Tragic Death of Gay Student

It was a bad morning at the start of a crappy day sandwiched into a dire week.

The students of Rutgers University (the State University of New Jersey) on the east coast of America found themselves waking up to an unseasonably cold September day with rain sliding down their windows and the prospect of running through storms and puddles for the next few hours to their classes. Mid-terms were getting underway with students suddenly realising they really should have got all that reading done a lot earlier. Added to this all the cable news stations were giving blanket coverage to the most negative US midterm elections in a generation – no more Obama hope on the political agenda, but a continuous narrative of unemployment and economic woes. The outlook was looking bleak and unwelcoming, and the storm certainly hadn’t passed yet.

As students walked to their classes a few picked up the free daily campus newspaper. Glancing at the headline “Two University Students Face Charges for Privacy Invasion” it looked a little more interesting than the usual mixture of “Residents Explore Future Waste Removal” and “First Year Seminar Challenges the Concept of the Family.” However, what had been a dry headline soon turned into a university tragedy.

The story was about a new student at Rutgers University named Tyler Clementi, a name that will sadly be remembered for its connotations of intolerance, homophobia and tragedy. Like nearly all US university freshers Tyler was sharing a room with, prior to his university career, an unknown roommate. Friends now report that Tyler and Dharun Ravi were not getting on well, they hadn’t bonded and a friendship had not flourished.

The problems started to escalate when Tyler asked his roommate if he could have the room to himself one evening a few weeks into term. On this night, Tyler had had what the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office have termed, a “sexual encounter” with another man. However, at the same time Ravi and a fellow resident called Molly Wei logged on to a webcam left in the room and watched Tyler and his partner over Skype. A few hours later Ravi announced to his 150 Twitter followers – “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Intentions and views now become muddied over whether Ravi and Wei had intentionally placed the webcam and purposefully filmed Tyler. However, what is known is that Tyler went to his Resident Assistant and two other “higher-ups” and complained of the violation of privacy and made his view plain: that he no longer wanted to room with Ravi. A few hours later Tyler wrote on an internet gay message board that “He [the Resident Assistant] seemed to take it seriously.”

Fifteen hours later Tyler had jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the roaring cold waters of the Hudson River below and ended his life.

In those fifteen hours Tyler had learnt that his roommate had gone back onto his Twitter account and announced “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9.30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.”

It is now apparent that Tyler felt unable to come to terms with his sexuality, a common problem among gay youngsters. However, what was a personal problem soon turned into a fatality when Tyler saw his love life broadcast to his new classmates and mocked by his roommate. Ten minutes before his death Tyler logged on to Facebook one last time and updated his status – “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

This is a narrative that has become well known and well read throughout the western world with Tyler’s death being spread across a number of newspapers and websites and coming to signify intolerance, homosexual issues, cyber bulling and homophobia. However, as a York ‘study abroad student’ attending Rutgers, what will always stick in my mind is the reaction of the university and its students.

At first their reaction was of one of severe depression and pity. Students and staff alike couldn’t quite believe what had happened. “I was just so surprised with the whole event. I just didn’t think something like that could happen here. Maybe somewhere else, but not at Rutgers” commented Georgia, a second year student living on campus. Throughout all these reactions there was a common theme – how did this happen at a liberal east coast university just forty minutes away from New York?

America’s public perception is often dominated by right-wing bible-belt God-fearing Christians, a perception that has only been strengthened by eight years of a George Bush presidency. However, New Jersey is a liberal state and only 68% identify themselves as in any way Christian, compared to 86% in “buckle of the Bible Belt” Texas and 92% in Alabama. This probably explains Rutgers students’ disbelief that one of their fellow students felt the weight of his sexuality so heavily that he decided to take his own life.

However, this disbelief soon turned into a sense of collective community strength. Soon Facebook statuses such as “Tyler Clementi RIP” were becoming common motifs, marches and vigils were being organised and professors felt it was their responsibility to help their students understand these tragic events. One such academic was Camilla Townsend, a Professor of Native American History, who started her Friday morning class by talking to her students about the tragic events, airing her own feelings of hope and holding a one minute silence in remembrance of Tyler.

Commenting on her speech to students Townsend says, “It is not my role to talk about all aspects of student life, but it didn’t feel right to go on with business as usual.” She sees the situation as comparable to when she was teaching at Colgate University, a liberal arts college in New York state, when two planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11th. “By the afternoon, when the second plane had hit and we had a clearer idea of what was going on, I attempted to hold a discussion with my class on what had happened and ‘why they might hate us’. It made a lot of sense to talk about it.”

The main challenge for everyone at Rutgers has been to both acknowledge and understand Tyler’s death, how it happened and how it can never happen again, but also to stop Rutgers simply becoming “the university where that gay kid killed himself.”

Along with acts of remembrance, vigils and marches there has been a polite, but forceful, voice at Rutgers reminding people to not turn this individual tragedy into a national spectacle.

This voice has been most clearly heard in an editorial of The Daily Targum (the campus newspaper) entitled ‘Media Exploits University Tragedy’. “The focal point of Clementi’s tragic death should have been a boy’s inability to deal with the hardships of life. And yet the news and certain organizations picked this up and carried it into the ranks of general causes for major social groups – for their profit… It is disappointing that everyone from news to celebrities picked up the story. Actress Brittany Snow and actor Neil Patrick-Harris are just two of the many celebrities belittling Clementi’s death – forcing his remembrance into a cause rather than a proper mourning.”

As Rutgers emerges from this storm, two quotations will stick in my mind. The first from Camilla Townsend – “How could we have created a world that left him feeling so cold so quickly?” This is a sentiment that many within the Rutgers community have been battling with over the last few days and is probably explained by the President of the University, Richard L. McCormick when he addressed students saying “Rutgers is an imperfect institution in an imperfect society.”

Sometimes universities can feel like wonderful places, cut off from the real world of employment, a first chance to escape your hometown and families and experience freedom. Unfortunately, when Tyler jumped off the George Washington Bridge he confirmed the simple fact that universities are part of the real world with all its happiness, its faults, its enjoyment and its intolerances.