A state panel that investigated last spring’s massacre at Virginia Tech has issued a harshly worded report that says the university erred in the way it handled a mentally disabled student who became a killer and in how it dealt with the immediate aftermath of the shootings.
The report was one of several developments involving the shootings in the last several weeks, including the release of an internal review by the university.
Despite complaints from professors and students that Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman, was unstable and threatening, no one at Virginia Tech “connected all the dots” and adequately dealt with his problems, the state review panel found.
Its report, released last week, also said university offices — including the counseling center and the student-affairs office — had misinterpreted federal privacy laws in refusing to share information about Mr. Cho’s behavior with one another and with Mr. Cho’s parents. The university never informed his parents that Mr. Cho had been referred to a psychiatric facility, the report said.
The panel found that the Virginia Tech police made a mistake in “prematurely concluding” that the first two murders on April 16, which occurred in a campus dormitory room, resulted from a domestic dispute and that the killer had probably left the campus. And the report said the university waited much too long — about two hours — to issue a campuswide alert about those murders.
But while it found fault with the response to the attack, and made many recommendations for improvements, the panel did not call for the firing of any officials.
Charles W. Steger, Virginia Tech’s president, acknowledged that it was “painful to hear the blunt and, in some cases, critical findings.”
While he called the inquiry “necessary,” he also said some of the recommendations benefited from “hindsight.”
“Although hindsight now provides us with the signs or indications within the university,” he said, "[Mr. Cho] clearly kept from the university the extent of his troubles and prior mental-health history. Ours is a system that asks for students to help us help them.”
The university issued its own report on the shootings, with its own set of recommendations, a week earlier. That investigation concluded that the university needed to improve its monitoring of troubled students, enhance campuswide communications, and better secure campus buildings to prevent a similar tragedy.
2 Approaches
The eight-member state review panel was appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, in response to the killings, which were the largest mass murder by an individual in modern American history. Mr. Cho, an undergraduate at the university, shot and killed 32 students and faculty members, wounded 17 more, and then killed himself. The panel was charged with reviewing the life and mental-health history of Mr. Cho, as well as examining the responses of the university and the police to the murders. It was also asked to interpret the effectiveness of both federal and state privacy and gun laws.
In its findings, the panel said that since Mr. Cho had been declared a danger to himself and ordered to seek outpatient treatment in 2005, he should have been ineligible to purchase a gun and violated federal law when he did so.
The report did applaud the police for responding quickly to both the shootings in the dormitory and later at Norris Hall, the academic building where most of the victims were killed. But it said that while the university wisely established an assistance center for families of the victims, the help “fell short” because of a lack of leadership and a lack of coordination among people providing services.
By contrast, the Virginia Tech review largely steered clear of assessing the actions of the police, university officials, or others on April 16, and did not mention Mr. Cho. At a news conference to announce its findings, Mr. Steger said the internal report was not intended to be “an investigation or forensic analysis.”
Instead, the document, the work of three review committees established by Mr. Steger, is a forward-looking appraisal. Its more than 120 recommendations include a host of steps the university should consider taking, such as improving its communications infrastructure, increasing the number of simulation exercises for campus police officers and others, and establishing an electronic “people-locator system” that would allow students and others to post their status after an emergency.
Better Communication Needed
Despite their different missions, both reports reached some similar conclusions, calling for better sharing of information about troubled students and for improvements in the system for issuing campuswide alerts in emergencies.
And both reports say that the university must clarify its policy on how federal privacy laws, like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, are applied.
The gubernatorial panel also calls on the Virginia attorney general, the U.S. Department of Education, and national higher-education associations to provide greater guidance on privacy law.
Another key recommendation made by both groups is the creation of a threat-assessment team that would conduct a comprehensive evaluation of complex cases, like that of Mr. Cho, and would be “empowered to act,” as the university’s report said.
Gary M. Pavela, a consultant to colleges on legal issues and a former director of student judicial programs at the University of Maryland at College Park, praised that proposal, noting that similar teams had been put in place at many public schools following the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado in 1999. “It’s a puzzle that higher education has not done this sooner,” he said.
Both reports also concluded that Virginia Tech and other institutions must improve mass notification in emergencies, putting in place electronic message boards at the entrances to key campus buildings, audible alarms in classrooms, and a system that sends immediate alerts to cellphones and other devices.
The families of those killed and injured have criticized Virginia Tech for not issuing a campuswide alert immediately after the first two murders, to try to prevent further violence. Vincent J. Bove, who runs a company that trains security personnel on college campuses, is representing the families of seven people who were killed or injured at Virginia Tech. He said they were “extremely disturbed” by the review panel’s report because it did not say who specifically was to blame for the university’s failure to act quickly.
“There is not direct responsibility attributed to the leadership team or the president,” he said in an interview. “The families believe that the 30 lives that were taken in the second shooting incident were all preventable. The university failed.”
In August a campus-crime watchdog group asked the U.S. Education Department to investigate whether Virginia Tech violated federal law in its response to the mass shootings on its campus. Security on Campus Inc., a Pennsylvania-based advocacy group, alleges that the university’s response time to the first shootings constitutes a violation of the Clery Act, a federal law requiring colleges and universities to disclose campus crimes and issue a “timely warning” of threats to students’ safety.
Deliberative Response
Virginia Tech has already begun to make changes in its emergency-alert system. As of late August, about 12,500 students, employees, and others had signed up for a new system called VT Alerts, which sends out text messages to cellphones about emergency situations, according to James A. Hyatt, the university’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.
The university will be conducting a “comprehensive evaluation” in the coming months of other recommendations, Mr. Steger said. Governor Kaine also said he would closely examine the state review panel’s proposals. He called it a “thorough” report and said it could offer a “blueprint” for change.
Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University, said the deliberative approach was a wise one. “It anticipates that there’s further work to do, rather than trying to do everything at once when the heat is on,” he said. “They’re conscious of the fact that Virginia Tech has become a case study.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 54, Issue 2, Page A1
