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[merce]

That one isn't the only creepy student I've had. And I'm in first year out of grad school!!!
I've had plenty of "weird" kids. Youth is about being weird and rebelling against the norm. It's hard to say when a killing spree will come from behavior we've seen again and again.

That's just it, though, "behavior we've seen again and again," isn't necessarily normal behavior.

And as I tell my students as they work through their theses: So what?
What is your point?
How does that help us?
What can we get from common behavior not being normal?

... It's not normal.

So what?

I still don't know what to do with that-- the distinction between normal and not-normal.
If you were to ask me, I'd say tons of people I know could be potential killers.

[prytania3]

Let me see...let's keep all handguns, but lock everyone up who doesn't act normal.

Well, there's your solution.

[neutralname]

That one isn't the only creepy student I've had. And I'm in first year out of grad school!!!
I've had plenty of "weird" kids. Youth is about being weird and rebelling against the norm. It's hard to say when a killing spree will come from behavior we've seen again and again.

That's just it, though, "behavior we've seen again and again," isn't necessarily normal behavior.

And as I tell my students as they work through their theses: So what?
What is your point?
How does that help us?
What can we get from common behavior not being normal?

You're still in graduate school, and I've earned my Ph.D. already so there's no need to help me work through a thesis.

Apparently there is such a need.  You haven't said what you would do in the case of a college student, or what you would count as a useful reaction.  You can't send college students to the school psychologist.  Maybe you could would have the power to send them to a dean.  Would that help?  Probably not much.

I taught writing for nearly seven years at the college level, and I didn't ever have a student write about anything such as killings or shooting sprees. I created a positive environment, and I actually couldn't picture myself reading those types of papers. I set some boundaries in my class. Now, maybe some people would consider that limiting their creativity. I didn't see it that way. I also had experience working with seventh graders in special ed classes. If I found them drawing pictures with anything that resembled violence or blood and gore, I would document it and give it to the school psychologist. It's not normal.

Such confidence in knowing what is normal!  Such confidence in predictions of dangerousness!  But based on what?  It's amazing to me that once you take a person from their area of expertise, they will still act like an expert.  Do a literature search, read the psychiatry and criminology journals, talk to some of the people who work in this area, and then come back and say if you are so confident of your claims.

[smart_e_pantz]

Forgive me for saying something unpopular, but I don't think universities should admit students who have a history of mental illness. Protection of the many should always take precedence over giving the benefit of the doubt to an individual. There is no constitutional right to a college education.

One of the professors in my graduate program was a paranoid schizophrenic.  She was no danger to others but a serious danger to herself.  As long as she was on her medication she was completely functional (and everyone knew when she went off her meds and there were others professors in the department who could and would walk her through the process of getting back on her meds).

She was also quite brilliant.  She wrote one of the seminal books on a major theorist in the discipline that is still being assigned in the discipline twenty years later.  She was also the only professor I ever had who could break sociological theory down enough so I could actually understand what the hell those theorists were writing about.

If we applied your standard, our discipline would have been deprived of a brilliant mind.  This would have been an unfortunate loss to us all--particularly since there were so many other ways of dealing with her problems short of barring her from the classroom.

[smart_e_pantz]

I also agree with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" re: lawsuits.

Just look at what happened after the MIT suicide.  This girl had attempted suicide before entering MIT and had been hospitalized while at MIT and her parents were informed about this.  Instead of her parents keeping her out of MIT until she could get stable, they sent her right back.  When she committed suicide, these same parents turned around and sued MIT for not doing enough.

So, to avoid lawsuits like this many colleges passed policies to remove students from campus who exhibited signs of being a danger to themselves.  The result...  a slew of lawsuits from students who have been removed because of these new polices.  So, we are holding colleges responsible for both not doing enough and doing too much.  Colleges are are just screwed because there is nothing they can do that isn't going to piss someone off!

[iomhaigh]

That one isn't the only creepy student I've had. And I'm in first year out of grad school!!!
I've had plenty of "weird" kids. Youth is about being weird and rebelling against the norm. It's hard to say when a killing spree will come from behavior we've seen again and again.

That's just it, though, "behavior we've seen again and again," isn't necessarily normal behavior.

And as I tell my students as they work through their theses: So what?
What is your point?
How does that help us?
What can we get from common behavior not being normal?

You're still in graduate school, and I've earned my Ph.D. already so there's no need to help me work through a thesis. I taught writing for nearly seven years at the college level, and I didn't ever have a student write about anything such as killings or shooting sprees. I created a positive environment, and I actually couldn't picture myself reading those types of papers. I set some boundaries in my class. Now, maybe some people would consider that limiting their creativity. I didn't see it that way. I also had experience working with seventh graders in special ed classes. If I found them drawing pictures with anything that resembled violence or blood and gore, I would document it and give it to the school psychologist. It's not normal.

Just because you can control (according to your post) the content of your student's papers, that does not mean that you can control their thoughts and behaviors.  If you think you are immune from a student snapping in your class just because you create a positive environment.... woe betide you.  

