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R E C E N T L Y

What if they threw a revolution and nobody came?
By Ben Fritz
Conservative foundations are pouring money into traditionally liberal campuses in the hopes of converting a new generation of right-wing radicals, but will their millions bear fruit?
(02/19/99)

Internship hell
By Andy Dehnart
Is previous experience really necessary for another summer of photocopying, filing and gofering?
(02/17/99)

The teachers we loved
Writers send valentines to the people who opened their minds
(02/12/99)

The reluctant accuser
By Alexandra Robbins
When faced with quasi-assault from a friend, a young student finds neither college counselors nor handbooks have an answer
(02/10/99)

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
Penned off in gilded ghettos, the scholars of sex miss the complex biological and cultural story of human sexual nature
(02/10/99)

--------Ghosts on campus

WITHIN THE COZY COMMUNITY OF CAMPUS LIFE, THERE ARE PLENTY OF CRACKS TO FALL THROUGH.

BY LORI GOTTLIEB | There are invisible people on my campus, and I swear, they're everywhere. Now, I'm no Shirley MacLaine, but on any given day, I can find at least a dozen of these campus apparitions, and I'll bet if you looked, you could too.

I first found out about the invisible people when my friend Seth stopped me as I unpacked my spirals in lecture one Monday. "Guess what?" he said, an urgency in his voice. "I heard a girl in our class killed herself. Can you believe it?"

"No, who?" I asked, scanning the classroom for an empty seat.

"Anna," Seth replied. "Did you know her?"

"No, I can't even picture her. Did you know her?"

"No one did," he shook his head. "Someone said she must have been the girl who sat in the last row, in the corner on the right. Isn't that weird?"

Weird, yes. But not just because one of our peers decided to off herself. Weirder, I think, is the fact that of the 35 people who gathered four days a week in the same small space, at the same time, over a three-month period, not one of us ever noticed Anna. How could that be?

By Thursday, though, everyone seemed to know who Anna was, or who they thought she had been: She was flaky, dedicated, careless, compulsive, failing the class, acing the class, nice, strange, cooperative, competitive. Her picture was printed in the college newspaper. A fund was started to help pay her funeral costs. Everyone rallied around Anna, a name without an identity. In her death, the girl whom no one knew suddenly became larger than life.

Back in high school, another girl committed suicide. Her name was Tina, and during freshman and sophomore years, she too was mostly invisible. I knew her to be the quiet Asian girl who got straight-A's, the one who lugged around a backpack of books equal to the weight of her small frame. I said "hi" to her in class, rarely in the hallways. I'd scream, "Hey!" to my friends 15 feet away, but Tina, with her eyes focused on the floor, never caught my attention.

Then one day in French class, Tina, who never raised her hand, volunteered to answer a question. But instead of giving the correct answer, Tina replied, "It's time for tea," in an eerie British accent. Heads turned, a few people snickered. But no one stopped to wonder why the brightest girl in the grade, the shy student who never spoke in class, would suddenly raise her hand only to say something nonsensical and bizarre. The teacher simply moved on to someone else, and Tina became invisible again.

Over the next few months, when my friends and I would see Tina in the halls, we noticed that she'd be muttering to herself. "Okaaay ..." was our usual response. Eventually, she began randomly walking up to people and saying things like, "The end is near, my lady," in her newfound British accent, but instead of engendering concern, her behavior was viewed, if at all, as an eccentricity of some sort. Even the bright red lipstick on her formerly naked lips didn't really register.

When I went to my locker before history a few weeks later, the noise in the hallway was more frenzied than usual. Like a game of telephone, word quickly spread: Tina was dead. In the middle of the night, she had shot herself. The school held an assembly and told us to look out for "warning signs" -- strange behavior, talk of death or dying, changes in appearance. "If Tina had sent out some warning signs," the school social worker announced self-righteously, "then maybe we could have helped her." It occurred to me then that Tina did send out warning signs, but her attempts to be noticed were ignored.

I'm not sure if Anna sent out any warning signs. Maybe she did and they never reached me. Maybe they never reached anyone. But Tina's did, and I -- and many others -- didn't respond to the call. Ultimately, death was the final message each girl sent, the only message the world would receive. In their absence, they became visible at last.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Do they recognize each other?