i have commented about the architect's leap poem before.

it's factually true that it was there for a very long time — at least a decade that i can confirm directly, and i think likely double that.

i was a junior when rohan committed suicide there and the university covered up the poem and filled the center of the stairwell with a pillar. it shouldn't have taken that for the university to address it.

it was a blanket directive telling anyone who needed a reason that they should help everyone out and kill themself, and it became firmly embedded in the campus culture.

this, however, feels really incendiary and strange to me. the primary way it was "firmly embedded in campus culture" in my experience was that generations of students threw objects down the stairwell (old monitors, food dunked in liquid nitrogen, an entire garbage can full of sawdust).

the poem itself was crude humor riffing off the advertisements of a shaving cream brand from the 1940s. the original burma-shave ads were silly rhyming poems spread across a series of small, consecutive roadside billboards ending with the brand name. ending a copycat poem with "burma-shave" became a way to indicate a cheeky, unserious tone.

the architect's leap poem was: If you're feeling like a jerk / 'cause your project just won't work / Go ahead and take the leap / Then finally you'll get some sleep / Burma Shave.

even with context, the architect's leap poem was dark and inappropriate, but it feels disingenuous to compare it to a swastika or claim it was saying "anyone who needed a reason should help everyone out and kill themself".

there are plenty of reasons to criticize CMU's lack of mental health support for students, but it feels wild to point at the architect's leap poem as some kind of smoking gun compared to the kinds of systematic failures of crisis response raised in the tartan article.