International News

America’s worst campus massacre

"You caused me to do this." That was Cho Seung-Hui’s excuse for murdering 32 people. People found an essay in the young student’s room that appeared to blame everyone but himself for what he was about to do. In it, he raged against religion, women, rich kids, debauchery and "deceitful charlatans" at Virginia Tech, where he was studying English.

It was the worst peacetime shooting in American history. Investigators are still scrambling to work out what happened when. But a combination of announcements, leaks and witnesses suggest that around 7.15 in the morning of April 16, in a dormitory called West Ambler-Johnston Hall, Cho shot and killed Emily Hilscher, an attractive 19-year-old would-be vet. Around the same time, he shot Ryan Clark, a popular member of the university marching band. Why he chose these two as his first victims is unknown. Rumours that he was attracted to Hilscher are, inevitably, circulating. Clark may have been shot because he tried to intervene.

Thereafter Cho mailed a manifesto to NBC News. It included pictures of him posing with guns, video clips and a rambling and obscene diatribe against wealthy people. At 9.05, Cho entered Norris Hall, a block of classrooms half a mile from Ambler-Johnston. He locked the doors with chains to stop people escaping. Then he walked into classrooms, one by one, and tried to kill everyone inside. He had two guns: a Glock 9 mm and a Walther P22. Both are semi-automatic: they fire bullets as quickly as you can keep pulling the trigger. Each Glock magazine held 15 rounds; the Walther’s held ten.

Survivors said the gunman killed without saying a word. He shot teachers and students at close range, in the face, in the mouth, anywhere. He put about three bullets into each victim, to make sure.

Every time he emptied a magazine, he reloaded with skill and speed. He had plenty of ammunition. He kept on killing until police burst into Norris Hall. Then he shot himself. His face was so badly disfigured that police found it hard, at first to identify him.

Some of his classmates had a hunch, though. When the news broke that a gunman was shooting people at random, several guessed it was Cho. He had always been quiet in class — in fact, he rarely spoke to anyone. He hid behind sunglasses, a hat and a blank expression. But his classmates found him intimidating. It was his imagination that alarmed them.

He wrote two short plays for a creative writing class. Nearly every line speaks of gore. The cardboard dialogue suggests an author who never really listened to other people. And the plots are suffused with anxious fury: about money, sex, religion and overbearing adults.

In 2005 two female students complained to the police that he was stalking them, but declined to press charges. Police warned him off but did not arrest him because he had made no specific threats. A district court found reason to believe him "mentally ill" and "an imminent danger to self or others" and ordered him to undergo a psychiatric test. But the examination found "his insight and judgement are normal" and he was discharged.

What is certain is that he was buying guns and training himself to use them. He bought a gun on February 9, at a pawn-shop, and another on March 16, at a gun shop in a nearby town. Both sales were legal. A quick background check showed he had no criminal record, so he was entitled, under Virginia law, to buy one gun each month. The gunshop owner insisted he found nothing suspicious about the clean-cut college boy.

Cho’s victims — and he injured as many as he killed — were a fair cross-section of Virginia Tech. There were teachers and students, engineers and international studies majors. One professor, Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor, blocked the door of his classroom with his body to slow Cho’s entrance. This bought enough time for his students to jump out of the window. But not enough for Librescu himself to escape.

The day after the shooting, the flags were flying at half-mast outside the Virginia headquarters of the National Rifle Association (NRA). America’s mighty gun lobby tries to keep a respectfully low profile at times like these. But it responds to the challenges that inevitably arise when the weapons it champions are used to kill innocents.

Some Democrats called for tighter gun controls. There is little danger of that. The blood-letting in Virginia Tech is unlikely to shift the debate about guns, because the two sides draw opposing conclusions from it. Those who already favour gun control argue that if Cho had been barred from buying semi-automatic weapons, he would not have killed so many people. Those who oppose gun controls argue that if only his victims had been armed, they could have shot him before he shot more than a few of them.

