Category Archives: Academia

My Take on Carnegie Mellon University

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

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View of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon lawn, Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2012. (http://www.broadwayspotted.com/).

It’s with extreme disappointment in which I write my latest post, this one on Carnegie Mellon University, or as the locals and attendees call it, CMU (sorry, Central Michigan University folks). But I feel I have little choice, given the amount of crap I’ve received over the past few months from my doctoral institution. The alumni association and the fundraising people at Carnegie Mellon ask me for money at least twice a week, and don’t seem to get it when I say “no” or “never” or even “when Hell freezes over.” I’ve known creditors less persistent about getting money out of people than the fundraising arm of Carnegie Mellon.

The last straw for me, though, was last week. I received three emails on the same day, not to mention a letter in the mail, all asking for donations. One also included an alumni survey, which I dutifully filled out and rated Carnegie Mellon at the low-end of every category in the survey. “Not only do I not mentor my students or aspiring college students about Carnegie Mellon,” I said. “I go out of my way to make sure that they do not ever consider applying to or attending Carnegie Mellon,” I added at the end of the survey.

Romney in 47 Percent Video, September 18, 2012. (Joe Pompeo/http://capitalnewyork.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws – cropped/low resolution.

I don’t think that the alumni association or the fundraisers really understand the depths of my disappointment regarding my four years at CMU between ’93 and ’97. I found the university culture about as welcoming as going to a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, and with many folks from the same crowd as well. Anytime your campus refuses to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, or insists on having Dinesh D’Souza give a two-hour talk on race without an opposing viewpoint, it’s a stifling place. A campus in which the College Republicans stage marches while not having a strong College Democrats or progressive group in place is a bastion of conservatism, not just politically, but socially as well.

In four years, I became friends with a very small group of students and professors. I would’ve made more of an effort, if I hadn’t been told practically from day one that my master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and my other achievements meant little because, well, I had a degree from Pitt. And these sentiments came from my professors!

From my fellow students — who often walked by me as if I were a ghost until I forced them to say “Hi” — there was the impression that I must’ve gotten into the History program under some “special dispensation,” as one White guy put it. Yeah, my M.A. — earned in two semesters with a real committee examination — and a year of PhD work had nothing to do with my ability to write rings around my fellow students!

All in all, my Carnegie Mellon experience only worked out as well as it did because I reached out beyond my department and beyond the university to maintain connections and friendships with real people. My list of good folks at Carnegie Mellon is pretty short. The late Barbara Lazarus (see my post “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Barbara B. Lazarus” from July ’09), Susan McElroy, John Hinshaw (who himself didn’t talk to me for two years after I’d gotten a Spencer Fellowship), and “My Friend Matt” (September ’12). The Black Graduate Student Organization (or BGSO), the graduate students of color/women graduate students working group that Barbara headed, and our group of fourteen doctoral students of color (the total number of non-White and non-Asian PhD students at Carnegie Mellon). That and playing intramural and pick-up basketball as much as three times a week were the sum total of my positive people and experiences at CMU.

Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, or “the new sanitarium,” October 22, 2012. (via Wikipedia).

I spent the majority of my non-classroom time on Pitt’s campus hanging out with friends there, working on my dissertation, meeting with some of my former professors, or otherwise enjoying my status as an alumnus. If anything, I needed to walk across that bridge between Carnegie Mellon, Schenley Park and Pitt as much as I did in order to keep my sanity, to make sure that I was essentially the same person I’d been while going to grad school with comparatively less uptight folk.

Of course, I could also go on about how my experiences with Joe Trotter as my advisor (see my “Outrage, Maybe” post from May ’10) turned me into an anti-Carnegie Mellon advocate, or how the sanitarium look of the university buildings could leave Polyanna depressed. But for those involved in alumni fundraising and related tasks at Carnegie Mellon, get this. I will never, ever, ever, give CMU one penny of my hard-earned dollars. I’d sooner give my idiot ex-stepfather a penny at his grave before you could pry a cold copper piece out of my hands, alive or dead. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me for four years of unnecessary anguish in the midst of my determined success.

My Take On K-12 & Higher Education & Corporatism

08 Monday Oct 2012

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Pink Floyd–The Wall (1982), February 16, 2012. (http://free-education.info). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res and related to blog subject.

