The pressured end to any academic year is probably enough to make anyone feel a little off colour, but at New York University things really do appear to be taking a turn for the worse.
So widespread have psychiatric problems become at the troubled university, where in the past few months alone four students have plunged to their deaths, that the New York Post recently dubbed NYU as the city's "meds" school.
Doling out prescriptions for antidepressants has become a way of life at the university, the paper reports, noting that prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax and BuSpar have tripled over the past five years. At the same time, prescriptions for anti-psychotic drugs such as Clozapine jumped 173%, a study showed.
The article quotes a university spokesman, John Beckman, as saying that the jump in medicated students was "a reflection of a nationwide problem, as more than half of those who got prescriptions were already on the medications when they arrived from high school." An internal report obtained by the tabloid paper reveals that 16% of the university's freshmen "seriously considered suicide" at least once in the last year.
Regular EducationGuardian.co.uk readers may recall NYU's name from another report this week about a homeless student who had lived for seven months in the university's library without being caught.
Steve Stanzak, the 20-year-old student, was rumbled after university administrators were alerted to his weblog in which the self described "phantom-man that haunts the stacks" chronicled his undercover life inside NYU's Bobst Library.
Haha, brilliant post
Mr Stanzak's blog actually isn't a half bad read. But any student, or instructor, wishing to jump on the weblog bandwagon might do well to check out this inspired rant by one stateside academic on why the trend really is a load of old boots.
Among the many aspects of blogging to attract the writer's ire is the incredible amount of time and space devoted to "comments", which typically seem to break down into just three, invariably tedious, categories:
1. Conversation: "Hey, I found your comments on the colleges of Oxbridge to be way off."
2. Random misc. "Ali G is so funny. Isn't he?"
3. Return comments (comments by the original author), typically in the form: "Haha ... good one. You're so right about students being far more apathetic about social protest than they were back in the '60s. Haha. Brilliant."
Brilliant.
Hold the academic presses (1)
Prozac during pregnancy may affect babies - headline, wire report
Dumber and dumberer
NYU isn't the only US institution to have suffered an embarrassment or two recently. In Boston, a former Harvard Medical School professor was arrested for allegedly bilking 35 students, co-workers, friends and Internet chums out of $600,000 he claimed would help launch a Sars research institute in China.
Weldong Xu, 38, is accused of starting the swindle last July, at the height of the Sars scare, convincing mostly Asian acquaintances to lend him money for his new research centre, according to the Boston Herald. One friend reportedly took a second mortgage out on his home to give him money.
How dumb is that? Not as dumb as Dr Xu, it would appear. According to another report in the same paper, the humbled egghead told police he lost all the money he gathered to a Nigerian email scam - promising him a $50m return on his investment.
Academics wishing to learn more about these email scams may like to study the conference papers from a recent forum held by the Nigerian Email Association.
Among the gathering's highlights were a debate on the effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters, a roundtable discussion on whether sending 10 million emails a day is perhaps a few too many, and an informative look at how banking systems throughout the world operate - with a special emphasis on money transfers.
Hold the presses (2)
"Alcohol Bottles Found at Fraternity" - headline, Indiana Daily Student.
Sleepless in academia
The international academy never sleeps. In Pollenzo, Italy, the classrooms have been painted, the wine cellar is waiting to be stocked and come next autumn the first batch of students will arrive at the recently established University of Gastronomic Sciences. University administrators said they expected 60 of them, culled from nearly 500 applicants around the world, drawn together purely for the academic contemplation of food.
In Norway, the filming of a new version of Henrik Ibsen's classic play A Doll's House has inspired the creation of what has been described as the world's first new master's degree programme in Ibsen studies at the University of Oslo, reports Aftenposten. The university says that the new film, which will star Kate Winslet and John Cusack, has generated interest among potential students far beyond Norway's borders. Among its major educators will be Toril Moi, a professor of literature from Duke University in the US.
Duke's Dr Moi may be getting out just in time, too. Her North Carolina university is eliminating early morning classes as well as trying to come up with other ways to help its sleep-deprived students. The institution is also considering new orientation programmes this autumn that would help students better understand the importance of sleep.
Lack of sleep among college students is an old problem, but one that appears to be getting worse, according to some national surveys, it was reported this month.
The article notes that American students sleep an average of six to seven hours a night, down from seven to seven and a half a couple of decades ago. In March, the University of Michigan hosted a conference on sleep deprivation, where it was heard it can hurt academic performance and increase stress levels. Perhaps the academic who revealed that startling fact was suffering from a bit of sleeplessness too.
