The Virginia Tech campus has been flooded with self-appointed grief counselors, therapy dogs and Scientologists, reports the Washington Post. There’s something vulturish about it.

BTW, if anyone has advice on how to gets comments working again, let me know. I can’t post comments for you; they don’t work for me either.

Update: Trying to make sense of the senseless slaughter at Virginia Tech, leads to mawkishness, false sentiment and vulturism, writes Christopher Hitchens on Slate. Cornell’s president ordered bells run 33 times for the victims and their killer.

For an academic president to have equated 32 of his fellow humans with their murderer in an orgy of “one-ness” was probably the stupidest thing that happened last week, but not by a very wide margin.

Read the whole thing.

Getting into a good college isn’t Admission Impossible?, writes Kevin Carey on American Prospect. Top colleges are admitting a lower percentage of applicants because more students are applying to many more colleges.

The stock characters include the tearful student — dreams crushed under an avalanche of rejection letters — the angry parent, the frenzied guidance counselor, and the college admissions official or other expert who notes with grateful wonder, “If I had to apply to my alma mater today, I couldn’t get in.”

There’s just one problem: it’s not true. The declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications.

More students are graduating from high school and applying to college, but “the number of spaces in elite colleges is increasing too, at a nearly identical rate.” What’s soaring is the number of applications to elite schools.

Imagine 20 students, each of whom applies to five schools and gets into two. Now imagine if the same students each applied to ten schools and got into two. The outcome for the students is the same: two acceptance letters. But the schools report lower admission rates, and the odds of admission seem worse.

I was graduated from high school in 1970. I applied to five colleges and got into two, which was one more than I needed. My daughter, class of ’99, applied to 10 schools and got into four.

Via Eduwonk.

Gory stories are a staple in college creative writing classes. What should an instructor do if she suspects a student might act on his fantasies? From Salon:

Creative writing teachers have long wrestled with what they should do with students who turn in gruesome stories, as many colleges do not have formal policies about how teachers should respond. Further, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.

“Lots of great literary works are deep and dark and disturbing — that would be Kafka,” says Deborah Landau, director of the creative writing program at New York University, who plans to discuss university protocol with her staff in the wake of Monday’s massacre. Yet teachers increasingly are being expected to distinguish between students’ pushing their creative boundaries or showing frightening warning signs. That’s a tall task, especially when students routinely hand in twisted texts dripping with bloodshed, cruelty, perversion and extreme sex scenes, say teachers.

Most of these horror writers aren’t Kafka. But very few are would-be killers either.

I majored in creative writing in the early ’70s. I don’t recall this phenomenon at all. No violence, no explicit sex. Of course, my memory’s going.

To argue that an armed student could have stopped the Virginia Tech killer, an adjunct professor at Boston’s Emmanuel College pointed a Magic Marker at students in his class and said, “Bang” several times. A student he’d prepared earlier “shot” Nicholas Winset, a financial accounting instructor, with an imaginary gun.

“Why did I stop?” Winset asked his 23 undergraduate students , before someone replied that the “gunman” was shot.

“So guns maybe aren’t all bad,” Winset told the group.

He was fired — two weeks before the end of the semester — and barred from campus. The administration’s statement says the school prohibits “any behavior or action which makes light of or mimics the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech.”

Winset said the Catholic college urged instructors to discuss the tragedy with students. He spent five minutes discussing victimhood, nonviolence and gun control before moving on to accounting.

Emmanuel accuses the professor of incivility.

The college said on Monday that Winset’s firing “had nothing to do with academic freedom” but rather “his insensitivity toward the students who were murdered at Virginia Tech” and “his use of obscene and discriminatory language which is not tolerated from students, faculty or staff at this institution.”

Winset was “disparaging the victims as rich white kids combined with an obscene epithet. He did not do this as part of an open debate with his students,” the statement said.

This must be the first time in modern history that someone on a college campus got in trouble for referring to rich white people.

The only student interviewed said he didn’t think his classmates were upset or offended, but someone must have said something to someone.

Winset had told Emmanuel before the incident that he was moving on to another job, but apparently they couldn’t tolerate him on campus for the final two weeks. What’s open debate going to sound like at Emmanuel in the future? Kind of quiet.

Winset has posted a defense on YouTube.

Classically Liberal provides several examples of school (and mall) killers who were stopped by armed resistance.