Rebelling is pretty normal for teenagers.  Merce has a valid point.  There are no easy ways of predicting who will become violent.  Just because someone is a little weird, antisocial or just plain strange does mean that they are going to have a violent outburst.  

Feel free to PM me when your first student has an outburst and chucks a chair at you, and for your sake, I sincerely hope it is only a chair or some verbal abuse.   I won't be as narrow-minded and dismissive as you are currently being, and it will be horrifying to have your precious world shattered.  Trust me -- it is horrifying even to those of us who do not labor under the illusion that we can tell "normal" from "abnormal" and that violence will never touch us because we have control over our classrooms.  You cannot hide from violent students by not allowing them to write on violent topics or pretending that they are not there or that you can tell who they are.  It is easier to handle that outburst if you are not fooling yourself.  Trust me on this one -- I've been there.  Repeatedly.  (Indeed, I sometimes think that Merce has taken over for the students I taught at my former school.)      

I know that we are all struggling with this, and I know that you are wishing that schools could do more than they can, but these are adult students we are talking about.  You cannot force someone into therapy.  You cannot force someone to comply with your standard of normal.  They cannot commit someone unless they are a danger to themselves or another or are willing to be committed.  Until there is a verifiable threat uttered, you cannot just go locking up the "not-normal" people willy nilly.  This has nothing to do with people fearing lawsuits and everything to do with civil liberties.  

And anyway, depsite all this desire to make the world a safe place full of normal people.... we can't do it.  Cannot.  Not going to happen.  

(And, seriously, from one PhD with more than seven years of college level teaching experience to another: are we not supposed to learn from our students?  Does that not presume that from time to time our students might have something to teach us?  Are we infallible?  Is there a need to pull rank because one of our students points out a flaw in our logic?  Worse, is there a need to pull rank when one of our colleagues does so?  Since when does a piece of paper and the number of years of teaching behind us determine our wisdom and worth?)  

[kilpikonna]

It's amazing to me that once you take a person from their area of expertise, they will still act like an expert.

Haha!  neutralname, I think I love you.

...But this sort of thing shouldn't be about anybody's area of expertise.  Everybody whose job involves drawing conclusions from data should have a grasp of the base-rate fallacy, which is really the principle in question here.  The probability of the data given the hypothesis is not the same thing as the probability of the hypothesis given the data.  And that means that when an event is really incredibly rare, warning signs don't mean sh!t.

[case_insensitive]

Here we have an example of people in positions of authority apparently making some fairly large assumptions about a person acting erratically who had uttered threats to classmates.  I don't care if such a threat

You may not have a choice. In my homestate (a patient's rights state), making threats is just making threats. Nothing can be done until the seemingly unbalanced actually attempts to hurt someone.  We learned this the hard way when my sister's ex kept calling and threatening to kill us.  He kept doing this despite being told we were recording every call.  We had loads of evidence, but nothing can be done, not even a psych eval, until someone has been hurt. Threats do not amount to enough evidence for force psych eval or anything else.

This differs very widely by state, though.

Forgive me for saying something unpopular, but I don't think universities should admit students who have a history of mental illness. Protection of the many should always take precedence over giving the benefit of the doubt to an individual. There is no constitutional right to a college education.

Where is the line to be drawn then, between those who are just a bit unbalanced but are still allowed in college adn those that are a "threat to the many."  I don't know anyway to operationalize that.  Not to mention, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of mental illness in many states.  Plus, the above mentioned "patient's rights" states won't let you do anything to one of those folks until they've PROVEN they are a danger.  One of the "prices" of freedom is that we have a very diverse society, which includes diversity in terms of mental and emotional abilities and disabilities, among many other variables.  I'm certainly not going to be the one to say "lock up this or" or "lock up that one" or "let that one run free instead."

[mytiaraisaskew]

"Maybe this student does write about macabre topics and killing, but he could be the next Quinton Tarantino. My gut instinct tells me this kid is troubled, but I don't really want to say anything in case I'm wrong."

That's the problem educators deal with today.

I confess to reading one of his plays, and trust me, he is not the next Quinton Tarantino. That said, the members of the English dept. had referred him to counseling and were keeping an eye on him; however, he hadn't done anything wrong really in the English dept. You can't lock someone up because he is a loner or writes macabre plays poorly.

The thing that gets to me is that his writings had to be totally over-the-top frightening.  Us English-type people have seen a lot of weird sh*t that passes for creativity (and sometimes it is, in fact, creative and weird sh*t all at the same time).  So you know his stuff had to be incredibly scary if TWO professors looked at it and said "yep, we've gotta try and do something here."  How sad that, try as they did, nothing came from their efforts.

[prytania3]

"Maybe this student does write about macabre topics and killing, but he could be the next Quinton Tarantino. My gut instinct tells me this kid is troubled, but I don't really want to say anything in case I'm wrong."

That's the problem educators deal with today.

I confess to reading one of his plays, and trust me, he is not the next Quinton Tarantino. That said, the members of the English dept. had referred him to counseling and were keeping an eye on him; however, he hadn't done anything wrong really in the English dept. You can't lock someone up because he is a loner or writes macabre plays poorly.

