Book Review: No Right to Remain Silent, The Tragedy at Virginia Tech by Lucinda Roy
Stuart Nachbar
April 20, 2009
Last Thursday, April 16, was the two-year anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech. Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot and killed 32 students and faculty members in a classroom building that he had locked, before taking his own life.
No Right to Remain Silent takes a different perspective about the shooting, one of a faculty member, Lucinda Roy, who had counseled Cho one-on-one on his poetry. Cho had entered Virginia Tech as a management information systems major, but had switched to English, hoping to express a literary voice. Roy found his skills lacking, but more important, she saw a student who was seriously depressed and in urgent need of counseling. She explained this to the news media covering the tragedy, as well as law enforcement officials, only to find that she had accidently gone against university protocols.
While Roy devotes a significant portion of this book to her attempts to provide academic advice and to encourage Cho to seek professional counseling, she devotes more attention to the campus protocols and the limited counseling and mental health services available to the student body. Virginia Tech is a very large university (26,000 students) and student-faculty interactions are more limited than in high schools or much smaller colleges. Roy cites 10 cultural factors that have the, in her words, "potential to contribute to education's perfect storm" as public education becomes further defunded by state governments. These are:
1) A shortage of teachers and resources in K-12
2) A lack of treatment facilities and services for mentally ill students of all ages
3) The accessibility of guns and bomb-making equipment and manuals
4) The prevalence of mental illness and suicide in the student population
5) A "nonteacherly focus" in high education, meaning a shift in focus from students to revenue raising and the lack of emphasis on training faculty to teach students with different needs.
6) A pop culture that routinely exposes children and youth to excessive violence
7) A growing devide that separates youth culture from adult culture
8) The prevalence of bullying in K-12 (often called "harassment: when it affects the adult community)
9) A rise in alcoholism, drug abuse, and prescription medications in student populations
10) Open campuses with relatively little security or security funding
To this I would add the greater use of the Internet as a social medium by college age youth. Roy regularly points out that Cho felt excluded and rejected within the student body, but he was also feared. The Internet offers a means for the excluded to gain acceptance, even in the act of violence, but it also offers more opportunities for social rejection that could also lead to violent behavior.
Roy also discusses the issues of gun control versus "concealed carry" permits to allow students, faculty, administrators and passers-by who come to the university community to carry guns. She does not take a position opposed to gun control, however, she adds that universities need to provide more funding, as well as provisions for student information access, for mental health counseling. As one example, she mentioned that Virginia Tech did not have a resident psychiatrist who could have adequately counseled Cho. He had to be sent off-campus for observation. In addition, records of Cho's counseling visits were supposedly lost. assumably with concerns over the university's reputation.
No Right to Remain Silent is an interesting book for educators, among others, concerned with the state of higher education at the larger institutions. It also raised several questions for me on the issue of gun control versus "concealed carry" permits. Advocates of "concealed carry" believe that, had students or faculty been in a position to defend themselves, incidents such as this shooting could have be reduced or prevented. But the idea of "concealed carry" within a college community raises questions that Roy, and others, have not yet addressed. for instance:
In the event that someone carrying a concealed weapon injures themselves, could the university be held liable?
In the event that someone such as Cho was shot by someone carried a concealed weapon, will the university protect them in the event of legal action from the shooter's family?
In the event that someone carrying a concealed weapon injures an innocent bystander, for example another student who had been in the classroom with Cho, what is the liability?
How will parents of current and prospective students react to the thought of a campus where many individuals carry concealed weapons? Will they feel safer, or the opposite?
Is the university willing to invest more to provide support services for its students? I would consider a university campus community at a large school to be much like an urban center; there are densely populated neighborhoods on campus and crimes are more likely to take place in densely populated areas. However, urban centers provide not only police but social services, including counseling, as well.
This past weekend, I attended the Scarlet and White spring football game at Rutgers, which attracted a record crowd of 16,000 fans. Virginia Tech's football team plays a similar game. Before I was allowed to go through the turnstiles, I was asked to open a bag that I was going to take into the stadium; it contained my camera and a sweatshirt in case it got cold. Such searches are not uncommon practice at major sports events, and no sports venue, at least in the New York area allows anyone other than security personnel to carry weapons.
But football games attract more students and graduates than any single event, and they have their fair share of drunken behavior and fights. So, I'm thankful that only the law enforcement officers have guns. But here's a question: would a "concealed carry" school hire more security to collect and hold weapons in a secure area during a football game? It's one thing for the New York Yankees to do it; they just raise ticket prices. It's another thing for a university that is more price-sensitive about public events.
I would be more in favor of the concept of a campus auxiliary force, which would be comprised studenta, faculty and administrators who have prior military or police experience, than the adoption of "concealed carry" practices on college campuses. Such a force would be accountable to campus security and the senior security officers would have the right to investigate the prior work experience of each applicant.
As a work of non-fiction, No Right to Remain Silent has too much inside politics and policy questions to be of interest to a reader of true-crime stories. But as a work that provoke issues and questions on campus safety and community, it rates an A.
