The Cost of Freedom?

Wednesday, April 25, at 1:10 p.m., U.S. Eastern Time

Katherine S. Newman is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. She is the author, with Cybelle Fox, David J. Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth, of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (Basic Books, 2004).

A transcript of the chat follows.

Karen Winkler (Moderator):
    Hello, and welcome to our live chat with Katherine S. Newman. I'm Karen Winkler, a senior editor with The Chronicle Review, and I'll be your moderator today. Katherine is the Malcolm Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and the incoming Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. Her essay for The Review on the causes of rampage shootings is based on the research she and four former graduate students at Harvard University did at the request of the National Academy of Sciences, published as Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Basic Books, 2004. Katherine, welcome. Let's get to the first question.

Question from Karen Winkler:
    You mention in your essay that school shootings grew in frequency in the late 1990s. Are they something basically new to our contemporary era?

Katherine S. Newman:
    We tend to count things we can categorize and hence before we started thinking about this kind of multiple homicide as a special category of events, we didn't really count them. I thought the earliest ones began in the 1970s until I was interviewed for a Discovery channel documentary (which will be airing in a couple of weeks, I believe) about Bob Bechtel, a professor of environmental psychology in Arizona, who shot a student in his college dorm at Dartmouth in the 1950s, was sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, and released after four years. I had never heard of this case and, truth be told, it would not have been in my "count" because there was only one fatality. The oldest case that would have fit my definition was the 1966 sniper case at the Univ of Texas. So, they are not "new" but they do seem to have been increasing in frequency, albeit from a very tiny base (and they are thankfully still quite rare).

Question from Jennifer Ruark, CHE:
    The criminologist James Alan Fox has said that the profile of high-school shooters, like the ones at Columbine, is different from that of college-age shooters -- that the latter are more likely to kill themselves and are not seeking notoriety. Do you agree, and if so, how useful is that distinction?

Katherine S. Newman:
    I have great respect for Professor Fox, but in this instance, we disagree completely. One cannot look at Cho and see someone who was not seeking notoriety. Why else would he prepare the videos? Likewise, many high school shooters do kill themselves or put themselves in a situation where they will be killed by others. The main difference I see between Cho and the shooters I studied is that he was about 10 years older and that much farther down the line in the progression of mental illness. The shooters in Rampage were 11, 13, and 14 and the evidence we have on their mental stage suggests very early onset of the kind of psychotic disorder that Cho presented in a more full blown form.

Question from Mitch Gerber, CHE:
    At the end of your essay in The Chronicle, you say that the price we pay for our civil liberties "will be debated for years to come." Where do you come down in that debate? Should civil liberties be constrained in an effort to avoid just such incidents as the one at Virginia Tech?

Katherine S. Newman:
    This is one of the hardest questions to answer. I do think we need to develop a clear standard that will determine when a person who has been legally determined to be "a danger to others" should be asked to leave the campus. We have a responsibility to our students and to ourselves to insure a safe environment. Yet we need to do that in a way that is nuanced and not knee jerk. It needs to be a high bar. But the Virginia Tech case tells us that this standard is not in place or not sufficiently informed by relevant background data. And that seems to me insufficient.

Question from Peter Schmidt, CHE:
    We often hear about bullying at elementary and secondary schools and efforts to fight it. How much of a factor do you see it being in life on college campuses? Do you see higher education institutions doing much about it, or responding to it with much sophistication?

Katherine S. Newman:
    The bullying problem is really an adolescent issue in today's world for the most part. A variant of it -- hazing -- is a problem on many college campuses, but it tends to be visited on those who are trying to join rather select groups (fraternities, etc.) rather than the ubiquitous experience it is in junior high and high school settings. Universities have tried to regulate hazing, but have not always been successful.

Question from Linda Campbell, liberal arts college:
    In the case of college students, who are in the process of becoming independent adults, but are still supported by their parents, have their privacy guarded been over and above their parents need and responsibility to be informed?

Katherine S. Newman:
    The age of adulthood is a topic of considerable research interest for me now. I think our concepts about rights have not kept pace with the sociology of independence. The kind of adulthood kids had at 18 when I was in college now accrues to people in their mid-20s. So yes, I think students in college still need their family's support and if they are ill, their parents should be informed, particularly if it is life threatening.

Question from Dallas, Texas:
    According to your research, what role does gender play? Since all of the shooters you mention are young boys, does your research draw any conclusions about men being hard-wired for violent rampages?

Katherine S. Newman:
    I absolutely reject the notion that men are "hard wired" for violence. I think we live in a cultural milieu that projects manliness through violence, but there is nothing biological about that. When my father was young, Humphrey Bogart was a matinee idol and the picture of manhood. How did we get from that slim, brooding, intellectual to Rambo? We have taken a cultural turn in the last forty years in how we think of manhood and it has heavily influenced our youth in ways that are destructive. The real men (fathers, neighbors) don't look like or act like Rambo, but popular culture doesn't portray that variety of masculinity.

Karen Winkler (Moderator):
    We're getting close to the half-way mark. Keep sending your questions.

Question from Mark, Goucher College:
    To what degree do you feel students who have observed strange or scary behavior should be held responsible if they do NOT report it to the college?

