It Takes A Campus

In the wake of the massacre that killed 27 students and 5 professors at Virginia Tech, I remain haunted by the anguished appeal of a mother to the students her now-dead son once called classmates. “If they see a friend who’s going through turmoil, if they see a friend who is in some pain, and they don’t want to talk about it – make them talk about it,” Susan Kayton told the Boston Globe. “If they don’t want counseling, drag them to counseling.”

Kayton’s son, Daniel Barclay, was not killed at Virginia Tech. He was a student at MIT whose dead body floated to a Cape Cod beach this week, the victim of an apparent suicide by drowning. The news of his death is not mentioned on MIT’s homepage. That same website, though, features a prominent link to a story entitled, “MIT community shares sorrow, support for Virginia Tech.”

The week before Seung-Hui Cho’s mental illness unleashed the most horrific bloodbath in US history, a sophomore at Stanford University committed suicide by hanging himself. To this day, no announcement of Mo Morsette’s death has been sent to other students on campus. Yet news of a memorial service held at Stanford in memory of those slain at Virginia Tech was also featured centrally on Stanford's website.

In no way do I mean to minimize the terror at Virginia Tech. The memories of those fallen students, the mysteries of their final moments, and the murderous evil with which Cho slaughtered them deserve all the attention they have received. But across the country this week, too many college campuses unified in sorrow over the deaths at Virginia Tech while ignoring the depression that threatens to destroy their own communities. If anything positive emerges from this horrible incident, let us at least commit to combating the tragic ignorance of the hopelessness of so many other college students before they kill others or themselves.

This won’t happen overnight. For one thing, colleges don’t even seem to want to face the issue. They hide behind claims of privacy and hopeful theories of student development to keep the depression of individual students from sending ripples through the apparent stability of the campus. To admit imperfection might make the university itself look bad, might decrease enrollment, might fracture the impression of unity that emerges at football games and commencements.

Details of treatment should not be released publicly. But the fact that depression exists in dorms can no longer be a private concern shared only between troubled students and counselors. By choosing silence, the colleges themselves suffer from the same avoidance of reality that cripples the victims – yes, the victims – of mental illness.

These are not issues that have only impacted one isolated student at Virginia Tech. All that was unique to that campus last Monday was the extent of the effect. What is universal at far too many – if not all – college campuses is the breadth of the cause and the unwillingness to intervene.

Imagine what would have happened at Virginia Tech this week if the rampage occurred at a different campus -- if, say, it tore apart the University of Virginia rather than its in-state rival. I have no doubt that administrators and students at Tech would have reacted in outward displays of sadness while avoiding inward analyses of their own community’s fragility. Perhaps there would have been a memorial vigil held on the now-infamous Drill Field. Seung-Hui Cho probably would not have attended. There would be pictures in the school newspaper of the students who did attend. There should be. But there would be no mention of the student who sat quietly, eerily, helplessly – and alone – in his dark room during the candlelight tribute across campus.

There must be.

To continue to ignore that troubled boy would be to ignore all we have learned this week. A truly collegial environment would make his plight a source of communal concern before his illness destroyed that community.

In such a place, the campus would hope together if he were to disappear into the ocean. And if he were to hang himself, the campus would know.

As we have seen across the country during the past few days, it takes communities united in grief and humbled by death to mourn. What we must also realize is that it will take unified and strong communities to prevent such an event from taking place again.

Let us never forget the 32 innocent people who needlessly died at Virginia Tech this week. Let us also never forget the mental anguish of the hopeless killer who savagely murdered them.

And let us never forget Daniel Barclay or Mo Morsette.