School shootings and social margins

We know about the shootings yesterday in Colorado:

Authorities have identified one of the two suspects in a shooting Tuesday at a public charter school in Colorado just eight miles from Columbine High School.

Devon Erickson, 18, has been held in the attack at STEM School Highlands Ranch in which seven students were injured and one killed, reported 9News, the Denver NBC news outlet.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the second suspect has been identified and is a juvenile girl, which crosses a threshold of feminine equality that we never would have wanted. I wrote most of what follows a year ago, just after a school shooting in Texas, but I hardly need to change a word.

It is chilling to think that what used to be outside the margins regarding guns and schools is now becoming normalized: "The Best Explanation for Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is the Least Comforting."

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

It works like this:



This "infectious" behavior is well known and described by people who study and teach leadership. Here are two real problems: First is what Granovetter describes: once there are enough early adopters of a behavior, then mass adoption easily follows. Hence, Gladwell describes school shootings as a "slow motion riot." But portents are that it won't stay slow.

Second is what is revealed by retired Army officer and psychologist Dave Grossman, who documents in Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing and other works that more and more boys are growing up learning to kill vicariously through both popular media and electronic gaming - and that for increasing numbers the vicarious violence will give way to actual.

In one of his early works, On Killing, Grossman documented the great difficulty the US Army had in World War II in training its soldiers, especially infantrymen, actually to take the enemy's life. The leadership found that American men came into the military with deeply-inbred reluctance to harm other human beings, and that only a small minority of infantry even fired their rifles once in a firefight.

Grossman's thesis in what is happening to America today is that we have, as a whole society, widened the boundaries of what constitutes prohibited violence. Prior generations had mass murderers, of course, but even the most depraved killers in the not-too-distant past would never have even thought of shooting schoolchildren at their desks. Now it is, as Gladwell notes, becoming increasingly within the boundaries of conduct that society has moved.

In the coming days the editorialists and TV commentators will have a lot more to say. I do not expect their offerings to be much different from what they said after the Parkland, or Aurora, or Sandy Hook massacres or ... well, pick one. The media’s talking heads will recycle the same things they said before. We’ll hear a lot about America’s gun culture, and all the talk will be about guns and not about the culture.

Does America have a "gun culture?" You bet it does, and it this is it:

This movie was to open in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, the
day of the killing rampage in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Warner Bros. pulled the opening

The Hollywood gun culture:

Business Insider reprints part of an AskMen piece on
"The 99 Most Desirable Women Of The Year."
Here is no. 99, Bérénice Marlohe, who plays Severine in Skyfall.

Glorifying violence, especially gun violence, is the present purpose of America's entertainment industry. This is what untold numbers of our children are doing in their homes:



The margins continue to be moved, whether we want it or not. Because there is too much money being made by murder-as-entertainment to give it up, and we the people are willingly paying for it.

One of the ways that the Columbine shooting remains key is in how subsequent school chooters have imitated it to some degree. Not every shooter, but enough to see that Columbine still forms a template. For example,

Some aspects of Friday's [Texas] shooting had echoes of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. The two teenaged killers in that incident wore trench coats, used shotguns and planted improvised explosives, killing 10 before committing suicide themselves.

As did the accused killer in Texas, except for the suicide. Reports say, though, that he told police he intended to commit suicide but found he could not go through with it.

As for this week's shootings? The WSJ article linked above concludes,

George Brauchler, the district attorney for the area, noted at the Wednesday morning news conference the number of mass shootings that the Denver region had endured over the years.

“If you had suggested to anyone behind me that within 20 years and 20 miles, we would have dealt with Columbine, the Aurora theater, Arapahoe High School,” he said, rattling off Colorado mass shootings, flanked by officials. “We would have thought you were mad.”

Steve Holley recalled being at his son’s school to pick him up just as the school was put on high alert because of the scare involving the woman obsessed with Columbine.

“It was just like, ‘Here we go again,’ ” Mr. Holley said of Tuesday’s shooting. “I remarked to one of the other parents we were waiting in the gym with: ‘This is the new norm.’ ”

"The new norm" - the slow-motion riot is not happening slowly any more.

"What's Jesus Got To Do With It?"

Nashville Public Radio interviews Vanderbilt Divinity School New Testament Prof. Amy-Jill Levine, who was my main NT professor there during my M.Div. studies. Web page here.

Secret Service on preventing school shootings

This 2012, two-minute video is an interview with two Secret Service researchers about school shootings. Main takeway: In almost every case of someone shooting up a school, the shooter wrote or said in advance that he was going to do it.

And so did Nikolas Cruz, quite a long time before the Parkland, Fla., massacre. But the question is begged, if one of the most important ways to stop these shootings is to report to the authorities, then are not the authorities obligated to take steps?

