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President Bush’s sanguineness
notwithstanding, college campuses are not sanctuaries of security where
nothing but high level intellectual maneuvers transpire. Never have been;
never will be. Yet, immediately after
Seung-Hui Cho went on his slaughter binge at Virginia Tech, the media were
awash in the fine art of grammatical contrary-to-fact punditry: They should
have done this. They shouldn’t have done that. Why didn’t 26,000 students
know immediately that they were in danger?
Who’s at fault? Well, folks, I’m here to tell
you that it doesn’t work that way on college campuses. You can install
state-of-the-art security and communications systems until the next tsunami
hits, and you’re still not going to prevent a student gone mentally haywire from
wreaking havoc. Part of the problem is the concept of campus itself. The
very idea that a walled-off bailiwick of dormitories and classroom buildings
constitutes a natural social environment is psychologically bizarre. Add the
fact that many of these islands of enclosure are situated in small towns like
As Tech computer science
professor Roger Ehrich noted, ”What makes this university unusual is that
it’s a social island far from the urban atmosphere of most major colleges.”
And that’s fine, as long as you think that social and cultural segregation is
normal. Consider too the type of people
being thrown together in close-quarter living arrangements and forbidding
classrooms. For the most part they are socially immature young adults tossed
into a great mixing bowl with other socially immature young adults. Raging
hormones abet a constant socialization process. Yet they’re being asked to
handle all that and pass French 101 too. Little wonder that Plato advised
that higher education not kick in until age 30. According to one recent study,
more than half of college students are clinically depressed, and nine percent
have considered suicide. Colleges are constantly battling the abuse of
alcohol and drugs. Away from home and lacking the
type of cultural and social outlets that a more urban environment might
offer, students turn to selective organizations like fraternities and
sororities to provide a sense of belonging and the security associated with
the in-crowd. Though college administrations extol diversity, the fact is
that minorities tend to form their own cliques and interact primarily within
their own groups. Yet, while group inclusion
fosters a certain degree of mental and emotional security for some, the
exclusionary nature of such a system can often lead to devastating results. I have counseled all too many
students whose academic performance has hit the skids as a result of being
rejected by fraternities or sororities, battling with roommates or simply
being on the fringe of a social structure fostered by the tight-knittedness
of a small-town campus environment. Some agreed to seek help from our
psychological counseling service. Others simply went home, never to return. A seemingly serene campus can
thus be an extremely cruel milieu for students who are unable to adapt to the
rigors of social norms as defined by those who have mapped out the turns it
takes to make your way through the labyrinth of four years of college. While I am no apologist for
Cho, I can, I think, surmise the origins of his motivations. Incessant
bullying for and the exclusion that derives from strange speech patterns,
minority status, low economic class, sexual orientation, devotion to
academics, aversion to sports or simply being “different” in terms of social
preferences place immense psychological pressures on loners and outcasts in
their late teens or early twenties. Where the breaking point occurs
for most of these individuals is hard to predict, though the warning signs
were certainly prevalent enough in the case of Cho to cause at least two of
his professors to raise a red flag. Having been there myself, and
having had my life threatened by disgruntled students on at least two
occasions, I can understand the position in which these Tech professors found
themselves. Federal and state laws are of
little help. They prohibit authorities from forcing a troubled student to
seek psychological counseling. Nor can counselors report mental illness to
parents if a student is 18 or older without his or her consent. While
students can be sent home if they contract communicable diseases, they cannot
be removed from campus because of mental illness unless they have committed a
threatening act. If anything positive is to come
out of the recent horror at Virginia Tech, it should be a thorough discussion
of how we treat mental illness on our campuses. In addition, there should be
an immediate relaxation of the laws that so minimize the options for professors
and campus administrators dealing with troubled students. While the fact that someone
like Cho was able to buy a handgun and a semiautomatic weapon when a judge
had earlier declared him mentally incompetent is an issue that begs clarification, it is, in the final
analysis, tangential to the real cause for his homocidal rebellion. Make no mistake about it. There
are other Chos out there. But until we deal with the incentives for their withdrawal,
their anger and their delusional decisions, changing gun laws or upgrading
security and communications systems will be tantamount to spitting in the
wind. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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