Stanford Professor Bruce Wooley opened Friday’s lecture on circuit design with a lesson about a more important set of connections.

“If you feel stress — and we all do, and sometimes it’s positive — say it to somebody,’’ he told his students. “Find a friend. Talk to your research supervisor or any faculty member. Anybody, just so it doesn’t build inside.’’

“They heard me,’’ Wooley, the genial chairman of the university’s renowned department of electrical engineering, said later, discussing the apparent suicide of Stanford graduate student May Zhou. “But do they actually believe me? Who knows. They put so much pressure on themselves. Things are very different than when I went to school.’’

Yes, Professor Wooley, things are much different than when you went to school.  Back then, when the good-ole-boy network set careers in motion, pressure was not a concern.  Why was that so?  Was it because certain privileges paved the way towards a secure academic future?  Was it the massive influx of government funding for certain kinds of scientific research during the Cold War that later granted your generation of academics the new found power of controlling the conditions of their employment through corporate funding?  Was it that ‘circuit design’ did not yet interfere with day-to-day communication, entertainment, and commerce?  The answer is not very important right now.

What is important now is why today’s graduate students might be thought to be inflicting upon themselves an unprecedented amount of pressure.  Why such pressure cannot be imagined as coming from the inveterate competition and salesmanship of Professor Wooley’s classroom or the corporate dynamic of the contemporary university system itself.

After she is found, is it not the most apathetic cold shoulder when today’s university claims its students’ pressures are self-imposed and then continue on with its day-to-day routines?  Is it not the most contemptuous arrogance to claim it is the students who might not be listening when Mengyao Zhou is found in Santa Rosa Community College?

Police in Santa Rosa, where Zhou’s body was found in the trunk of her car, said Saturday that although they continue to suspect she took her life, it might be weeks before a final determination. If her death is ruled a suicide, Zhou would be the second Stanford student to take her life this month, and at least the fifth since summer 2005, according to police reports. 

 more:  http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16565917.htm