More Colleges Watching for Dangerous Students

More and more colleges are deploying "threat assessment teams" to identify and keep tabs on dangerous students. Two states, Virginia and Illinois, made the teams mandatory after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that left 32 people dead. Now, over 80 percent of American colleges have some form of behavioral oversight team. The team at Pima Community College in Tucson, where alleged killer Jared Lee Loughner was a student, identified him as troubled months before he shot and killed six people outside an Arizona supermarket, and the school suspended him. But not everyone thinks the teams are an unqualified good: while they are often successful at picking out problem students, they may not keep crimes from happening. Other times, administrators can use them for their own goals, like one Valdosta State University president who demanded an inquiry into a student's mental health because the student opposed the construction of a campus parking garage.