boston

Harvard University is reviewing its policies on graduate students following the death of Jason Altom, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the chemistry department who killed himself last August by taking cyanide.

Altom, the third Harvard graduate student to commit suicide since 1997, was working on the synthesis of a complex molecule under the supervision of organic chemist Elias J. Corey, winner of the 1990 Nobel prize.

“This event could have been avoided,” Altom wrote in a suicide note, part of which was reprinted by the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper. “Professors have too much power over the lives of their grad students.”

Altom suggested in the note that a thesis committee, made up of three professors, should be formed earlier in the research process to help students assess their work and to protect them from what he described as “abusive research advisers”. He added: “If I had such a committee now, I know things would be different.”

Poor faculty advising had been highlighted last March as a serious problem in a letter to the university administration from the Graduate Student Council. Changes in the advising structure, as advocated by Altom and the student council, were incorporated in a nine-point plan adopted by the chemistry department in mid-September.

“Jason's death prompted an examination of the role the department should play in graduate students' lives,” says atmospheric chemist James Anderson, who became department chairman in July.

Under the new guidelines, each second-year graduate student will establish a pre-thesis committee composed of the adviser and two other faculty members. Students will also have “confidential and seamless access” to psychological counselling services paid for by the department, says Anderson.

Other changes include the introduction of “frequent” buffet dinners for graduate students, postdocs and faculty members, as well as regular meetings between the chairman and graduate school classes.

A survey will assess the usefulness of the new policies. “We plan to make more changes, but want to evaluate these measures first,” says Anderson. The heads of Harvard's other science departments are “paying close attention to what we're doing”, he adds. “They realize that the isolation and depression experienced by some graduate students is not unique to chemistry.”

All 3,400 of Harvard's graduate students were questioned during the registration period in September about the effectiveness of the advisory system. “Our efforts have been galvanized by this event [Altom's suicide],” says Margot Gill, administrative dean of the graduate school. “It has forced us to ask if there is more we can do to improve the graduate student experience.”

Anne Pruitt-Logan, scholar in residence at the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington DC, endorses the idea of creating advisory committees for students. “But most of these committees focus too narrowly on the research, when students need broader mentoring,” she says.

Although the advisers would not be counsellors per se, says Pruitt-Logan, “they would hopefully be observant enough to see that something is amiss. Having a group of advisers increases the chances that someone will catch signs of distress.”

Stephen Senturia, an electrical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), agrees that the adviser-student relationship is a critical issue. “It's easy to fall into the notion that the adviser owns your life,” says Senturia, who runs workshops that expose students to ethical dilemmas in research and train them to handle problems with their supervisors.

Thesis committees at the university should form earlier than they do at present, he suggests, as a way of “broadening the support base for students”.

But Senturia points out that MIT's Graduate Student Council is not pushing for changes in the advisory programme. That could mean that students are satisfied with the present system, he says. “Or maybe they're just too busy.”