The gun smoke had barely cleared from the lecture hall at Northern Illinois University where last week a former graduate student had executed five students before killing himself when local and national scribes began speculating about a new trend in mass murder American-style. The "Chicago Tribune" Web site, quick with coverage of the…

This study examined the direct effects of beliefs about aggression and nonviolence on physical aggression and their role as protective factors that buffer adolescents from key risk factors in the peer, school, and parenting domains. Multilevel analyses were conducted on data from 5,581 adolescents representing two cohorts from 37 schools in four…

"Catalyst" is a publication of the U.S. Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Redefining Resources For Prevention; (2) Message From Kevin Jennings, OSDFS Assistant Deputy Secretary; (3) Environmental Management…

The shootings that took place last spring on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, located in Blacksburg, Virginia, elicited a host of reactions, many deeply emotional. In groups of college and university presidents, the response was generally empathetic. Indeed, they were right to be put on alert by the random and…

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act has sometimes caused confusion among higher education professionals since the legislation was introduced by Senator James Buckley in 1974. Reasons for this confusion range from the fact that it became a law without the usual congressional considerations to the belief that FERPA was never intended to…

In 2007, against a tragically ironic backdrop of National Poetry Month, April indeed was "the cruellest month" (Eliot 1922, I.1). The media spotlight during that time repositioned from Iraq and Afghanistan to Blacksburg, Virginia, where a stateside guerilla incursion at Virginia Tech would mark the single worst episode of school shooting…

Gary Pavela, director of student judicial programs at the University Maryland at College Park, is an expert on how colleges can assist troubled students. In a forthcoming installment of his weekly newsletter on campus law and policy, the "Synfax Weekly Report," Mr. Pavela discusses Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech. Among other…

The authors of this article include the professor and most of the students in a doctoral course on marriage and family therapy ethical and professional issues that met the semester that a disturbed student shot and killed 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty before killing himself. In this article, we reflect through short essays on issues…

Numerous researchers discuss the solidarity-producing effects of crime, natural disasters and mass tragedies; however, there is much we do not understand about the processes involved in the phenomena. We specify the social relationships that "generate" and "sustain" solidarity by building on Hunter's descriptions of the…

"Catalyst" is a publication of the U.S. Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Campus and Community Coalitions--Getting Organized for Prevention; (2) Message From William Modzeleski, OSDFS Acting Assistant Deputy…

The film documentary titled "Hip Hop: beyond beats and rhymes" captures ongoing conversations among scholars, cultural critics, and hip hop insiders about the state of African Americans by interrogating distinct expressive forms associated with hip hop culture. Durham draws from two scenes to describe her memories as the researched…

The author of this article, a sociologist who has studied the social roots of school shootings, describes what scholars of adolescent violence have learned from research about the causes of rampage shootings. Among her observations: (1) rampage school shootings are never spontaneous; (2) school shooters broadcast their intentions; (3) school…

As a professor of law and higher education, Lake compares the April 2007 shootings to those at Kent State nearly 40 years earlier. The mishandling of the Kent State crisis brought heavy criticism of higher education, and a culture of rules, procedures, and policies arose to replace old patterns of using force and violence to manage conflicts. …

This article reports how researchers at Virginia Tech, working in a variety of disciplines, are studying the long-term effects of the campus killings 10 months ago. After the killings, administrators at Virginia Tech realized that their normal institutional-review process for research proposals was not sufficient to deal with the likely onslaught…

In this article, the author relates the incident that happened at the University of Texas to the tragedy that took place at Virginia Tech. On August 1, 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower, in Austin, and in 96 minutes fired 150 high-powered rounds of ammunition down upon an unsuspecting university family. The…