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The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese American, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context. What was the appropriate channel for processing, either with co-workers or students, the sorrow and fear that the death of a student inspired? Foo went on preparing for her fall classes.
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The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors: a new sports complex, a new “well-being” center. Students were still not allowed to congregate in large groups, so the lush quads and dining halls were eerily silent.
The following Wednesday, students began classes, with the option of Zooming in from their dorms. Some W.P.I. faculty members continued scaled-down versions of teaching strategies they developed during the pandemic: prerecording lectures, holding seminars over Zoom and experimenting with ways to have lab sessions with only 12 students present. Fastening Air glasses to the heads of the 12 so everyone else could watch from their dorms had not worked very well. (The glasses ran out of battery power too soon, and they gave people headaches.) The leaves began to turn in Worcester.
W.P.I. had possible risk factors for mental-health issues and suicide among the student body: Its academic culture was fast-paced and intense; the enrolled students skewed male; there was a comparatively high number of neurodivergent and introverted students who might struggle to maintain the social bonds that help protect against psychological challenges. But then, in 2021, risk factors for every type of student were elevated.