Posted: 9/7/06 Section: News

Media Credit: The Associated Press [Click to enlarge]

NEW YORK - A depressed Hunter College student who swallowed handfuls of Tylenol, then saved her own life by calling 911, was in for a surprise when she returned to her dorm room after the ordeal.

The lock had been changed.

She was being expelled from the dorm, the school informed her, because she violated her housing contract by attempting suicide. The 19-year-old was allowed to retrieve her belongings as a security guard stood watch.

Policies barring potentially suicidal students from dorms have popped up across the country in recent years as colleges have struggled to deal with an estimated 1,100 suicides a year. But some of those rules have come under legal attack.

Hunter College announced last month that it was abandoning its 3-year-old suicide policy as part of a settlement with the student. The student, who was allowed to continue attending class, claimed in a lawsuit that her 2004 ouster from the dorms violated federal law protecting disabled people from discrimination.

The school, part of the City University of New York system, also agreed to pay her $65,000.

Hunter spokeswoman Meredith Halpern said the college may still consider temporarily removing troubled students from its residence halls, but such evictions will no longer be automatic.

College officials say such expulsions are not punitive; Halpern said Hunter's policy was aimed at protecting students' privacy and shielding them from schoolmates' prying eyes. At George Washington University in the nation's capital, spokeswoman Tracy Schario said the idea is to give suicidal students a break from the stresses of university life and encourage them to seek help.

But some activists suspect such evictions are an attempt by colleges to avoid legal liability if someone commits suicide in the dorms.

Up until recently, the prevailing legal theory had long been that adult students were responsible for their own behavior, and that colleges could not be held liable. But that philosophy was undermined by a pair of court rulings involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ferrum College in Virginia.

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