Comment

The tragic shoooting at Virginia Tech underscores the laughable absurdity of the minor flap over Pomona College's crime stats. A few unauthorized golf cart trips and a spike in dorm room thefts hardly constitute a dangerous situation. And, no amount of planning can prepare a campus for the sort of random insanity that happened in Blacksburg yesterday.

All we can do for that is to make contingency plans for a scenario that in all likelihood may never happen. Short of a continuous campus lockdown and placing metal detectors and armed guards at every building, there may be no way of completely preventing a lone, crazed person from committing a mass shooting at any campus, workplace or government office. And such measures conflict directly with the academia's ideal of openness and the free exchange of ideas. Such are the calculations our times force upon us.