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Mr. Lowry, I assume you have received a lot of emails from professors on this subject — I’ll add mine to the list. I teach in the graduate school of our university and am faculty director of two graduate programs. Faculty here have had many serious discussions about what took place at VT because we know that our campus, like virtually all other public and open campuses, is vulnerable to the same kind of event. The rules that are most clear about expelling a student from a university revolve around academic performance. Expelling a student (or teacher, for that matter) for behavioral problems that are within the law is almost impossible. Universities attract more than their share of strange people; once there, they are put under a lot of different types of personal pressures. This pressure results in strange behaviors in many cases. In the past two years I have referred two graduate students to both campus police and the school’s counseling services. Neither was expelled. The Dean of Students told me that while the type of behavior these students exhibited (threats made to another student) was not an issue among graduate students as recently as four or five years ago, it is now arising each year, even among PhD students. Every professor can tell stories of students in the past whose behavior was frightening and who were referred to campus resources. The fact is that a student can’t be expelled because they are scary. And even if they are expelled, they can’t be kept off campus. About four years ago, a student was expelled from the nursing program of a sister university and he came back a week or so later, walked into a classroom and killed two professors. The issue of what type of behavior can warrant legally expelling a student is wrestled with every year. The implicit assumption in so many blog discussions that campuses are not sensitive to student behavior risks or are too lazy or cheap to do something about it is inaccurate. The assumption that VT had actions open to them that they didn’t pursue and that would have materially reduced the threat posed by a functioning psychopath is one the public seems to have embraced but one that faculty and administrators like myself find to be, most unfortunately, not very realistic at all. Mr. Cho is an example to me and my colleagues of a problem where anything short of incarceration would have been inadequate. Universities are institutions of higher learning, not hospitals, not counseling centers, not half-way houses or rehab centers or parole programs with their own special and enforceable behavioral rules; the range of options they have for controlling the type of aberrant behavior exhibited at VT are very limited. The decision by NBC to give Mr. Cho an international stage from which to posture and be heard is far more significant, many of us feel, than any lessons VT and other universities can learn about addressing behavioral problems that arise on campus.