unico said:
they had no problem responding immediately when Morva was loose on campus in August. It was shut down as soon as there were reports that he was spotted. why was it so different this time?
Although...Morva was an escaped prisoner who had killed a hospital guard in order to escape, wasn't he? So it may have seemed more reasonable to reckon he was likely to pose an immediate public danger than in this case.
I do not mean to seem insensitive about it...if one of the injured or killed were a friend or relative, I don't know how I might feel. And I do tend to think colleges across the board will handle such situations differently from now on. Still I think I can understand why the police were initally inclined to conclude this was essentially a 'domestic incident' turned violent (with tragic consequences for a third party who attempted to intervene) and not at all likely to lead to the kind of situation which followed. It's not unheard of a for a random killing spree to be preceded by something like that but it is very, very rare. From what I've read, Cho was originally going door-to-door in the dormitory attempting to find his girlfriend, and did not harm or threaten anyone else he encountered before finding her. Perhaps I am mistaken there.
Irvine511 said:
it's just so awful. am sort of at a loss for words. i start to get angry, but then i just get sad.
This was what I meant by saying my stomach turned over every time What-ifs about this came to mind as I taught yesterday...first you feel this urge to just tear the throat out of whatever vile f* thought his own momentary sufferings "justified" this, then you get hit with the realization of the preciousness of all that has been lost and realize that that is the real crisis which needs to be faced right now.
An awful, awful thing.
sulawesigirl4 said:
I suppose it's inevitable, but I am dreading the xenophobic backlash that is sure to come. According to CNN he was a resident alien (green card holder) and not technically an "international student" (which is the population that I work with) but I imagine that difference will be lost on many.
I remember about a decade or so ago there was a rash, probably random, across the country of international grad students committing suicide, which occasioned some distress among folks like you who work with international students about what if anything needed to be done. Now that's a very different kind of situation because it's not going to provoke "xenophobic" anger, but I'd like to think that *if* anything must come out of this for people who work with international students, it would be to take a closer look at the unique kinds of stresses they are under and whether more needs to be done to monitor and address those. Most of my foreign students are fantastically well-adjusted young people who after a few weeks of culture shock, settle in just great, make friends of all kinds, maybe establish connections with other students from their home country or region, develop solid relationships with their advisors and do very well academically...but every now and then there are those who don't, probably kids who were already shy or socially unaccomplished to begin with, so they become alienated and withdrawn and/or perhaps unhealthily dependent on one or two social contacts here (which it sounds like may have been the case with this young man). Of course they are far, far, far more likely to pose a danger to themselves (or to become easy prey for bad people) than they are to harm anyone else; of course this act could just as easily have been committed by an American student--people violently avenge themselves over relationships gone sour all the time, and while that hardly ever leads to subsequent mass killings, it would not be entirely unprecedented either. But
if anything like that must come of this, I would hope it would be of that sort.
It's not clear to me whether he was in fact an "international student" in the usual sense anyhow; apparently he held resident alien status, and I'm not sure whether his family perhaps lived here also or not.