Stuart Nachbar blogs at www.EducatedQuest.com, an open book on thought and fiction in education and politics.
No Right to Remain Silent takes a different perspective about the shooting, one of a faculty member, Lucinda Roy, who had counseled Cho one-on-one on his poetry. Cho had entered Virginia Tech as a management information systems major, but had switched to English, hoping to express a literary voice. Roy found his skills lacking, but more important, she saw a student who was seriously depressed and in urgent need of counseling. She explained this to the news media covering the tragedy, as well as law enforcement officials, only to find that she had accidently gone against university protocols.
While Roy devotes a significant portion of this book to her attempts to provide academic advice and to encourage Cho to seek professional counseling, she devotes more attention to the campus protocols and the limited counseling and mental health services available to the student body. Virginia Tech is a very large university (26,000 students) and student-faculty interactions are more limited than in high schools or much smaller colleges. Roy cites 10 cultural factors that have the, in her words, "potential to contribute to education's perfect storm" as public education becomes further defunded by state governments. These are:
1) A shortage of teachers and resources in K-12
2) A lack of treatment facilities and services for mentally ill students of all ages
3) The accessibility of guns and bomb-making equipment and manuals
4) The prevalence of mental illness and suicide in the student population
5) A "nonteacherly focus" in high education, meaning a shift in focus from students to revenue raising and the lack of emphasis on training faculty to teach students with different needs.
6) A pop culture that routinely exposes children and youth to excessive violence
7) A growing devide that separates youth culture from adult culture
8) The prevalence of bullying in K-12 (often called "harassment: when it affects the adult community)
9) A rise in alcoholism, drug abuse, and prescription medications in student populations
10) Open campuses with relatively little security or security funding
To this I would add the greater use of the Internet as a social medium by college age youth. Roy regularly points out that Cho felt excluded and rejected within the student body, but he was also feared. The Internet offers a means for the excluded to gain acceptance, even in the act of violence, but it also offers more opportunities for social rejection that could also lead to violent behavior.
Roy also discusses the issues of gun control versus "concealed carry" permits to allow students, faculty, administrators and passers-by who come to the university community to carry guns. She does not take a position opposed to gun control, however, she adds that universities need to provide more funding, as well as provisions for student information access, for mental health counseling. As one example, she mentioned that Virginia Tech did not have a resident psychiatrist who could have adequately counseled Cho. He had to be sent off-campus for observation. In addition, records of Cho's counseling visits were supposedly lost. assumably with concerns over the university's reputation.
No Right to Remain Silent is an interesting book for educators, among others, concerned with the state of higher education at the larger institutions. It also raised several questions for me on the issue of gun control versus "concealed carry" permits. Advocates of "concealed carry" believe that, had students or faculty been in a position to defend themselves, incidents such as this shooting could have be reduced or prevented. But the idea of "concealed carry" within a college community raises questions that Roy, and others, have not yet addressed. for instance:
In the event that someone carrying a concealed weapon injures themselves, could the university be held liable?
In the event that someone such as Cho was shot by someone carried a concealed weapon, will the university protect them in the event of legal action from the shooter's family?
In the event that someone carrying a concealed weapon injures an innocent bystander, for example another student who had been in the classroom with Cho, what is the liability?
How will parents of current and prospective students react to the thought of a campus where many individuals carry concealed weapons? Will they feel safer, or the opposite?
Is the university willing to invest more to provide support services for its students? I would consider a university campus community at a large school to be much like an urban center; there are densely populated neighborhoods on campus and crimes are more likely to take place in densely populated areas. However, urban centers provide not only police but social services, including counseling, as well.
This past weekend, I attended the Scarlet and White spring football game at Rutgers, which attracted a record crowd of 16,000 fans. Virginia Tech's football team plays a similar game. Before I was allowed to go through the turnstiles, I was asked to open a bag that I was going to take into the stadium; it contained my camera and a sweatshirt in case it got cold. Such searches are not uncommon practice at major sports events, and no sports venue, at least in the New York area allows anyone other than security personnel to carry weapons.
But football games attract more students and graduates than any single event, and they have their fair share of drunken behavior and fights. So, I'm thankful that only the law enforcement officers have guns. But here's a question: would a "concealed carry" school hire more security to collect and hold weapons in a secure area during a football game? It's one thing for the New York Yankees to do it; they just raise ticket prices. It's another thing for a university that is more price-sensitive about public events.
I would be more in favor of the concept of a campus auxiliary force, which would be comprised studenta, faculty and administrators who have prior military or police experience, than the adoption of "concealed carry" practices on college campuses. Such a force would be accountable to campus security and the senior security officers would have the right to investigate the prior work experience of each applicant.
As a work of non-fiction, No Right to Remain Silent has too much inside politics and policy questions to be of interest to a reader of true-crime stories. But as a work that provoke issues and questions on campus safety and community, it rates an A.
Stuart Nachbar blogs at www.EducatedQuest.com, an open book on thought and fiction in education and politics.
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