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Progress

April 16, 2008

Richmond Times-Dispatch Editorial

In the year since the massacre at Virginia Tech, the state and its public institutions have made considerable progress toward preventing a similar tragedy.

Colleges and universities have put alert systems in place. The General Assembly and Gov. Tim Kaine have passed several measures to reform mental health, and have injected almost $42 million to help move the reforms along. The loophole that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to buy firearms has been closed.

The federal government has issued a regulatory clarification permitting institutions of higher education to share mental health information about troubled students with the appropriate agencies and parties. UVa's Board of Visitors just formalized rules permitting the school to inform parents about a troubled student's mental-health problems. A new state law requires all schools to form threat-assessment teams. Professors and administrators across the state are, needless to say, now highly sensitized to the possibility of violence and the need to keep an open eye for warning signs.

More needs to be done — particularly in the area of mental health, particularly when it comes to community-based care and the still-inadequate continuity of care between state institutions and complete independence. Time, the great healer, has a tendency to erode the sense of urgency felt as the immediacy of tragedy fades. (When was the last time you knew the threat-advisory level from the Department of Homeland Security?) Virginia should strive not to let the passage of time divert its attention from the work that remains.

It also should keep in mind two caveats. The first is not to let the pendulum swing too far: Some of the perceived failings in mental health oversight (e.g., a high threshhold for involuntary commitment) arose from prior reforms instituted because of abuses of different sorts in decades past. Universities, where idiosyncratic behavior often is not all that idiosyncratic, will have to tread cautiously when scrutinizing faculty and students for possible threats. There is a fine line between the eccentric and the erratic.

The second caveat concerns the truism that lightning rarely strikes twice. Responses to past crises can help prevent future ones, but few can foresee the form the next crisis will take. (If perfect foresight were possible, then crises would never occur.) The sorry truth is that despite Virginia's best efforts, tragedy will strike again. Progress does take place, but the line approaching perfection is asymptotic: We will get closer, but we will never reach it.