Mental-Health Lawyers Caution Colleges Against Disciplining Students for Emotional Difficulties

From The Chronicle: :

College administrators should be careful not to discriminate against troubled students in response to Seung-Hui Cho's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, psychologists and lawyers said at a news briefing on Thursday.

Violent behavior is rare among people with mental illness, said Robert Bernstein, a psychologist and executive director of the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which sponsored the briefing. Students should feel comfortable seeking counseling without worrying that their colleges will discipline them, said Karen A. Bower, a senior staff lawyer for the center.

Colleges' various policies on students' mental health show that the institutions are just beginning to navigate that terrain, Mr. Burnim said. The Bazelon Center plans to release soon a model policy that would encourage students to seek treatment and ensure that any disciplinary action is based on dangerousness and not discrimination, said Ms. Bower.

Freedom to Discuss Virginia Tech?

From Inside Higher Ed: :

Emmanuel College last week urged all professors to talk to students about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. One adjunct who did so for about 10 minutes — but not in the way Emmanuel envisioned — was promptly fired and barred from the campus.

Nicholas Winset and his supporters see his dismissal as a violation of academic freedom and an example of the way colleges may overreact to a nationally traumatic event. Winset also says that key details about his class discussion provide context that has been lacking in some initial reports on the incident. He has posted a detailed discussion of the class that got him fired ...

From a blog posting in response (note that quotes were not made in specific response to this particular controversy):

"What in the Hell is going on Emmanuel College. Civility? ... CIVILITY??? ... on a college campus? About that Guido Calabresi, former Dean of the Yale Law School, once said, “It was tasteless, even disgusting, but that’s beside the point. Free expression is more important than civility in a university.”

And in “The Community of Scholars,” my old friend Paul Goodman said, “It is my thesis that the agent of this clinch is administration and the administrative mentality among teachers and even the students. It is the genius of administration to enforce a false harmony in situations that should be rife with conflict.

If only...

The networks cancel The Cho Show.
By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine:

When a major story like Virginia Tech breaks, viewers linger, wanting to know more. There's nothing wrong with that expectation. But having committed to going wall-to-wall with the Cho murders, the networks are too cowardly to tell viewers that only 30 minutes of essential Cho story exists, and that viewers should feel free to turn their sets off after they watch that much. Instead, the networks added soy extender and sawdust to inflate 30 minutes of solid news into a six- or seven-hour marathon.

There's a path around this quandary. In his book The Language of New Media, scholar Allen Bells reports how the BBC responded in 1930 when it was confronted with a 'shortage of news deemed worthy to broadcast.' The Beeb didn't dress up yesterday's broadcast with new comments from another expert. Instead, the announcer would admit, 'There is no news tonight.'

If only today's broadcasters were as honest.

What if...?

Va. Tech Anguishes Over Missed Signals
From The New York Times:

But in three, hour-long talks that began that October day, [the teacher] tentatively edged away from the lesson plan for her class of one, moving beyond poetry and drawing the darkly troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho, into a tortured and all-too-brief conversation about the human need for friendship and the pain of being trapped inside oneself.

Looking back, it may have been the closest anyone ever came to reaching the brooding loner before he metamorphosed into the gunman responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history....

It is only now that she asks herself: What if ...?

How many such "what ifs" arise in the life of every teacher? Cho's teachers at Virginia Tech probably did more than most. Is there a better way?

Troubled Students: What is a university to do?

From The New York Times: "Laws Limit Options When a Student Is Mentally Ill
By TAMAR LEWIN

Federal privacy and antidiscrimination laws restrict how universities can deal with students who have mental health problems.

For the most part, universities cannot tell parents about their children’s problems without the student’s consent. They cannot release any information in a student’s medical record without consent. And they cannot put students on involuntary medical leave, just because they develop a serious mental illness.

Nor is knowing when to worry about student behavior, and what action to take, always so clear. ...

Universities can find themselves in a double bind. On the one hand, they may be liable if they fail to prevent a suicide or murder. After the death in 2000 of Elizabeth H. Shin, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had written several suicide notes and used the university counseling service before setting herself on fire, the Massachusetts Superior Court allowed her parents, who had not been told of her deterioration, to sue administrators for $27.7 million. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

On the other hand, universities may be held liable if they do take action to remove a potentially suicidal student. In August, the City University of New York agreed to pay $65,000 to a student who sued after being barred from her dormitory room at Hunter College because she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt.

Also last year, George Washington University reached a confidential settlement in a case charging that it had violated antidiscrimination laws by suspending Jordan Nott, a student who had sought hospitalization for depression.

“This is a very, very difficult and gray area..."

Intra-UW exchange on guns and deterrence

"E pur si muove!":

These killers go into schools and playgrounds because they feel safe there. Don't you think it is time to interfere with their government-given sense of security? If an armed professor or student had brought the Blacksburg killer down, it would have saved innocent lives immediately. It would also have given the next insane murderer reason to pause and go elsewhere, or maybe just to either seek help or keep his evil thoughts to himself.

My libertarian UW philosopher colleague Lester Hunt argues that the Virginia Tech massacre calls for more guns (and less regulation), not fewer guns (and more regulation). He is neither the first nor the last to do so. Perhaps if everyone had guns, the killers would be dispatched before their toll got quite so high. But the notion that this would be much of a deterrent frankly eludes me. Very few of these deranged individuals leave the scene alive, dying either by their own hand or in an exchange of fire with police.

UTexas law professor Sandy Levinson has argued that liberals have been badly served (politically) and almost totally ineffective (in affecting access to guns) in their efforts at gun control. (He also thinks there is more to the NRA's Second Amendment arguments than do most fellow liberals.) While I would support restrictive federal legislation (I agree with Sandy that "hit or miss" legislation by individual states is pretty fruitless --except perhaps in reducing accidental and spontaneous familial shootings), I'm not inclined to hold my breath waiting for it, any more than after numerous political assassination attempts and other massacres. Chalk it up to American exceptionalism (or focused insanity) on this topic.

For a view criticizing this position, and Democrats who shy away from gun control, see: Why Democrats dumped gun control | From Salon News:

'The solution isn't to clam up on guns,'... 'but rather to change the terms of the gun debate ... It's time for Democrats -- and progressive Republicans -- to embrace a 'third way' gun policy that treats gun ownership as neither an absolute right nor an absolute wrong and that calls for a balance between gun rights and gun responsibilities. To win elections, Democrats need to reason with gun owners rather than insult them.'

And if that doesn't do it for you, try this:
From Salon.com: By Walter Shapiro
Repeal the Second Amendment

The best way to reduce the odds of another blood bath like the one at Virginia Tech is to amend the Constitution and abolish the right to bear arms.

One of the 32: Remembering Liviu Librescu

Intersecting on a Fateful Day, Lives That Spanned the Country and the World - New York Times:

Liviu Librescu, 76, a professor who had done groundbreaking work in aeronautical engineering, was born in Romania and survived the Holocaust, only to be killed on Yom Hashoah, the international day that commemorates Holocaust victims.

Students said Professor Librescu had blocked the door to his classroom to prevent the gunman from entering. A daughter-in-law, Ayala Librescu, who lives in Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, told Ynet, the Web site of the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot: “He must have realized that the murderer was approaching. He saved his students and was killed by gunshots.”

For more on Professor Librescu:

Slain Israeli Professor Saved Others in Va. Tech Massacre - From Arutz Sheva