When I was a sophomore in college, our campus looked like a prison. My classmates and I walked to class between eight-foot tall chain-linked fences. Security guards patrolled bridges around the Ivy League school.
It was 2010 and, in the last academic year, six students had killed themselves at Cornell University. Two jumped off bridges into the Ithaca gorges on consecutive days in March. Classmates anxiously checked in on one another. Parents panicked. The administration scrambled to maintain a sense of calm on campus.
That’s when the fences went up.
Fencing in students to stop suicides might seem extreme. But Cornell isn’t the only school to take drastic suicide prevention measures in recent years. In 2003, New York University installed glass barriers in the atrium of its 12-story Bobst Library after a spate of student suicides there. Even so, a distressed student climbed over one of these walls and jumped to his death in 2009; the university has since replaced these glass panels with metal screens to prevent further incidents.
[For more of this story, written by Nathaniel P. Morris, go to https://blogs.scientificameric...amp;utm_medium=email]
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