We often treat K-12 education and higher education as if they have nothing in common, as if they possess completely separate values and have developed in complete isolation from each other. But in this age where the American technocratic and the plutocratic elites want to privatize everything, there are clear connections behind and between emerging trends in corporatized K-12 education reform and with the rise of for-profit colleges and universities. These trends and connections aren’t good ones for the mass of American students, particularly for those who are poor and of color.

It’s pretty simply really. Both public education and postsecondary education have been under attack from profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding for at least a quarter century. In particular, the issues have been how to improve public schools so that poor Black and Latino kids can graduate high school on the one hand, and how to modify higher education so that the adult version of these kids can obtain a serviceable certificate or degree on the other. With these changes comes the theme of a watered-down education for the poorest twenty-five percent of Americans. It’s the new pathway to a sub-living wage job and tens of thousand of dollars of student loan debt.

A better way of presenting this reality, though, would be to overlay my own educational journey as a poor African American growing up in Mount Vernon, New York onto this corporatized educational insanity. I would’ve gone to public school to be sure. But instead of the SRA exam test that I took every year between third and sixth grade (not a high-stakes test evaluating teaching effectiveness, by the way), I would’ve seen some sort of comprehensive reading/mathematics test from at least second grade on.

Overcrowded classroom (with DOE Chancellor Joel Klein) with two teachers, PS 189, Brooklyn, NY, September 16, 2009. (Craig Warga/NY Daily News). Qualifies as fair use – blog subject with no comparable picture.

Given where I grew up, instead of having a group of veteran Black teachers for most of elementary schools, I would’ve ended up with some teachers from Teach for America or The New Teacher Project. For the technocrats surely would’ve held my teachers responsible for the sixty-percent poverty rate at my elementary schools, um, I mean, the low test scores. Teachers from these alternate certification programs tend to be well-meaning, perhaps even extremely smart, but not passionate or fully trained teachers. Certainly not like the highly dedicated African American teachers I had at Nathan Hale (now Cecil Cooper) and William H. Holmes Elementary, who held us all to high enough standards to prepare me for a gifted-talented magnet school program known as Humanities.

Of course, given the resources devoted to high-stakes testing, and the constant practice tests, there would’ve been the virtual elimination of music, art, PE, and creative writing. With that shift, there wouldn’t have been a Humanities Program, just a few classes for the best and brightest students. Instead, the option of a private charter school or a KIPP program may have been a possibility. With an average cost of $10,000, however, I doubt a $1,000 or $2,500 voucher would’ve made it possible for me to attend the one, and with KIPP schools being all about discipline, I would’ve thrived there about as much as fish thrive in the desert.

I would’ve moved on to middle school and high school, received algebra in ninth or tenth grade (if at all), struggled to enhance my reading, writing, science, math and other skills, and otherwise would’ve goofed my way to a high school diploma. Would I have taken an AP class, or had a Meltzer as a history teacher, or taken the PSAT or SAT? I’m not sure, but highly unlikely. Still, I would’ve graded with a diploma, with proof that my education was the equivalent of an average ninth or tenth grader’s, confirmed by a decade of standardized state tests!

Then, after three to five years of struggling to find full-time work above minimum wage, or after several years in the military, I’d make the choice between  a University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, DeVry University or some other for-profit college. I’d discover quite quickly that I was wholly unprepared for even the most watered-down online college curriculum, taking courses in a four, six or eight-week format (instead of the typical ten or sixteen-week semester format).

Romanian Army POWs from Battle of Stalingrad, February 3, 1943. (http://ww2incolor.com).

There would’ve been no agonizing choice between Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, no switch of majors from computer science to history, no big moment in my development as a person. All because I wouldn’t have had the kind of earth-shattering experience that attending college full-time and in-person often can be.

Somehow, if I’d somehow survived the first semester or first year, I might’ve eventually graduated, albeit with a degree that will be of limited use in obtaining a good living wage. And with $70,000 in student loan debt and a degree from a disreputable for-profit college, forget about me going to graduate school to be a professor.

That’s what this K-16 system will lead to. Money flowing into the hands of illegitimate technocrats, testing companies, charter schools and for-profit institutions. Money and influence flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach for America. A permanent, if slightly better educated, low-wage underclass. That’s the now and future construction of K-16 education if we allow these trends to continue.

The Great “Original Sin” Debate

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

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Obama-McCain Third Debate (post-debate picture), Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, October 15, 2008. (Jim Bourg/Reuters).

We’ve finally meandered our way into the presidential debate cycle portion of our Election ’12 cycle. I’m grateful to finally see what the media has built up to be a match between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants! Not really, of course. But from standpoint of political reporters and pundits alike, tonight’s first debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney might as well be a sports event.