High price of education neglect

A bloody clash erupted in late March when security forces prevented pro-Taliban militants from recruiting pupils for jihad at a private secondary school in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, projects such incidents as part of a struggle between his "enlightened moderation" and obscurantist militants. But critics say General Musharraf is failing in one important arena. His five-year old plan to reform Pakistan’s madrassas is "in a shambles", according to a report recently released by the International Crisis Group, a research and policy outfit.

Officially 53 percent of Pakistanis are literate. Others say the figure is nearer 30 percent. Literacy, often defined as no more than the ability to write one’s name, is as low as 3 percent among women in some rural areas. Pakistan has a rapidly ballooning population of 160 million with over 85 million people below the age of 19. The education system, left to atrophy for 30 years, is crippled by every possible ill: crumbling classrooms, poor teaching materials, untrained and truant teachers and endemic corruption.

It is not all grim. The government is taking education more seriously and pouring in more resources. In the province of Punjab, which has a population of 83.7 million, the World Bank has ploughed over $850 million (Rs.3,509 crore) into educational reform. Over the past three years more than one million children have enrolled in Punjabi schools for the first time. The provincial government has introduced free textbooks, a $4 monthly stipend for girls, a teacher-training scheme and has cancelled token school fees. Like NWFP, Punjab has purged its textbooks of much pro-jihad and anti-Indian propaganda.

But the good news ends here. Poorer provinces have been unable to cash in. Baluchistan, blighted by a low-level separatist insurgency, has been able to increase spending by only 20-30 percent. Across Pakistan as a whole only 52 percent of primary-school-age pupils attend school. Of them, nearly one-third will drop out. Only 22 percent of girls above the age of ten complete primary schooling, compared to 47 percent of boys.

The private sector, which provides 30 percent of primary and secondary education, fares little better. Private schools are mostly over-subscribed, poorly paid and staffed by badly trained teachers. Many ‘English-medium’ schools, offering to bridge the social divide between the Anglophone elite and the ‘masses’, are a swindle. Pupils are instructed mainly in Urdu. Nevertheless, educationists are concerned that the divide between schools is reinforcing the social chasm.

To be fair, the government is seeking to combat these woes. It has pledged to increase spending on education from 2.5 percent of GDP to 4 percent. But similar promises were made last year. Already some 40 percent of the education budget is returned to the exchequer because of a lack of "capacity", or the failings of a cumbersome bureaucracy.

Grey power rule in education

The Bar Cristal, beneath an elevated section of Rome’s inner ringway, caters mostly to travelers from nearby bus and rail stations. But by 7.30 a.m most days, it is packed with teachers, many of whom have come from as far away as Naples. They are part of Italy’s army of 150,000 casual teachers, waiting for a call to teach in a short-staffed school. Darting between classrooms, they tack together take-home pay of €1,100 (Rs.55,000) per month.

In early April Romano Prodi’s centre-left government enacted a law to give full-time jobs to a third of these freelance educators. The plan is to absorb all of them by 2009. This reflects a wish to improve the consistency and standards of teaching. But it also responds to recent incidents suggesting Italy’s teachers have lost control.

Since 2000, successive reports from OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment have shattered the belief that Italian schools are among Europe’s best. The most recent put them near the bottom of the heap. In maths Italy’s 15-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in all but three OECD countries. No similarly exhaustive comparison has been done for tertiary education. But that so many young Italians study abroad, and so few young foreigners (2 percent of all foreign students) do in Italy, points to equally low standards at university level.

As in much of Italy, a logjam blocks young entrants. This explains the morning crowd at the Bar Cristal. It may lie behind the breakdown of discipline in classrooms. In 2001, 90 percent of upper secondary teachers were over 40 compared with an OECD average of two-thirds. A mere 0.1 percent were under 30 (against 11 percent in all rich countries).

Matters are worse in universities, where patronage, cronyism and secure tenure are the rule. A study by Corriere della Sera in January showed that a full 30 percent of top academics and 10 percent of lecturers were over 65. Only nine of the country’s 18,651 senior academics are under 35, compared to 7 percent in America and fully 16 percent in Britain. In education, as in far too many walks of Italian life, it is grey power that rules.

Ukieri offers equal partnership

Academics and researchers across India and the UK will soon have the chance to bid for funding in the second round of collaborative projects aimed at transforming links between the two countries.

