Suicide U.

Over the past year and a half, four NYU students have taken very public swan dives. There haven't been any jumpers there for a while now, but because those four all took place over a relatively short period of time, it was termed an "epidemic," and the NYU administration was urged to do something about it.

The first thing they did was put up glass barriers along the upper balconies of the Bobst Library. It had been from those balconies that one student jumped and another, only a couple weeks later, tried to fly.

Last week, university administrators announced their second anti-jumper initiative. After months of research and study, they've decided that the best thing they could do at this point is block access to dorm balconies.

It didn't matter that none of the four jumpers had actually jumped from a dorm balcony-apart from the two at Bobst, one used a high-rise apartment building, another a hotel atrium. The balconies could potentially be used, and so they were all being sealed off with doors that could only be opened four inches.

Not that this will really do anything to prevent suicides. What it will do, however, is help prevent a certain type of very public, very flamboyant suicide from taking place on university property, thereby helping deflect any subsequent lawsuits.

The administration had to do something, and making this feeble, cosmetic, p.r.-oriented effort was a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) we guess, than actually trying to figure out why a bunch of pampered students at "the most desirable college in America" would want to kill themselves in the first place. After all, they have that free bus service-what more could they want?