In the end, though, this isn’t as much a presidential debate as it is a personality contest with questions and psychologists’ interpretations of nonverbal communication. It will be more hype than substance, more stiff than an overbaked souffle. One of the men — most likely President Obama — will win this first debate, though it won’t be clear how significant this “win” will be, given the trends for the past couple of months.

Professor Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University, circa 2012, October 3, 2012. (http://www.history.cmu.edu).

I am reminded of another debate, one that occurred in my Comparative Working-Class Formation graduate seminar at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of ’93. It was taught by Professor Wendy Goldman, wife of Marcus Rediker, both decidedly Marxist, but in Goldman’s case, Marxist without any considerations of race at all. It was a course that turned into a debate because I’d already grown tired of professors at Pitt who believed race and gender to be identities subsumed under the long, hard human battle over class inequality (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestreicher and Race” from February ’11).

All semester-long, there had been a three-way tug-of-war between me (and occasionally, my former Pitt grad school colleague who decided to hop across the bridge to Carnegie Mellon to take this course), ten brown-nosing students who’d agree with her despite the evidence (led by Mike and Mark, the “M&M Boys,” as I labeled them for my friends and colleagues) and Goldman. I didn’t expect my now fellow Carnegie Mellon grad students to take my side. But I did expect them to read E.P. Thompson and Sean Wilentz and other folks with a critical eye and not just to get an A out of our professor. There may have been one or two other classes I dreaded more in three years of grad school. Yet I’d never been around a professor more unaware of their own biases than Goldman (see my “Crying Over E.P. Thompson” post from September ’09).

It all came to a head when it was time to discuss David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness (1991) and, indirectly, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984) on the last Thursday in October ’93, which happened to be my mother’s forty-sixth birthday. Both authors looked at the formation of the White American (and male) working-class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Goldman, as usual, took the stance that the only ideology of significance was one that proclaimed class inequalities the predominant issue explaining the radicalization of the American working-class.

Michelangelo’s sin of Adam and Eve painting, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City (1508-1512), May 20, 2005. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Finding this a bit laughable (a mistake on my part), I pressed my argument that at least in the case of US history, race and class distinctions have been and remain intertwined. So much so that a typical neo-Marxist analysis of the American working-class couldn’t apply. The next two hours were me and my Pitt colleague against the M&M Boys, the other brown-nosers and Professor Goldman. Luckily in my case, I could not only quote Roediger and Wilentz, but Herbert Gutmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a host of other scholars to press home my counterargument. At the end, our professor said to me, in utter exasperation, “I guess we should just go back to original sin.” It meant that I was being a racial determinist, which I guess was supposed to be an insult as well as her version of “No mas, no mas!”

Aside from the fact that America’s “original sin” really was the taking of Native American lands and the systemic destruction of Native American peoples and culture, I really didn’t have much of a response to Goldman’s excited utterance. I finished my argument with a final volley that included Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) and Roediger, and class adjourned sooner thereafter.

My brown-nosing classmates looked pretty beat from the class session, while me and my colleague from Pitt were both energized from the three-hour class. Still, we couldn’t help but discuss Goldman’s Moment of Surrender at the end of the class. Of course we knew what her “original sin” comment meant when it came to race and slavery. The comment, though, seemed small and petty coming from a professor, one that was too personal, and not professional.

Still, the worst thing I learned is that it took Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness to confirm ideas that Du Bois had begun writing about in 1903 and 1935. That, for me, made me apprehensive about wanting to work with scholars who may well see me and my work as well-intentioned, but inferior to theirs. At the same time, I learned that, for better and for worse, that not going along to get along can be a good thing, especially after years of ridicule from people of all stripes for doing so.

My “original sin” of not going along with whatever Goldman said forced a debate, one of the more exciting times I had in grad school, certainly at Carnegie Mellon. How could that be bad?

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

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Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.

edX and Ex-lax (& Higher Education’s Future)

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Ex-lax Chocolated Laxative, September 26, 2012. (http://overstockdrugstore.com).

Last May, Harvard and MIT announced a $60 million partnership that would provide free online courses to 600,000 students worldwide. That this came on the heels of an experiment in which former Stanford professor (and now co-founder of the Udacity.com online classroom platform) Sebastian Thrun made his “Introduction to AI” course available for free online in the fall of 2011 says something. The current model of providing a college education or postsecondary training – for-profit, public, community college or otherwise – will be dead for most students by 2030.

