On the Harvard Bomb Threat
Posted on December 18th, 2013 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
I’m not surprised by the news that the tomb threat at Harvard was a lame attempt by a sophomore, Eldo Kim, to get out of an exam.
(Funnily enough, on the day of the threat a Harvard associate professor chastised people on Facebook for even considering this possibility.)
I’m sure that this young man will be castigated, as he should be, but isn’t this the logical result of certain ongoing trends at the university? The competition, the pressure, the grade-grubbing, the cheating, the emphasis on outcome (grades, jobs, awards, acceptance to yet another institution) rather than process (i.e., education)?
I look at Harvard from a distance, of course. And I know from my time(s) there that there are many, many wonderful and inspiring young people on campus. But there does seem to be a growing culture of students who are obsessed with advancement but have little concern for ethics…..
7 Responses
12/18/2013 8:16 am
This is the logical result of those trends in the same way that bank robbery is the logical result of trends toward economic inequality and consumerism.
Crime is crime. People who behave like this are locked up. This is not an academic topic.
It is possible that more resources should be focused on mental health, cultural support, and community-building. But I do not think so. Not everything is about resource allocation. There are people whose jobs it is to prevent people from snapping, and they work hard. They are competent and there are enough of them. This guy snapped anyway; lock him up.
Now, of course, grade-grubbing, economic inequality, pressure to achieve meaningless success, consumerism, and cheating are all bad things. We oppose them! But they are in the deep deep background of the causes here, most of which are in an unstable boy’s wiring.
Also, I oppose regressive taxation.
12/18/2013 9:23 am
Strangely, I thought it would almost surely turn out to be a student, as soon as they listed the buildings. Three of the four building were obvious exam locations; the 4th one of the freshman dorms. There was no reason for the 4th, except to make it seem like the target wasn’t exam locations… (Of course, given the timing and the building chosen one would naturally suspect a student anyway.)
I agree here with SE, in the sense I don’t think there’s a lot you can extrapolate from this isolated event. Is Harvard a competitive place, that can be a high-pressure environment for some (many?) students? Sure. It was that way decades ago when I was a student, too. But we don’t get people pulling fire alarms or, now much worse, putting out bomb threats, on any regular basis. I don’t think this incident reflects “the logical result of certain ongoing trends at the university”, and I don’t think the “growing culture of students who are obsessed with advancement but have little concern for ethics…..” is really a problem unique to Harvard.
As SE says, “Now, of course, grade-grubbing, economic inequality, pressure to achieve meaningless success, consumerism, and cheating are all bad things. We oppose them!” But I don’t think they’re a proximate cause of this event, and while I’d like Harvard to do more about some of these bad things, I’d also like all universities, our whole educational system, and our whole society to do more about them, too.
12/18/2013 10:10 am
There is such a thing as evil. A merely stressed out, hyper competitive student would do the well established thing — go to the health service and say he has a headache. This situation seems more like a murder-suicide, an act of vanity and narcissism, not ambition. I bet he knew he would be caught — a faux sophisticate with his Guerrilla Mail and Tor, but using the Harvard wireless network with a device he had registered. He could have walked a couple of blocks to Starbucks and maybe never gotten caught (though he may have left other bread crumbs — a panicked message to a House mailing list over the weekend about the Gov 1368 exam). One report I read says he was raised in South Korea. Youth suicide is a serious problem there, and this may be his Americanized proxy. For some reason he wanted to throw away everything he had. Well, he succeeded.
I remember one precedent, but life was so much simpler in the old days. The amiable, disheveled classicist David Mitten was administering an exam to 250 students in his “Alexander the Great” gen ed course in 2001, when a man walked in brandishing what he said was a bomb. Mitten’s response was not fear, but indignation. “Who are you? There is an exam going on!” The students left but Mitten stayed until the guy was arrested.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/1/19/during-exam-man-threatens-to-blow/#
12/18/2013 4:15 pm
The old days… of 2001! Just eight months before, I guess, the new days which started on Sept. 11.
I’m not sure however that this is “evil,” Harry. It’s certainly wicked, though.
12/18/2013 4:28 pm
No, evil, because the act had drastic consequences for lots of other people, people just like the perpetrator and also for the unknown people who did not get their 911 responses promptly, etc. Moreover, evil because Kim was fully aware of those consequences when he did the deed; it was exactly what he wanted to happen, fire trucks and police cars arriving and his fellow students all having their exams canceled just so his would be cancelled. The famous 1987 ARPANet worm was wicked, not evil; I think of that because it was another felony committed by a student using a computer on a college campus. That student did not intend the consequences; Mr. Kim did.
Granted, my evil needle shoots way up for people who are selfish and narcissistic. Those qualities, among the privileged class (anyone at an Ivy League school), make any sin a thousand times worse in ny eyes.
12/19/2013 10:51 am
‘
‘It’s finals time at Harvard,’’ Gold said. ‘‘In one way, we’re looking at the post-9/11 equivalent of pulling a fire alarm. Certainly I’m not saying the government response was unjustified, but it’s important to keep in mind we’re dealing with a 20-year-old man who was under a great deal of pressure.’’
12/23/2013 12:36 pm
Not just Harvard, and not just now.
When I was a freshman at Columbia in 1984, someone decided he didn’t want to take the next day’s exams: he firebombed an elevator in the freshman dorm.