E-mail:

Rich-
Your question about how much a student has to do to get kicked off of campus is a serious one, but I’m not sure that it has as easy an answer as you think it does.
Cho was clearly mentally ill, but unfortunately that’s not as rare as you would think. Helen Smith estimated the rate at about 1% or 250 VT students for traits of psychopathy alone. I have had several students to whom I suggested counseling. On what grounds should we expel students? Extreme creepiness? You make your fellow students nervous, get out? How many of the denizens of The Corner would have been able to get an education? (Congratulate me. My first joke in two days.) I assure you that everyone at Virginia Tech would be interested in knowing how to separate the mass murderers from the hundreds of harmless crazies we have studying (and teaching) here.
Cho was investigated by the police for “annoying” two girls, he cooperated and broke off contact. He was processed through the campus discipline system, he complied. He was encouraged to seek mental health care, he went to St. Albans. The police claim that they never had a report of any direct threat that he made. I have yet to hear anyone seriously suggest that he could have been involuntarily hospitalized. I don’t question that we didn’t do enough – the results speak for themselves. But I’m getting pretty damned sick of hearing “Virginia Tech did nothing” from people who haven’t bothered to read the direct reports of the police.
You guys on The Corner have a choice to make. You can do some real research and enter a serious discussion, or you can toss off gratuitous insults at people who watched 32 of their colleagues die.
Which is it gonna be?