Silent on Suicide

For all the emphasis that Cornell administrators put on mental health and suicide prevention, when a student does commit suicide the community is surprisingly tight-lipped about it. Between 1996 and 2006, 21 students at Cornell committed suicide, averaging about two suicides per year, which is close to the national average. However, The Sun only reported three of these.

When former Cornell student Ash Thotambilu ’06 committed suicide in 2006, the paper dedicated a mere 62 words to the story, shorter than the length of this paragraph. In 2000, two students committed suicide over the summer: The Sun reported that Jun Wang died after jumping into Fall Creek Gorge, but did not bother to reveal the name of the graduate student in mathematics who had done the same.