One teen, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide after his roommate and a female next door, set up a webcam in his dorm room after he asked to have the room, and broadcast him making out with another male. A couple days later, Clementi posted on his Facebook that he was going to commit suicide and then jumped off the GW Bridge.
Clementi is the fifth teenager in the past month to end his life. All of this comes right around the same time Campus Pride released a national report of campus climate for LGBT students and staff. I attended the congressional briefing on this report for my internship and hearing the various statistics from the report was terrifying. Why, even now, there is so much harrassment based on someone's sexuality and their school's administration does NOTHING, I just can't understand.
I'm not naive. I realize that we are a long time away from there being no discrimination at all, but the administration should be held to higher standards than the students who attend these schools. It should not have taken Clementi's death for the students who invaded his privacy to know they were doing something wrong.
Clementi, a freshman not even a month into the school year, had already made it to the most elite symphony Rutger's University has.
My LGBT Lit prof today talked to us about this whole situation. She opened the class with a slide that alluded to a quotation by Henry James.
The whole quotation is as follows:
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.I think more people need to take this advice to heart.
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