When it came to the Parkland horror, apparently not. The literally years-long prequels to the massacre were filled with warnings that were, in some cases, deliberately ignored.

There were multiple warning extending back to early 2016 that Cruz was a threat to human life and safety

The Miami Herald:

The rage and obsession with violence documented by Cruz’s therapists during nearly two years of interactions when he was 15 to 17 years old continued through his school career: Again and again, authorities were warned about the teen’s explosive tendencies and lack of impulse control. Again and again, authorities ignored the warnings.

In addition to the troubling behavior Cruz exhibited at the schools he attended — including an incident in which the teen reportedly brought a backpack with bullets to class — law enforcement officers were also alerted that Cruz might be dangerous.

The FBI failed to act on two tips about Cruz, one of which involved Cruz posting online that he planned to become a “professional school shooter.” The Broward Sheriff’s Office was also warned about the teen, and had received a report that he “planned to shoot up the school.”

The FBI failed and has admitted to it. They failed so severely that Fla. Gov Scott called for the director's resignation.

The Broward County sheriff's department failed many times, especially after being specifically warned that Cruz would become violent very soon.

The school system could have had Cruz arrested, but did not because he was named Cruz.

The Broward County school board knew of Parkland shooter's obsession with guns and violence, documents show.

Stoneman HS administrators  themselves failed to take action in advance of the shooting..

Deputies visited Cruz's home on police business 45 or more times in the preceding few years.

911 audio of Deputy Peterson's radio transmissions provably show that he lied when he said post-event that he thought the shots were coming from outside the school.

Three other deputies arrived and took cover behind the cars and did nothing.

EMTs have said on the record that deputies prevented them from entering the school to begin treating and evacuating wounded. (Link is to local reporter's Twitter feed.) Also here.

So Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 12.

Reporting threats to the authorities only works when the authorities do something about the report. For the Parkland shooting, the authorities failed at literally every level. One has to ask: if they were going to design a system to fail on purpose, what would they have done differently from what they did do?

Sports: how to pay full costs of college

Would love to see a chart like this with the percentages of HS athletes who participate in NCAA athletics on a scholarship. Then let parents see it who are spending a fortune on putting their kids on every league sport they can under the delusion that it will pay their way through college.

I swear I could write a book about it. Our son did receive a scholarship for track and field when he started at Wake Forest in 2006. He was a thrower (discus, shot put, hammer, etc.). It was not until after he was awarded the scholarship that my wife and I learned how incredibly difficult they are to get. In fact, it was not offered at all until (a) he had been accepted to WFU on academic merit, and (b) he finished his senior HS year ranked second in the state in both shot put and discus.

And the first year his amount was 17 percent of Wake's $46,500 cost. He did not receive 100 percent until his senior year, and that was after he had been ranked as one of the top 15 javelin throwers in the NCAA. (Soph and junior years were much higher, but still less than100 percent.)

A coach told me that colleges do not award athletic scholarships for experience, that is, just because a kid showed up for practices and games for 10-12 years before college. If a boy or girl has played that long and is not ranked, then from a college coach's perspective, it means one or all of the following: S/he is not motivated, so no money for them. S/he is not talented, so no money for them. S/he has had bad coaching that the college coach now has to overcome, so no money for them.

Most parents do not know that the NCAA allocates scholarships to schools per sport. So there is a ceiling on how many full scholarships each head coach can award (which explains why they fractionalize them). As the coach told us, the way to get more money is to perform at a high level. It is literally pay for play.

However, academic awards have no such ceiling. Colleges can award as much money for academics as they can raise and get endowed. From parents' perspective, this can be very, very lucrative. I know a certain young lady whose academic awards and scholarships came to 125 percent of her annual costs. Yes, the extra 25 percent was hers to keep. She literally made a profit going to college.

Truly gifted child athletes can have a future in scholarship athletics, but they are a tiny number. For the other kids, athletics should be just for fun and fitness. Parent, spend that "would have spent" money for tutors in math and science.

Why college grads don't know how to think

This does not mean what you probably think it does. Not any longer.

Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills -- Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

That's because the test the freshmen and seniors take are not designed to test the critical thinking that is taught them in high school and college. Nor is this result the least surprising.

Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think.

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole. 

Above  all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason—then prioritizing the latter over the former.

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Boldface added. What is the result? Where to begin? Well, how about where the overwhelming majority of American kids get their education, the public schools system. Education journalist Bruce Deitrick Price explains what happened when a parent had an unplanned, frank conversation with her child's principal:

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

And then they go college. Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen writes,

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. ...

At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Bret Stephens wrote in 2012,

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president. ...

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

Then there is Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College who identifies as gay and mixed-race. She wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.”

Prof. Martinez

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.” (link)

Noted British philosopher Roger Scruton explains one result:

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’

Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.