The thing that gets to me is that his writings had to be totally over-the-top frightening.  Us English-type people have seen a lot of weird sh*t that passes for creativity (and sometimes it is, in fact, creative and weird sh*t all at the same time).  So you know his stuff had to be incredibly scary if TWO professors looked at it and said "yep, we've gotta try and do something here."  How sad that, try as they did, nothing came from their efforts.

I only read 1/2 of one play, and it was so incredibly bad I didn't finish it, so I never got to the scary part.

[prytania3]

Here's a link to the plays. THere is also an interesting piece written by the classmate who submitted them. Evidently the whole class was worried that one day he'd get a gun and shoot them. Also, when he heard about the shootings, the first person who came to his mind was Cho. Sounds like they all knew they had a psycho on their hands, but there was nothing they could really do.

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/

[spork]

I also agree with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" re: lawsuits.

Just look at what happened after the MIT suicide.  This girl had attempted suicide before entering MIT and had been hospitalized while at MIT and her parents were informed about this.  Instead of her parents keeping her out of MIT until she could get stable, they sent her right back.  When she committed suicide, these same parents turned around and sued MIT for not doing enough.

So, to avoid lawsuits like this many colleges passed policies to remove students from campus who exhibited signs of being a danger to themselves.  The result...  a slew of lawsuits from students who have been removed because of these new polices.  So, we are holding colleges responsible for both not doing enough and doing too much.  Colleges are are just screwed because there is nothing they can do that isn't going to piss someone off!

What's better, one lawsuit from a pair of disgruntled parents whose child was barred from attending a university, or thirty-two lawsuits from parents of children who were killed by a student who should have been removed from campus but wasn't?

In the MIT case referenced above, and in the recent VT case, it seems to me very unlikely that the students in question were actually learning much while in college.  If they're so mentally unbalanced and/or socially maladjusted that they can't learn, why keep them there?

[neutralname]

In the MIT case referenced above, and in the recent VT case, it seems to me very unlikely that the students in question were actually learning much while in college.  If they're so mentally unbalanced and/or socially maladjusted that they can't learn, why keep them there?

If my school removed all the students who were distracted by personal problems to the extent that they were not learning much, but were just getting by, we would lose half our students.

[spork]

In the MIT case referenced above, and in the recent VT case, it seems to me very unlikely that the students in question were actually learning much while in college.  If they're so mentally unbalanced and/or socially maladjusted that they can't learn, why keep them there?

If my school removed all the students who were distracted by personal problems to the extent that they were not learning much, but were just getting by, we would lose half our students.

So be it.  There's too many people going to college anyway.

[asleepforyears]

I also agree with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" re: lawsuits.

Just look at what happened after the MIT suicide.  This girl had attempted suicide before entering MIT and had been hospitalized while at MIT and her parents were informed about this.  Instead of her parents keeping her out of MIT until she could get stable, they sent her right back.  When she committed suicide, these same parents turned around and sued MIT for not doing enough.

So, to avoid lawsuits like this many colleges passed policies to remove students from campus who exhibited signs of being a danger to themselves.  The result...  a slew of lawsuits from students who have been removed because of these new polices.  So, we are holding colleges responsible for both not doing enough and doing too much.  Colleges are are just screwed because there is nothing they can do that isn't going to piss someone off!

What's better, one lawsuit from a pair of disgruntled parents whose child was barred from attending a university, or thirty-two lawsuits from parents of children who were killed by a student who should have been removed from campus but wasn't?

Spork, I agree with your logic, however, I don't think anyone could have reasonably foreseen a shooting of this magnitude.  That and on a larger college campus, there might be more than one student bounced from classes for this kind of behavior in a given year!  Admittedly, I'm just throwing that out there as a possibility, but in a given year, I'm sure (especially english faculty) see more of this "creative" and/or "disturbing" writing. 

I work in a graduate admissions office, and we had an applicant for the previous cycle who was unable to procure hus transcripts (we found out later that the person hand outstanding bills at their previous university).  This individual sent what could easily be described as 'menacing' emails to multiple individuals in my office, talking about how hu almost 'joined a group of people who kill other people' just to get a "piece of paper" [college degree].  This person also came in to our office on occasion and exhibited strange behavior (beyond what would be normally considered "individualistic"). The emails went on and on in a disoriented and rambling fashion about how we women (most of us are female in this office) need to break free of... oh, I don't even know what-- that we were "the man" or something... anyway, we were so freaked out that we called the campus police to investigate it, because of the number and the tone of these emails.  We can't bar this person from being admitted, but they want to work in a K-12 school!!  Of course, they didn't pose a 'direct' threat.  And we couldn't legally bar them from admittance, because they aren't GUARANTEED to commit acts of violence.  Besides, I can't guarantee hu is mentally unbalanced, despite the strange behavior in the office, and the bizarre emails... so I have no 'grounds' to prevent his entree into the university.  I can't prove hu's a risk, and I can't prevent hum from coming here-- without facing a lawsuit. 

Maybe I'm off on a wild tangent at this point, but it's a sick game of probability when we pit "how many do we think we'd lose by keeping this person?"  And that makes me sad.  I don't really have a point except to express my frustration.