What might the author of this (Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering and Oakland University) be saying:
>Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.
Hate to get into a factual dispute, but:
>The Home Office says that despite the temptation to assume that things are always getting worse, crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years.
Even if the crime rate were going up, it probably wouldn’t be “soaring.” But even if it were soaring, I think it would compare favorably with ours. And furthermore, and more fundamentally, whether less gun control would change things for the better is a distinct–a very distinct–question.
On this shaky basis the author moves toward the conclusion:
>In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?
She might as well say “some say. . .”. That at least would be more honest about the straw man to follow. But, like Richard Cohen, she doesn’t need to wait for any fancy diagnosis or police investigation: it’s about evil. That’s even less helpful and insightful than her original suggestion. I don’t know of the psychological category for evil. My father, when he was alive, used to commit people like Cho to mental institutions as a danger to themselves or others. There was, and as far as I know, there still is no category called “evil” which is grounds for commitment. But while we were talking about all of this, several psychologically disturbed people just bought guns (legally) to deliver themselves and perhaps some of us from evil.
“This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life.Z”
oh, we poor, dreamy academics. always with our theories and books and words and facts and never with any concrete solutions we’re so unaware of the real world. thank the Maker that we have such aware, competent, and clairvoyant journalists to offer us prescient solutions for our troubsome inability to cope with reality.
Careful there PM, she’s a professor of engineering.
I was speaking about this very subject with scherman today. it seems that every time they mention that kid, they preface it with “English Major…” and perhaps i’m overly sensitive, but there’s almost this pejorative tone to it, like, “he wasn;t a ‘serious’ student, just a humanities sort,” so it doesn’t shock me that she’s an engineering professor. after all, they’re doing the serious work, right? the rest of us are just taking up the college’s time until we figure out what to do with our lives. we don’t produce any labor force, just bookish types and mass murderers. sorry if this sounds overly bitter, but ilstened to the gonzalez hearing s on NPR and i’m more convinced than ever that our nation has become fashionably stupid and/or so geared up with the a profit motive that they can’t see anything else. i love my books, so i must be A.) liberal, B.) weak, C.) subversive, and D.) bordering on insanity.
Calling it “evil” is the coward’s way out. Slapping an abstract metaphysical label on what happened makes the problem all airy fairy and inaccessable. It doesn’t address anything calling it evil. “Hey, I can’t solve evil, what am I, God?”
The man was distrubed and showed signs of being unbalanced. Pehaps if we spent more time paying attention to physical signs of problems here and now, things that we can do something about rather than some loose idea of “evil,” we might actially learn something or get somewhere.
“Pehaps if we spent more time paying attention to physical signs of problems here and now, things that we can do something about rather than some loose idea of “evil,” we might actially learn something or get somewhere.”
Ah yes, Nevyn.
And what will you “do about it”? After all, given your bankrupt, reductionist nonsense, you limit – from the very outset – what you can do about it.
It is no surprise that you would mock the use of the E-word, for, given your presuppositions, you’ve ruled any such absolute category out from the start.
That is to say, you’re a materialist, my friend, so don’t pretend as if you’re disdain for the professor’s comments comes from your thoughtful investigation. Rather, it comes from the very framework of what you will investigate and what you will not.
So what will you “do about it”? No doubt, something like this…
“There’s nothing to learn from this except giving it validation. If this rambling showed up in an emergency room, my colleagues and I would listen carefully and, when we reflected that it was delusional, would go see the next patient and start the medication,” he said. “This makes it sound like he was tormented. He wasn’t.” – Michael Welner
What a compassionate agenda you all have.
At least your consistent though.
After all, if “everything is material,” then all that could possibly be “wrong” with such a person must necessarily be treated “materially”.
Give ’em some pills and move on, right?