Skip to main content
-
cognitivedaily
-
Animals, numbers, and suicide: Quick links from around the web
- An excellent article in American Scientist compares "animal math" with math ability in infants. Some similarities and limitations emerge. While rhesus monkeys appear to successfully understand concepts such as 1+1=2 or 1+2=3, 2+2=4 appears beyond their ken. Five-month-old babies show about the same level of expertise.
- The always-excellent BPS Research Digest has an article on the differences between people who think about suicide and those who attempt suicide. While suicidal thoughts are common, a much smaller group actually attempts suicide. There are gender differences -- men who feel they are in control of their lives are less likely to try suicide, but the same metric doesn't work for women. Overwhelmingly, among adults age 40-44, unemployed people are much more likely to attempt suicide than working people.
- Then there's this bit: Many schools are now evicting students from dorms after suicide attempts. Apparently the logic is this: try to destroy your life and we'll finish the job for you.
- Speaking of colleges, Malcolm Gladwell writes about a proposal to ban the NCAA -- in essence, to save college sports by stopping any form of regulation. It appears that all these years of regulation have done little to meet their goals -- to promote fairer competition and save schools money. I'll do you one better, Malcolm: why not just ban college sports?
A ban on intercollegiate spors is wrong because a classically liberal society let's people do what they want. As for the NCAA, doing away with that institution is somewhat different, because it has an anti-competitive monopoly on college athletics.
Okay, how about a voluntary ban? I certainly didn't mean to legislate against it.
Just remove sports from colleges - let the sports clubs and leagues thrive on their own and let the colleges focus on academics and thrive in that area. It is the mix that is poisonous.
College sports bring in far too much money. Universities will never voluntarily eliminate them.
Many schools probably have a similar policy of expelling students who attempt suicide. As I understand it, the rationale is driven by several factors. While no one wants to admit it, the liability issues are overwhelming. We assume college students are adults and try to treat them as such, but many schools require freshmen to reside on campus their first year of school and a good lawyer (or bad depending on one's subjective opinion) could probably figure out a way to hold schools liable for those students' well being. Another consideration is the potential for one suicide leading to other suicides. In the past, there have been incidents where suicide rates increased after celebrities committed suicide (e.g., Marilyn Monroe & Curt Cobain) and, although it is anecdotal, the assumption has been that it was modeled behavior. Academic performance is also a consideration. If an individual believes suicide is an acceptable answer to his or her problems, then his or her academic performance is only going to be poor, which will not only contribute to a bad transcript, but also make the student feel worse. While I do not know if most schools mandate counseling as a requirement for readmission, I do know that some do. The general rationale for removing students who attempt suicide is fairly straight forward, but changing the locks is a bit much and probably makes an already traumatic experience more stressful. Such actions can likely cause additional problems and the affected students would be better served if a different more rational approach was used for expulsions.