“Why do you want to study in America?” I asked my over-educated, alcohol-dependent Tamil acquaintance as we sat on the stoop of my apartment building in downtown Madurai in 1998. We’ll call him Selvaraj.
Selvaraj had educated himself into a corner in urban India without the elite local connections required for gainful white-collar employment. He also had a drinking problem, had attained a chronic liberal arts infection (not conducive to income), and became financially dependent on interpreting for foreigners. The latter is fun in your twenties but not the kind of gig that allows you to marry well among Tamil elites, i.e., not a real job to the parents of educated Tamil women back then in the city I was in.
So, Selvaraj was trying to find a way into graduate school in America and leave India entirely. The country was too conservative and limiting for him.
“I don’t think you understand how lonely you will be on an American university campus,” I responded in English, “Americans are just not into deep friendships like you have here. They’re focused on themselves. No one will be looking out for you. You need to be really, really independent.”
He seemed unconcerned with my warning. Ultimately, he never did get to America, most likely because he lacked the cash reserves necessary to obtain student visas. The United States requires student visa applicants to have many rupees in cash in a bank account to prove to the government that the students can support themselves in America. Indians on F-1 visas also have severe restrictions on working in the United States.
I knew a Tamil guy who came to the U.S. on a sponsored student visa and hated it so much that he quit and joined a clique of Tamil expat cab drivers to have a community and friends. He couldn’t deal with the alienation of an American university campus. Community and belonging mattered more than his individualistic career quest.
If Indian visa-holding students are lucky, they can join cliques of other Indian students from the same city or region to reproduce on campus the large friendship networks they often leave behind in India.
However, any ethnic network protection effect is much less certain for Indian-American students who have begun to assimilate into American high schools. They aren’t as likely to just hang out with folks from the same background. Unless their high school was chock full of Indian-American kids (which is true in some zip codes near Seattle), they will make friends with kids from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.
And that’s the sign that these hyphenated Americans, like Akul, are growing up American, delinking from their parents’ culture and blending into an urban American way of life with its many individualistic assumptions about personal privacy, friendship obligations, and personal responsibility.
All three of these variables become critical when college kids go out partying at night, whether or not they are hyphenated Americans. The recent case of an Indian-American student -Akul Dhawan- who died of hypothermia after trying to walk a short distance alone back to his dorm at the University of Illinois-Champagne is a tragic reminder of how assimilation introduces kids raised by career-focused immigrants to new dangers they (and their parents) are unlikely to have experienced within their origin country. The children of India’s elite are heavily sheltered.
“It’s not that kids don’t indulge in reckless behavior; they do. But it should not come at the expense of their life.”1
Ishu Dhawan, Akul’s father, expresses here the sentiment that society should protect young people from their own poor decisions. A caring society, in his view, has lots of guardrails. No 18-year-old should die like Akul. What’s interesting, though, is that Ishu does what most American parents do in these kinds of tragedies: he turns to the most prominent authorities involved, here it was the campus police, to find fault.2
When I read the police timeline, though, I saw something different.
Here’s the timeline of events from January 19:
[Champaign, IL - University of Illinois Campus] - Air Temp - 2 degrees Fahrenheit
At approximately 9 p.m. on Jan. 19, Mr. Dhawan met with friends at Busey-Evans Residence Hall, where Mr. Dhawan consumed alcohol.
At approximately 10 p.m., Mr. Dhawan and his friends attended an event at Canopy Club, 708 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana.
Around 10:45 p.m., Mr. Dhawan traveled with friends to Green Street. Security video obtained later showed him consuming more alcohol before the group returned to Canopy Club.
Mr. Dhawan’s friends re-entered Canopy Club between 11:25 p.m. and 11:29 p.m. while Mr. Dhawan remained outside. He was denied entry by venue staff when he attempted to enter at 11:31 p.m. He continued to attempt to gain access to the venue multiple times, but was repeatedly denied by staff.
Around midnight, two different rideshare vehicles were called to pick up Mr. Dhawan outside Canopy Club. He declined both rides despite attempts by venue staff and a passerby to convince him otherwise. Subsequent phone calls and text messages sent by friends to Mr. Dhawan’s phone were not answered.3
Canopy Club was 350 feet from Akul’s dorm.
With temperatures that night falling below zero, coroners say prolonged exposure to cold temperatures and acute alcohol intoxication contributed to his death from hypothermia.
Dhawan was found unresponsive on the concrete steps of a university building, where he was pronounced dead on the scene.4
He died on the steps of a building across the street from his dorm, implying he was very disoriented. He was only about 100-150 feet off target.
How did this happen?
Most of the media coverage focuses on the proximate cause - the search failed to locate Akul, who passed out in public and was visible from the street - i.e., the failure of the campus police to do an adequate search.
