Students' rights weighed as colleges try to assess threats
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
A growing majority of colleges nationwide are keeping tabs on students through "threat assessment teams" charged with identifying dangerous students, causing debate to erupt over how much power the schools should have as they try to flag disturbing behavior.
Two states — Virginia and Illinois — now legally require such teams and 80% of colleges nationwide have started them since the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that left 32 people dead. At Pima Community College in Arizona, a Behavior Assessment Committee identified alleged gunman Jared Loughner as a person of concern months before a weekend massacre that killed six and injured 13 others, and the school suspended him.
Questions are now being raised about the appropriateness and effectiveness of the teams. In the wake of the Arizona shooting, some experts are questioning whether the school could have done more to help Loughner, or to alert authorities beyond campus borders. "There's a dangerous person put out in the community," says Stetson University College of Law professor Peter Lake.
Other critics say administrators may try to use threat assessment teams for their own purposes. In a case involving a student dismissed from Valdosta State University, a federal judge ruled that the former president improperly called for an investigation into the student's mental health, employment and grades mostly because the student opposed plans to build a campus parking garage.
Since April 2007, news reports show that at least 67 people have been killed and 69 others injured in attacks by U.S. college students.
Since April 2007, news reports show that at least 67 people have been killed and 69 others injured in attacks by U.S. college students.
ReplyDeleteAs highly trained academics, we of course immediately recognize that this is a useless statistic without knowing the percentage of the population in college and the percentage of murders committed by college students.
a) this scares me personally, as I have plenty of students who go through emotional troubles in their early 20s but pose no threat to their communities. Will they be arrested and kicked off campus for handling a breakup really poorly or suffering severe depression and anxiety? There is absolutely no way to tell which person is going to take their issues to the next level and buy a gun.
ReplyDeleteb) It's about time the media create an industry agreement to stop publishing the details of the person/ their name/ their cause /etc. In France, they do not publish the names of individuals in public suicides in order to prevent other people from having the same idea. Instead, they report a "grave accident" and use other euphemisms.
Every report gives another grieved person the idea that gunning down a crowd will bring them glory.
No matter about the law of a "threat assessment team" in a certain Commonwealth, we had to deal with an unstable student about a year ago and didn't get a lot of support.
ReplyDeleteThis guy freaked people out and what were we supposed to do? Answer: Call campus police to tip them off if he showed up in the faculty office spaces. Of course, some of us were concerned that it would be too late by then. [And... there's more to this story, of course.]
So... for a while, the office door was locked, unless I was around (or another male). Being a large guy (ex-prop), somehow I got to be "the heat" in the office. Maybe my next job is as a bouncer.
AdjuctSlave is right.
ReplyDeleteThere are about 300M people in the US, and and about 17M of them are college students.
The rate of homicides in general is about 5.5 per 100,000 people in the US, or about 150 per year. If we take 'since 2007' to include 2007,8,9,and 10, then there have been about 600 homicides total.
So, roughly 11% of all homicides have been done by a population representing 6% of the people in the US.
OK, this sounds pretty dire, but then you have to remember that people under 18 and over 65 are not likely to commit homicides, so this brings it closer to parity.
So, in general: yes, college kids are slightly more dangerous than a random person-off-the-street.
But only slightly.
It would also help to know how many of those attacks were the sort of domestic conflict that is at least as common among people of the same age not in college (the Yeardley Love case comes to mind; sadly, it wasn't all that unusual an event in some ways; people were just shocked because they expect better of clean-cut, privileged college athletes). It would also be handy to know how many are cases of armed robbery, drug-peddler rivalry, and the like perpetrated by people who haven't quite decided whether they want to grow up to be blue-collar or white-collar criminals.
ReplyDeleteAs a rule, I suspect that college students, like most people their age (and perhaps any age) are statistically most dangerous to others when they get behind the wheel of a car, and generally more dangerous to themselves than to others.
None of which means we shouldn't try to track the cases that are genuinely potentially dangerous, but, yes, this could easily go too far, perhaps all the more so at a time when we have a lot of returning veterans (which doesn't mean I wouldn't be a bit alarmed by Terry's student, too).