Poisoned Ivy

...She grew up under military rule...

...Tadesse, a 21-year-old Ethiopian whose already deep troubles had festered in her three years at Harvard, had lulled her roommate after Ho, a sweet, diligent, pre-med student, insisted on living with others the following year...

...khievement,” Thernstrom writes, “can stem from insecurity, a need to prove oneself better than everyone else, or from depression-a need to make oneself feel better-as much as it can from talent or a desire to contribute to the world...

...But this explanation raised as many questions as it answered...

...It is a community, Harvard president Charles Eliot said in 1869, that “stands firmest for the public honor...

...on the way back .. . from a night of partying, they turn destructive and walk on cars, smash glass entryway doors, violate one another’s bodies...

...High school turned out to be even worse...

...It should be said that Trang Ho, a victim unfortunately overshadowed by her murderer, seemed to thrive at Harvard...

...And so, when police entered suite H-22 on May 28,199S, the bodies were not hard to find...

...A top detective told Thernstrom that the university regularly fails to report suicides, “by mistake...

...Reading accounts of Harvard’s behavior in this affair, it is hard not to think of it as more a shadowy corporation-with an $11 billion endowment to protectthan an institution of learning...

...At the commencement exercises, they were never mentioned...

...Looking for a Villain When she decided to attend Harvard, Tadesse was surely drawn to the mystique captured by Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel: “It was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud loneliness, rich books and golden browsing...

...But ultimately the book succeeds in highlighting the two critical themes of this tragedy: First, this is a story about mental illness and the mysteries of its depths, causes, and cures...

...For many institutions, such a tragedy might force self-examination and lead to change...

...I swallowed my pain and anguish just as my siblings did to theirs...

...But in such a highly-charged atmosphere, the search can be daunting and fraught with obstacles...

...Harvard is different...

...And what meaning could be taken from the fact that these brutal acts-the killing of another and the killing of self-had taken place at a university which many consider synonymous with knowledge and human progress...

...MIT, by comparison, has none...

...At home, “there was no comfort to seek...

...At West Point, students are steeped in the values of teamwork and cooperation even when they’re being put through grueling drills...

...Everyone is loolung for a villain and we don’t want to be it...

...But, for the most part, Harvard provides a very poor safety net for this highly volatile student body...

...Harvard also does little to attend to students’ emotional lives, though the qualities it seeks-creativity, intensity, passion-often coincide with vulnerability...

...I see friends deserting me...

...But Fox is distant and unsympathetic...

...On the floor in the first of two small rooms, Trang Phuong Ho lay dead of 45 stab wounds, including 11 in the head, chest, and neck...

...Cambridge police were refused essential interviews and documents and eventually had to cede the investigation to Harvard’s own police, which Cambridge detectives found less than forthcoming...

...Though Harvard is steeped in history-the lectures of Emerson, the scholarship of William James, the education of John Kennedy-many there don’t seem to understand that unflattering, even horrific, history may be the most important to remember, so that it doesn’t repeat itself...

...News & World Report...

...Hoy was also an academic adviser at Mather House, next door to Dunster, and he was not alone in his commitment to understanding his students...

...After the deaths, Liem told Boston Magazine that “I had no inkling there was a problem...

...But stonewalling and zealously denying responsibility hardly seems like the honorable course in the aftermath of two student deaths...

...please do not close the door in my face”-Sinedu Tadesse had certainly crossed that line...

...She was thrilled to find a roommate for sophomore year, but when this friendship proved to be less than perfect, Tadesse relapsed into bitterness and anxiety-with an edge of mounting rage...

...By the end of her freshman year-by the time she told her life story to strangers and begged them for, “a few hours from your week...

...Even the best-adjusted and most-confident high schoolers can be reduced to quivers there...

...But her outward achievement was matched with intense loneliness...

...Not because he sensed danger for his patient, but because he wanted to cancel an appointment...

...For a lost young woman, thousands of miles from home without friends, Harvard offered nothing except a two-hour orientation for foreign students and occasional therapy sessions-with a doctor of education...

...What, if anything, had Harvard done to help her...

...Far from the “solution” Tadesse sought, it is hard to imagine an environment worse for her than Harvard...

...Many students find a niche-academic, social, extracurricularthat allows them to enjoy, rather than be threatened by, the exceptional talents of their peers...

...House officials had a copy of the desperate letter that Tadesse had written to strangers-a letter that includes the phrase “if I live”-but it’s unclear what they did with it...

...The roommate, of course, was Trang Ho...

...Several days before her death, Tadesse dropped off her picture at the offices of Harvard’s daily paper, The Crimson, with a note that advised, “KEEP this picture...

...There is a moment in time, always difficult to discern, where common feelings of unhappiness verge into depression, where the vocabulary of ordinary experience should be discarded for the vocabulary of disease...

...If the greater world reveals itself only to those courageous and daring enough to re-imagine and test the very foundations of knowledge,” Hoy writes, “Harvard seems to believe its task is to nurture and develop minds unsettled and unsettling enough to look into the darkness...

