Wave of Suicides at Columbia University: More Evidence P.C. Kills

A disturbing wave of seven suicides and likely drug overdoses has swept through Columbia University so far this school year — and students say cutthroat academics and inadequate campus counseling programs are in large part to blame.

The student deaths include three in January alone — two of whom police suspect overdosed, plus an exchange student from Japan who killed herself by leaping from the seventh-floor window of her Broadway dorm.

The four other student suicides came once a month, from September through December, The New York Post has learned.

They include a promising 21-year-old journalist, a 29-year-old Navy veteran, a Moroccan exchange student and an 18-year-old freshman from Brookfield, Missouri, named Taylor Gilpin Wallace.

“You don’t know how badly I want to jump out that window right now,” Wallace, who would be Columbia’s October suicide, said in a Facetime call from his John Jay Hall dorm room to his mother in Missouri — days before quitting school, moving back home and hanging himself in his basement.

Why? What’s going on here?

Yes, progressives, we already know your answer: It’s due to the “hatred” stirred up by Donald Trump.

But academic environments are immune to Donald Trump. Elite universities like Columbia are bastions of left-wing, “social justice” progressive ideology. Dissidents are not permitted. Conservatives are routinely shamed or screamed off campus; they have been for decades.

Modern academia provides a utopian vision of “all-for-one-and-one-for-all,” where all but the welfare state has long since withered away. It’s a brave new universe where young persons are prepared for a future of guaranteed equal income and legislatively required equal results. Safe spaces and trigger warnings are rampant. “Microaggressions” are punished with far greater severity than theft or assault. And yet, inexplicably, according to the progressive dogma most of us are exposed to these days, suicide is rampant at Columbia University. What gives?

It’s hard to pin down one central cause for suicide. But it’s reasonable to assume that the common elements for all suicides include (1) overwhelming despair and (2) profound fear. What quality of human nature is least present in a person who commits suicide? Self-esteem. Or self-respect, if you prefer. What gives rise to and fosters self-esteem? Confidence in one’s reasoning, thinking and comprehending mind. If you don’t enjoy confidence in your mind’s ability to think, reason and ultimately to know, you’re a very strong candidate for mental disorder including, in the extreme case, suicide.

In theory, universities should be the safest haven of all for the thinking, objective, independent and unencumbered individual mind. Mental health should flourish there. Yet that’s where universities are failing their students. Thanks to rampant political correctness, they’re failing to provide an intellectual environment where students can ask honest questions and learn how to reason and think. Schools are so saturated with political correctness these days that even comedian Jerry Seinfeld no longer wants to perform on campuses. There’s a constant and pervasive sense of walking on eggshells, offending the wrong people and risking harassment or even expulsion for failing to tow the intellectually correct line on any number of subjects.

How on earth can anyone be expected to thrive in such an atmosphere?

There are other more personal, individualized reasons that young people will commit suicide. You cannot literally blame all of it on political correctness, of course. But something is deeply wrong when you see suicides on the rise at college campuses. The university atmosphere ought to offer relief and confidence, not despair and fear. Something has gone deeply wrong with our educational institutions. You can’t blame deplorables, conservatives or Donald Trump. Their presence and influence are less discernable on these campuses than just about anywhere else. If progressives are right, college campuses should be the most inspiring and happy places to be. Yet they’re apparently not.

College campuses of America, institutions which charge tens of thousands a year: Look at yourselves in the mirror. You’re doing something deeply, profoundly wrong to young people. By terrorizing their intellectual states, you’ve sent their psychological states into a tailspin. You’ve made academia an appropriate place for suicide. And throwing money at the problem by providing more counseling will not address the root problems; not even close.