red flags and higher ed

Music: Neil Young: Harvest (1972)

Yesterday it was reported that the Aurora Assassin, James Holmes, sought help from a University of Colorado psychiatrist, Lynne Fenton, and that Dr. Fenton approached the university's behavioral health watchdog group with concerns about her client. The Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment Team (BETA) at the University of Colorado is a recently created group of mental health professionals assembled for the express purpose of preventing violence and catastrophe (er, just like the Aurora massacre). It was to Dr. Fenton that Holmes mailed his Mein Kampf, but she did not discover the notebook detailing his plans until after they were carried out.

Today the BlogHills are alive with the sound of condemnation: why didn't the BETA do something? The official answer from UC and the BETA group was that Fenton reported her concerns in June, but that Holmes left the university shortly thereafter. The group believed they no longer had the power to do anything about Fenton's concerns because Holmes had left the university. Further, owing to confidentiality issues, we don't know exactly what Fenton's expressed concerns were. We simply know that she had them and that she reported them.

Much speculation in the MSM today suggests their reasoning is akin to passing the buck, or perhaps yet another example of academic cover-up. From my personal experience dealing with students with "behavioral" issues, however, I think BETAs response is both sincere and truthful: mental health professionals in academic settings are very constrained, guided by a maze of protocols that are designed to protect universities from lawsuits. Whether or not the BETA had the power to do something is beside the point; they perceived they could not act if the student was no longer affiliated with the university. This is a reasonable, if not overdetermined, perception (I mean, I've personally seen this "our hands are tied" excuse many times at my own university). And, barring knowledge of the notebook Holmes mailed, it's entirely possible Holmes' interactions with Fenton did not rise to the level of official, actionable behavior. Whatever the case, I do not think Fenton is to blame any more than the threat assessment team; Holmes would have had to demonstrate a possible "threat to himself or others" for the group to have legal standing to act. Aside from the fact that Holmes was not a student by the time the committee would take up his case for consideration, it seems to me quite likely that Holmes did not present a clear danger in respect to the very clear protocols established for action or reporting concerns to authorities

Of course, I have already discussed this problem before this information came to light: we do not have the mental health infrastructure to deal with threatening students. The law errs on the side of protecting the student, and probably rightly so if we reckon with the power hierarchy involved in all academic settings (surely it would suck if a teacher's concerns about a student's morbid paper could lead to compulsory mental health assessments, expulsion, and so forth).

I think it is likely to come out that the university did everything "by the book" and is not to blame (at least from a legal standpoint). But I also think that, as this story continues to unfold, we'll be learning more and more about how constrained mental health professionals are when expressing concerns about a client or student. Now, I am strongly in the camp of those who defend confidentiality in matters of mental health---I think the whole enterprise of mental health treatment depends on it (if only for the social stigma). But I also think BETA teams and the like should be afforded much more power and discretion. How much, of course, is the pickle.

While we wait to learn more information, however, I think it's pretty instructive to point out the political character of this case. Presently, the neo-liberal jet set has identified higher education as the latest battleground for winning the hearts and minds of "the people." Their vision for education, perched upon a business model of incorporation, is to metamorphose teaching and learning into a transaction of deposit and withdrawal: student deposits money, withdraws knowledge. This vision is entwined with a sort of anti-indoctrination zeal, that some how the "left-leaning" academy is injecting students with "liberal" ideas and turning the classroom into a sanctuary of Marxist thought. To "improve" education, we need to focus on inputs and outcomes, they say. They imagine the student as Joe Friday, "just the facts professor."

Such a vision, of course, is in stark distinction from the one what demands educators steward the mental health of students: "why didn't they do something?" cries the self-identified conservative. "They're covering something up, they're passing the buck!" they proclaim. The irony here, of course, is that the BETA team modeled exactly the vision of neoliberal education: here's the information, take it or leave it. No editorializing. If he's a student, we can act, but since he's not, we should not. No discernment allowed. In other words, in the today's culture wars it's precisely the same kind of "paternalism" that is decried by the "right" that would have had the power to do something about Fenton's concerns. In Loco Parentis has been under attack because, so says the "right," it's a form of liberal indoctrination. Yet only having the "power of the parental" could have prevented Holmes from doing what he did.