The Virginia Tech Slaughter
There are times when it is a positive good not to have a television set and the last few days have been one of them. Just reading about what happened is bad enough. I don't have any useful observations about this horror, though it touched the Clemens family in more ways than one. It all comes down to theodicy, I suspect.
My older brother Jesse went to Virginia Tech, back before it was known as VT. The Corps of Cadets was still nearly the sum total of the student body. Like my brother, they all expected to go into the army as 2nd Lts, and most assumed they would serve in Vietnam. There were no more than a handful of female students. He is very upset about the whole thing over on our family blog. It is one of the few times I have seen him actually write down an opinion about anything!
When I was a grad student at Florida State, my friend Budweiser worked on a local political campaign with a very kind, decent woman who devoted countless volunteer hours to causes she thought important. Her husband was a professor at FSU who had a graduate student from Hong Kong. The student flunked his prelim exams for the doctorate three times and was booted from the program. This meant he would have to return to his family in Hong Kong as a disgraced failure.
Instead, he walked across the street to a gun shop and attempted to buy a gun. The shop owner thought the guy was acting so irrationally that he refused to sell him one. The student simply walked up the street to the next gun shop and bought one there. Then he went back to his professor's office, shot and killed him and then blew his own brains out. We didn't know quite what to make of it then, either.
Now I am a professor and occasionally have come into contact with students who have concerned me, and one who genuinely frightened me. There was, just as in this case, nothing that could really be done. I certainly cannot say what the administration at VT should have done, but I can say this, after several talks with my own university administration about disciplinary problems, and watching problems my colleagues have had: Administrators are absolutely gutless when it comes to drawing a line for student behaviour. It is axiomatic here that if you have a problem with a student, the administration will not back you up.
I have no reason to think that my university is unusual in this regard.
Labels: academics, Moral dilemmas, Society
posted by Clemens @ 3:13 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
It seems to me there are several things about the way universities (and perhaps society at large) handle mental illness that need to change.
1. Mental illness is not a crime, and yet the only recourse apparently open to concerned students at VA Tech was to call the police. The police are trained to deal with crimals, not the mentally ill. Where was the campus counselling center in all of this?
2. "privacy laws" mandate that parents of mentally ill students cannot be told by university officials or mental health professionals that there is a problem. So who is responsible? Genuine mental illness has nothing to do with upbringing (though it can run in families). The only adults who could focus entirely on seeing that their child gets the help they need are cut out of the loop.
3. who is responsible for mentally ill adults? Since hospitals all over the country were shut down in the '80s, the criminal system is, and prisons are now FULL of people who beling on hospitals (and may well never have committed crimes had they been hospitalized in the first place). It's alsoa huge part of teh reason for dramitic increases in homelessness.
4. At some stage, we all need to realize we are our brothers' keepers -- for our own health and safety if for no other reason! But expecting mentally ill people to come to realizations on their own that they need help, or to even reliably stay on their meds just doesn't make sense. I'm not advocating forced medication of the drepressed, but leaving treatable people without treatment just because they are incapable of giving informed consent makes absolutely no sense. Experts estimate that at elast 90% of mentally ill people can be managed with meds and conselling. If we actually did it, there would be a whole let less people in jail, victimized by crimes and violence, ar even losing their jobs and/or families.
Because of privacy laws, the fact that the shooter has been committed as a danger to himself was not reported, so did not show up on the background check run on him when he bought his guns.
There is more than enough problems highlighted by this tragedy to keep us busy for years.
When I was a lowly grad student in the early '90s, Massachusetts instituted a new law that said if a person drove drunk and injured themselves or otehrs, the last bar and the last bartender to serve that person alcohol was legally liable. That is even if an already-drunk person stops for a single drink at a bar before getting in his/her car after a long night of pub crawling.
Sounds unfair, doesn't it? But the incidence of drunk driving plumeted and MA still has one of the lowest annual fatality rates due to DUI, ~15 years after the law was implemented.
Who was responsible at VA Tech?
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