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[jackofallchem]

     I am really surprised that things like this don't happen more often. I wonder if it will ever happen to one of my students.  A large number of undergraduates have had their perception of their lives shattered in my classes.  Imagine if you spent high school being told you were brilliant, going to be a doctor, the pride of the family, school, town etc. When you went to college, you expected all of this to continue, but you failed out after 1/2 a semester and had to leave school.  Your life has changed suddenly and not for the better.  Who do you blame?  Do you blame your family and former teachers who inflated your false pride, but failed to prepare you for life, or do you blame the mean professor who just doesn't understand what a unique and wonderful person you really are (and that is what is really important)?  
    It isn't just the naive freshman who are confronted with severe emotional stress in college.  In the graduate programs I have seen, it is rare that someone doesn't seriously want to drop out at some point because the of the emotional punishment.  Many people do quit because they can't take it anymore, some go on, and a very few just break.  
     College can be a very traumatic place and some people aren't going to take it very well. Some stress is needed to bring out the best in students (if you really want students to get the most out of their education, there will be some stress involved). I think we (faculty and administration) need to really think about whether all of the stress we put on students is necessary or not, however.  What can we do when it overwhelms students?  I don't know how to really help the underprepared, but high self-esteem student who crashes, but I would like someplace I could send them for help.  There is stress inherent in graduate school, but the stress that got to me and many of my friends the most was (in my opinion) unecessary stress caused interpersonal problems and a lack of any way to deal with them.  
      Don't think I am unsympathetic to what happened, I have friends at VPI&SU, but I hope that in the aftermath some of the issues above will be dealt with instead of the inevitable, pointless argument about gun control (murderous people are OK as long as you don't let them have weapons).

[spork]

Just for the record, my students are both male and female.

As for the Virginia Tech shooter, via AP:

"The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school's counseling service . . . "

I will not include the remainder of the wire report because it seems too speculatory.

From another source, I have information that in the dorm the shooter was involved in an altercation with the first female victim.  The first male victim was an RA who attempted to intervene in the dispute.  Since the shooter was already armed at the time he was in the dormitory, it appears he had already "snapped" (or decompensated, or whatever term you prefer).

Given what's coming over the AP, it sounds like the shooter DID exhibit certain signs of mental instability prior to the murders.

[merce]

I am sure many of us have had a great number of students with big attitude problems, mental instability.


I've wanted to suggest counseling to perhaps a dozen students.
I've had actual threats spoken in the classroom.
I've had a stalker.
I've had a number of students who struck me as scary/dangerous.


We just have to be aware I guess.

[cynical]

I sat in the rarefied atmosphere of Mozart's Coffee Bar listening to an excellent student opining about Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.  He sat near the front of a 45 student class and spoke often, asking intelligent questions and making sophisticated apercus.    He was the kind of student who other students admired.  The kind of student who makes other students think:  Why can't I come up with these questions, ideas, insights.

Until later that day, after I had encouraged him to pursue graduate studies, he strangled his girlfriend and abused her corpse.  Now he's serving life in prison. 

Sometimes you just don't know.  Sometimes you just cannot tell.  Turns out he had a fairly dangerous rap sheet, of which the Uni knew nothing. 

[spork]

There are all sorts of details coming out about Cho Seung-Hui that, if true, should have clued people in that he was having some sort of problem and that a serious intervention was called for:

- extremely uncommunicative both in and out of class
- no known social network
- stalking of female students
- treatment for depression
- writings that faculty believed were disturbing
- referral to campus counseling center

[illuminata]

Spork, I agree that it *appears* at this point that the young man who did the shooting was exhibiting troubling behaviors. I wonder who was treating his "depression" and what sorts of interventions were supposed to be taking place? Not to point fingers, but to learn from mistakes made. Of course, a sticky wicket for mental health folks is the right of the individual to refuse treatment- unless a client expresses intent to harm, he or she cannot be mandated for treatment.

