously suggested that they stop at the Bobst Library on the way and
ride the elevator to one of the top floors. While the two friends looked
over the rail, Bohler quietly cowered in a corner. Then, as the friends
walked toward the elevator, Bohler went to the rail, stepped over and fell
into the open space of the atrium.
Because of the presence of marijuana and mushrooms in his blood, Bohler's
death was ruled "accidental." Nonetheless, Bohler's leap had an intense and
eerie impact on the NYU campus - it was at the same time, on a Friday
afternoon, one month after the first suicide. And, once more, there were the
screams and hurried exits from the library before students gathered outside
on Washington Square Park.
"There was an overwhelming sentiment at Bobst [after the second death] - I
can't believe this is happening again," says Meyer, the student newspaper
editor, who once again ran through Washington Square Park to cover the
story. "This time, it was fairly traumatic because there were many students
who just happened to study a lot on Fridays who had now seen this twice."
The university, criticized for never publicly acknowledging the first
suicide, responded more quickly after Bohler's death. That evening, Wais,
the student affairs vice president, sent an e-mail to all students and
staff, and NYU President John Sexton sent an e-mail of his own the following
Monday, acknowledging both deaths.
An aggressive program of stationing counselors in dorms and the library was
again followed, and the university put security guards on the upper floors
of the library until Lexan, a see-through plastic barrier, could be
installed on all floors.
The stark similarity of the two deaths caused a great deal of soul-searching
on campus, especially among students who already agreed with a standard
criticism of NYU - that the university's dispersed physical layout and the
seeming coldness of New York contributed to a loneliness, an absence of
community.
In fact, the presence of drugs in Bohler and the possibility that he simply
became disoriented or euphoric suggested that there wasn't a strong
connection between the two deaths. But what had now happened twice at Bobst
became an opportunity for students to vent a shared feeling about NYU.
Micah Bloomberg, 22, of Tempe, Ariz., is a senior who came to NYU because of
the strength of its film program, which he had known about since the eighth
grade. He appreciates the quality of the program at NYU but has become
disenchanted with the "gigantic education machine that is NYU."
"The first one, back in September - the first library jump - felt like a
surprise," Bloomberg says. "There was never an attempt [by the
administration] to face that there may be something characteristic here that
should be addressed. I don't think these administrators are evil. They just
give the impression of being more concerned about the university and its
reputation than the students."
Another senior had a similar opinion. "I've really liked it here but there's
no denying that NYU is very bureaucratic," says Jamie Brandi, a 21-year-old
from Maine majoring in politics. "You're a number. ... Since all the
suicides, the school has definitely made more of an effort to outreach and
make the school feel more friendly and welcoming, but it really isn't."
While trying to dispel the image of NYU as a cold, alienating campus,
university officials faced another difficult challenge. With New York's
scrappy tabloids and local TV stations now raising the possibility that the
second death was a copycat event, it was virtually impossible to shelter
students from the contagion effect that the experts had warned against. But
attempts to shape the coverage in something as unpredictable as the New York
media largely failed, and in many cases just made the university look naive
or insensitive.
"This was an opportunity for the media to focus on a national epidemic of
student suicides," Mills says. "Instead, the focus was on the horror and
drama of individual cases and the `Oh, NYU is doing something wrong'
mentality. So we could control, or try to control, the spread of the
contagion by our own actions. But we couldn't control the media spread of
the contagion."
University spokesman John Beckman felt the onslaught of the media most
intensely and was particularly exasperated by the attempts of reporters to
reach "a single explanation" for the two events, an approach that only made
matters more difficult for NYU students.
"There's a natural tendency when looking at these deaths to assume that
there must be a single underlying reason," Beckman says. "The reality is
that each death involves individual circumstances and happened for unique
reasons."
Carolyn Bohler says that she "can't imagine what the university could have
done better" in handling her family. A representative from NYU met their
train when family members traveled to New York after Stephen's death and
provided them with a hotel, a driver and even a meeting with the university
president. But Bohler does suggest that there was more of a connection
between the two deaths than the university has acknowledged.
"I do not think [Stephen's death] would have happened if someone else hadn't
done it first," Bohler says. "And the legend about [the floor below the
atrium] creating an image of spikes. It obviously entered Stephen's
consciousness. If there hadn't been a previous case I can't imagine he would
do it."
? ? ?
Mystery still surrounds the third NYU death, which came just eight days
later, on Oct. 18.
Sophomore Michelle Gluckman, 19, from Brooklyn, N.Y., either fell or jumped
from a sixth-floor apartment at 1 University Place, just off Washington
Square Park. Gluckman was at a party with friends and reportedly yelled, "I
just can't take it anymore!" before forcing herself out the window and
falling to an enclosed courtyard below. The Washington Square News reported
that New York police concluded that Gluckman "likely jumped and was not
pushed," but the case has not been closed or ruled a suicide.
There was no doubt that the student deaths at NYU were now taking a heavy
toll on the university's morale and earning it unwanted attention.
Once more, university administrators say that they listened to its experts
and encouraged students to avail themselves of counseling services and
coached professors to look for signs of distress among their students. NYU
continued to refuse to schedule a memorial service, Mills says, on the
grounds that a public grieving might "glamorize" still one more death to
potentially vulnerable students.
