Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Excerpts from Virginia Tech English professor Lucinda Roy's book on the April 16 shootings
"No Right to Remain Silent" hit bookstores today
On the book's impact on her career:
It is difficult for someone who loves Virginia Tech as I do and who has spent more than twenty years serving it to write about the tragedy and its aftermath effectively. Virginia Tech and Blacksburg have become my home; many of Tech's faculty and staff I think of as my family. The students inspire me, and the campus is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I would happily have spent the rest of my life here, but I realize that this book will, in all probability, oblige me to move on. I have had numerous ethical debates with myself about whether or not I should write it. But I have concluded that it is not right to remain silent when you witness something like this, not if you believe your account could help us avoid making similar errors in the future. I do not speak as someone who feels we did everything right at Virginia Tech; rather, I speak as someone who fully appreciates the terrible price we pay when things go wrong.
Initial reaction to Cho:
From the beginning of that initial interview on October 19, [2005], Cheryl and I realized that Seung was not simply a student who had issues with his poetry professor and his peers in the class. Shyness is common, but Seung was so silent it was alarming. After he had sat down on the sofa in my office, he remained almost completely motionless. At first I thought that he was rigid with fear, but there seems to be more to it than that.
On advising him to seek counseling:
I offer to go with him to counseling services. I tell him again that it's free to students and that counseling can help him. I tell him not to be afraid. I use those words now and he is not offended. Some weeks ago, however, when we met for the first time alone, he looked at me with such hatred that I thought he wanted to kill me. I wanted to get up and run as fast as I could, but I was the chair. I had no right to leave him there. I asked him if he was angry. He'd shaken his head no. I hadn't believed him because his body language seemed to counter his claim, just as it had when Cheryl and I had spoken with him during our first interview.
Lack of administrative discussion:
By the end of the first week following the tragedy, President Steger and his key advisers had “battened down the hatches,” a phrase I have often heard utilized by one of his team to describe the administration's approach to the media. This wasn't just an attempt to keep outsiders away; the hatches were battened down internally also. From Tuesday, April 17, when the identity of the shooter was confirmed up until the time of writing this book, there has been no meaningful internal investigation with regards to specific incidents related to Seung-Hui Cho. As far as I can tell, apart from the development of some guidelines about how to evaluate and refer troubled students, Cho's history at Virginia Tech has been erased from the upper administration's collective memory.
Questioning the administration:
After tragedies like this, people clam up. They are warned that it is too dangerous to talk about the specifics of a case when lawyers are chomping at the bit, when the media is lying in wait like a lynch mob. But people also remain silent when they are worried that what they have to say could injure them somehow.
In the days and weeks that followed the tragedy at Virginia Tech I was reminded of how much silence has to say to us if we listen with care.
Sadly, the tragedy at Virginia Tech did not usher in an era of openness on the part of the administration. Questions that related to the specifics of the shootings, to Cho, or to troubled students in general were viewed in the wake of the tragedy as verbal grenades.
On preventing the tragedy:
You are not meant to say you are sorry after tragedies like this. People avoid doing so. And thus it is that the same fear that kept some people silent before the tragedy keeps people silent all over again.
I could not prevent the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Although I felt that Seung-Hui Cho was suicidal, I did not witness the full extent of his rage; he kept it hidden from me, or perhaps he didn't feel it when we were together, or perhaps it grew inside of him like a tumor until nothing was left.
On the book's title:
Sadly, President Steger and his key advisers have not helped their own case by remaining silent for so long. … When I began thinking about the title for this book, I was saddened by how rarely the upper administration of Virginia Tech spoke to victims' families, and I was plagued by questions about Cho's volatile silence. As I wrote, I began to understand how pervasive silence is when it comes to issues relating to the well-being of the young in this country. … If I remained doggedly silent, how would I bear it if some other tragedy on the scale of the one we had endured (or even greater, perhaps) occurred in the United States or elsewhere? If I honestly believed that what we had witnessed was not an aberration but a mounting rage among a small minority of young people who see themselves as both victims and vigilantes, how could I refuse to speak?