Katherine S. Newman:
    We cannot hold them legally responsible. They hold themselves morally responsible. There is no legal requirement to report on scary behavior and I don't think we can create one. But I do think it is critical for young people to recognize that they are the -- for the most part -- the only ones who will be privy to information that can serve as a warning and that coming forward is an act of responsibility, not a betrayal of a confidence. We have to be sure, in turn, that they have someone trustworthy to come forward to.

Question from Anonymous:
    How could a society prevent abuse (political or personal) of a system that would involuntarily lock up or otherwise restrain someone like Cho?

Katherine S. Newman:
    The requirements for involuntary commitment are extremely stringent and probably properly so. Indeed, Cho could not be restrained even when it would have been in our (and his) best interest to do so. I think we have to keep our stringent requirements, but improve our reporting systems so that we know instantaneously when such a decision has been reached. We do not want to turn into a police state, but we have an obligation to protect the public and balancing those requirements requires sensitivity and thorough review and revisiting over and over again to insure a degree of responsibility. Depriving someone of their liberty is a very serious act; depriving others of their lives is just that much worse.

Question from Anonymous:
    In your research, did you find a pattern that allowed these young men to acquire guns and other weapons?

Katherine S. Newman:
    For the most part, they acquired the guns by taking them from family members who had them secured in their homes. They did not buy the weapons. But they lived in places where guns were readily available. Cho purchased his, but in this he was unusual compared to the kids I studied. Ironically, older people in these areas argued that guns were much LESS part of daily life now than they were when they were young. In their youth, people brought rifles to school every day during the hunting season. No one does that any more.

Question from Paul Fain, CHE:
    The Cho case seems to be an outlier, given the much higher number of people he killed as compared to other school shooters you've studied. How do you account for this difference? Do you suspect that he had different motives than the other killers?

Katherine S. Newman:
    The difference lies only in the amount of time he had to execute his plan, I'm sorry to say. I don't think his motives were any different that the others. He was looking to change his image from the invisible, incompetent person he felt himself to be to the powerful, manly, person in control -- as he was on his way out of this world. He was suicidal, particularly after the first two shootings, and simultaneously bent on creating an entirely different public persona than the character he had been in real life. And he did just exactly that. I think his motives were much the same as the others I've studied.

Question from Anonymous:
    Why do you think Cho Seung-Hui left his roommates unharmed? Does this fit into a "typical" pattern? Thank you.

Katherine S. Newman:
    From what I know at this point, and this is subject to revision as the situation clarifies, Cho shot people he did not know. At least there is no evidence from his computer of any link with the girl who died first. Perhaps he had a fantasy life with her, but we know of no actual connection. If that remains the case, then I think we could say that he went after people who were strangers to him -- people who were abstractions -- rather than people whom he knew, even if he refused to communicate with them. This abstraction pattern is quite typical. School shooters don't generally know who they've killed until after the fact. They aren't targeting individuals for the most part; they are targeting a pecking order, an institution, a community.

Question from Andrew Mytelka, CHE:
    Could you comment on the rash of copycat episodes across higher ed in which people threatened violence citing Virginia Tech? (The links below are to episodes we mentioned on The Chronicle's News Blog.) It seems that colleges and local police have overreacted, and local and national news media have played along.

http://chronicle.com/news/article/2165/3-more-colleges-disrupted-by-threats-amid-post-virginia-tech-fears

http://chronicle.com/news/article/2163/bomb-threats-shut-down-college-in-mississippi

http://chronicle.com/news/article/2154/yale-warns-theater-audiences-that-any-weapons-on-stage-are-fakes

http://chronicle.com/news/article/2142/college-fires-adjunct-who-shot-students-in-class-to-make-a-point

http://chronicle.com/news/article/2131/u-of-colorado-police-find-2-guns-in-students-dorm-room

Katherine S. Newman:
    Copycat "wannabees" are very common after school shootings. All kinds of bizarre people come out of the woodwork. Indeed, I often hear from a few myself after a network TV interview. We are a fame-addicted culture and people who are a little unbalanced are looking for their share. That said, copycats in the immediate aftermath have not engaged in the kind of advanced planning that Cho and the other rampage school shooters have conducted. Copycats long after the fact often follow a very similar path, sometimes dedicating themselves to exceeding the death toll of the last major shooting. Cho clearly gave a lot of thought to glorifying the Columbine shooters.

Question from Ted Weidlein, CHE:
    Have you moved on to new areas of research, or are you continuing to study school shootings? What other scholarly work is being done in this field that you find important? Do the events at Virginia Tech suggest new lines of inquiry?

Katherine S. Newman:
    The school shooting project was almost an accident as my principle lines of research at the time were in the field of urban poverty and economic insecurity. Rampage was such an exhaustive effort that I don't know what else I (or my coauthors) could add to what we already did. The cases I have commented on since we completed it fit the patterns we described fairly well. What I would like to do is continue conveying our ideas and make them as publicly accessible as possible. It is an opportunity for relevant scholarship that I value. I think the lines of inquiry post VT will have to do with policy change more than anything else.