What will this new form of higher education look like? Will students who can now take a couple of Harvard or MIT online courses for free so overwhelm these schools that paying customers will also demand a free online education, and lead to the disintegration of higher education as we know it?

The answer lies somewhere in between higher education feast and famine. For the selected few, Ivy League and other elite institutions will continue to thrive, no matter the costs. Parents will continue to send their kids to Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown – and students will enthusiastically attend them – for far more than a degree. The social networks that students will build at these universities and use as alumni for jobs, careers and even marriages easily outweigh the high cost of tuition. Just ask the Obamas.

For most college students, though, edX is but the tip of the spear. Ultimately, a decade or so from now, going to college will be as simple as clicking on an app on your iPhone, iPad, or whatever an Apple, a Google or some other corporation comes up with next.

edX logo, May 2, 2012. (http://news.harvard.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws – main subject of post.

No one institution or single university collaboration can take charge of this transition to a national and international online higher education experience, even with edX’s implementation. But with an Apple or a Google’s history of collaboration, technical expertise, and innovative vision, they can pull off the moving of the higher education platform to an accredited application. One that even Harvard, MIT and Oxford could get behind – though they may have to hold their noses at first.

By the time this transition is complete, online college – or, dare I say, iCollege – will look more like a combination of EA Sports’ Madden NFL ’13, Skype, Twitter and Facebook than the standard threaded discussions and video recordings we have today. It will be a process where any professor could be put in a lab with sensors and a classroom full of students asking every possible question and providing every possible answer to a series of topics that would add up to a course. And an Apple or a Google could do this over and over again for the thousands of possible courses an undergraduate student could take, in the US or anywhere in the world.

That alone would make this a decent revolution, at least technologically. Combining it with Apple’s or Google’s ability to negotiate agreements with accrediting agencies and with universities across the country, though, would make iCollege an all-out revolution. Because of these partnerships, the future iCollege would be light-years beyond the new edX, as this would enable students to transfer their credits to a UC Berkeley, Harvard or New York University if they so chose to take an in-person course whenever necessary.

Corridor in code, The Matrix (1999) screen shot, September 26, 2012. (http://luisangelv.wordpress.com).

This could be a one-time $500 million investment that could yield tens of billions in profits annually. In the process, it would make higher education much cheaper, more democratic and less exploitive of students and government resources. For an industry or job-related certificate: $5,000. For a two-year or associate’s degree: $10,000. For a four-year degree: $24,000.

There would be casualties, of course. Testing entities like the College Board, Educational Testing Service, and ACT will somehow have to adapt to this democratization of higher education or die out. The current set of for-profit institutions, community colleges and large state public institutions will have to become specialists in specific career training activities, partner within an iCollege consortium, or go out of business. Like it or not, this is the road that American and international higher education is on, one rapid stride after another. But it’s all for the better. Or at least, it could be?

Anthony Cody, Gates Foundation in Ed Reform Debate

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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The below is my response to Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress’ (of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) “Response to Anthony Cody: The Role of the Marketplace in Education.” Given their corporatist, technocratic stance on education reform, I guess I should stop applying for jobs with Gates, since I don’t think they do much in the way of good work in education.

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The use of MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is self-serving and sanctimonious here at best, along with the idea that charter schools are public schools, as if the two are interchangeable. King’s letter wasn’t just about the growing impatience of African Americans on the long road to equality. It’s also about how to walk the road, the tools necessary to walk the road, as well as the urgency with which we should walk the road. In my dealings with the Gates Foundation over the years as a nonprofit manager for various projects and initiatives, speed has often been more valuable than getting it right. From the first funding of community-based computer labs in libraries (like Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh) to small schools collaborations with nonprofits and NYC DOE, moving from thought to finish was typically at warp factor five or higher. Even program officers I’ve met or known at Gates have admitted over the years that not every multi-million dollar expenditure for small schools, teacher effectiveness, or teacher evaluations has come with plenty of setbacks and mistakes, as well as inconclusive or minimally positive results.

To argue that charter schools are public schools is technically correct, but in practice, hardly so. Charter schools have their own boards, often do not draw their teachers from the same pool as traditional public schools, and many have selection criteria for students. Charter schools — particularly ones with higher levels of success — often have board members with deep pockets or are able to raise funds through those kinds of connections. They may have by-laws that enable them to hire non-union teachers, non-traditional teachers, even college instructors, in ways that traditional public schools simply cannot. And though the selection criteria for students varies from one charter school to the next, traditional public schools don’t have that option.

