Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

One of the papers in A Nest of Vipers, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield Academic Press, 1990) is “The roommate’s suicide and the 4.0” by William S. Fox. Fox summarises this piece of contemporary American college lore as:

If your roommate commits suicide, you get a 4.0 that semester.
The value “4.0” means the highest marks available in each subject.

Dead Man on Campus is a feature film whose narrative is built round this concept. Josh (Tom Everett Scott) enters the medical programme at Daleman College on an academic scholarship. He intends to work hard but is distracted by his partying roommate Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and by Rachel (Poppy Montgomery) who becomes his girl friend. Josh’s early grades are so bad that he would find it impossible to achieve the average for the year which he requires to keep his scholarship. Cooper’s business-man father arrives on campus and threatens dire consequences if he does not start working, so both roommates are in trouble.

In a bar, an old drunk tells them of his experience at college, His roommate committed suicide and he benefitted from a college rule that “if your roommate kills himself you get straight As”. Cooper’s reaction is to suggest that Josh sacrifice himself but Josh rejecxts that idea, However, they decide to check out the College Charter in the library. In a section on suicide they discover that it does contain just such a provision. Cooper persuades Josh that they should arrange to have a suicidal student move in with them. They try to increase their knowldge of the circumstances in which suicide s are committed. Josh goes the the Psychology department for information where he is interviewed by Dr Durkheim. Durkheim wrongly assumes that Josh is himself contemplating taking his own life. [This is presumably a knowing reference to Emile Durkheim, the author of a famous sociological analysis of suicide,]

They focus on a number of potential suicides, including a paranoid who believes Bill Gates is trying to control his brain and a rock musician who only pretends to be suicidal to create an appropriate image. Having given up their attempts to benefit from the suicide rule, they find a friend, Pickle, who has swallowed pills and left a suicide note. Believing him to be already dead, they plan to move him into their room. However, Josh realises he is still alive and revives him. Cooper is angry that Josh has spoilt their last chance of good grades and they quarrel.

Josh climbs the College Tower and threatens to jump. A crowd gathers but Cooper succeed in “talking him down”. Once saved, Josh secretly tells Cooper that he figures that the college would not expel a student who had shown himself to be suicidal. He is correct and he stays on to study psychology rather than medicine. Cooper’s father, impressed by his success in saving Josh from suicide, agrees to finance another year at college. Things seem to have worked out well for them both, but they arrange for Pickle to move in with them, “just in case” things go wrong.

Dead Man on Campus was copyrighted in 1998 by Paramount Pictures. It is an MTV Production, directed by Alan Cohn and produced by Gale Anne Hurd. The story is credited to Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder. The screenplay is by Michael Traeger and Mike White.