There it is again, the proximate-cause-is-all-we-need bias. The last responsible person, the campus police, becomes our moral focus. They attract our ire. We blame them.
But there were other, more subtle things at play in this case.
Akul got separated from his friends at the entrance to a music venue. Why? Why did not one of his group stay with him? Akul was apparently too drunk to be let into a music venue that clearly allowed 18-year-olds with ID to enter.5 He had already been inside once that night, so we can assume he had legal ID on him an hour later. Staff separated him from his group, as is the policy for well-maintained venues when you discover an underage person who is drunk. But instead of grabbing one of Akul’s friends to chaperone him, Akul was isolated by the staff. His drunkenness immediately became his sole personal responsibility. The fact that none of his ‘friends’ noticed the separation and hung back to be with him is also a classic sign of American social life. You are even on your own when you’re out partying with friends. Having lived in Tamil Nadu for three years, I’m confident that the Tamil friends would have waited for everyone to get admitted before entering. Someone would have hung back to argue with the staff (likely) and then walked him home. It’s called defaulting to support, even if it means you don’t go to the music venue either (the venue you just went to an hour earlier). In summary, the staff applied an individual-by-individual policy of rejecting any one person who seemed too drunk without caring that they were chopping up a group, AND the friends didn’t really step in or even notice. That’s a pretty weak group of friends.
Akul refused an Uber ride back to his dorm. Why was he given a choice?
The staff tried to help, but the drunk adult -Akul- refused the help. Ah yes. Only in America would we try to have a rational conversation with someone way far gone on substances. When I had a psychotic break on anti-malarial medication in Tamil Nadu in 1998, it took three locals (two were friends) to drag me into my landlord’s front room and hold me there as I calmed down, and they got a rickshaw to take me to a hospital. They didn’t ask for my consent. They grabbed me and took me to the room. The community stepped up and solved the problem with multiple adults. It’s not that hard unless you have a ridiculously rigid notion of individual privacy and consent, even when the person involved is clearly unable to make anything resembling a good decision. Unless you easily let the belligerent, antisocial individual just win.
No one offered to walk Akul 346 feet to his dorm in case he passed out. Why? If they thought he needed a cab to go 346 feet down the road, clearly, they thought he was too drunk to get home on foot. So, why would someone at the venue not just walk him there? Look again at the map above. Or, if not that gesture, then go find all of his friends inside the venue (we all have names for a reason) and get them to do it in a group! I have loads of media liability insurance, so I’m happy to go out on a limb here and say if anyone should be held responsible, it should be the owner of the music venue whose staff had two easy solutions to get this kid chaperoned and off the property. They also had a third - they could have called the police since he was drunk and under-age. An arrest record is better than death, isn't it?
This sad story is extreme. Sure. I suspect tens of thousands of drunk college students have stumbled alone back to their dorm before and actually made it. Mostly not on nights as frigid as January 19 in Illinois. So, the American mind will blame the victim here yet again OR the local search team for being unable to do a basic grid search of a couple of square blocks. We don’t blame the shitty friends or anyone at the venue who clearly mishandled the situation due to a classic bias toward personal responsibility and privacy.
‘Hey, man, if you don’t want the Uber, that's fine. You’re on your own.’ That was a real big effort, there.
The problem with Akul’s needless death was NOT the poorly executed search in 0-degree weather with a -20-degree wind chill. It was the lack of community responsibility felt at the entrance to that music venue where the critical separation and confrontation took place.
This was a social tragedy, not a personal one. It begs us to ask yet again what is the nature of group responsibility in the face of an outlier so easily managed. Do we let the wildly drunk individual solve their own problem and then pay an enormous price for their inebriated stubbornness? Or do we temporarily override individual privacy and consent and get him home safely, even if he’s being an asshole? Do we err on the side of protection to keep people safe or on the side of autonomy where it makes little sense?
Let me know where you stand in the comments!!
https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/around-campus/campus-life/2024/02/11/igsa-akul-dhawan-vigil/
https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/university-illinois/an-open-letter-from-the-family-of-akul-dhawan/article_85fd762d-bdb7-540d-ac93-4817e0d14c38.html
https://police.illinois.edu/uipd-releases-additional-details-in-student-death-investigation/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/illinois-student-akul-dhawan-hymothermia-cause-death-rcna140181
Canopy club admittance rules
In China, the friends would not have allowed this to happen because the whole group would be shamed by their failure to look after one of their own.
How do we really know what he was like? It's not insignificant. We all have friends, and then we have friends... Ones who we would always do all the things that you listed for, others not nearly as much. Moreover, the now popular media narrative is the victimhood. Somebody else is always to blame.