Liberals and Virginia Tech

Liberals Cost Lives ^ | 4-22-07 | MissEdie

[William Tell]

I think that we may just have to agree to disagree.

I see no indication whatever that Cho exhibited any violent behavior prior to already being admitted to the University.

The dysfunction that you describe prior to his admission is never going to be used to eliminate candidates to many programs. The opportunities to expel Cho due to his dysfunction occurred after his admission.

Perhaps our backgrounds are very different. I have been associated with many technical people over three decades. The ability to be successful technically is not highly correlated with being able to express one's self or to be highly successful socially. The weirdest of the engineering students at the top technical universities would readily compare to Cho. It's simply not the case that such behavior predicts violence.

Just as some serial killers, like Ted Bundy, are educated, articulate, and sociable, there are many socially dysfunctional people that are not a menace to themselves or others and who can benefit from higher education.

I disagree that the University had a duty to eliminate Cho from the University as of the date he was admitted. Any such duty appeared later due to Cho's behavior and expelling him could easily have triggered the violence which did occur.

There simply are some situations in life that are beyond control and the occasional suicidal killer is just such a situation. Each of us has an unalienable right to defend ourselves from such a person whenever and wherever such person appears.

[GovernmentShrinker]

The weirdest of the engineering students at the top technical universities would readily compare to Cho. It's simply not the case that such behavior predicts violence.

I have trouble believing that top engineering students would have gone their whole lives, including college, never speaking in complete sentences (though some foreign students here may not do so in English, because their English is so poor), and spent their high school and college years not responding verbally or with eye contact when a neighbor, classmate, or professor addresses them.

I'm not saying there was any way to predict his violence, but I hope that admissions standards for decent colleges involve a bit more than "no reason to think applicant would become violent, therefore he's accepted". Yes, social ineptness and disinterest in social interaction is fairly common among top math/physics/engineering students, and their academic excellence is often used to offset their social shortcomings in the college admissions process. But Cho was not a math/physics/engineering student of any sort, much less a top one, and his refusal/inability to communicate made him totally unqualified for the humanities or social sciences. In other words, he was really not qualified for any program the school offered, and obviously wasn't going to offset lack of academic achievement with vibrant contributions to the extracurricular life on campus, and so didn't belong there.

[ladyinred]

Thank you for this information Eva.

[Eva]

I don’t really think that Cho was associated with any Muslim group, but having lived in both Detroit and Northern Virginia, I think that he was exposed to Islamic thinking and probably identified with the hate filled rhetoric. The kid was already crazy and was probably very susceptible to any suggestion that his paranoia was justified by what he saw as decadent western society.