The Real Problem

With the start of the school year and a call for the president’s resignation, the Virginia Tech Massacre has resurfaced. But I want to approach this from a different angle - by looking at a possible root opposed to looking for a scapegoat.

Does “campus culture” lead to incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings?

The day after the Virginia Tech University shootings, I interviewed a retired Philadelphia police officer that founded a security company that protected numerous college campuses on the East Coast. Having spent more than a quarter of a century on college campuses, but not being a college graduate himself; he noticed something about university life that he found deeply problematic: the culture of college campuses is shaped to celebrate winners and all out ignores less successful people.

The accolades heaped on the academically and athletically gifted were his biggest examples. Anyone who has attended a university with competitive athletics doesn’t have to think hard about how everyone from the administrators to people indirectly affiliated with the college, but live/work in the same area code responds when a championship is brought back to campus. While the praise for the intellectually accomplished is less flamboyant, many people who experienced this privilege inconsistently can acknowledge opportunities being made available to them during the height of their success that weren’t when things were less than stellar.

He admitted that resources for people in need – the mentally and emotionally ill and the less academically successful – were available, but the fact that campuses’ make value assessments for people is the root of the problem. And feelings of worthlessness in the grand scheme of campus made some people less likely to get help, making the few available resources null and void.

Neither my interviewee nor me knew Seung-Hui Cho, but we both assume that Cho’s biggest concerns weren’t with his classmates’ morals as his words might lead one to believe. He left a note describing his classmates as “rich kids” and “deceitful charlatans” involved in “debauchery.” But his anger and frustration was with how “rich kids” involved in “debauchery” made him feel as a person in college, which he probably incorrectly assumed was a microcosm of the future he never got the chance to embrace.

So the question is, does college culture need to be revamped? Is there something wrong with the way campuses – and depending on the university, the nation – have built celebratory subcultures around successful athletes? Should the regalia and honors for those who excel beyond their peers be easily distinguishable? Should these people hold more value at our institutions of higher education? Are they in fact more important in our greater society? Or should people accept that there are winners and losers in life and that they should adjust to society’s standards of how people are treated based on their place on the totem pole?

Eugene is a journalist based in Phoenix. Check out his lighter fare at Intelligent Ignorance.