Students and saints

On Monday, an educated young man massacred 32 people at a college in Blacksburg, Va.\nIn 1999 an educated young man – a former IU student – went on a murderous rampage across Illinois and Indiana, which culminated in the killing of a graduate student in front of the Korean Methodist Church here in Bloomington. \nIn the 1970s a very educated man from Washington blazed a trail of violence from Tacoma to Florida, abducting and murdering nearly 30 young women.\nSuch violence is abominable. And while it might be rare in any setting, there is a crucial lesson we must learn from the wretched lives of Cho Seung-Hui, Benjamin Smith and Ted Bundy: Education is not our salvation.\nThere’s an almost palpable delusion pervading academia. The collective intellectual hallucination goes something like this: “If only people were more educated, that would solve all the world’s problems. Utopia is within our reach, if we could just educate everyone.” This is hogwash.\nTo make a blunt illustration: Last year I gave a presentation at a high school for gifted students in Muncie; the program was about the Rwandan genocide. As part of the program I asked the students – Indiana’s best and brightest – to speculate how genocide could ever happen, be it in Rwanda, Bosnia or Germany. After some awkward silence, a student finally suggested it’s because “people are stupid.”\nTed Bundy certainly wasn’t stupid: he held a degree from the University of Washington. Cho Seung-Hui wasn’t stupid: he had nearly earned a degree from Virginia Tech.\nNo, monstrously wicked men are not stupid. And on the other side of that coin we see that education does not a saint make.\nMost damning is the example of Charles Taylor. In 1977 he obtained a degree in economics from Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. Some years later – after embezzling nearly $1 million, escaping from a Massachusetts prison and (allegedly) collaborating with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi – Taylor began waging a brutal uprising in the jungles of Liberia. His army employed child soldiers, mutilated innocent civilians, smuggled guns into neighboring Sierra Leone and traded blood diamonds to continue the insurrection.\nCharles Taylor was certainly not stupid, and that B.A. from Bentley College did not make a saint of him. In the same way, very highly educated (not stupid) medical doctors slaughter over 5,000 unborn children every year in Indiana. Clearly, the letters “M.D.” are not an indication of virtue, either.\nOf course, I’m not saying that every college-educated man will become a serial killer or war criminal. And I’m not suggesting that education is evil. (Honestly, I’ve spent the last 17 years of my life getting educated; it’s not bad.)\nBut in the shadow of Cho Seung-Hui’s massacre we must be honest with ourselves: Classrooms and diplomas don’t offer some mystical infusion of virtue.\nThe children in “The Lord of the Flies” discovered that the monster on the island doesn’t stalk the jungle at night: It’s inside each one of us. It’s embedded in human nature, and Ph.D.s cannot exorcise it.