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The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal What Virginia Tech Showed: Are We Missing Part of Our Mission? Donald N. McComb The terrible and senseless tragedy at Virginia Tech was an event that some have feared since the aftermath of Columbine eight years ago (McComb, 1999). We are analyzing and forensically dissecting the events and life of the Virginia Tech perpetrator to understand what we desperately need to know—why this happened! The conjectures we construct, however, will not fully erase our fears that this kind of incident can happen again, because we will never know what was actually going on in the mind of the killer. The frightening aspect is that members within our unique community, not outsiders, have perpetrated most of these mass tragedies. I believe that, in addition to taking obvious steps to improve physical security (cameras, increased patrols, etc.), we can be much more productive and supportive of our college community if administrations focus on a positive and coordinated effort to identify and help those who are struggling within our communities. Perhaps this tragedy is a wake-up call to a serious flaw about our approach to educating as well as protecting those within our community. Our overall mission is to provide a safe and stimulating environment in which our students and faculty can learn and explore new ideas. During the decades I worked in higher education, I believe we made an ideological shift that has changed the concept of our role as educators in a protective and nurturing environment to one as a business with a focus on profit (or spread). College is the first step beyond the nurturing environment of immediate-family life and the protected structure of K–12 public education. We recognize this population has transitional social needs, and we address them by providing residence hall resident advisers, first-year advisers, first-year seminars, social events, and other activities. We do this because it is the right thing to do, but what stimulated these changes was the increasing dropout rate for new students and the loss of revenue it represented in relation to the marketing capital used to recruit them. I don't believe that a business approach in higher education is inherently bad—on some level, we must operate in a business-like model to survive. Perhaps, though, we now need to shift the pendulum back and pay more attention to the environment in and around our campus communities and the development of individuals than to new monumental structures and administration legacies. Problems can come from outside the school community or inside, and we can choose to create an armed and walled enclave from the rest of society or a responsive and caring structure that helps our community (students, faculty, and staff) cope with its problems. I believe that in the majority of publicized, violent school events, the threats came from those within the community itself, its undergraduate and graduate students. As we look at the events surrounding school violence in such places as Columbine, Austin, Virginia Tech, and Michigan, a common thread emerges showing that many different community segments were aware of “potential problems” with the perpetrators. As no one entity had the full picture of the problems in these students' lives, no person could adequately assess the risk potential or consider intervening, implementing, and monitoring before the perpetrators became violent toward themselves or others. Our military does not “trust” the maturity of students just coming out of high school; why should colleges and universities follow a different philosophy? When high school graduates enter the armed forces, they go through basic training during which a drill sergeant assumes the role of parent, teacher, and guardian. There is not one aspect of a recruit's life that escapes the sergeant. He or she knows of health issues, classroom performance, socialization with peers, personal history, and many other factors. The drill sergeant creates a holistic perspective of each recruit and becomes the primary point for monitoring integration into the military community and utilizing support structures to address problems. With current interpretations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), administrations often demonstrate politically correct behavior. We treat our students as adults and expect they will not only survive but also excel by themselves within our structure. We claim to have our population's best interests at heart, but, at the same time, we hamstring ourselves by compartmentalizing and isolating the very information that could truly help us gauge how well these students are adapting to adult life. Higher education grew out of an ideology addressing both shared knowledge and fostering new concepts. We still support these ideologies with some of our “old” and “new” traditions. For example, the concept of tenure for faculty members was created to offer security in an environment where they can differ ideologically from the administration and the political establishment without fear of dismissal. This “dissension within the ranks” is part of a rich and stimulating environment in which to explore and formulate the concepts and beliefs our students will take with them into their professional careers. In a “new” tradition, we have nourished the concept and the responsibility of fostering good citizenship within our student bodies. More than ten years ago, we began to embrace the concept of community service as a course and, hopefully, a way of life for our students. We may now want to include individual wellness within our community as a basis for service to others. FERPA is not the monumental roadblock some perceive it to be, especially internally, when protecting the health, welfare, and privacy of our individual students and the campus community as a whole. We know some information is shared with parents when students are declared as dependents on their parents' tax returns. A program designed eight years ago at one institution met interpretations of FERPA yet still gathered and shared at-risk information about students. The frequency of this identification is what triggers an interdepartmental risk meeting to assess the potential and to plan an implementation strategy addressing the need. Regardless of the approach, we need “life risk managers” at colleges and universities to implement support-monitoring programs now. Our focus should include identifying internal populations with multiple issues, so that resources already available can be brought to bear, thus avoiding the outcome we saw at Virginia Tech. Reference McComb, D. N. (1999, May 4). There, but for the grace of God, go we. The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal, 1(2). Retrieved September 12, 2007, from http://www.psu.edu/dus/mentor About the AuthorDonald N. McComb is the former coordinator of academic advising, Cabrini College, Radnor, PA; director of adult and off-campus programs, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA; and assistant academic dean, Spring Garden College, Chestnut Hill, PA. He can be reached at seanmccomb@juno.com. Published in The Mentor on September 14, 2007, by Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies Available online at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/ Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © The Pennsylvania State University | All rights reserved | |