For Ethan Scott Brown’s graduation day in December, his happy mother had prepared everything with great care.
Tracy Scott had booked a restaurant in Glasgow for a post-ceremony dinner. She’d ordered a cake, bought balloons and wrapped up the new watch she’d bought her son to celebrate the momentous moment – the culmination of four years of educational slog.
A nurse, Tracy had not been to university herself and didn’t socialise ‘in those circles’. She’d fretted over her own outfit, frantic not to let down the bright, brilliant son whom the family jokingly called The Prof.
‘I remember saying to Ethan, “Is this OK? You won’t be ashamed of your mother wearing this?”,’ She says, dabbing her eyes.
‘He said, “No, mum, you look good”.’
Tracy had left some of the details to Ethan because, as she says, ‘when they are grown-ups, you have to, don’t you?’
She had deposited funds into his account to reserve a time slot with a photographer and rent a graduation gown. She had also volunteered to iron Ethan’s shirt.
‘He said he’d already done it. I said, “Let’s see”, and he had. His good suit was hanging up. I went to bed thinking everything was ready.’
The next morning, she was up and dressed early, ‘hair curled and everything’, when she called to Ethan that he should be up by now.
‘You’d usually get a grunt from him or something, but there was no reply at all, so I just went into his room. But as soon as I opened the door, I saw. I knew. Then I screamed.’
There would be no graduation. Aged just 23, Ethan had taken his own life.
He had never been on the list of students who were graduating that day. The suit, the shirt, the gown hire – it had all been a sham.
Having failed to complete a module, he was informed by Glasgow University that he would not be awarded his coveted Honours degree.
‘And we think–or we thought then–that he was too ashamed to tell us he had failed,’ says Tracy.
‘There were so many opportunities where he could have told us.’
He had planned as well as his mother had. Being a neat person, Ethan could not stand anything that wasn’t in place.
Four suicide letters – ‘pages of them’, says Tracy – sat neatly on the very desk where Ethan had carried out his studies.
Two were for his family, one was for his best buddy Kyle, and one was for the police.
In them, Ethan apologised for his actions, but explained that he felt he had let everyone down.
His motivations were not made clear at the time, although nobody was very interested in the details.
Ethan’s stepfather, Colin, was with Tracy in their solicitor’s office, and it was Colin who followed the 999 operator’s instructions on the morning Ethan had been discovered and gave him CPR, even though they knew it was meaningless.
‘Even the woman on the phone was crying as she was telling me what to do,’ he says.
What an incredible loss.
Ethan was Tracy’s second child, and it had been his life’s dream to study at Glasgow University, just like his Auntie Marilyn, Tracy’s sister.
In his primary school yearbook, he had written about where he saw himself in ten years.
‘Still begging Glasgow University to accept me,’ he wrote.
However, Ethan’s passing goes beyond a simple family sorrow. The controversy is a national one.
The family has held a press conference, making public the truth behind Ethan’s death, which they had to piece together themselves.
There was ‘no help at all from the university, which didn’t even send a note of condolence, and which has acted as if Ethan didn’t exist’, says Colin, bitterly.
Their solicitor, Aamer Anwar, a former rector of Glasgow University, goes further. ‘Callous’ is how he sums up the way the family has been treated.
In fact, Ethan had not ‘failed’ his degree, as he had gone to his grave believing. He had been the victim of a string of errors by staff at the university.
Ethan himself had contacted the university several times, querying what had happened and asking to be allowed to graduate.
He had also ‘reached out’, says his mum, about mental health problems, especially after the loss of his grandmother.
‘Ethan never wanted to accept help. He was so independent. But he asked for it from the university. He tried to sort this all out himself.
There was a stage – when he learned he didn’t have enough credits to graduate and he just didn’t understand it – when I said, ‘Do you want me to ring the university?’ And he said, ‘No, mum. I can’t have my mum phoning up.’
Now she regrets not picking up the phone.
Only after his death were questions asked about Ethan’s state of mind and about how a capable student can suddenly ‘fail’ his degree, despite being on track to do well.