And as I said earlier, although there may be indications of a broad problem with a student, identifying the potentially dangerous ones well enough to take action based on those indications is very slippery. None of us want students on campus who are homicidal, but identifying them is very hard- esp since most would deny such tendancies if directly questioned -very different from suicidal ppl who will generally admit it if asked direct questions.

Obviously, we don't know enough to prevent this from reoccuring. Much much work to do. It's tragic all around for everyone- including this kid's family in China.

[tenured_feminist]

This is why I like the system my old Uni had in place. It was not widely publicized, but I think it worked.  Counseling alone is only one part of the picture.  If a student really is in a bad way, you need to get campus security, res life, and faculty to the table along with the counselors.

I will never know if the one consult I was involved in made a difference.  But at the end of the day, nobody died and the student left campus quietly.

And again -- who knows if this is a piece of the VA Tech story or not at this point -- but we need to take violence and threats of violence against sexual intimates WAY more seriously.

[kilpikonna]

blcroft3, well spoken!

I appreciate that everybody wants to solve this problem, but I am pessimistic.  Massacres are a rare event and it is very nearly impossible to predict a rare event.  The false positives you'd get from watching the loners, the weirdos, the crash-and-burn-semester folks, the campus counseling visitors, the people who just aren't handling it -- they'd be huge, and they'd eat up, like, half this board.  How many of you guys were well-adjusted in college?  Better question -- how many of you were consistently well-adjusted through all of college?

This absolutely can't be solved through profiling, not unless you want to eject dozens of times more people than will ever pose a threat.  Simply can't be done.

[bfrank]

Unfortunately, in many universities the problem may not be whether a disturbed individual can be identified,
but instead the decision to ignore a disturbed individual who shows clear signs of being dangerous.  My impression of many people in academia is that they tend to try to avoid unpleasantness, even when it is obvious that a problem may have to be confronted.  In the case of this student I have to wonder whether those who counseled him saw a danger (particularly if he made threats), but could not compel themselves to take further steps.

With regards to lack of notification and action between the first and second shootings, I hope that VT made the decision not to close campus simply because they thought it woul "look bad", especially at the time when many prospective freshman are deciding which college to attend.  Remeber "Jaws"? 

[histgradstudent]

Eh... Look, obviously we should go with our gut sense on these kinds of things. If a student seems disturbed, or possibly violent or something, it makes sense to take appropiate actions, such as calling campus security or referrring them to counseling and if a student really creeps you out, then make a point to meet with them in a public place.

All of that said, when we are talking about something as strange, bizarre and rare as this, I'm not sure if it really is worth talking about what we can do to stop it. I can imagine ways to make sure this couldn't happen but none of them seem very appealing. We could put metal detectors on all campus buildings and hire armed guards to stand everywhere. Do we really want to do that though? Ditto for starting surveillance on every quiet, somewhat odd student. The truth is that the vast, vast, vast majority even of disturbed people aren't going to hurt anyone. Sometimes something is so abnormal that it isn't really worth trying to understand it. My guess is that in the next few weeks we are going to learn all kinds of things about this guy, and what he did still isn't going to make much sense. I don't know, I'm just pretty skeptical about anybody saying this has some larger cultural significance. I just don't think so.

I'll go out even farther on a limb -- in the Virginia Tech incident, apparently (I'm going with information that may be proven inaccurate, but it fits with other such killings) there was:

- a male student obsessed with a female student.

- the female student ended a relationship -- real or perceived -- with the male student.

- male student purchases weapons, large amounts of ammunition, and chains.

- male student kills ex-girlfriend and a male student who is perceived by the shooter as the new object of her affection.

- male student then proceeds to the location of his academic major (not confirmed, but let's assume this), in which his performance is not meeting his or others' expectations, and kills numerous people after chaining building doors shut from the inside.

