The Boston Globe has an accounting of college and university multiple murders since 1990. It does not include murders in K-12 schools or the Oakland murders.
CA Campus Shooting: Rare event, common pattern by James Alan Fox. He is an eminent scholar in this field, The Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Boston.
His observation is that many of the cases involve graduate or professional students or ex-students. The number of such murders is disproportionate: undergraduates are the vast majority of college and university students.
Quote:
Unlike undergraduates, students in graduate and professional programs often lack balance in their personal lives, narrowly focusing on academic work and training to the exclusion of other interests and other people in their lives. They often spend long hours in the library or lab, while ignoring or abandoning their marriages, friendships and hobbies.
Many of these advanced students, who had been at the top of their class in high school and college, come to find themselves struggling to get by with just passing grades. At a point in life where they are longer supported financially by parents, many experience great pressure to juggle employment with coursework and thesis research, with little time left over for attending to social networks. At some point, their entire lifestyle and sense of worth may revolve around academic achievement. Moreover, their personal investment in reaching a successful outcome can be viewed as a virtual life-or-death matter.
This do-or-die perception can be intensified for foreign graduate students from certain cultures where failure is seen as shame on the entire family. Foreign students also experience additional pressures because the academic visas allowing them to remain in this country are often dependent upon their continued student status.
Even if emerging facts confirm that today's shooter at Oakland's Oikos University does indeed fit the mold, this does not mean that such behavior would have been foreseeable. One fact is indisputable, rare events can never be anticipated, not matter how ominous the circumstances. The best we can do is to continue efforts to keep concealed weapons as far away from college campuses as possible.
Some undergraduate colleges cultivate the same highly achievement-driven climate that Fox cites in tertiary schools. However, none of the schools known for that undergraduate climate appears in Fox's history.
It may be that exclusion is a more important factor than is the "do-or-die" mentality. Indeed, Fox begins by noting the constrained lives that tertiary students often live. I cannot speak to anything but graduate schools (not professional schools), but in my experience graduate students tend to be helpful to each other, just as do many undergraduate students. However, some students always are left out, perhaps because of their own choice or perhaps because other students want nothing to do with them. It is possible that we could better monitor that situation.
It would be interesting for Fox to extend his chart to include all mass murders committed by students, whether or not on the campus. It would be a much larger list with many more deaths. Jared Loughner's murders would be in the chart. For social action, it may matter less whether the student murdered other students or whether the student fits the pattern of isolation that I suspect is there.
I wish that I thought that preventing the concealed carry of weapons on college campuses would make the difference. I doubt that it would. In fact, I am not sure that any of the murders in his chart were committed using concealed carry weapons. It's not the best that we can do. The best is to attend to our students more carefully and care-fully than we do today.
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