It’s hard to envision a more disquieting way to end the 2007-08 academic year.
A tragedy, no matter on how grand a scale or how much media attention it receives, is still a tragedy.
The passing of Binghamton University senior Willie Poon — and the two previous BU student deaths this year of Anders Uwadinobi, a freshman who died in a dorm boxing match in December, and William Gage, who was most recently enrolled at BU last spring and died over spring break on Long Island — did not occur on the obscene scale of a Virginia Tech massacre, but are nonetheless crippling to the campus community.
It’s sometimes easy to ignore the innate bond that everyone on this campus shares. It’s a large school, there are large student groups, large groups of people you haven’t met and never will, yet on some level, our collective experience is the same; Poon’s family, friends and fraternity will miss him, no doubt. But even those beyond Poon’s inner circle, those who had never met him, are still connected.
And while Poon is mourned, like Gage and Uwadinobi before him, the community’s collective prayers are with another BU student who, as of Monday night, lays in critical condition in a local hospital after an alleged weekend bar fight with a BU men’s basketball player.
This is how Binghamton University closes an otherwise laudable year. Normally at this time, you’d want to look back on all the accomplishments, the good that transpired. It’s a little harder now.
There is a certain thing about tragedies: they’re so unnerving because they’re so undeserved. Summer is so near, you wonder what happens if the school year happened to end just a little bit sooner. You look at the likely culprit in the weekend’s events — alcohol — and wonder if a little more care had been taken, if things might have been different.
Diving into hindsight, however, does little good on its own. After the publicity of Virginia Tech, the lesson that should’ve been learned on campuses everywhere is that life itself trumps all else.
Accidents are accidents, and they’ll happen, but with more diligence there could be one less tragedy. Now, though, we have a responsibility that every BU student bears for their Vestal-bound peers in the fall.