As details emerge about the Virginia Tech shooter, I can't help but feel an eerie familiarity about the killer, Cho Sung Hui.
News accounts paint Hui as a loner who stalked girls, wrote disturbing poems and plays, who teachers, roomates, and police describe as "creepy"--so many red flags, so many attempts to deal with him, all failed. Why?
It's not like this was just a normal guy who snapped one day. For years, everyone around the guy knew something was wrong with him and did everything they could to bring attention to what they felt was a highly disturbed person.
The system failed the students and faculty at VTech, and the system that allowed this to happen will continue to fail us unless we wake up to the realities of living in a hyper-violent society.
More below.
First, let me tell you a little bit of background about me that lends me some authority on this subject. I've been a writing teacher at a university since 2000. When I was still just an intern, a young man who had been struggling in class told me if he didn't pass his portfolio, he'd climb a tower and spray the campus with bullets. This was just two days after the Columbine shootings. Freaked out by his comment, I told my mentor teacher about it, who in turn told the Department Chair about it. The student was interviewed, professed to be "just kidding," and the matter was dropped.
Luckily, the student passed, and no one was harmed.
Since then, I've read my share of disturbing student writing. One girl admitted in her journal that she was suicidal, and I immediately walked her to the counseling center and sat with her while she filled out the paper work necessary to begin counseling. Another girl confessed that she was cutting, and again, I had to intervene.
I'm an English teacher, and as such, am privvy to more information about students than math teachers or biology teachers. Students use their writing to confess, to work through problems, to express pent up emotions. They trust us with their inner most thoughts and feelings. We are, therefore, in a position to know things about students that we may not want to know. Because of this, we sometimes read things that concern us.
Even on my small university campus, English teachers have been threatened, stalked, and intimidated. We've had numerous incidences where students have written disturbing journal entries or essays, and we always take these seriously. There are systems in place that are supposed to safeguard us and our students. When we feel a student is a danger to himself/herself or to others, we document and report it, just as the English profs at VTech did.
Yet, those systems failed in Virginia, and we must ask why. Reports tell us the police had been called because he was stalking female students. He had been referred to counseling twice, and voluntarily committed himself to an institution. Professors removed him from the classroom, yet he was still allowed to attend VTech. WHY? At what point does "freedom of expression" or "Just kidding" or "I'm sorry" give way to the realities of living in America today? Why didn't someone in authority expel him? Why was he allowed to continue there without a clean bill of mental health from a professional counselor?
Students and faculty are quite aware that at any time, a student can snap and harm those around him. That is the reality of living and working in the school system. We've seen too many incidences of school shootings not to realize it can happen to us. Just last year, our building was on lockdown because of a disturbed man who made threats against members of the department. Yet, we still cling to our liberal arts notions, our "cloisterd wall" philosophies that our young students are there to read Keats and sprawl out on univeristy lawns.
We need to wake up. We need to realize that the universities, just like the high schools and middle schools, are no longer safe from the violence that permeates every aspect of our society.
We need stronger policies and vigilant enforcers who aren't afraid to expel or prosecute these ticking time bombs. God Bless those teachers at VTech who tried to keep their students safe by removing Hui from the classroom, but dammit to hell, next time a teacher comes across a student like this, he or she needs to do more than privately tutor the student in her office. All of us who teach need to consider the group before the individual's "rights" to be creepy and violent.
I know that this incident will be masticated and analyzed from every angle, but to me, teaching is my life, and I take responsibility for the safety of my students. I will no longer hope and pray a disturbed student is "just kidding" when he expresses dangerous intentions, either directly or indirectly.
I challenge all teachers to take this matter to heart and vow to put the group before the individual.