Madness After Virginia Tech from Psychiatric Risk to Institutional Vulnerability

Madness after Virginia Tech From Psychiatric Risk to Institutional Vulnerability Benjamin Reiss Perhaps no contemporary creative writer has had a greater impact on American colleges and universities recently than Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre of 16 April 2007, which left thirty-three people dead (including him). As virtually everyone knows, Cho was a troubled English major whose writing and bizarre behaviors set off alarms for his fellow students and professors, several of whom tried to intervene in his life well before the gruesome violence erupted. According to the New York Times, "as many as eight of his teachers in the [previous] 18 months had formed what one called a 'task force' to discuss how to handle him," and this group made at least two pleas to university officials to take action.' In the wake of Cho's violence, college campuses across the country have enacted strategies and created policies to detect violent impulses in their students before they become manifest. The tacit assumption behind these directives is that the university's counseling center, security team, administrators, and faculty can work together to predict violent behavior and intervene before violent acts are committed, and monitoring students' academic and creative work is one important element in that preventive intervention. Many of these strategies include issuing guidelines to faculty about how to scrutinize students' writing, when and to whom to report troublesome signals, and how to balance the competing values of free creative expression, students' right to privacy, and campus security. Many of these directives minimize the first two values and emphasize the last. The University of Illinois, for instance, casts a very wide net for potentially violent student writers: "Previously, a piece of violent fiction passed on to the counseling center by a teacher would be followed up only if Social Text 105 • Vol. 28, No. 4 • Winter 2010 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2010-009 © 2010 Duke University Press 2 5 it included a named target.... This policy changed when it became appar- ent that they never would have had the chance to evaluate Mr. Cho. Now a student who writes anything focused on killing should be called in."^ At my own university, such blanket policies have never been broached, and faculty are encouraged to remember that often "weird doesn't mean dan- gerous; it just means weird," in the words of the director of Emory's counseling center. Such compassion, however, is counterbalanced by admin- istrative discussions about setting up security cameras in dorms with live feeds to the campus police (a policy that never came to fruition), and the distribution to all faculty members of a video urging them not to hesitate in contacting the counseling center with concerns about student behavior, including writing that is "angry, tnorose, strange." As for legal concerns, the paramount one should be the university's liability for not intervening, since "the legal risk—and the human risk—is not taking action and not doing something we should have." Faculty have been told that concerns about student privacy in this context are misplaced, given that "there are no rules, regulations, or statutes that prohibit a faculty member from shar- ing information about the student with other appropriate individuals at the university."^ Similar attitudes prevail on a wide range of campuses, both private and public, and they have been reinforced by a federal task force report on the aftermath of Virginia Tech—written by the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Education and the attorney general—and a review panel commissioned by Virginia governor Tim Kaine."' Media discussions of such developments do raise some objections. A writer for the New York Times, for instance, wondered about the effects on literary culture—in particular, that "intervening could squelch a young writer's voice."^ The Daily News mused about how one could tell whether "dark writing foreshadows the next Unabomber or the next Stephen King."'' Academe Online ran an imaginary debate between two professors, one con- cerned with security and one with academic freedom and openness. This second professor recoils at the idea of expanding "the use of writing as a surveillance system." He describes the chilling effect of such surveillance on students and the nightmarish, Kafkaesque webs in which one might be trapped. He also protests that even violent imaginings might have a kind of therapeutic effect: "Dozens of studies have shown that writing acts therapeutically, for traumatized veterans and nursing home residents and prisoners and troubled kids."^ The debates staged here are not about whether students' creative writing and other academic efforts should be subject to quasi-psychiatric scrutiny but about which type of scrutiny: a caring, therapeutic one or a forensic one that uses writing as a case to be made for intervention. But those who propose a therapeutic rather than a surveillance orientation toward the classroom tend not to consider that the therapeutic task might bleed over into the domain of intervention, leading 26 Reiss • Madness after Virginia Tech at one end of the spectrum to possibly unwanted counseling sessions and at the other to removal from the classroom, expulsion, or even involun- tary hospitalization. Lest this seem an extreme scenario, remember that this is precisely what was at issue in the Virginia Tech case: shouldn't the authorities have recognized that the testimony and evidence provided by Cho's creative writing teachers was enough to lock him up, or at least ban him from campus, before he acted? (Lawsuits and civil rights complaints directed at other universities also make clear that administrators do some- times act to remove the mentally ill from campus and run legal risks in doing so. I return to this phenomenon in my conclusion.) Perhaps not surprisingly, such protests against—or really, musings about—psychiatric scrutiny of students' writing have generally been lim- ited to assessing the trade-offs of negative effects on the psyches or creative lives of individual students who come under surveillance versus the needs of the institution to provide security.* What I would like to call into question is the structure of relations emerging post-Virginia Tech among faculty, students, administrators, and counselors around the problems of mental illness and the risk of violence. My contention is that the classroom — and most intensely the literature and creative writing classroom — is in danger of becoming a barely acknowledged zone of quasi-psychiatric surveillance, risk assessment, and preventive intervention. While the mitigation of violence—including suicidal behavior, which is a far more prevalent phenomenon than homicide—is a self-evidently worthy goal to be addressed by the campus community, the "risk" thinking that leads to identifying students before they act has not been sufficiently analyzed by those who are asked to play a role in identifying those students. While this development has become increasingly visible and urgent in the wake of Virginia Tech (and, in different ways, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999), it does have a history, one that reaches back at least into the nineteenth century. In order to frame what I think is a necessary conversation about the use of the classroom to detect psychiatric abnormality and the risk of violence, I would like to lay out some elements of that history so that we may wrench ourselves free of the panicky responses that immediately follow such events. And in my conclusion, I propose an alternative framework for thinking about the situation of those students living under the description of mental illness, one that moves beyond identification and isolation of risky populations to a more thorough examination of individual and institutional vulnerabilities.' While identifying risk springs from a top-down concern to protect institutions from the possible behaviors of individuals who pass through them, "vulnerability" provides a framework for thinking fiexibly about how institutions might exacerbate individuals' susceptibility to harm, and vice versa—and how actors within institutions might strive to promote resilience rather than to predict and prevent future harm.'" Social Text 105 • Winter 2010 27 Pangraphic Panopticism One might ask three basic questions about the emergence of psychiatric surveillance of creative writing in the classroom: How did creative writing come to constitute evidence of mental illness? How was the detection of deranged (or degenerate or psychotic) writing made consequential for its authors? How did this operation come to be detached from the field of psychiatry proper and moved into the educational system? Psychiatric interest in the aesthetic productions of the mentally ill goes back to the late-eighteenth-century origins of the psychiatric pro- fession, with Philippe Pinel in France and Benjamin Rush in the United States. Through the romantic period, this interest often served to human- ize the mad rather than to justify stigmatization and/or incarceration. The insane. Rush believed, had an uncommon capacity for artistic expression, a belief shared by American asylum superintendent Pliny Earle in his 1845 tract, "The Poetry of Insanity."" At a time when romantic poets embraced childlike intuition as the route to inspiration, Earle wrote that his patients, "in their attachments and antipathies, their sources of pleasure and of pain, their feelings,

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