Another Tragedy at Yale

A Yale employee committed suicide last week:

Yale police are investigating what they are calling the apparent suicide of a school employee.

John Miller, the manager of community programs for the school of music and an alumnus of the school, died on Thursday morning. School officials said he fell from the fourth floor of Hendrie Hall at 165 Elm St.

As saddened as I am by yet another tragedy at my alma mater, I am not surprised. Nobody wants to talk about it but the truth is that the environment on campus is so oppressive that such tragedies are, unfortunately, doomed to happen all over again. There is no doubt in my mind that, yet again, we will hear about how this is an isolated incident that was caused by mental issues of a single individual and how this has nothing to do with the “extremely safe” Yale campus.

There are many things that are deeply wrong at Yale. I remember my years there as ones of constant, unrelieved depression. Only after I started working at my current university did I realize that one didn’t need to wait until becoming a famous tenured professor to avoid being humiliated and mistreated in academia. The contrast between the way in which Yale’s President Levin treated his graduate students and junior faculty members and the way our Vice-Chancellor here behaves towards us is glaring. Here, we are human beings worthy of respect and every consideration. There, we were nobodies. Unless we had ultra rich parents, of course.