However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.

Ah, yes: it is objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth. And critical thinking means you know how to denounce the system in proper Marxist terms.

Want a janitor's job? Get a degree.

Janitorial work is increasingly becoming the domain of the college degreed - and if you apply, you'd better have a degree in a technical field.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that as many as one out of three college graduates today are in jobs that previously or historically have been filled by people with lesser educations or none. 

The U.S. now has 115,000 janitors with college degrees, along with 83,000 bartenders, 80,000 heavy-duty truck drivers, and 323,000 waiters and waitresses. Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. 

Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

The problem is that high school grads - as many as three-fourths! -are increasingly unprepared for even the ever-lowering standards of undergraduate work. Most college graduates are similarly unprepared for "the real world" and so half of college grads are unemployed or underemployed, a figure no doubt amplified by the very bad economy.

So anyone attending college today needs to understand some crucial things that will form the new normal for some time to come and why these factors should directly determine what you major in:

1. It will matter to employers what you studied, even if the job has not historically required a degree.

Work habits and self discipline are the key virtues employers seek. A graduate with an accounting degree might not find an accounting job, but rare is the student who can successfully complete the degree without both those virtues.

So with the job market being an employer's market, hiring managers for non-technical jobs will likely use the technical difficulty of an earned degree as an indicator of whether you are a good prospect. Absolutely any degree whatsoever that ends with the word "studies" is utterly useless for demonstrating focus and self discipline.

2. The "degree required" bar has been greatly lowered and will stay there for many years.

Is a college degree really needed for janitorial work? Of course not. But as more and more new janitorial hires possess a bachelor degree, it will become normative for their employers to expect. Even if the economy improves, it will be a long time before actual degree-required jobs are plentiful enough to return the mass ranks of janitorial hires to high school education only.

This being so, you must face a crucial question with all the compassion of a Swiss banker; "Is college worth the price?"

3. No matter your dream of employment, computational competency, clarity of expression and computer literacy will be dominant virtues of value to employers.

Forget the sell job that colleges like to tell you about "finding out who you are" there. You can spend a lot less than four years doing that and get paid for it to boot.

You are going to college to learn skill sets that will enable you to make a living. No matter what courses you take, when you graduate you must be literate, numerate and computer competent - and that last does not mean gaming.

Update, March 2024: "Half of college grads are working high school-level jobs a year after graduation."

What you studied also matters, the researchers said. They found that fields requiring quantitative reasoning, such as engineering (26%), finance and accounting (29%), and computer science (36%), had the lowest five-year underemployment rates.

Health-related work, including nursing, had the lowest underemployment rate, with only 23% of graduates not working college-level jobs five years after finishing their bachelor's.

Is college worth the price?

Not worth the debt - NYPOST.com

For students, piece of advice No. 1 is: Don’t go into debt. When I went to law school, back in the ’80s, I turned down free rides at a couple of excellent schools to go to Yale Law School, even though it meant taking on a lot of student-loan debt. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone to do the same thing today, even to go to Yale Law, the undisputed king of the law-school rankings — and I’m positive I wouldn’t make a similar tradeoff for many other places, even Harvard Law.

True for undergrad schools, too. As anyone who has helped son or daughter with a college search recently, as I have in the last year (daughter graduated from high school last Friday), sticker shock is endemic.Georgia Tech runs more than $40,000 for non-Georgia residents; their idea of financial aid was for me to borrow $37,400 of it. When I called the financial-aid office to plead, the nice lady I talked to said that they do not give financial aid to non-Georgia applicants (though she did not put it quite so baldly).

Wake Forest offered us $46,000 per year in scholarships and grants. Sound like a lot? It is a lot - but it still would have left us with almost $13,000 to come up with. Sorry, I am too old to take on that kind of debt times four years.

Wake Forest (my alma mater, btw) underscores the real reason there is a higher-education bubble: I cannot see how a baccalaureate degree from the school could possibly be worth almost a quarter-million dollars. Not all bachelor degrees are created equal. Wake is very much a liberal-arts school, probably one of the best such schools in the world.

And good luck getting a job to pay off the commensurate student debt with that degree in medieval German literature.

Wake's law school and business school have proven excellent investments for later return - but as even law professor Glenn Reynolds points out in the Post piece, law schools have been fudging their criteria for post-graduation success for some time and a JD degree pretty much guarantees nothing any more. As one partner-track attorney told me recently, a job-seeking, newly-minted attorney needs to have a diploma from one of the top ten (not ten percent, ten) law schools in the country, and (not or) have graduated in the top fourth of his/her class, to even be considered for interview by most law firms. Don't have that? So sorry.

College payments have to be evaluated the same way as any other spending, by present value and eventual worth. Fewer and fewer top-tier schools can pass that test.