Educators: Virginia Tech shootings highlight problems dealing with troubled students

By: JUSTIN POPE - Associated Press | Monday, April 23, 2007 7:53 PM PDT ∞

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Like so many, Rane Arroyo wept at the news of the Virginia Tech massacre. He cried for the 33 lives lost, but also in sympathy for the writing teachers who saw glimpses of the shooter's tortured mind.

"We all have stories," said Arroyo, a veteran University of Toledo writing instructor and friend of Lucinda Roy, the Virginia Tech professor who worked personally with Seung-Hui Cho after he was removed from another professor's class for violent writing and disruptive behavior.

The issue hits close to home for another reason, too.

Just this month, Arroyo has been dealing with a threatening student, an episode he calls the scariest of his career. Only in the last week, he says, has the university begun taking the danger seriously enough.

How to respond to troubled students isn't a new topic for educators, particularly in creative fields such as writing, where class assignments can become a vehicle for students to express inner turmoil. Indeed, it's become particularly problematic on college campuses, where privacy laws give teachers fewer options than their counterparts in secondary schools -- who often can at least call parents. And colleges have seen a sharp increase in students who arrive with psychological and psychiatric issues.

Now, the Virginia Tech shootings have prompted some teachers to think more carefully about their own students, and there's a swell of discussions in faculty meetings and on teaching listservs. Roy has said a number of teachers have e-mailed her, sharing their fears.

"It's at least made me give second thought to short stories that I ordinarily wouldn't have worried about," said Michael Knight, director of the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee. "It's made me think twice right now."

At Virginia Tech, a number of faculty were concerned enough by Cho's writing and behavior to form a "task force" to deal with him. His work was laced with violence, profanity and raw anger -- but to no apparent literary end. People were objects, not characters. And his worrisome class submissions were combined with odd behavior -- another warning sign.

Cho went on to slay two students in a dormitory, then gun down 30 others before killing himself. Some teachers were shaken imagining what it would be like to see the violence in their own students' writing explode in real life.

"I just thought, 'It could have been me,"' said Leslie Adrienne Miller, a creative writing professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. "It could have been any of us."

Most commonly, the concern is that students may be suicidal. But many veteran teachers say they have, at some time, worried about the safety of others -- including themselves.

In 1991, a man who had been a physics graduate student at the University of Iowa shot dead his dissertation adviser and four other people before committing suicide. In 1996, a graduate student opened fire on his thesis defense committee at San Diego State, killing three professors. And in 2002, a graduate student killed the dean, a professor and a student at Virginia's Appalachian School of Law.

Teachers at any level, and in any subject, might pick up on troubling signals from a student. But it is college teachers in creative fields -- especially writing, but also music and art -- for whom the issue is especially pressing.

Particularly in large universities "students are often lost," Arroyo said. "They find a home in creative courses because we know their names. We know when they're absent. We know when they're depressed. We're very aware of their history. The teachers in my program, we talk about the various students, and most students welcome this. But it's also a place where a lot of personal stories come out."

College students are usually adults, so instructors cannot compel them to attend counseling and cannot share their work with parents without the students' consent.

Cho was referred by campus police to outside mental health care, but once he entered the system his treatment became private and could not be shared with his teachers -- or anyone else at the university unless there was an explicit threat.

"There's only so much a doctor of literature can do. They're not doctors of psychiatry," said David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing programs. "The universities are caught between two irreconcilable principles: treating these students like children who need a certain amount of caretaking, and treating them as adults who have privacy rights."

After Cho was removed from poet Nikki Giovanni's course, Roy met with him three times for about an hour each. She tried to draw him out, and get him to write about things outside himself. She tried to collaborate with him on some poetry, but he was largely unresponsive.

"He seemed to be running inside circles in a maze when he was talking about himself," Roy told the AP last week. "So I thought if I could get him to project and talk about other things then that would be a good thing."

In the wake of Cho's shooting rampage, whether Roy and other teachers might have done more "is a question I'll probably ask myself for the rest of my life," she said.

Instructors say violence is a part of the culture and a part of the students' lives -- so they don't want to overreact if students write about it. It plays a legitimate role in much widely respected literature, from Flannery O'Connor to Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe.

"In a creative writing class you encourage students to take risks, not to be afraid to take risks as long as it's in the service of what is hopefully some literary ideal," says Knight, the Tennessee instructor.

Or, as Ben Locke, an assistant counseling director at Penn State puts it: "You can't hospitalize everybody who says something disturbing in an English paper."

In fact, despite a lack of formal training, many teachers believe they're fairly adept at identifying when writing steps over the line. The key signals are when the violence seems gratuitous, with no literary purpose, and when it's paired with disturbing behavior in class, as was the case with Cho.

In extreme cases, experts say, that may indicate students don't appreciate the distinction between the world they live in and their imagination.

A question certain to be asked now is whether teachers need better tools when a student crosses that line. Some say it's a topic for universities to address. Others, like Miller, want federal privacy laws changed to give teachers more options for dealing with potentially dangerous students.

"I can't think of many professors who are really happy with the way the universities respond (to such situations)," Fenza said. "But just about every university is going to be having this conversation about what the counselors can do, what the campus police can do, what kinds of decisions the deans and provosts and presidents are going to need to be making."

-- AP National Writer Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.

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