Return to the McCarthy era
When an honor student is transferred to another school following a creative writing assignment and young women are banned from college campuses simply for suffering from an eating disorder, one has to wonder if we’ve regressed to the McCarthy era.
In the former incident, Allen Lee, a senior at Cary Grove High School in Cary, Ill., was transferred to another high school after he wrote about a dream where he was killing classmates and having sex with the bodies.
Lee wrote the story for a class assignment in which students were told not to censor themselves and to exaggerate.
There are several things that don’t make sense about this.
First of all, if officials really believed Lee was such a threat, why did they transfer him to another high school?
If Lee was a threat to fellow students at Cary Grove, wouldn’t it logically follow that he’d be a threat elsewhere as well?
Are the lives of the students at Cary Grove somehow more valuable than those of the students at the other high school?
It also seems unfair to Lee that school officials didn’t consider factors other than the essay in their decision.
The class assignment was to write an essay in which they did not censor themselves.
True, it was not wise of Lee to write about being a gunman in a school shooting, especially so soon after the massacre at Virginia Tech.
But it should also have been taken into consideration whether Lee had a criminal record, whether his other writings had similar themes and whether he had exhibited any other disturbing behaviors or personality traits.
If the essay was a first time offense, I think the most that should have happened to Lee was suspension while investigators determined whether he really was a threat.
The latter incident I referred to is the Web site for the University of Northern Colorado’s campus police.
The site showed pictures of individuals banned from university premises.
One person banned was Brittany Bethel.
She suffers from anorexia and was suspended after she went into cardiac arrest in the campus rec center.
According to an April 25 article in the Rocky Mountain News, Bethel has never threatened anyone and owns no weapons.
The Web site made it clear that not everyone on the list was considered dangerous, but that all were unwelcome on campus.
Even so, it is unfair listing a person whose only “crime” is to struggle with an eating disorder along with convicted felons.
Banning her from campus in the first place was unfair.
Yes, Bethel clearly needed help at the time of her suspension, but at 21, she is legally an adult and entitled to decide whether she should attend school.
The way she has been treated is inexcusable.
I am all for preventing school violence.
No one in their right mind wants another massacre like Columbine or Virginia Tech.
But blacklisting innocent people is not the answer.
If anything, it is time and energy wasted that could have been spent keeping an eye on people who really are dangerous.
I don’t know of a 100 percent effective way of preventing such a thing from happening.
Better security, better training for police forces and a good emergency warning systems would probably all help.
But when school security has come down to suspending someone for having anorexia and expelling students over English essays, we’re doing something wrong.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum