How UCD acts on threats
Sacramento Bee 4/20/07
"We can do an interim suspension immediately if we feel there's an imminent threat," said Jeanne Wilson, director of Student Judicial Affairs, which coordinates a crisis response team. The team includes campus police, counseling and psychological services, housing officials and the campus violence prevention program.
But Wilson said action can't be taken if officials aren't alerted by faculty, staff or students. At Virginia Tech, university officials apparently didn't act for several weeks after 63 of 70 students refused to go to a creative writing class with Cho and Professor Nikki Giovanni threatened to resign unless Cho was removed from the class.
UC Davis English professor Jack Hicks -- who supervises about 450 undergraduate creative writing students annually -- said there have been cases where he's immediately picked up the phone and called the counseling center, department administrators and judicial affairs.
A Virginia Tech professor tried one-on-one teaching with Cho. "That was very nice of her, but that was not her call, putting herself in a position to solve what is a large institutional problem, because we're not very good at being cops," Hicks said. "You can't permit a person to come to class and wreak havoc like that -- if 63 of 70 students are driven away by a madman, I'm confident this administration would respond promptly to this situation before it becomes murderous."
But Hicks, a 30-year veteran, said, "It's hard to know exactly how you head this behavior off." Even if a student is suspended or taken in for a psychiatric evaluation, he or she can only be held for so long, Hicks said.
And when it comes to a student's writing, violent words must be balanced with freedom of expression, Hicks said. "If we locked up every student who was writing about anti-social behavior we'd have an empty campus."
Cho's disturbing writings crossed the line, Hicks said. That was clear when other students felt so intimidated they didn't want to come to class.
Judicial Affairs director Wilson said her office would seek to meet with the student and teacher as soon as possible. If the student refused to meet, or was told not to return to class but went anyway, "we'd call police," she said.
"If we haven't been able to meet with the student but were concerned about an imminent threat, plainclothes officers would have been sent to the class as a precaution," Wilson said.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, UC Davis received at least a dozen calls reporting questionable student behavior, she said, adding that plainclothes officers can't be sent out on every call.
"When in doubt, we err on the side of safety -- sometimes it's better to call the parents without a legal opinion."
Her staff also immediately contacts Counseling and Psychological Services, or CAPS, "because they give us valuable insight into how to approach that person -- they may say don't meet without a police officer."
CAPS psychologist Emil Rodolfa, who trains teachers how to handle troubled or disturbing behavior, said that based on his 19 years at UC Davis, "I don't think a faculty member would wait until students stopped showing up to class," he said. "We become involved in these situations fairly early."
Students have been taken to a hospital because they're thought to be suicidal or a danger to others, "usually in an ambulance, but if a student is being belligerent or aggressive, we will bring campus police into it," Rodolfa said.
While officials try to ensure the individual student's rights, if faculty or other students are thought to be in danger, "a certain possibility is to pull that student immediately out of class," Rodolfa said.