I'm going to guess that the shooter showed signs of not being the "quiet Asian kid who did well in school and never bothered anyone."  Probably he exhibited obsessive behavior toward the female student, maybe made threatening remarks or whathaveyou.  I suspect this behavior had been intensifying for much of the semester.  I bet his academic performance was in a downhill slide as well.

[eumaios]

As Obscure and others have pointed out, mental illness or disorder does not equal dangerous and dangerous does not indicate diagnosed (or diagnosable) mental illness.

I don't know how a person can tell who's dangerous and who's not. Some of the scariest people I've known were happy-go-lucky, generous chaps--99.8 percent of the time. Then suddenly someone would be on the floor, bleeding.

I worked in a jewelry store a long time ago. One afternoon, a nice-looking young couple came in to buy wedding rings. They looked like all-American kids. They were polite and cheerful. The girl's mother was with them, beaming. While they were in the store, the young man treated his fiancee with what seemed to be real and tender affection. I measured their fingers and wrote up the order. The boy paid cash. We all congratulated them. "What sweet kids," we employees said to one another.

The next morning the police came to the store to ask us about the young guy. About an hour after I had sold him wedding rings, the boy picked up a girl in the video arcade in the mall. He drove her to a wooded place, raped and sodomized her, and stabbed her to death. The police hinted that this seemingly nice kid had nearly hacked his victim to pieces.

All you can do is keep on keepin' on.

[spork]

Unfortunately, in many universities the problem may not be whether a disturbed individual can be identified,
but instead the decision to ignore a disturbed individual who shows clear signs of being dangerous. 

You hit the nail on the head.  On NPR this afternoon was an interview with one of the perpetrator's English professors, the one who was very disturbed by his writings for class.  She stated in the interview that she contacted the campus police, student affairs, the counseling center, et al., and the response she got was "our hands are tied until he makes a specific threat."

Someone did notice, someone did do the right thing; the whole incident could have been prevented.

[reluctant_loudmouth]

Someone did notice, someone did do the right thing; the whole incident could have been prevented.

Or not.  Attempts to deal with an unstable student administratively might push such a student over the brink & actually cause a tragedy of precisely the same sort.  Do we know for sure that his actions at VT were not in response to administration's attempts to deal with faculty/students' complaints about him?

[histgradstudent]

Suppose he could have been expelled? What would have kept him from just coming back on campus? Might have happened anyway. Really, take away the violent disturbed writing and the description of this guy given by his roomate doesn't really sound all that different from my freshman roomate. He was also a weird guy, he also just sat at his computer a lot, he didn't have lots of friend and to be honest he did seem pretty angry in a creepy, repressed kind of way.
He still hasn't killed anyone as far as I know.

 I think there's a teological bias here. After something terrible like this has happened, everyone goes back and usually they find warning signs. At the time, none of it added up. When we see what happened it all comes together, but I guarantee you there are thousands of people who sounds like this guy who will never hurt anyone.
 
Anyway, I don't mean to get too technical. It is a terrible thing, but I think the immediate reaction to try to find some larger significance is understandable but misguided. I don't think this has much  to do with overindulgence of children, or isolation or anything else. This is a terrible thing, but it is also thankfully very unusual and very aberrant. 

Unfortunately, in many universities the problem may not be whether a disturbed individual can be identified,
but instead the decision to ignore a disturbed individual who shows clear signs of being dangerous. 

You hit the nail on the head.  On NPR this afternoon was an interview with one of the perpetrator's English professors, the one who was very disturbed by his writings for class.  She stated in the interview that she contacted the campus police, student affairs, the counseling center, et al., and the response she got was "our hands are tied until he makes a specific threat."

Someone did notice, someone did do the right thing; the whole incident could have been prevented.

[helpful]

Obviously, we don't know enough to prevent this from reoccuring. Much much work to do. It's tragic all around for everyone- including this kid's family in China.

Boy, are you way off..He was from South Korea and his family lived in suburban Washington, DC and he had lived there since 1992!