BE PREPARED. Newsweek provides the stories of student Harold Ng, who was injured in the Cole Hall shooting, and Jeff Merkel, Northern Star reporter and Marine medic.

A cop was there and this is when I stepped out of the reporter's role obviously and said, "Look, I'm a Corpsman, maybe I can help. Give me some gloves." He gave me some gloves and I swiped his first-aid bag and I took off through the building. I've been working at the paper for two semesters, but I've got five years of real life programming. It definitely overrode anything in those two semesters.

There was a lot of tension. There wasn't a lot of screaming, it wasn't running around. The people that were there were more than willing to listen to [what] the police had to say. The first responders did a great job. All I had to do was put gauze on [victims' wounds] in place of T-shirts and paper towels.

A couple of other students, one who was an Eagle Scout and one who was a lifeguard, said they were willing to help. I said, "This is what we need to do. Get on line and talk to every single person you see. If they are not hurt, they go to this side. If they are hurt, my name is Jeff and they should come this way and call my name." They did a wonderful job. They made it as easy as possible.

He also notes,

I've been telling my wife the only thing that DeKalb has on the other places we have been is that no one has shot at me yet. I know that I wasn't shot at in this case, but this is too close to home.

Elsewhere, the university and law enforcement are putting together information on the shooter. He left a laptop behind, but removed the hard drive first. There's a sitemeter hit I received a week or two ago that I'm going to let the authorities know about.

The sociology department, out of which the shooter won a dean's award and subsequently coauthored a publication, is having a rough time.

Students and faculty at NIU's sociology department were coming to terms with the realization that the man they knew as a warm, charming and high achieving student carried secrets they may never unravel.

"He was gracious, he was generous with his time and he engaged the other students," department chairwoman Kay Forest said.

Kazmierczak confided in a few people at the department that he had spent time in a "halfway house" before college. No one pushed him for more information, and he didn't provide details.

"It's the kind of thing where later you look back and think, 'Why didn't I ask more about that,'" Forest said.

The department is receiving extra counseling, beyond the briefings being offered to each department later this week. I would advise outsiders, however, not to second-guess. Yes, perhaps a parasuicidal doing research on parasuicidal behavior is a warning signal. On the other hand, good social science work requires the researcher to suspend judgement in order better to elicit information from the population he is observing. (The press corps doesn't get this: questions that effectively accuse a person of a misdeed get the fighting spirit up. Or visualize the Church Lady investigating the coming of age of Samoans.) In addition, a university in the United States is a place of second chances. We work with former prisoners and GED recipients and Harvard dropouts for a reason.

That noted, the nonjudgemental stance of the observer is not a proper moral code for a society. There's a long Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred post on Northern Illinois and the parallels to Virginia Tech that includes the obligation to judge and set standards and marginalize.

What makes us human and distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is the singular truth that we can consciously choose to control our self centered desires and urges. We can make moral decisions and choose ethical behavior notwithstanding those urges and desires- a very unanimal-like condition. The healthy human being is one who is aware of these attributes and chooses to live ethically and morally.

No matter how much the media and ’science’ try to tell us otherwise, we are not simply ‘more evolved animals.’

Man is responsible for his behavior, no matter how hard media and pop culture desperately want it to be otherwise. We are all accountable, ‘root causes’ notwithstanding and we all charged with elevating ourselves.

Put another way, the burden on my colleagues upstairs -- nay, on higher education generally, will be lighter once the common culture recognizes that judging "judgemental" behavior harshly is not evolutionarily stable.