An Incoherent Rambling on Virginia Tech...

So, I've let this whole Virginia Tech thing sink in a little bit and being a guy whose worked at a College for six plus years now, I feel like I'm in a little bit of a unique position here. I apologize in advance for the lack of proper grammar, and realize this is more of a rant than anything else, but in getting it out a little bit, I find some peace, as this one hits very close to home for me.

I may be jaded because of the length of time I've been doing this RD thing (too long), but the number of kids with GENUINE problems... I'm not talking about the kids who might booze too much here and there or set off the occasional fire alarm.. has risen exponentially. I'm talking about kids with SERIOUS psychological issues. I could name 10-15 students in the past three years alone I've encountered frequently that are SERIOUS disruptions to the greater community and nothing's done about them.

Everyone's talking about all the side bar issues like Gun control, video game violence, even why campus security doesn't do more. They're really missing the issue. I'll share a few stories here about the insanity that is today's college campus:

The worst I've ever seen was this kid... he was ALWAYS the kid who seemed close to the problem. You'd do a write up and he'd be at the end of the hall smiling watching the whole thing or he'd be walking out of a room where nonsense was going on.... well one night he and his roommate got completely wasted and got into a fight. He had a metal rod in a cast he was wearing. He hammered his roommate with it and the kid's head hit the corner of the door way and he fell to the ground. The hit to the head split his head open, the hit against the doorway did the same and when he hit the floor it was like a Mellon hitting a rock. Well I'm literally trying to hold this kid's brains in his head and we've got EMS there and he's SCREAMING while the cops are taking away "I hope that fvcker dies".

Well he got prosecuted and served only a year of jail time only for the school to ALLOW HIM BACK INTO THE INSTITUTION with NO mandatory counseling of any kind. So what does he do? Gets caught stealing books and selling em back to the book store. He got a $50 fine. Then he pulled a knife on an RA and didn't get sh!t. He literally was threatening professors via telephone and the school STILL did nothing about it. We had the Dean of Campus life, who was a total moon bat by even moon bat standards who thought everyone was provoking him.

Well I left SC two years ago and I come to find out this year they placed him in a senior apartment WITH THE KID WHO HE BRAINED his sophomore year. It's just utterly inexcusable.

One time I had to get a STATE police-issued warrant to search a kid's room and cracked a safe he had in there that had $15,000 in it and a few pounds of cocaine in there amongst other things.... the school didn't kick him out. Instead, they sent him to counseling and wouldn't allow police to prosecute (love MA law, btw).

So when I hear that VT say "Oh, we didn't know this kid was in an institution", I say that's complete and total bullshi_. They have his health center records and I'll bet it's on his medical records. Professors and even the school counselors (who at most places are beyond incompetent) were recommending he be removed from the community and he wasn't. He had a record not only with police but on campus as being a big disciplinary problem. Every single indicator there could have been for the school to remove him from the premises, or at least suspend him until he was psychologically cleared to come back to campus, was there and they did absolutely nothing about it.

This year alone I've got a ton of 'cutters' in the dorm who're girls that slice their arms up when they get upset. Out of 125 residents, I'd say 25 have serious social and or mental impairments. I've got one girl who will repeat entire conversations. You'll get about 5 minutes in with her and bam, she shoots back to the beginning and starts the whole thing over again. I already talked about the girl who was screaming at the Dean of Students and literally was punching the walls and pulling her hair out by the roots. She's still here.

There's GOT to be some sort of way admissions offices can better filter these kids. IMO, EVERY college kid should be evaluated by a counselor of psychiatrist to see if they're ready for it. Sure, some will still slip through the cracks, but at least you'll help curb the problem a little bit. As someone who lives and works with these kids every day and has been doing so for a long time, I can't tell you how much my wife's and my work load has gone up because we're literally explaining to these kids that slapping your roommate isn't the way to tell them to turn their music down. At least at Springfield when I had the guys, you yelled at them, intimidated them a bit, wrote them up and made peace with them when they were sobered up. The girls always have the 'issues', but even at the end of my time at SC, I noticed the mental stability of the guys going way down too.

In terms of security, well, there's only so much many of them can do. We have cameras and a guard stationed at every dorm entrance. Training requirements for campus police officers has no consistency from campus to campus. Most aren't even armed. There's nothing they can do to subdue unruly or violent students. Imagine asking a plumber to fix a leak without a wrench. These guys who work on campus police forces aren't even allowed to carry firearms in most cases and simply lack the tools to be able to do their job. That's not even getting into the fact that the super moonbat judicial officers at these campuses completely undermine what they're doing at every turn, just because they hate police. It's frustrating. Then to make it worse, they toss RA's at them with crappy training and put them at risk.

The other thing is too, that students need to start taking responsibility for their own safety at some point. I see kids holding doors for people I've never seen before. I write em up for it because it's a huge safety risk. They prop doors, and don't sign people in, anything. We had a kid who obviously raped a girl two years ago. She was beat up and his DNA was (thankfully.. for the case at least) all over her. But there was no record of him being signed in. They looked at the security footage and some other kid just held the door for him. Thank god we had the cameras, or we wouldn't have been able to definitively place him in the building during the time of the assault.

So I guess in sum, while we can debate gun control until we turn blue, it's really NOT the issue here. The issue is the messed up kid. But the first 'greater problem' we should be looking at is how colleges and universities are handling kids with problems. They can only do so much from a security standpoint so I won't fault them on that. Howie Carr was arguing that kids should be allowed to carry on campus, and though I agree with him 99% of the time, I thought he was completely nuts on that. If you saw how irresponsible most college kids are with their homework, much less a firearm, you'd be astonished. Giving college kids guns ain't going to solve the problem, it's going to make them more difficult to handle.

When you brush ALL that aside, where colleges bear some measure of responsibility is what they do when they KNOW they have a problem child who is a detriment to the community and they decide to do nothing about it. There's a neo arms race going on with colleges competing over tuition dollars that has caused them to take kids with issues less seriously. The money is the important thing. Beyond that, it's social activist judicial officers on campus who treat the college disciplinary system as a social experiment, with no regard for the people they effect through their action or, in these cases, inaction.

I've seen this stuff so many freakin' times and I'm just sick of it. I screamed about this while I was at SC and saw this coming years ago. Frankly, I'm shocked it hasn't already happened and it'll happen again. What gets me on the societal level is two things. 1.) the media's glorification of the shooter. He WANTED us to be talking about him like they were today on the news. Giving a guy like that press encourages the idiots. We had a bomb threat at a Republican event we held in Northampton the other day and when I talked to a reporter about it, they said they wouldn't print it because it encourages those types of people. The same treatment should be given to this kid. All it does in the end is embolden idiots and other crazies. 2.) In watching the commentary, it just astonishes me as to how detached adults are from what kids are going through these days. They're talking about gun control, what the campus security should have done and just about everything that doesn't matter at all. They're not recognizing that we've got a generation with a ton more messed up kids than we had before and we need to figure out how to reach them, how to treat them, but most of all, keep them from harming themselves and those around them.

Sorry for the rant, but this hits a little too close to home for me. What's more frustrating for me, is I feel like myself and other professionals in my field have seen this coming for years, and yet no one's done anything about it. Worse yet, now that it's happened, we're moving further and further away from solving the issue.

Again, apologies for the rant and the overall incoherence of this particular entry, but sometimes you just need to tee it high and let it fly.