...Poisoned Ivy For some students,getting into Harvard is the easy part by Joshua Wolf Shenk AN EARLY 20TH CENTURY building perched aside the Charles River, Dunster House is known among Harvard undergraduates for its grand common spaces and awkward, cramped living quarters...

...But what is that story really about...

...The first acaclemic experience for many students is applying to freshman seminars and being turned down by most, or all...

...Tadesse may or may not have been warned that the university was also famously indifferent to its undergraduates...

...By virtue of exceptional test scores, Tadesse won a coveted spot in a school for diplomats and foreigners...

...As far as I can remember my life has been hellish,” she wrote: Year after year, I became lonelier and lonelier...

...At a faculty meeting, a dean instructed attendees not to talk to the press...

...In a previous controversy, Liem had fired tutors who spoke to The Crimson...

...Afterwards, his contract was extended...

...This might seem like an advantage, since most advisors are graduate students or low-level faculty...

...In a case of this complexity,” Dean of the College Fred Jewett told Thernstrom, “we prefer to centralize information...

...a noose in a shower...

...it was an enchanted name like Cairo and Damascus...

...Your attacks on all things Harvard are tiresome...

...Its counseling resources are thin and its academic advisors are often unqualified, lackadaisical, or overcommitted...

...They would take every chance to show me they did not have any love or respect for me...

...30,000 people died in an official campaign of terror that began when she was two years old...

...Still, Harvard is held to a higher standard by its own asking...

...Melanie Thernstrom tries to answer these questions in Haljivay Heaven, a meditative “diary” of the murder-suicide...

...The summer after her freshman year at Harvard, Tadesse confessed these feelings in a letter that she sent to strangers, picked at random from phone books and Internet chat groups...

...And that leads to the aspect of the book which, aside from the two deaths, I find most depressing...

...Sinedu Tadesse, her roommate of two years, hung by JOSHUA WOLF SHENK, a former Monthly editor, is an associate editor at U.S...

...Liem’s deputy, the house’s “senior tutor,” was out of town at the time of the deaths-though the term was not yet over, she was already on vacation...

...Meanwhile, Dunster House tutors who talked to Thernstrom later retracted their comments, saying they feared being fired...

...By what path did Tadesse descend into violent madness...

...Thernstrom briefly discusses Damian Schloming, who drew as his freshman advisor John Fox, an esteemed former dean of the college...

...But I hung on tight because I wanted to come to the States in search of a solution...

...Thernstrom’s relentlessly self-conscious style is sometimes tedious...

...no warmth,” Tadesse wrote later...

...But Harvard’s response was defensive, paranoid, and accusatory...

...And whether the school deserves “blame” is a complicated question...

...Sinedu Tadesse and Trang Ho would have graduated in June of 1996...

...Hoy came to Harvard in 1988 after 14 years as a professor of English at West Point and he was struck, he writes, “that Harvard students often become destructive when alcohol or sheer frustration break down their thin layer of civilized restraint...

...And so it is no coincidence that students “lash out at one another, or...

...Sinedu Tadesse was clearly a troubled young woman when she matriculated to Harvard from an elite private school in Ethiopia...

...I have received my medical care from the University for over forty years and am entirely satisfied,” he responds to one of Damian’s pleadings about his need for counseling and medication...

...Home was not a comforting place...

...Tadesse’s path to that Sunday morning is a thicket of familial, biological, and social problems...

...Tadesse, in fact, had been rejected for a seminar taught by Thernstrom, for which she had more than 100 applicants...

...Shortly before the murder/suicicle, the therapist tried to reach Tadesse...

...If you don’t like it here go away.’’ This lund of arrogance isn’t unusual...

...The story’s basic outline was quickly apparent...

...It was an unfortunate system,” Thernstrom writes, “that in order to take a writing class to learn you had to prove you were already accomplishedbut it was the way many things were done at Harvard...

...A political prisoner for several years, her father was one of the junta’s many victims, and the children were raised to be paranoid and distrustful...

...There will soon be a very juicy story involving the person in this picture...

...Mine was an admissions officer...

...Dunster House, where I lived as a Harvard student from 1990 to 1993, was a caricature of Harvard’s style, combining ineptitude and authoritarianism...

...Thernstrom reports the salient fact that Harvard, used to throwing its weight around in legal disputes, has 11 in-house lawyers...

...I was so lonely...

...Harvard’s environment can exacerbate these problems, as a former professor of mine, Pat C. Hoy 11, illuminates in his Sewanee Review essay “Soldiers and Scholars,” which was later excerpted by Haward Magazine...

...Second, it is the story of a rarely seen side of Harvard University- the self-interested bureaucracy that is less interested in student welfare or truth than in protecting its reputation...

...Desperate for friends, she found herself paralyzed in social situations...

...If I went early or left late, I would be roaming the yard or deserted hallways alone while other students roared with laughter or talked their hearts out standing in groups...

...Karel Liem, the senior faculty member in charge of Dunster House, told police he had read the letter, then denied to Thernstrom ever having seen it...