REALITY DECONSTRUCTS BROWN UNIVERSITY.

In April 2007, a mentally disturbed student took out his frustrations on fellow Virginia Tech students.  We withheld commentary on the day's events until the fog of war dissipated.  Mat "Dean Dad" Reed, posting anonymously on his Blogger platform, noted the vulnerability of campuses.

They're open, they're highly populated, they're lightly patrolled (if at all), and they're full of stressed-out people. In a way, they're almost naive, if it's possible for institutions to be naive. As I've mentioned before, they really aren't built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.

My reaction to the events of that day, watching Virginia Tech's students respond, was "That could be us," referring to Northern Illinois.  Our students might have intuited the same thing.  Those stressed-out people?  More so during exam week, and in December of 2007, a combination of potentially racially-motivated threats and immoderate weather led university administrators to revise the final examination schedule.  We got through exam week without any gunplay.  I don't know if any internal investigations after the fact learned anything about the seriousness of the threats.  Valentine's Day of 2008 might have pre-empted any such investigations.  We regrouped, and our students of the era had a new bond with their contemporaries at Virginia Tech.

Saturday, a review session for an introductory economics class at Brown University was in progress, when an unknown person, who is still at large, shot several people.

Two students were killed in an active shooter incident that began at Barus and Holley, according to an email sent to the Brown community. An additional nine victims were hospitalized, one of whom remains in critical condition. Six are in critical but stable condition, one is in stable condition and one has been discharged. The incident occurred between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturday.

The fog of war is taking longer to dissipate than is often the case in such events, and the conspiracy buffs? institutional skeptics? citizens who recognize they're living in a low-trust society where the highly regarded Institutions of Higher Learning assure us that "truth" is a social construction? are speculating like crazy.  A Daily Beast report dips into the fever swamps of the conspiratorial types who argue with but generally vote for Trumpian populists.  A Twitchy post from noon Sunday, when one could still charitably argue that the fog of war was real, not something augmented by post-modern word-noise, made much of the fact that the professor of record for the course was one Rachel Friedberg, M.I.T. graduate, affiliated with Brown's Program in Judaic Studies, time on faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  But that post also noted she was not conducting the review session.  Well, no, that's what graduate assistants do.

Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and teaching assistant for the economics class, told The Boston Globe that the review session had just wrapped up when the shooter entered carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind the podium at the front of the auditorium and huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she reached the hospital, The Globe reported.

Oduro didn’t want to describe what he saw as first responders evacuated the classroom, but said it hurt to see his students “all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”

Seniors serving as teaching assistants? A few things have changed in economics.

The conspiracy buffs have also noted that one of the students was head of Brown's College Republicans.

Ella Cook ’28 has been confirmed as one of the deceased victims of Saturday's shooting, according to a statement from U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, who represents Alabama.

Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov ’29 has been confirmed as one of the deceased victims of the shooting, according to a statement from U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan Jonathan Henick.

The University has not officially released the names of the victims.

Sometimes it's prudent to hold off on any speculation until the evidence is in hand.  But Providence authorities are not doing much to clear the fog of war.  This story broke Saturday just after Navy sang second, with early reports of a "person of interest" questioned and released, and a second "person of interest" detained and questioned Sunday and ultimately released.  There was security camera tape available.  "The footage showed the gunman walking calmly down a street near campus, dressed in all black with his face covered."  The difficulties Providence authorities are having identifying the real suspect do not please Town Hall's Matt Vespa.  "Latest Brown University Shooting Update Is Wild...and This Story Has Become a Total Circus."  Well, no, a circus has proper logistics, a train, performing pachyderms, and serious clowning.

What the Brown community and Providence more generally are learning, though, is that an Ivy affiliation does not confer an exemption from reality.

Investigators were not immediately sure how the shooter got inside the first-floor classroom. Outer doors of the building were unlocked but rooms being used for final exams required badge access, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said.

Smiley was emotional as he discussed the city’s efforts to prepare for a mass shooting.

“We all, intellectually, knew it could happen anywhere, including here, but that’s not the same as it happening in our community, and so this is an incredibly upsetting and emotional time for Providence, for Brown, for all of us,” he said. “It’s not something that we should have to train for, but we have.”

With Saturday review sessions on the schedule, the classroom buildings likely were on their weekday schedule with doors unlocked.  Brown being Brown, though, you know the postmodern-cum-identity-politics silliness would not be far away.

This afternoon, The Atlantic published an article by Xochitl Gonzalez ’99, a trustee on the Brown Corporation. Gonzalez wrote that she once thought mass shootings, like the one that occurred at Brown, were preventable. But now, she wonders “if that is not a bit of dated, magical thinking.” In her essay, she expressed disappointment at living in a country that has caused some Brown students to experience school shootings more than once.

Gonzalez is a staff writer at The Atlantic who previously published an article in response to the protests surrounding the Corporation’s decision not to divest from the conflict in Gaza. She is a New York Times best-selling author and a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.

And you know a Common Dreams contributor, Columbia's Ivana Nikolić Hughes (we hit the woke daily double, dear reader) would have something foolish to say, despite starting off well.

I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday, but the class is required of all Columbia College students and so having the exam on the weekend ensures that there won’t be conflicts with the exams for other courses they are taking. The 60 students in my classroom are a fraction of the nearly 740 taking the course this semester.

The exam began at 2 pm, less than 24 hours after the shooting at Brown University, and just hours after many of us learned about the shooting in Sydney, Australia. Given these devastating events, I offered this morning that anyone who was adversely affected could take the exam later in the week or take what at Columbia is called an incomplete, which means that they would take the final exam at the start of next semester and only then be assigned a grade. Only about two dozen students took this offer, some sharing personal stories about having close friends from childhood or high school among the victims at Brown. It makes sense that the high-achieving students that Columbia attracts would have high-achieving friends at Brown. Some also hail from Providence and have had impacted family members.

Never mind all that talk about "diversity and inclusion," it's likely that matriculants at Columbia and Brown share a lot of neighborhoods and cultural capital and can probably distinguish the Cape from the Vineyard.  But then (I told you we hit the woke daily double) she veers into incoherence.  Trumpian populists have not populated the fever swamp to the exclusion of all others.

The fact that the second shooting of the weekend took place in Australia, a country with strict gun laws, complicates the debate somewhat, demonstrating that this is not just about gun control. Sure, more gun control in the US would help; after all, our rate of mass shootings per capita is far higher than in all of the other developed countries. But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.

Maybe it's time to take a closer look at the effects of the academy going from a skeptical pose to an adversarial pose, in which the right kind of violence is fine.  Maybe it's time to question whether the Ivies, including Brown and Columbia, being the training grounds for the administrative state, is itself desirable.  Only then might her peroration make any sense.

As I look at my students, still busily working on the exam, and recall the joys I’ve experienced teaching them and getting to know them this semester, I feel that we owe them so much more than what’s on offer at the moment. Not only do they deserve not to be thinking of mass shootings while studying for their college exams, but they definitely deserve to inherit a world in which peace is sacrosanct and sanctioned violence is not the answer.

Take care of the good of the intellect, and you might have a chance at securing the rest.

Meanwhile, whoever shot up that review session at Brown is still on the loose.