NYU also felt that it had to be as circumspect as possible about Gluckman's
death because her family had specifically requested that her name be
withheld, even though it had already been published in the press.
Some of these decisions, however, made the university look as though it had
something to hide. Wais, the vice president for student affairs, was
subjected to more criticism when he circulated an e-mail the day after
Gluckman's death, pointing out that she had fallen from a building "not
owned by NYU" and that "We are part of a troubling national phenomenon: the
untimely deaths of young people."
Both statements were interpreted by some students as an attempt by NYU to
distance itself from a third student death and deny that any thread joined
what was clearly now a cluster of tragedies.
"This is part of the odd paradox we were in," says Beckman, the NYU
spokesman. "On the one hand, we were criticized for not providing enough
information, but then when we do, we're criticized for that. It's hard to
argue that we were trying to distance ourselves from the death when it was
the university itself that notified the community."
David Scicchitano is an NYU biology professor who supervises one of the
dormitories as a faculty fellow in residence. He conducted many so-called
fireside chats with dormitory residents during the successive waves of grief
after the student deaths. He agrees with the NYU decision to not schedule a
public memorial because it could trigger copycat suicides and recalls
"considerable anguish behind the scenes" as administrators wrestled with
that decision.
"By listening to the experts, it did, in fact, have a negative impact on PR
[for the university] and even faculty," Scicchitano says. "It made us look
cold. But there was no intention of looking cold. There is no right answer.
I think the administration just didn't come off well enough because of the
issue of public grieving."
Allan Salkin, an NYU adjunct professor of journalism and a free-lance
writer, says the university was now dealing with an epidemic. "By the third
death, the mood on campus was, `This is weird and getting out of control.'"
Salkin says. "There was a lot of concern among professors to see if students
were showing any signs - a much more heightened awareness of your students'
emotional lives."
Salkin became a lightning rod of campus feelings himself after publishing
columns in the weekly The Villager and the New York Post that criticized the
university for insensitivity and labeled the Bobst Library the "Atrium of
Horror."
NYU's handling of the suicide crisis and occasional public relations
bungles, Salkin says, reflects an unwillingness of the university to let the
student deaths get in the way of its "imperial plans" for improving the
university, a take that infuriated administrators.
In Salkin's view, the trauma over the suicides and deaths has raised
important issues of identity for the school during a time of great change.
"There's no question that NYU has come up amazingly in recent years," Salkin
says. "They have managed in spite of a hyper-inflated real estate market to
build new dorms, hire new faculty and, yeah, they've really improved the
place. But the university has not gotten over its inferiority complex as an
old immigrant school that is not quite comfortable yet with its new status."
? ? ?
The fourth death occurred over a weekend, on Saturday, March 6, and most
students learned about it from local television and the New York Post. Diana
Chien, 19, who had moved only a month before to New York from Cupertino,
Calif., to be close to her boyfriend, was a sophomore transfer student in
her first semester. Chien stepped backward off the roof of a building at
36th Street and Avenue of the Americas, and the medical examiner's office
ruled the death a suicide.
"[Chien] was new, she was only here for a month, and didn't have a lot of
friends," Meyer says. "The big change in this one from the other three was
the sensationalist media coverage - [there was] much, much more of that."
Students and administrators were particularly upset after the New York Post
the next day ran a dramatic photo of Chien falling from the building and
then reran the photo on its front page the next week after learning that
Chien was an NYU student. The barrage of criticism of the Post that followed
in other media only drew more attention to the suicides and deaths.
By the fourth death, many NYU students seemed to feel that the story was no
longer about them, or the lack of a clear thread of causes linking the
deaths, but about public perceptions of a school that followed them
everywhere.
"It's been really annoying and tasteless when people outside [NYU] say `Oh,
you're the school with all the suicides,'" says Kristin Bamberger, 18, a
freshman from Brookfield, Wis., who is a resident of Rubin Hall, where
Stephen Bohler lived.
Fleisher, the student newspaper managing editor, also defends NYU. "You just
have to say to people, `It's not us, it's not us, there's nothing we're
doing here to cause this,'" Fleisher says. "There's no curse on this place."
Meanwhile, NYU administrators are conducting a rigorous self-assessment,
Mills says, and laying plans for next fall to make NYU friendlier and more
accessible. Among the changes being considered are instituting a buddy
system for students and having counselors assigned directly to dorms instead
of a single counseling service office.
No matter how effective these steps are, however, they can hardly remove the
memories of academic year 2003-04 or the questions raised by the school's
policy of sticking with the advice of certain experts while the deaths kept
coming.
"Could all of these experts they used be wrong?" asks Jonathan Vafai, a
fourth-year medical student at NYU who is the student body president. "Sure
they could be wrong. ... Creating more of a community at NYU, which they
talk a lot about now, wouldn't necessarily stop these deaths. At least two
of these cases happened when the victims were around their friends. They
were with community."
And there's no doubt that the administrators who have come in for so much
criticism from students have felt intensely the tragedies themselves. Mills
was one of several NYU administrators who endured sleepless nights.
"I have a 7-year-old child," Mills says. "I didn't come home for several
days and he knows why. You start thinking, `Oh no, what happens in 10 years
when he goes off to school?'"
http://www.ctnow.com/news/custom/topnews/hc-nyudeaths.artapr11,1,115398.stor 
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