There were no fewer than four NYU tours taking place in the atrium of Bobst at 11:30 this morning. According to NYU ambassador-in-training Natalie Veenhof, Bobst is a routine stop and the tours were scheduled in advance of today 300 download. She said she only found out about the suicide at Bobst when she arrived here this morning, and she did not know whether the ambassadors conducting the tours even knew about it yet.
Veenhof said that NYU ambassadors go through special training to hande difficult questions, but she hasn’t gone through it herself yet and did not know whether suicide was one of the topics covered.
I understand it is tough balancing the tragic death of a student with the normal operation of the university, but surely someone at the Office of Public relations could have sent out an emergency message suspending Bobst as a stop until we find out what exactly happened?
Update: According to former NYU ambassador Will Pulous, his trainers said one of the toughest questions a tour guide could get was,”Do you think the high rate of suicides at NYU is tied to unsatisfactory financial aid?” Pulos said ambassadors were told to mention the Wellness Exchange and its helpline.
that’s disgusting
[...] NYU is still running campus tours in [...]
I got to the library at about 9:30, and you couldn’t tell anything had happened. The floors were shining and the staff refused to acknowledge anything had occured – not much for mourning eh?
I work in stacks on the eighth floor. My boss didn’t even know there was a suicide, at 10:30 AM.
Why doesn’t the NYU community acknowledge these things to its employees? Granted it is a terrible occurrence but everyone at Bobst should know about what happened, regardless of being an NYU student or not.
The first picture is a little tasteless (see bottom left corner).
@max I took the photo and totally did not notice that till you pointed it out. I remember tha kid, trust me he was fine. Just a little sleepy.
@Surekha Good to know, though cropping wouldn’t have been a bad idea…
I really doubt unsatisfactory financial aid is a huge motivation for a person to kill himself, at least wait until you have to pay it off . . .
It really boils down to two sides of the coin here – do you want to interrupt the rhythm and everyday flow to ignore the tragedy, or do you want to stop everything acknowledge it?
The business side might suggest that the show must go on, that we can’t stop because what’s done is done and everybody needs to move forward and cope on their own time. If we let every small and large hitch get us down, we wouldn’t make it through a single day. Everybody has problems – maybe not as large as a dead student in their library, or perhaps so – but at the same time just about everybody finds some way to make it through each day. So the idea here might be to keep pushing forward (plus, you don’t want to strike “visit Bobst” from the agenda and explain to prospective students that somebody slammed into the tessellations seven hours prior – that can be a bit of a killjoy).
On the other hand, somebody left this earth fewer than 24 hours ago. Just 20 years old, future in front of him, launched himself from the 10th floor of a library, how can anyone ignore that? Perhaps it is best to stop, acknowledge, try to see the big picture as well as the little one, and try to make some sense of the situation. Death is difficult to ignore.
I’m more inclined to follow the first path. Coping and reacting should happen as subtly as possible, since anything else is a break in normalcy. And as much as we might ponder and muse as we lay down to sleep tonight, we all want to be able to walk into Bobst without thinking, shoot, somebody friggin’ died where I’m standing. We want to go back to the status quo with today’s suicide at the back of our minds and not our forebrains. We’re not pretending it never happened; rather, we’re coping, accepting, understanding (if there even is anything to be understood, as there might not be in some cases where —- happens) and moving on. It’s the best way to deal with a tragedy.
I’m sorry, I feel that it needs to be addressed that Ambassadors are trained on how to deal with questions concerning difficult subjects, never has it been stated the way that Will Poulous reports that it was. Suicide is a problem with our age group and at colleges across the country, but the “trainers” with the Ambassador program (re: other Ambassadors and counselors) have never drawn a correlation between financial aid and suicide. I have answered questions from concerned parents about suicide in colleges, and never once has the topic of financial aid played into the discussion. I would expect that the truth would be presented in these articles, but more often than not I find inflammatory lies, and it feels that a tragedy is being used to attack a group that you have attacked in the past. I find that a much poorer show of respect than continuing regular University functions.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by NYULocal, _T_a_y_, Vahak Janbazian, Annie Liu, Electric Torpedo and others. Electric Torpedo said: NYU Tours At Bobst Despite Student Death This Morning http://bit.ly/3WVHgg [...]
I’d also add that your title may fall a bit under error by exclusion: perhaps you’d like to attack the deans that allowed classes to continue in Bobst, or the librarians that allowed students to enter the library to study? The Ambassadors function as part of NYU, and NYU did not close down the entirety of the library at that time.
A new low, even for the NYU Local. I am shocked that you would use the death of a student as an opportunity to sling mud at the ambassador program. If you feel the need to repeatedly attack us for portraying a positive image of our university (which, by the way, most of us happen to actually love), at least be tasteful about the weapons you use. This is disgusting. Not to mention the fact that the “ambassador-in-training” you quoted has not been hired as an ambassador, and thus is not a recipient of our internal emails, so of course she didn’t know if we knew about what had happened. You really should start checking your facts before publishing. Our program would never send a tour guide out without the information needed to conduct the tour appropriately, and any attempts to suggest otherwise are just taking advantage of the tragedy of this student’s suicide to make a story.
First of all, NYU Local is not a legitimate news publication so everything read here must be taken with a grain of salt. The only reason I am on it now is because a friend told me about this article and how poorly it was reported. How about focusing on the real issues like the way Sexton handled the suicide like the fact that Bobst opened back up at 9:30 am and NYU life continued like nothing ever happened. I agree that it is disturbing that tours were continued through Bobst but if you did real reporting NYU Local you would have discovered that the admissions department was not aware of the suicide in time to stop the 11:00 am tours. Why should they think that something was wrong when Bobst was running regularly at 9:30 am? NYU Local is what’s the problem with journalism today- writing about events without any factual basis in order to promote self-interests. Your vendetta against the Admissions Ambassadors is clear and it is more disgusting that you use a serious issue like a student’s suicide to enforce your opinion of the ambassadors and to get people on your side. Guess what, no one is. Congratulations on your distasteful content and questionable morals.