This is a call to the UF president, provost and dean of students.
I’m severely disappointed in how the university dealt the recent death of Michael R. Edmonds Jr.
As the news broke, I sat in my residence hall refreshing Twitter feeds to verify the rumored death. The awful news led to a conversation with a fellow student.
We spoke about being a part of a prestigious university that holds its morals to high standards (seen in the fast response to hazing earlier in the semester). We just knew that we were going to receive some sort of official communication in the following hours, affirming that the university saw this as an important issue that emotionally affected a lot of students, even if they didn’t personally know Michael. But the email never came.
UF has to be a stronger force against the thoughts or actions of suicide. The failure to communicate the news from the university’s point of view takes away from the gravity of the issue at hand. A student with suicidal thoughts might feel as though his or her suicide would also go unmentioned as this one did.
There exists a divide between students who believe this happens all the time and those who believe it rarely happens. This is why I feel that the university needs to address student suicides with as much urgency as any other threat to student safety.
Daniella Saetta
Environmental engineering sophomore