Question from Mae, private liberal arts U:
    Even when Universities are aware of problems, the courts have not been supportive of institutions attempting to suspend or bar from campus students that they consider suicidal or otherwise dangerous. (see the CHE article "Sounding the Alarm). Yet they have also been found negligent when NOT contacting parents when a child does harm his/herself. What is a University to do?

Katherine S. Newman:
    This is exactly the issue that I think will be front and center as a consequence of V Tech. My guess is that universities will become more proactive in reaching out to parents and risk that liability because it is far less damaging and easier to explain than the reticent response. But that's sheer speculation on my part. It does seem to me that anyone who has been declared a danger to others has to be excluded immediately.

Question from David Glenn, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
    In a recent essay, Russell Hardin of NYU described the argument you present in Rampage:

An extreme case of small community effects is to give misfits no place to feel at home in their own communities. Katherine Newman et al. (2004) attribute the mass killings over the past few years in high schools in Columbine (Colorado), Westside (Arkansas), and Heath (Kentucky), to the chilling uniformity and predictable stability that such communities effectively impose on their members. In such towns, networks overlap. Your current neighbors went to school with you, your child's teacher is in your church, and you coach the little league team for which your child's school mate plays. Any child who gets into trouble in one of these contexts will soon have a reputation in all of them.

But that same dynamic wouldn't necessarily seem to apply in a much larger and more setting like Virginia Tech. To what extent do you believe that those same "small community effects" operate on large college campuses?

Katherine S. Newman:
    You are right to a degree. The predominant pattern in high school shootings has been that they unfold in small, isolated, rural towns that are extremely high in social capital -- very stable, very integrated across generations. That stability works very well for those who get along socially, but it is like a life sentence for the marginal. Virginia Tech is not in a big city, but it is certainly larger than Westside, Arkansas (population about 3,000 if you total up all surrounding areas). Nonetheless, someone who is very sick and isolated as an individual can come to perceive a pecking order that he cannot surmount. There is more than one route to marginality and he found it.

Question from burton.bollag@chronicle.com:
    On the issue of gun control, there appear to be two opposing reactions to the tragedy. Some feel restrictions on carrying handguns on campuses prevented the chance that someone with his own gun might have been around when the shooting started, and might have courageously intervened by shooting back at the killer. Others feel the rather extreme ease with which almost anyone can purchase guns enables such tragedies. I doubt both are right...

Katherine S. Newman:
    Personally, I favor gun control. I cannot conceive of any reason why a civilian should have an automatic weapon that can fire hundreds of rounds. If it was harder to get ahold of guns, people who are ambivalent (not quite as dedicated as Cho) would find it more difficult to pursue a plot. That said, this is not a remedy for someone who is as dedicated as Cho. Before V Tech, the worst massacre of this kind took place in Germany, which has tighter gun control than anything we will ever see. I'm afraid we have to deal in probabilities and not absolutes. Gun control will not stop all of these shootings; it will stop some. The idea that we should teach in an environment where are students are armed strikes me as insane. I would never work in a university that permitted weapons. Would you?

Question from Josh Fischman of The Chronicle of Higher Education:
    A judge sealed materials from Columbine containing depositions from the parents of the shooters. The given rationale was that the judge feared the information would inspire copycat crimes. Is that a real risk? And is it outweighed by the value of that information to other parents and teachers and counselors and other students, who might use it to spot warning signs of growing sociopathic behavior in young people?

Katherine S. Newman:
    There is ample material floating out there on the air waves to add fuel to the imagination of copy cat wannabees. I don't think those depositions would make the situation worse. Indeed, I'm a little skeptical of the rationale here. It was extremely hard for me to get my hands on equivalent reports in the cases I studied, but where I could, nothing was more valuable in allowing me to peer inside the mind of the shooter. Prevention will be impossible without these kinds of documents.

Question from Andrea Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education.:
    Why are students who are forewarned of a colleague's plans to carry out a shooting often reluctant to notify authorities and perhaps prevent a tragedy from occurring?

Katherine S. Newman:
    There is a whole chapter in our book called "Why Kids Don't Tell" and it details all the reasons we discovered in our research. Here are some: (1) they don't understand the underlying meaning of what they have been told because the threats are more like ambiguous hints; (2) they lack confidence in adults/authorities regarding confidentiality; (3) they don't want to betray a friend; (4) they aren't sure the shooter is serious and hence worry about fingering him falsely. These things change in the aftermath of a case like this because the stunning reality becomes clear and the meaning of threats assumes greater clarity.

Question from Don Troop, CHE:
    Can anything positive emerge from this latest rampage, and if so, what?

Katherine S. Newman:
    I think we will re-examine policies on dealing with students who are mentally disturbed. Universities will think more about warning systems, about ways to reach students quickly if an incident happens. And with luck, we will tighten up the data recording system that should have popped Cho's name out when he went to purchase a gun. That would not have stopped him acquiring weapons another way. It just would have made it a little harder. Otherwise, it is a terrible tragedy from which many will never, ever recover.

Karen Winkler (Moderator):
    That's all we have time for. Katherine, many thanks for talking with us.