The UK-India Education and Research Initiative (Ukieri), a multimillion pound five-year programme launched last year, is a unique international collaboration designed to ensure that India and the UK become partners of choice. It also recognises India’s role in developing higher education.

Ukieri is about to seek bids for 25 awards for research and ten awards for programme delivery. One priority is building research links between centres of excellence, another is encouraging more doctoral and postdoctoral partnerships. Opportunities are arguably greatest at the lower end of the scale because the awards are to research teams rather than individuals, and younger researchers are more likely to be able to spend an extended period abroad.

Marie Lall, a specialist in South-east Asia at the Institute of Education, University of London, believes there is often a neocolonial attitude towards India in the UK. "It’s the attitude that ‘India can learn from us’. Ukieri is a breath of fresh air in talking about equal partnerships," she says.

Dr. Lall spoke at a recent Ukieri policy dialogue in Kolkata, which brought together academics and policymakers to discuss widening access and social inclusion. There were initial suspicions in India that Ukieri was another means of marketing the UK as a postgraduate destination, but these fears have since been allayed.

Comments Tim Gore, the British Council’s head of education in India: "I don’t think the benefit is necessarily synchronous. In fact, in most cases, I think it will be asynchronous — the UK will gain one sort of expertise and India another."

According to Gore the social sciences were not prominent in the first round of bids. He is eager to see more social science and humanities proposals, but he stressed that there were no quotas for subjects.

India’s University Grants Commission has identified institutions and departments with "potential for excellence", and UGC chairman Sukhadeo Thorat says links with the UK could help their progress. He speculated that there could eventually be joint appointments, with researchers being able to work in both countries.

Indonesia

Curious case of institutional cruelty

Nine years after the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in Indonesia, the country is democratic but many institutions remain unreformed, not least the army and police. Perhaps the most bizarre relic of the past is the Institute of Public Administration (IPDN), a national training college for civil servants in West Java. Inexplicably this is still run, as it was under the old regime, like a military boot-camp — with uniforms, drill routines and violent rituals inflicted on novices by their seniors — as if its mission were to turn out paratroops, not pen-pushers.

The latest in a series of violent deaths at the college has outraged public opinion. The college’s bosses first said that Cliff Muntu, a 21-year-old student, had died of liver failure. An autopsy found he died of massive injuries all over his body, caused by blunt objects. He is said to have been beaten senseless after making a blunder during a flag-raising ceremony. After the truth about his death emerged, one man who had taught at the college since 1993 was briefly suspended for telling the press that 17 other students had died suspiciously over that period and that their deaths had been covered up.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered an inquiry and stopped the college from admitting new pupils for now. But he is under great pressure from Parliament to close it altogether. The institution’s problems can hardly have come as a shock. At its past two graduation ceremonies, Yudhoyono made fine speeches calling for an end to IPDN’s culture of violence but then, typically, did nothing.

There seems no reason to keep IPDN open. The 150 billion rupaiah (Rs.69.67 crore) a year it costs certainly does not produce an efficient civil service: ask any Indonesian taxpayer. Asep Suryahadi of SMERU, a think-tank in Jakarta, notes that similar courses in public administration are anyway offered by many Indonesian universities — minus the militarism and thuggery. Nevertheless, despite the college’s reputation, it has no shortage of applicants. In a country where unemployment is high, students prize its guarantee of a civil-service job on graduation — if they survive that far.

Macquaire-Somani joint varsity project

The Sydney-based Macquaire University is seeking approval from the Indian government to open its first campus, probably in Delhi. Under the proposal an Indian firm — the Somani Group, which is involved in insurance, IT and manufacturing — will fund most of the building. Macquaire would control academic matters.

The university proposes to provide undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees and some students might visit Australia as part of their postgraduate studies. The new campus projected to open in 2009 will initially enroll 300 students, with numbers reaching 2,000 by 2014.

This is the second major Indo-Australia joint venture in higher education. Melbourne’s Monash University recently set up a joint research centre with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Educational Supplement; Times Higher Education Supplement and The Economist)