HuffPo’s new college vertical just printed a great, sad article about the history of suicide at Cornell, “suicide capital of the combined Ivy League, Big Ten, Little Three, and Seven Sisters.” A staggering amount of research seems to have been involved — and to our mind, the saddest story is that of Shirley Slavin, in 1940:

Shirley Slavin arrived with her mother to enroll for freshman classes. After a few days on campus, she journeyed to the east side of Fall Creek, lingering for nearly an hour. In front of more than twenty witnesses, Slavin asked a passerby to hold her books and purse — and then leapt 125 feet to her death.

The article also delves into the history of suicide prevention at Cornell — including the shocking/wistfully sad rejection of “suicide bars”‘ construction on the gorges.

In 1977, such barriers had been added to the suspension bridge over Fall Creek, which one professor described as a “claustrophobic channel with a honky-tonk garishness worthy of Las Vegas [where] serried ranks of close-spaced bars make a prison corridor.”

The post is part of author Rob Fishman’s Masters’ thesis at Columbia School of Journalism — go read it, please!

It must be a slow week at Not Penn State because an opinion blogger for The Daily Pennsylvanian decided to devote an entire post on the “Best places to kill yourself on campus”. To his credit, the writer provides a hyperlinked disclaimer in the second paragraph:

…stop reading somewhere around HERE if you get all uppity with sensitive things. My editor would like me to link to ponies and rainbows at this point in the post.

One link is to Penn’s Reach-A-Peer Helpline, and the other is to Ponystars, an online game created for five-year-old girls. We get it: the post is not meant to be serious. But is poking fun at suicidal college students ever acceptable? And where’s the editor in all this, the voice of reason that should have shot this down before it saw the light of day? The only conclusion I could draw is that the editor is probably too busy tending to his or her ponies on Ponystar to really care. More quotes from Will Steinberger’s not-so-funny post after the jump.

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