Tech President Stands By Decisions: He Says School Did the Right Thing; He Will Not Resign His Post

Aug 31, 08:55 AM

Current Headlines: By Rex Bowman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

Aug. 31--BLACKSBURG -- Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger said yesterday that he has no intention of stepping down, following a critical report by a gubernatorial panel on the April 16 massacre on campus. Steger also said he stands behind Police Chief Wendell Flinchum.

School officials challenged the assumption that alerting students earlier could have saved lives, as well as other findings.

"To say that something could have been prevented is not to say it would have been," Steger said in a meeting with reporters hours after the governor released the report. "Moreover, it is entirely possible that this tragedy, horrific as it is, could have been worse."

Steger added that he respects the panel's opinion, but disagrees with it. "I believe, based on what we knew at the time, that we did the right thing, quite honestly."

Student gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed two students at West Ambler Johnston Hall around 7:15 a.m. Two hours later, after mailing off a rambling manifesto to NBC News in New York, he showed up on the second floor of Norris Hall, where he killed 30 more people and then killed himself.

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Tech did not send a campuswide e-mail alerting students and faculty of the first shootings until 9:26 a.m., about 15 minutes before Cho started killing people at Norris Hall.

The two-hour delay prompted some critics and families of the victims almost immediately to begin calling for Steger to resign, and the panel's report strengthens their argument that bad decisions may have contributed to the magnitude of the massacre. One recommendation by the panel was that police should resist focusing on a single theory in the early stages of an investigation.

Yesterday, though, Steger said administrators delayed sending out the e-mail -- which said simply that there had been a shooting in a dormitory -- because they weren't sure what was going on and they did not want students to panic.

Steger said he has spoken to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine many times in the past four months and the subject of his resignation has never come up. Kaine said yesterday at a news conference in Richmond that he does not think Steger or Flinchum should be fired.

"There is no basis upon which that decision would be appropriate, from what we know," he said.

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Vincent Bove, a New Jersey expert on school safety who speaks on behalf of about half a dozen families of the wounded and killed at Tech, has said repeatedly that Steger must go. The families Bove represents include the Gwaltneys of Chester, whose 24-year-old son was killed in the massacre. Despite isolated calls for Steger's resignation, which includes some victims' families, the campus has been solidly supportive of the president -- he received a standing ovation from students during a large convocation shortly after the killings -- and Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said that support continues today. Students, faculty and administrators almost unanimously agree that resigning "would be disastrous and the wrong thing to do," Hincker said.

In interviews on campus yesterday, some students said they agree with the panel's conclusion that an earlier e-mail warning was probably the correct course of action.

"They should have sent it out a lot earlier," said Megan Hoops, a 19-year-old political-science major from Mountain Top, Pa. "But I don't think anyone should be fired over it. I think they had their reasons for what they did."

. . .

"I think they should have sent it out earlier, but I don't think they should blame anyone," said Page Wohlgemuth, a 19-year-old fashion-design major from Hackettstown, N.J. "I stand by the president."

The panel's report also sharply criticizes the campus police department for not requesting that administrators alert students of the first set of shootings.

Steger said Flinchum's job as campus police chief is safe. "I have nothing but admiration for Chief Flinchum, and his job is not in jeopardy."

Steger and other university officials said they agreed with the panel's conclusions that the school needs to do more to identify potentially dangerous students, and that laws might need to be changed to make mental-health records more accessible to school officials.

Provost Mark McNamee said many of the recommendations contained in the report are already being implemented by Tech, which issued its own internal reports and recommendations this month. For instance, the school is hiring more mental-health counselors and case managers.

Steger said university officials would be willing to lobby for legal changes that would allow high schools to notify colleges of incoming students' mental histories. Cho was treated for mental illness while a high school student in Centreville, but Tech never knew of his troubled past, a circumstance also highlighted in the panel's report.

"No one at this university had any foreknowledge of his mental-health problems that seemed dominant throughout his life before college," Steger said.

Steger took issue with criticism in the report that the university did a poor job of working with victims' families in the aftermath of the massacre. Steger acknowledged the university could have done better, but noted that the 50 people assigned to work with the families were all volunteers doing a hard job, and some of them used their own credit cards to help the families. "It's troubling to see them unfairly criticized."

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The bulk of Steger's disagreement with the panel's report, though, concerned its criticism that campus police erred in not requesting an immediate e-mail alert, and that administrators may have violated the university's own policies in failing to issue a warning.

Initially, campus police believed the two students killed at West Ambler Johnston were shot to death by the boyfriend of one of them, and police were confident the boyfriend was off campus. Those circumstances left administrators with little to no worry that the killing would continue elsewhere on campus, Steger said. Meanwhile, administrators were also mindful of the panic caused eight months earlier when students thought an escaped jail inmate had been seen on campus.

"You had students running out of Squires [Student Center] in a panic situation, you had the SWAT team coming in, and you had other students standing around watching," Steger said. "And to me, that was a formula for disaster I wanted to avoid."

Steger said administrators had an e-mail alert ready to send out as early as 9 a.m. April 16, but they kept waiting for more information, hoping to learn something that would guide them in telling students how to react. Critics have said they should have issued an e-mail alert and let the students and faculty decide for themselves how to react.

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Despite their disagreement with the panel's criticism, though, Tech officials acknowledged that in the future they will likely send out e-mail alerts immediately.

"I believe that's what the panel is telling us, and I believe that will be my recommendation," Hincker said. "I believe the protocol in the future will be to get it out as quickly as possible, imperfect as that might be."

"In the future, at any university, if something were to happen," McNamee said, "I think you can expect immediate notification." Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or rbowman@timesdispatch.com.

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