It is difficult for someone who loves Virginia Tech as I do and who has spent more than twenty years serving it to write about the tragedy and its aftermath effectively. Virginia Tech and Blacksburg have become my home; many of Tech's faculty and staff I think of as my family. The students inspire me, and the campus is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I would happily have spent the rest of my life here, but I realize that this book will, in all probability, oblige me to move on. I have had numerous ethical debates with myself about whether or not I should write it. But I have concluded that it is not right to remain silent when you witness something like this, not if you believe your account could help us avoid making similar errors in the future. I do not speak as someone who feels we did everything right at Virginia Tech; rather, I speak as someone who fully appreciates the terrible price we pay when things go wrong.
Initial reaction to Cho:
From the beginning of that initial interview on October 19, [2005], Cheryl and I realized that Seung was not simply a student who had issues with his poetry professor and his peers in the class. Shyness is common, but Seung was so silent it was alarming. After he had sat down on the sofa in my office, he remained almost completely motionless. At first I thought that he was rigid with fear, but there seems to be more to it than that.
On advising him to seek counseling:
I offer to go with him to counseling services. I tell him again that it's free to students and that counseling can help him. I tell him not to be afraid. I use those words now and he is not offended. Some weeks ago, however, when we met for the first time alone, he looked at me with such hatred that I thought he wanted to kill me. I wanted to get up and run as fast as I could, but I was the chair. I had no right to leave him there. I asked him if he was angry. He'd shaken his head no. I hadn't believed him because his body language seemed to counter his claim, just as it had when Cheryl and I had spoken with him during our first interview.
Lack of administrative discussion:
By the end of the first week following the tragedy, President Steger and his key advisers had “battened down the hatches,” a phrase I have often heard utilized by one of his team to describe the administration's approach to the media. This wasn't just an attempt to keep outsiders away; the hatches were battened down internally also. From Tuesday, April 17, when the identity of the shooter was confirmed up until the time of writing this book, there has been no meaningful internal investigation with regards to specific incidents related to Seung-Hui Cho. As far as I can tell, apart from the development of some guidelines about how to evaluate and refer troubled students, Cho's history at Virginia Tech has been erased from the upper administration's collective memory.
Questioning the administration:
After tragedies like this, people clam up. They are warned that it is too dangerous to talk about the specifics of a case when lawyers are chomping at the bit, when the media is lying in wait like a lynch mob. But people also remain silent when they are worried that what they have to say could injure them somehow.
In the days and weeks that followed the tragedy at Virginia Tech I was reminded of how much silence has to say to us if we listen with care.
Sadly, the tragedy at Virginia Tech did not usher in an era of openness on the part of the administration. Questions that related to the specifics of the shootings, to Cho, or to troubled students in general were viewed in the wake of the tragedy as verbal grenades.
On preventing the tragedy:
You are not meant to say you are sorry after tragedies like this. People avoid doing so. And thus it is that the same fear that kept some people silent before the tragedy keeps people silent all over again.
I could not prevent the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Although I felt that Seung-Hui Cho was suicidal, I did not witness the full extent of his rage; he kept it hidden from me, or perhaps he didn't feel it when we were together, or perhaps it grew inside of him like a tumor until nothing was left.
On the book's title:
Sadly, President Steger and his key advisers have not helped their own case by remaining silent for so long. … When I began thinking about the title for this book, I was saddened by how rarely the upper administration of Virginia Tech spoke to victims' families, and I was plagued by questions about Cho's volatile silence. As I wrote, I began to understand how pervasive silence is when it comes to issues relating to the well-being of the young in this country. … If I remained doggedly silent, how would I bear it if some other tragedy on the scale of the one we had endured (or even greater, perhaps) occurred in the United States or elsewhere? If I honestly believed that what we had witnessed was not an aberration but a mounting rage among a small minority of young people who see themselves as both victims and vigilantes, how could I refuse to speak?
