What Can Schools Do?

By Julie Rawe

In the fall of 2005, some 17 months before Cho Seung-Hui went on his killing spree at Virginia Tech, his behavior was so disturbing that his creative-writing professor had him removed from her class. Later that semester, two female students complained separately about what one called his "annoying" advances, and after an acquaintance warned that Cho might be suicidal, he was detained for several hours, evaluated at a local mental-health facility and released. "Everyone who is hospitalized isn't going to be banned from campus," Dr. Christopher Flynn, head of Virginia Tech's counseling center, told TIME.

When it comes to the complex intersection of campus safety and mental health, the questions of what counts as sufficient warning signs and how universities should respond to them often end up in court. Move too quickly by, say, suspending a depressed student for posing a threat to himself or others, and schools can -- and do -- get sued for discriminating against the disabled. But parents of students who committed suicide have also wrangled settlements out of colleges for not doing enough to intervene. And, of course, there can be hell to pay for failing to protect other students when the red flags -- at least in hindsight -- seem clear. At large campuses like Virginia Tech's, which has 26,000 students, there can be hundreds who are in psychological distress or long-term counseling. Says Kevin Kruger, associate executive director of a national association of student-affairs administrators: "Making decisions about when to have those students leave and when to have them stay is very, very tricky."

Making things more difficult, there has been a rash of recent high-profile lawsuits involving students who were summarily booted off campus after they were deemed at risk of suicide. Last August, New York City's Hunter College agreed to pay $65,000 to settle such a case. In the wake of these suits, the Governor of Virginia signed a bill last month that prohibits state colleges from penalizing or expelling students "solely" for attempting suicide or seeking mental-health treatment for suicidal thoughts. The law's primary goal is to encourage kids to get help, and it also requires schools to develop policies for dealing with such students.

As universities work on their emergency mental-health protocols, they have struggled with privacy rights when determining whether to notify families that a student is acutely distressed. Last summer the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on suicide prevention among college students, issued intervention guidelines that covered, for example, contacting parents against a student's wishes. The foundation, co-founded by a retired pharmaceutical executive after his son committed suicide, recommended that colleges avoid policies that either require or prohibit calling parents when a student seems acutely distressed. Why? Because schools need wiggle room and because sometimes families can be a big part of a student's problems.

However much time colleges put into their efforts, there's no surefire way to predict violent behavior, and jumping to conclusions can have dire consequences for troubled students. "The label may stick and become part of their definition of themselves," says Gary Pavela, a judicial-policy expert at the University of Maryland and the author of a book on student suicide. And when that happens, there's no telling what tragic end the tale might have.

With reporting by Michael Lindenberger/Blacksburg