Tuesday, March 31, 2009
CBS postpones Virginia Tech professor's interview broadcast
English professor Lucinda Roy's new book, "No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech," hit bookstores today. But breaking news preempts broadcast of Roy's CBS interview.
The book
"No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech"
- 336 pages, $25
- Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.
Excerpt
April 16, 2009
Your thoughts
Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times
Lucinda Roy
Virginia Tech shootings
Complete coverage
Virginia Tech: One Year Later
An interview with Virginia Tech English professor Lucinda Roy that was scheduled to air tonight on "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" has been postponed.
Roy was expected to talk about her book "No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech" (Harmony Books, $25), which was released today. A CBS spokeswoman said a broadcast of the interview was postponed due to breaking-news coverage of the G-20 summit in London. The interview broadcast has yet to be rescheduled.
The book details Roy's relationship with troubled student Seung-Hui Cho, who shot and killed 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty before killing himself on April 16, 2007.The Roanoke Times will publish staff writer Greg Esposito’s interview with Roy in tomorrow’s edition and at roanoke.com.
According to a news release from the publisher, Roy’s book is "one teacher’s cri de coeur — her dire warning that given the same situation today, two years later, the ending would be no less terrifying and no less tragic."
Roy, former chairwoman of Virginia Tech’s English department, met Cho after he was asked to leave a poetry class for writing explicitly violent work and for disruptive behavior. Roy tutored Cho one-on-one and came to the determination that he was in need of psychological counseling.
In her book, Roy is critical of Tech’s administration, specifically president Charles Steger, for its handling of the shooting’s aftermath and for not conducting, according to her book, any "meaningful internal investigation with regards to specific incidents related to Seung-Hui Cho."
She also criticizes a mental-health bureaucracy that, due to red tape or lack of appropriate funding, she says kept Cho from receiving necessary treatment.
Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said he didn’t feel as though there was new information released in the book.
"It’s sad, I mean it’s sad that we revisit this," Hincker said Tuesday afternoon.
"It was a sad story. Obviously Lucinda is troubled and my reading of it, and I spent three hours, was it just made me sad again."
Ed Spencer, Tech’s vice president for student affairs, said he thinks the book’s release will have an effect opposite of the author’s purpose.
"She says fairly early on in the book that she would be concerned if this raised any anxiety among the families and, frankly, I think it will and I think that’s unfortunate," Spencer said Tuesday.
In the book, Roy acknowledges that its publication may end her career at Tech.
"I would happily have spent the rest of my life here," at Tech, she wrote, "but I realize that this book will, in all probability, oblige me to move on."
Hincker said he didn’t think that was the case.
"This is what academic freedom’s all about," he said. "I just can’t imagine it causing any problems unless they were in her own mind."
The book is available at Barnes and Noble Booksellers locations in Roanoke and Christiansburg. Both stores reported large numbers of copies available.
The book will be available soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow, at the Virginia Tech Volume II Bookstore and Books-A-Million in Blacksburg and at Ram’s Head Book Shop in Roanoke.
