Quote of the Day, #2
Posted on November 9th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
“Probably he was too smart and too elegant to survive in this world.”
—Mayumi Tonegawa, speaking of her son, Satto Tonegawa, an MIT freshman who killed himself on October 27th.
I got the quote from a Globe article headlined, “MIT Reexamines Campus Efforts after Two Sucides.” The piece looks at how the campus is evaluating mental health efforts and general quality of life issues in the wake of the deaths of Tonegawa and Nicolas Del Castillo, a freshman who hung himself three days before classes started in September.
Last week, in response to the suicides, [chancellor Eric] Grimson launched a task force to examine all aspects of student life, from mental health services to living arrangements.
My heart goes out to the parents and families of these young men—what a tragedy. But it strikes me as problematic at best to put this one on the culture at MIT. Was there really something about MIT that caused an 18-year-old to despair after perhaps a week of being there? Or a few months?
I wonder, for example, if there isn’t a hint somewhere in here about what might have gone wrong for Satto Tonegawa…. Or maybe not; we’ll never know. But it seems facile to say, Because this happened here, here caused it.
I went to college at a time when there was far less pressure on students than there is today. Though most of us excelled at something, we weren’t expected to excel at everything. There was still a conviction that it was good to be “well-rounded”—basically, balanced—and to some extent being well-rounded meant that you couldn’t be good at everything. Some things you did just because you enjoyed them, not because they got you somewhere.
I wonder if this is true for students applying to Yale and Harvard and MIT today, or if really their lives are so targeted that everything is directed toward getting in, getting in, getting in, so that if something goes wrong once one arrives at the college one has devoted one’s childhood to attending, a delicate balance is disrupted….
6 Responses
11/9/2024 9:34 am
These situations are awful, and the personal backstories are sometimes extremely complicated. So it is very dangerous to extrapolate from limited information. That said …
I was not thinking about mental health when I wrote this-I was thinking about civic obligation and the need for students to develop some non-material personal standards of success in life. Yet it proceeds from exactly the premise you have sketched. Where it departs is in suggesting that the university can play a role in moving students’ barometer of self-worth. Of course I know nothing about the particular case. But I would distinguish between “here caused it” and “here can do something to help young people learn to be adults, which requires a different kind of self-understanding than most late adolescents have.”
Most students arriving at the top colleges have been heavily conditioned to the importance of gaining admission—so completely conditioned that, having gotten in, their internal compass gives them little guidance about what to do next. They are the most promising students in the country, but the great universities give them little sense that they owe something more than tuition money for the privilege of their education. Many resemble the politician so compellingly portrayed by Robert Redford in The Candidate—willing to do anything in order to win, but bewildered by the freedom gained by winning. Redford’s character, at least, in the last moment of the movie acknowledges his bewilderment. Some col- lege students never become so self-aware. For those that do, few institutional signals call on them to repay to society the debt they have incurred. — EWAS, p. 47ff.
11/9/2024 11:08 pm
I was deeply troubled by the Tech article reporting that Tonegawa’s suicide was reported first by his suitemates who smelled “an odor” coming from his room-apparently he had been dead a week or longer before it was noticed. That makes me question the extent to which freshmen are left to their own devices at MIT-and perhaps all elite universities? Does no one notice when classes are missed, meals not taken, problem sets not turned in? Is there some role for more supervision of undergraduates, or am I hopelessly behind the times?
11/10/2024 12:52 pm
That is disturbing, Anon. How could his suitemates really not have noticed his absence for a week?
11/10/2024 9:53 pm
Well, sure it is possible. People take off mountaineering or to see their girlfriends in Michigan and don’t tell anyone. Maybe they they “should” but I don’t think that most students would regard failure to do so as a mammoth violation of social norms. Personal freedom is respected, after all. Perhaps I am out of date on that, but when I was a student, rooming with an athlete, we had pretty much complementary sleep schedules, and he was often gone for days at a time to away meets. We were perfectly cordial to each other but our lives almost did not intersect, and I certainly would not have been alarmed not to run into him for several days. (That said, OK, a whole week is a long time, but not a shockingly long time.)
When a group of students once registered a complaint with me along these lines, I observed that with card-swiping for entry into buildings and access to the dining halls, it would be the easiest thing in the world to drop on the dean’s desk every morning a list of students who had not swiped anywhere for X hours (take your pick for the value of X — could be adjusted based on trial and error). The dean could then check up on them, and notify parents or the police if they seemed to have gone missing. Or it could be handled in a more fine grained way, identifying those who had been recorded as eating but not sleeping, or sleeping but not eating, etc., for various forms of followup. All that would be explained to students ahead of time so they understood the monitoring rules. The data is all there, why not use it? I asked the students whether that is what they thought college should be like and failed to get a clear answer.
Sorry for the nostalgia, but the single strongest emotion I remember feeling when my parents dropped me off as a freshman was the exhilaration of freedom. I could walk the streets all night if I wanted to, or camp in the Paperback Booksmith, which was then open 24×7, and read all night. I didn’t want anyone watching me. Maybe times have changed.
11/11/2023 6:16 am
Harry-You may be betraying a Harvard blind spot: In my experience, most college students can’t just take off to go “mountaineering” or jet across the country.
And here’s another Harvard-centric implicit assumption: That people freely blow off classes to go visit their girlfriend in Los Angeles or schuss down the slopes of Gstaad.
In, ahem, New Haven, people actually go to class. So it’d be pretty unusual for people to take off for anything more than a weekend. I don’t remember anyone doing that, and if they did, it would be considered highly unusual and a bit odd.
That said, I agree with you entirely that the freedom of college is one of its great joys, and sure, one could stay out all night and no one would give a toss.
(Although for both of us this was pre-cell phone days. Hard to imagine that now someone could not be in touch or be reached for a week without raising pretty significant concerns.)
Also, it was pretty unusual for freshman suites at Yale to contain single rooms, and having an actual roommate would make it pretty tough to vanish unnoticed. That too may have changed as colleges have gone more upscale.
11/11/2023 7:35 am
Was he a freshman? I agree a freshman probably couldn’t disappear for a week without someone noticing. The proctoring is tighter and yes, there are few singles.