Universities and Mass Murderers

Few writers give much attention to how universities work as organizations. But there's some observations to be made in relation to the Virginia Tech massacre.

1. Nikke Giovanni is typical. In her comments on the Virginia Tech murderer, Cho Seung-Hui, the well-known poet Nikki Giovanni brought out two dimensions of faculty interaction with students. First, she emphasized that she has dealt with a wide variety of "troubled" and "crazy" students during her teaching career and that many students pursue murder and suicide themes in their writings. It's within that broader experience of dealing with large numbers of students that Giavanni readily identified Cho Seung-Hui as a particularly "mean"--aggressive, angry, sadistic--person who posed a danger.

Giovanni's working with difficult students is typical. In my seventeen years as a full-time professor, I've consulted with students about family traumas, drug abuse, eating disorders, depression, phobias, pathological insecurity, and family violence in the course of working with them in my classes. In fact, many of my most talented students have struggled with these issues. I also know English professors, historians, and social workers at my university who devote a fair amount of time and energy to student mental health and family issues. And I'm sure there are many more that I'm not aware of. Of course, professors can be as mistaken as anyone else, but college teaching is a helping profession and professors are often highly aware of troubled or dangerous students.

2. So Was Her Chair. Nikki Giovanni's consulting with her department chair about Cho Seung-Hui is also typical for the academic departments I've been around. When I have a difficult student issue, if I think students might file a complaint, or if I think my solution to a teaching problem might cause other problems, I usually consult with my chair and colleagues and some of my colleagues consult with me. Likewise, other professors also try to give chairs a "head's up" about difficult issues when they can. Cho Seung-Hui's disturbingly violent imagery and the surrepticious pictures he took of classmates raised troubling issues for Giovanni as a teacher. What was different about the problems posed by Cho Seung-Hui than other students. What was the best solution for dealing with the disturbances he was causing? Could she have Cho Seung-Hui removed from her class? What would she do if Cho appealed?

In the case of Cho Seung-Hui, Giovanni's chair solved the problem by taking him out of the class, meeting with him one on one for the rest of the semester, and pressing administrators to address the dangers he posed to faculty, other students, and himself. My chair (who I've had some epic battles with) has been very generous in this way as well. Department chairs have few resources other than their own time and energy for solving these kinds of student difficulties and Giovanni's chair took a typically self-sacrificing approach to the issue.

Campus Administrators: Just as the primary job of medical personnel is to tell people they aren't sick (a cardiologist told me yesterday that I didn't have a heart problem), a significant part of a campus administrator's job is to tell chairs, professors, and students that nothing can be done about their particular problem.

In a way, this is reasonable. Campus administrators have to address difficult budget issues on an annual basis, engage in an endless search for money, try to set overall priorities for the campus, and participate in a never-ending round of campus rituals. The rituals themselves take up a great deal of time and energy, especially during the spring semester as universities move toward graduation.

Because the efforts of chairs, profesors, and students to solve their own problems often creates problems (appeals, complaints, grievances, and lawsuits) for administrators, they have an inherent bias toward doing nothing in most cases.

That's what happened in the Virginia Tech case. Despite persistent efforts by the English Department Chair, the Virginia Tech administration decided that they could do nothing about all the danger signs coming from Cho Seung-Hui's English classes. Like most universities, Virginia Tech also had no mechanism for correlating the information on Cho Seung-Hui's class behavior with his sexual harassment of female students, suicide threats, and subsequent psychiatric evaluation.

This isn't to blame the Virginia Tech administration. They did what administrators at my university and most universities would have done. But 33 people are now dead and the inadequacy of administrative traditions were part of the process that led to the massacre. It's time for campus administrators to re-evaluate the ways that they deal with severe classroom and dorm problems.