Colleges walk fine line with troubled students

The tragedy at Virginia Tech has prompted calls for more security and less privacy.

from the April 20, 2007 edition

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"They had a time bomb waiting to detonate in their midst. They knew about it. Yet they failed to take the proper actions and safeguards to protect other students and others at the university," says Jerry Reisman, a litigation lawyer and partner with Reisman, Peirez and Reisman, in Garden City, N.Y. "They had a duty, and they breached that duty."

Mr. Reisman says the school failed by not acting to lock down the campus after the first of the two shooting episodes, and argues that officials could have expelled or suspended Cho based on his earlier behavior, or at least referred him for a mandatory mental-health facility stay.

But that argument, say others, demands that a school have much more predictive powers than the murky world of profiling models and mental-health diagnoses gives them and ignores their legal restraints.

This kind of incident – and the ensuing lawsuits –can leave administrators feeling trapped "between Scylla and Charybdis," says Robert Smith, a lawyer at Nelson, Kinder, Mosseau & Saturley in Boston, referring to the mythical Greek monsters who lurked on either side of a narrow strait. "You move in one direction, and you're violating the law; you move in another direction, and you're told you're violating the law," says Mr. Smith, who has often defended universities in the past.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, Virginia became the first state to bar colleges and universities from expelling or punishing a student solely on mental-health or suicide-risk grounds. Federal disability law also protects students unless they make direct threats, and privacy law keeps institutions from letting parents know of their children's problems and often from sharing information among officials.

While there are exceptions for emergencies, those are often unclear. Virginia is one of a handful of states that has refused to follow the California Tarasoff decision that requires counselors or psychiatrists to breach confidentiality if there seems to be clear danger.

At the same time, universities across the country are seeing a significant rise in the number of students diagnosed with depression and other mental-health issues, in part because of the advancement in psychiatry that often allow such students to live more mainstream lives.

Smith, for one, would like to see the emergency exceptions and actions a school could take increased and clarified.

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