Pareidolia

Ever since a psycho shot up a classroom last year and killed two students, the university has engaged in endless recrimination and self-flagellation. They promoted the chief of the university police to an associate provost position (or something like that), started locking all the doors, and even restricted where we could go with our key cards. (One floor of the School of Public Health Building is now locked with an old-fashioned metal key and you have to ring a bell to get in if your own office doesn't happen to be on that floor. Why? No idea.)

 

They hired a consulting firm to develop a safety and security plan for the university, and they've now come out with their 30 page report. The campus used to be completely open, it was just part of the city and the neighbors could walk through it, drop in on lectures and other events, and of course potential students could check all that out as well. Apparently that's over now and you'll need a key card to enter any building, or get an invitation and sign in with a security guard.

 

What I think is that this is all completely ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a similar event is any more likely now than it has been for the previous 250 years of the university's existence. Another way of looking at this is that there are, I don't know how many but I'll guess, about 5,000 institutions of higher education in the United States and as far as I can recall, in my lifetime, there have been maybe four or five shooting rampages at a college or university. That means that over the course of more than half a century your school has about a 1 in 1,000 chance of something like this happening, and as I say, it's no more likely to happen at Brown now than it was a year ago.

 

There have been innumerable more targeted violent acts at colleges of course -- universities aren't immune from the problems of existence. Some that sorta kinda overlap with our incident are instances of failing graduate students attacking a professor. A notorious event was Amy Bishop, a junior professor who shot up a departmental faculty meeting because the didn't get tenure. However, none of these events would have been prevented by locked doors because the perpetrators were already inside and were authorized to be there.

 

Humans compulsively look for meaning in random stimuli. But there was no meaning in the shooting at Brown other than what we already knew, which is that on occasion humans become homicidal maniacs. It's rare enough that it's unlikely to affect you directly in your lifetime, and we can't structure our lives and our institutions around such a remote possibility. Again, the incident last year means nothing more than that. The situation, the risk, has not changed at all, which means there is no reason to respond to it other than to mourn the losses and move on. But people just can't seem to do that.