V-Tech & Unintended Consequences

The slaughter of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech by a disturbed gunman on April 16, 2007 had an impact on the American campus similar to the impact the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had on the entire nation. It became more than a loss of lives; it was a reminder that danger can strike at any time, and a warning shot urging a new vigilance. In the immediate aftermath, universities across the country rushed to tighten up their emergency procedures and to increase safety precautions.

Within two days of the shooting, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper initiated the formation of a Campus Safety Task Force. The Task Force’s final report was introduced six months later at the November Board of Governors meeting by Leslie Winner, UNC system vice president and General Counsel who chaired the commission. The Board of Governors passed the task force’s proposals resoundingly. Many of the resolutions that require no expenditures are already being implemented on individual UNC campuses.

Such urgent action raises some concern whether, in the climate of fear caused by the Virginia Tech gunman’s rampage, there has been a rush to judgment that will lead to unintended consequences at some future date. And many of the task force’s recommendations touch on issues with hair-splitting legal definitions and ethical concerns.

Campuses are generally among the safest places in America. There has been a historical average of less than twenty murders annually on campus nationwide, among a population of millions. As Winner acknowledged to the Board of Governors in her presentation, North Carolina campuses are already safe, with roughly one-sixth the crime rate of the rest of the state. She added that “that the murder rate on campuses is a very small fraction of the murder rate of our society as a whole.”

This low crime rate occurs amidst a “tradition of openness,” according to Winner.
She acknowledged that there is a “tension” between the need to enhance safety procedures and this openness. This is merely one of many tensions the task force had to deal with, she said.

On of the most problematic of these tensions is the report’s endorsement of an aggressive methodology to identify and deal with potentially violent students before they act
out with tragic results. Winner said that the key means for accomplishing this is to provide people in different parts of the campus with a “mechanism” for making sure “the information from the police and the residence hall people and the academic affairs people all ends up in the same room at the same time.”

This emphasis is in response to the breakdown of communication and responsibility on the part of authorities at Virginia Tech. The killer, Seung-Hui Cho, had a long pattern of aberrant behavior: he was accused of stalking by at least two different female students, he was taken to a mental health facility for fear that he might be suicidal, and professors and other students alike were unnerved and distressed by his behavior and twisted writing. According to English professor Lucinda Roy, she went to the campus police and other authorities but they chose not to deal with Cho because he made no explicit threats to her safety.

Winner said it was imperative for the task force to address this type of communications failure on UNC campuses. “We need to have a policy for involuntary withdrawal for students who pose a threat, but who haven’t broken any rules,” Winner said. “We want to get them in contact with professionals who can ferret out normal weird behavior by kids from a serious propensity for violence.”

In light of the Virginia Tech incident, this seems a sensible proposition. In light of the rights of citizens in a free society, however, it is troubling. Winner expressed concern about the difficulties such a process might face: “This is very hard because you have to have a lot of safeguards in place to avoid stigmatizing people…[Y]ou need to provide the student with some level of due process.”

The initial step in this preventive methodology will be educating the university communities about “red flag” behaviors that can indicate antisocial tendencies. Some of these behaviors include drug and alcohol use, a “victim/martyr self-concept,” stalking, and anger problems.

The report then recommends that individual campuses craft procedures for reporting suspect behavior so that it will be dealt with appropriately. “There needs to be a clearly understood protocol for everybody to know what they should do if they interact with a student that they think is a threat to the safety of that student or to other people on campus,” Winner said.

She said that once students’ behavior is brought to the attention of school authorities, their situation will be examined by a “threat assessment teams” that cut across campus departments. These teams will include trained observers of youth behavior. If a team determines that a student should be considered a potential threat, he or she will be asked to voluntarily submit to assessment by a professional clinician, and to comply with the recommendations by the clinician. Refusal will be considered grounds for involuntary expulsion. “If they won’t do it, you have to say ‘leave,’” said Winner.

The final step in this process is the presence of accredited counseling centers on the campus that will include caseworkers who “can follow up with that student and assure that they keep their (treatment) appointments, or at least know that they didn’t keep the appointment,” said Winner.

There is something inherently disturbing about the concept of identifying people as potential criminals before a crime has been committed, planned or even conceived, and without an association with known criminal organizations. Heightening awareness on campus about suspicious behavior has great potential for errors and mischief. Many of the judgments required are highly subjective, and decisions will depend on a professional competency that may or may not always be present. Today’s campuses are often polarized, both politically and socially, with no shortage of finger-pointing. Even baseless complaints will be recorded; not all students are mature adults, and this apparatus of information could serve as a new form of intimidation.

Winner described this higher state of awareness concerning the behavior of one’s peers on campus as “a cultural change that needs to be made.” Such a cultural change will be no small thing. Amidst such a sweeping transformation, it would be prudent to have safeguards in place to prevent violations of civil liberties (as Winner noted). Yet the task force’s one proposed legislative change removes any legal liability by college health care professionals as long as they make judgments “according to their best professional knowledge,” and “act in good faith.” Historically, lawsuits have served as a last resort to correct injustices against the individual. This liability is not intended to prevent professionals and administrators from doing their jobs, but it at least serves as a caution for campus officials to not act rashly. To remove it is to greatly enhance the power of the state.

After 9-11-2001, emotions stirred by the senseless killing mixed with a real need to act resulted in a rapid response called the Patriot Act. That legislation has suffered from continual challenges regarding the safeguard of civil liberties ever since. Let us hope the UNC system will not also suffer future problems and challenges due to the eagerness by officials to put programs in place.

Jay Schalin is a writer/researcher for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.