I once heard that the NYU library was modeled after the idea of a 'panopticon' prison, in which architectural design allows one to simultaneously observe the entire building. If this is true, I'm not really sure why the Bobst masterminds decided to mimic a prison, or what advantage they thought students studying would glean from being able to watch a lot of other students studying. But now there's a security guard stationed on every 4th floor totally capitalizing on this building's wonky design.

Just had a lengthy chat with one of the security guards patrolling Bobst in the wake of last week's suicide. Your plans to jump in the library are foiled, NYU students. Having a productive conversation about suicide and mental health and why this school has a notorious history with both will have NONE of the positive consequences of sticking security guards on every floor of the library to...deter suicide? Talk kids down? Physically remove them from scaling the plexiglass put up also for this very purpose? I'm tired of NYU responding to student suicides in a way that says, 'hey kids, if you try to kill yourselves in our buildings, we will find you and we will catch you.' As an undergrad myself, I'm gonna have to say this attitude probably plays some part in precipitating the very environment that makes kids want to kill themselves in the first place. We need discourse beyond just the thousandth referral to the Wellness Exchange (GOD just call it just fucking CALL it already 9999 JESUS have you called it yet).

Of course, I can see why there's no choice but to do this right now. After all, past Bobst suicides have occurred in numbers (before my time). But I'm tired of the NYU student-suicide form email that does everything it can to vindicate NYU, followed by a refusal to facilitate any sort of public discussion (beyond WELLNESS EXCHANGE JESUS CHRIST CALL IT NOW OPERATORS ARE DYING TO TALK TO YOU), in spite of the fact that a student killing himself in such a public way in such a public space is something that everyone is going to think and talk and feel shitty about, and carries a pretty hard to ignore fuck-you message.

I would like to see a more productive response from NYU. I would like to see NYU alter the response I have seen them give every suicide that has occurred here since I've come to the school, of which there have been entirely too many. I understand the need for respect and privacy but I am tired of this university's presumption that our high suicide rate is a problem within the undergraduate student body but detached from the institution, a problem for which no blame or accountability can possibly rest on NYU.