Criticism of University Response
Sociology professor Kenneth Westhues has criticized the Virginia Tech response to the shootings and the Massengill Report. Westhues identifies the cause of the shootings as mobbing Cho experienced in the Virginia Tech English department, and suggests that the explanation for the Virginia Tech shootings should go beyond what he calls the "defective character" explanation:
A more truthful (and therefore more useful) explanation of the Virginia Tech murders focuses not on Cho’s character but on the interaction between it and the situations he was in, not on his personal identity but on the interplay between who he was and how other people treated him.Westhues cites the experiences of another Virginia Tech student in the same department as being very similar to Cho's. Westhues has criticized Virginia Tech and the Massengill Report for failing to advance a fuller explanation of the causes of the shootings, which he suggests should be one of "character-situation interplay".
Read more about this topic: Virgina Tech Shooting
Famous quotes containing the words criticism, university and/or response:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am not willing to be drawn further into the toils. I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the university out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Women had to deal with the men’s response when the women wanted more time “out” of the home; men now must deal with the women’s response as men want more time “in.””
—Kyle D. Pruett (20th century)