An inquiry was established, and it emerged that there had been a catastrophic string of administrative blunders. Ethan, who was studying geography, should actually have been awarded a 2:1.
‘How could no one have noticed?’ asks his mother. ‘How did no one care?
‘Ethan fell through the cracks in this system, and he can’t be the only one.’
An internal report, written by Professor Jill Morrison, identified where blunders had been made. She concluded that this was a ‘systemic’ problem, rather than a mistake by an individual.
Glasgow University has since apologised to the family, saying: ‘We are profoundly sorry that this terrible event occurred and understand the deep distress it has caused.’
It also insisted that the error in relation to Ethan’s marks was an ‘isolated one and that no other students have been affected’.
Tracy is outraged. ‘Did they forget we have read the internal report? You don’t need a degree to know that a ‘systemic problem’ is a big deal.’ The report makes for devastating reading.
While it documents that the university staff who were questioned about the events leading up to Ethan’s death were ‘visibly upset’, it says: ‘Staff expressed regret that they had not known the student and felt the circumstances of his time at the university meant that he was less well known than many other students.’
What does this mean? How can a student – a good and capable student – not be known to his own tutors and lecturers?
‘This is what I don’t understand,’ says Tracy. ‘Ethan was a good student. He went to all his classes. He loved it. But the big decisions about his future weren’t made by tutors who knew him.
‘It was all done by people who are called Professional Non-Academic Staff. I didn’t even know what this meant. At some point, he was just lost in the system. He fell through the cracks. He was just a number to them.’
Ethan started his university course in 2019. Glasgow was only a brief train journey from his family home in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, so he lived at home, commuting in every day.
His ‘in person’ studies were interrupted by the COVID pandemic. But Tracy says: ‘Still, when it was optional to either go in or do lectures remotely, he tended to go in. I think he went in more than most.’
Ethan probably wouldn’t have been the loudest person in the class, but he was known for his cheeky sense of humour and wide smile. He loved fancy dress parties – his mum laughs about the time he got a perm.
He didn’t have a girlfriend. When he died and the family were looking for answers, Tracy says she wondered whether there was ‘some great unrequited love or something that we’d known nothing about. There wasn’t’.
She thought he had taken to university life like a duck to water. ‘He still had his home friends,’ she says, ‘but he made a new group of uni friends’.
Ethan spent his third year abroad, happy to be picked to go to Stockholm to study.
‘I was worried sick about how he’d manage, but he had a great time,’ Tracy says.
But she adds: ‘When he came back, he tried to register for his final year. He couldn’t. The university didn’t know who he was, they didn’t remember him and had no record of him.
‘Then they said he couldn’t register for his final year because he hadn’t completed his third year.
‘We laughed about it at the time because it was so ridiculous. Ethan ended up having to get proof – transcripts, I think – himself. He wasn’t the sort to make a fuss about it. He just kind of rolled his eyes.’
However, when he eventually settled into his final year, things began to go wrong.
Tracy insists she saw no sign of depression, but he was deeply affected by the death of his grandmother around this time.
‘He had to hand in a dissertation in the December and he asked for an extension,’ she explains.
‘In the email, he cited mental health issues.
‘This extension wasn’t granted, and he had to scramble to get the dissertation done. I think he submitted it three hours late, but he did get it done, and he wasn’t penalised. He did well in it, too.
‘After that, there were another couple of pieces of work that he was struggling with, and he did ask for extensions for those. This time, they were granted.
‘My point is this: why did a red flag not go up then? Why did no one get in touch to ask, ‘Ethan, is everything OK?’
So were there any signs at home that he was losing his grip, I ask her. ‘No, and we’ve racked our brains since, thinking, ‘How could we have missed this?’. But Ethan would never have wanted to make a fuss or for us to worry.’
Ethan’s final exams took place in spring last year, and he should have graduated in the summer.
But he received word from the university – through a cursory email, his mother believes – that he had failed to achieve the needed ten credits. His family were aware of ‘some issue’ but Ethan downplayed it.
