Whether Amy Bishop or Matthew Harris or Bryan Kohberger, seriously disturbed and disturbing people on campus present schools with a serious dilemma, as in: What the hell to do? Psycho killer Bishop was a well-known and scary presence among her colleagues (and they didn’t even know that she had murdered her brother!), but they thought if they stayed real quiet and denied her tenure she’d go away. Harris, a minority, got promoted from woke campus to woke campus until someone woke up and started screaming about him. Mass murderer Kohberger turns out to have been a well-known nutcase at his school (see my headline), but they acted slowly and feebly in trying to neutralize him.
It’s easy after the explosion to say how could they have etc etc. But universities are civilized, deliberative, tolerant places, ill-equipped to deal with the not yet fully-flowered criminally insane. And of course we want universities to value oddness, to act slowly against even problematic people.
UD‘s thing is that the new insane proliferation of guns in America makes this otherwise creditable hesitation impossible. It’s now simply irresponsible to wait and see, or to sanction a bit, people who seem threatening. At the very least they should be made aware that the school is aware something’s wrong; they should be made aware that campus security is keeping an eye on them.