Yes, we need a twenty-first century education system in the US. But we’re not going to get there with more high-stakes standardized testing, with curriculum and teacher evaluations that are tied to test scores, with the funding of every half-baked idea that has its roots in the twentieth century. Real reform requires more than smart people entrusted with a portfolio of $5 or $10 million. It comes with real cooperation with educators, a commitment to engage parents, a curriculum that is about education beyond a test, a full-fledged effort at human development, not just job training. One thing that would be a place to start would be to focus on K-16 education, instead of separating the K-12 and post-secondary spheres, you know, to break free of our twentieth-century thinking about American education.

Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress should know all of this already. If they do not, shame on them for not doing the research and outreach that is a necessary part of grantmaking. However, since they do, it seems to me they need to do less defending of the Gates Foundation’s record and more work and real collaboration to move forward. “We don’t need no education” reform, so long as it continues to come out of elite money and thinking that dictates to the rest of us what reform will look like.

A Call for Psychological Screenings

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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Fourth blot of the Rorschach inkblot test, 1921, February 21, 2008. (Bryan Derksen via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Given that it’s the start of a new school year, and in the wake of so many shootings over the summer, it’s time to reformulate how we deal with violence and mass shootings. The saddening eruption of yet another mass shooting by former graduate student James Holmes at the The Dark Knight Rises opening in Aurora, Colorado in July is a case that makes clear my point. It’s time for colleges and universities to do psychological profiles as a requirement for admissions and attendance, and for public schools to be more proactive in providing psychological services.

James Holmes in court in Aurora, July 23, 2012. (Peterson/AP/CBS News).

There’s been much discussion of gun laws, assault weapons bans, and polls that show that a majority of Americans are anti-gun control. But there hasn’t been nearly enough dialogue about how to detect potential domestic threats to our safety to begin with. The majority of domestic threats in the past generation have come from young and mostly White males, either in high school or in higher education. We as a nation are either sympathetic — as in “how could they have turned out so wrong?” — or vengeful toward these perpetrators. We give so much thought to the Second Amendment that we completely neglect the root cause, the one thing the sympathetic and the vengeful do agree on. That someone like James Holmes would have to be psychologically unstable or “crazy” to do what he did.

The list of school and college-related mass murders and shootings goes something like this since 1996. San Diego State University, Pearl, Mississippi, West Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Littleton, Colorado,  University of Arkansas, University of Arizona School of Nursing, Virginia Tech (twice, in 2007 and 2011), Chardon, Ohio and Oikos University. Though Holmes technically didn’t unload his 100 or so bullets on a college, high school or middle school campus, he lived in the Aurora, Colorado community in part because he was a one-time University of Colorado graduate student.

It’s beyond time for schools and especially colleges and universities to remember that they are very much a part of communities, not just gigantic entities unto themselves. Part of the responsibility of being a significant member of a community is to play a significant role in ensuring the safety of the community. Not just on the actual middle school, high school or a higher education institution campus, but in the surrounding community as well.

Part of taking all necessary actions to ensure the safety of students, teachers, professors, administrators and community members is providing services that could identify behavioral or psychological issues among students. We’ve learned in the cases of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the Columbine High School shooters — and in the case of Seung-Hui Cho — the Virginia Tech shooter — that consistent psychological services may have prevented these murders and injuries. Had psychological screening been performed and other related steps — including barring these individuals from contact with the campus and reporting potential threats to law enforcement — these students might well have become productive citizens.

Peanuts’ Lucy Van Pelt as psychiatrist, September 12, 2012. (http://digitalcitizen.ca). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to blog post’s subject matter.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure if readily available psychological services at the K-12 level and required screenings at the college level would lead to a reduction in student-related mass shootings. But it would allow for the opportunity for students at an early age to discuss their delusions of grandeur, their feelings of isolation or ostracism, their rage and their need to strike out against fellow students and community members alike. It would give colleges and universities the opportunity to truly get to know potential students beyond their grades and community service opportunities, and to understand how first-year students respond to stresses and pressures of college long before they become a threat.

Most importantly, mental health screening would allow a college or university to identify psychological issues with a students before accepting them into their institutions. While this proscription may make university administrators and school district superintendents squeamish, it is certainly a conversation worth having. After all, it’s not as if the debate about gun control has gotten any of us anywhere in the past 50 years.