Within a month of the shooting,
the school hired one of the most powerful public relations firms in the U.S.,
Burson-Marsteller, to spin the tragedy to Tech’s benefit, (I go into greater
detail about Burson-Marsteller later).
This spin-doctor team quickly developed the idea the school was as much
a victim as those who had been killed or wounded. Indeed, the company did a
training video with President Steger teaching him to answer media and public
criticism that the school had not issued a campus-wide warning after the early
morning double homicide—he was instructed not to apologize and to use such
phrases as “the university grieves, too,” and “the university is a victim, as
well.”
Burson-Marsteller was counting on
the highly charged emotions following the rampage to carry their argument. The
public was so horrified by the shootings that any argument that helped put the
tragedy in the past fell on receptive ears. The slogan “Virginia Tech:
Inventing the Future” was used to try and focus public attention away from the
horror of the present. That slogan dovetailed with the feelings of the vast
majority of the public who wanted to move on; who wanted to put the magnitude
of this crime behind them. “Let the
healing begin” became an emotional slogan to conceal the school’s guilt and to
cover up the fact that there could never be true healing unless the crime was
thoroughly and completely analyzed. That analysis, however, school and elected
officials were determined to prevent.
The school first adopted a code
of silence. Simply put, if you don’t talk about something, it cannot get into
the public domain. As noted in an earlier chapter, the school had next to no
contact with the injured and their families in the immediate aftermath of the
shooting. Professor Roy, in her book No
Right to Remain Silent, writes, “It therefore became necessary for the
president [Charles Steger] and some members of his administration to construct
an ethical framework on which a culture of silence could be rebuilt. The most
convenient strategy was one that had been used before—i.e., a rigorous
enforcement of state and federal laws related to student privacy.” She goes on to note the irony in this
solution as it was the same use of privacy laws that resulted in an inability
by the university’s care teams, faculty, and disciplinary board to share vital
information about (or on) Cho that might have helped him receive proper
treatment before the shooting. As I have discussed in Chapter III this was,
both before and after the shooting, a complete misinterpretation of both the
spirit and the letter of the law. However, it was this bogus and obstructive
interpretation that the school chose to use during the investigation of the
shooting. To assert the primacy of a dead criminal’s right to privacy over the
public’s need to understand what led to his murderous rage seems ridiculous,
but what else were the administration and campus police doing when they did not
inform Cho’s parents or the English department of Cho’s incarceration at the
St. Albans Behavioral Center for the Carilion New River Valley Medical Center?
But, silence was not enough; Tech
needed more. The school needed a scholar, a respected academic to explain why
the Steger administration could not have foreseen Cho’s rampage. The Steger
administration thought it had found the answer to its prayers in the writings
of New York Times best-selling
author, Nassim Taleb. Taleb’s book, The
Black Swan, deals with events that cannot be predicted. A “Black Swan”
event can be positive or negative; it is “deemed highly improbable yet causes
massive consequences.” School officials, as they clamored to argue that April
16, 2007 was not foreseeable, were quick to call Cho’s massacre a “Black Swan.”
The school used the “Black Swan” argument in rebutting the Department of
Education’s findings that Virginia Tech, by not issuing a warning immediately
following the double homicide, had broken the law—the Clery Act.
If you read Taleb’s book, he says
that a “Black Swan” event has several characteristics. The most distinctive of
which is that nothing in the past can point to its possibility. Here, the
author cites a turkey that is fed lots of food for months on end, and then a
few weeks before Thanksgiving, the farmer cuts off his head. For the turkey,
nothing pointed to its imminent demise—the head-lopping was a total surprise;
it was a “Black Swan.”
Virginia Tech neglected to tell
the public that Taleb also says that “some events can be rare and
consequential, but somewhat predictable, particularly to those who are prepared
for them and have the tools to understand them…” Taleb calls these events “near
Black Swans.” The events of April 16, 2007, clearly fall into that category.
Furthermore, I would remind Virginia Tech that just because something is
unlikely does not mean that it is not predictable. And, there was ample
evidence that Cho might harm himself or others and the school found every
excuse it could to avoid confronting those indications and doing something
about them.
The school’s use of the “Black
Swan” defense is equivalent to intellectual dishonesty. What a shame that a
great academic institution would stoop to such duplicitous measures. Rather
than support the school’s case, Tech’s willingness to distort the “Black Swan”
is an indication of just how bankrupt Virginia Tech’s defense is. In fact, the
school’s readiness to misrepresent the “Black Swan,” as it desperately grasped
for excuses, only underscores the indefensible actions of the Steger
administration.
Was Cho’s rampage not
foreseeable, was his mental illness not widely known to school officials? How
many times does Virginia Tech have to be reminded of all the warning signs?
Does the school really have to be told again that a judge ruled that Cho was an
imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness? Has the school
forgotten that Cho’s behavior toward women got him into trouble with campus
police? Does the school not remember that in the fall of 2005, Cho’s writings
in Professor Nikki Giovanni’s “Creative Writing: Poetry” class were so dark and
menacing that students dropped out? What more evidence of prior knowledge does
anyone need than the fact that Professor Giovanni contacted the Dean of the
English department saying that unless Cho was removed from the class, she would
resign?
Was the school not aware that Cho
sent a very clear and vivid warning when he wrote a paper for a creative
writing class concerning a young man who hated the students at his school and
planned to kill them and himself?
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