Misinterpreting the Virginia Tech Legacy

In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, many colleges have rushed to create lists of "banned students" and make them public on their campuses. The students who land on these lists have violated various school rules -- some of them more violent than others, all of them cause for some kind of concern.

But in an effort to control the uncontrollable, many college administrations have overlooked the deepest lesson in all of this. It is not to further alienate emotionally and mentally-challenged students, but to seek them out and get them the help they need. By labeling these young people "banned," and distributing damning mug shots and details of their alleged violations, these schools are only furthering the distance between their most needy students and the community they so crave.

Take Brittany Bethel, a smart young woman attending the University of Northern Colorado. While working at the UNC recreation center last September, she collapsed from complications from anorexia. Since then she has been repeatedly hospitalized. Her Facebook page features a homemade video of her struggle -- sad and telling snapshots of Bethel literally disappearing are alternated with her own commentary: "Sadly I STILL struggle...slowly fadeing[sic] away..."

She is facing the most deadly psychological disease in existence, one that affects millions of women in the U.S. each year. A quarter of those with anorexia, die. Another half partially-recover. A lucky 25% of those afflicted get completely healed. Brittany is battling her best to fall in that category.

And amidst her battle, she was deeply wounded by an unsuspecting force -- her alma mater. She showed up on UNC's banned student list posted on their site last week, alongside rapists and other violent offenders, because she broke the school's honor code by proving to be "a threat" to herself. Bethel was, not surprisingly, devastated and embarrassed.

Is this our schools' wise reaction to the untimely deaths at Virginia Tech? Surely making non-violent students like Bethel feel like criminals is not going to make our campuses any safer. In fact, humiliating her -- and vulnerable others like her -- is only perpetuating a climate where individuals feel rejected, discriminated against, and alone. It is this climate that contributed to Cho Seung-Hui's violent act. His only way of connecting, it seems, was through a bullet.

It isn't news to anyone who has recently attended college, that they are sites teeming with emotional and mental struggle. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in college students. Between 1950 and 1995, the suicide rate among adolescents more than quadrupled. Some studies indicate that 15% of college students are clinically depressed.

The answer is not to vilify kids who fall prey to the pressure, but to expand our mental health services, normalize therapy, encourage students, teachers, and administrators alike to reach out to those who seem to be falling through the cracks. The answer is not to criminalize kids, but guns. The answer is not to further striate an already cliquish community, but expand it, make it more welcoming and embracing of difference. The answer is not to publicize the shortcomings of vulnerable students -- the post-Virginia Tech scarlet letter -- but spend our energy, time, and money on finding them help.

The impetus to create and distribute these lists of banned students on college campuses is one more piece of evidence that we are a throw-away society. Criminals languish in jails that provide little opportunity for true rehabilitation, instead hardening the men and women locked up and stripping them of their rights. Recidivism soars.

We slap failing labels on the poorest public schools and dock the pay of already overworked teachers. At our most generous, we lift the best and the brightest students out of these schools and send them to the rich side of town, pat ourselves on the back for our short-sighted generosity.

And now college students--our sons and daughters, our friends, our future -- are labeled and publicly humiliated so that college administrators can shun responsibility should the unthinkable happen. Concerns of liability have trumped those of wellbeing. Everyone rushes to put a band-aid act on a deep, festering wound.

If college leaders really want to respond in an ethical and visionary way to the tragedy they have just witnessed, they will put their energies towards expanding mental health care facilities, making counseling available and excellent, and organizing to ban hand guns. Now that would be a tribute to the legacy of those young lives that we lost.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her book -- Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body -- was published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press last week. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.