‘He was upset that he wasn’t going to be graduating in the summer, but he said he was sorting it and he’d be able to graduate in December,’ Tracy says.
‘To this day, I don’t know if he genuinely thought the university would sort it all out in time. But the point is he reached out to them and he got nowhere.’
Ethan’s family didn’t learn that he had never been scheduled to graduate until a few weeks after his passing.
‘We were devastated,’ says Tracy. ‘We never considered that the university would be at fault. We just thought Ethan had failed and had been too ashamed to tell us.’
Not until three months later did his aunt, who was more familiar with university procedures, begin to investigate and obtain Tracy’s consent to enquire about these unaccounted-for credits.
The family had attempted to access Ethan’s emails, but it hadn’t been possible. ‘Before he did what he did, he wiped his laptop, restoring the factory settings so I could use it,’ she says. ‘He told me that in his letter. He was trying to be helpful.’
Tracy says it is unforgivable that the university let the family believe for three months that Ethan had failed his degree.
‘Even when they heard he was dead, did no one think, ‘This seems odd’? We had to fight them to get any information at all. This wouldn’t even have come out if we hadn’t pushed.’
It’s surprising how depersonalised the system appears to be.
Tracy says she had no contact from university staff after Ethan died – not even his immediate tutors or advisers. ‘There wasn’t a phone call or a letter of condolence, nothing.’
However, there is evidence that Ethan made many attempts to contact himself before his passing.
The report says that there were two requests for extensions – in December 2023 and February 2024 – which detailed ‘deteriorating health and distress’.
Professor Morrison says these ‘could have alerted staff to a student with deteriorating wellbeing and provided an opportunity for communicating with him. As far as I could ascertain, there was no follow-up contact with the student’.
On the issue of the missing credits, there was ‘misunderstanding or confusion’ – with even staff at the university not being aware of what should happen if a student fails to complete an assessment.
There was only one essay that Ethan had failed to submit, and even without the marks for it, he had reached the standard required to achieve a 2:1.
But when his marks were recorded on a spreadsheet, the computer said he hadn’t. And no member of staff intervened to say, ‘This cannot be right’.
Even when Ethan sent emails – and there were at least two requesting clarification about the process for getting his degree – he was ‘fobbed off’, Tracy says.
‘He was told someone would get back to him, and they didn’t. They just abandoned him.’
The report recommended that changes should be made to how marks are recorded and that students ‘individual circumstances are discussed’.
However, Ethan’s family finds it astounding that this degree of interaction with a pupil would not be done regularly.
Their solicitor, Mr Anwar, says: ‘One of the issues and one that is continually raised by university students and staff – not just in Glasgow but in all large-scale universities – is that these are huge money-making operations now.
‘When I was at university, you had tutors who knew you by name. There were regular meetings and contact. There was a way of catching you if you had troubles.’
Tracy nods. ‘Ethan should have been caught, and they let him fall,’ she says.
Ethan’s university books are still sitting in his bedroom in a tidy pile just as he left them. The watch his mum bought him is there, too, still wrapped.
There will never be a graduation photograph on the wall, but there will be his degree certificate.
Glasgow University has agreed that the family will be able to collect it at a ceremony.
‘And we will, because he worked so hard for it,’ says Tracy, her pride in her son undiminished.
Where are the supervisors, counsellors, and mentors? In addition to making sure that all students are supported, universities must also make sure that those in such positions genuinely care about the welfare of their students.
Who are these heartless apologies coming from? While they’re red arrowing the words of sympathy for this heartbroken family. Evil really does walk among us!
These universities don’t give a damn after they have your money.
This is a story that’s so difficult to comprehend, and it makes me so furious that a young lad was overlooked.
I was moved to tears by this. Instead of performing CPR on the unfortunate youngster, his family ought to have been enjoying a wonderful day, and he should be alive and well.
This is an indisputable, tragic loss of life and a beautiful heart, and the university needs to pay, not that it would bring Ethan back, but somebody needs to pay for this.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 