Rich, I don’t know whether your VT professor is the same as my one, but this is an e-mail I received:

I am a [REDACTED] professor at Virginia Tech. I’ve spent far too much time defending my colleagues from some of the more egregious comments on line. I agree with a lot that you have to say about us, but I have a few bones to pick. It is now being reported that Librescue’s heroism was duplicated in two other classes in which students tried to barricade the door, sometimes successfully. In no case can anyone’s reaction be called “instinctive.” Only those with time to realize the danger and steel themselves against it survived. Our students were braver than your comments indicated. I also would like to hear you defend your snide criticism of the police response in the Corner this morning. No one knows better than Flinchum that the police response to the first two murders was a mistake. The results speak for themselves. But if you are among the chorus of people saying that the campus should have been shut down when the first two murders were discovered, how do you square this with your (quite proper) destain for infantilizing our students? Isn’t shutting down the campus the Geraldo response? How often is Montreal shut down in response to a murder discovery?

Well, I take it “two murders” is a rarer occurence at Virginia Tech than it is in most large cities. That’s why Chief Flinchum was incompetent. Not because he should have shut down the campus. But because an extraordinary event occurred and, in the manner of too many law enforcement agencies who believe they should have a monopoly on vital information, he kept it to himself. (See also Chief Moose in the Washington sniper case.) Had faculty and students known about the first incident, and that a double-murderer was on the loose, they would at least have been in a position to make their own risk assessment – about whether to cancel classes, or stay but be alert, or sit around and say, “Gee, Chief Flinchum seems to have everything under control. Let’s leave it to him.”

Whatever the epithets Derb and Michelle and I have piled up in our mailbags, the fact remains: when one man kills dozens of people across several hours in a facility that has its own police agency, that is not a “tragedy” but a systemic failure. And we would do the dead greater honor if we tried to analyze the reasons for that failure.